The right-wing opposition party (Herut) called for nationwide demonstrations in protest against withdrawal, and its leader, Menahem Beigin, asked for immediate elections. Two restive coalition parties threatened open revolt. Ben-Gurion himself, after announcing laconically that the government supported Mrs. Meir's U.N. announcement, ordered Army Chief Dayan to postpone his scheduled conference with UNEF Commander Eedson L. M. Burns, and cabled Washington for "further explanation" of Lodge's U.N. statement.
Next day, as Eban paid a rush call to Dulles' home (and was assured that the U.S. was not proposing to go back to the way things were before November in Gaza), Ben-Gurion read in the newspaper a letter to him from President Eisenhower expressing the President's faith that "Israel will have no cause to regret" its decision to withdraw. On this basis Ben-Gurion was prepared to ask the Knesset for a vote of confidence this week. Said an Israeli: "An unyielding stand means a U.N. crisis. Yielding means a Knesset crisis. For Ben-Gurion it is always crisis."
"Hold Tight.'" Throughout this whole drama of public proclamations and private exchanges, the official U.S. attitude had been curiously complicated. At times the U.S. had seemed to be reminding Israel with oversolicitous friendliness of the sentiment' for sanctions building up in the U.N. Assembly. Yet, when it came right down to it, practically everybody except the Arabs disliked the idea of sanctions, and the feeling began to develop in Israel that perhaps the U.S. Administration felt more strongly about applying "pressure" (its word for sanctions) to its Israeli friends than anybody else. In fact, early in the week Golda Meir had come right out with it: "I don't think there will be any sanctions. I don't think anybody does. Nobody wants them." But the U.S. had a timetable for its new Middle East moves, and there was no getting on to the next phase until the Israelis had been somehow shoehorned out of Arab territory that they had illegally occupied.
Many Americans were inclined to think that the Israelis had put themselves in the wrong by going into Egypt, and ought to get out of there. But in the U.S. as well as elsewhere around the world, sympathy had built up for Ben-Gurion's position. Last week the Israeli government in Jerusalem and its consulates overseas reported receiving thousands of letters of support from places as far apart as Bangkok and Bangor, Me., Stockholm and Santa Ana, Calif. Samples: "Don't surrender to Nasserism"; "Stick to your guns and positions"; "Call Ike's bluff"; "Don't give an inch"; "Stand pat"; "Hold tight."
The Fruits of Victory. If Israelis could accept "assumptions" which were widely approved, instead of gun positions held in defiance of U.N. resolutions, they would Dot come out of their retreat at all badly. They have shown that they can lick the strongest of their neighbors. They have shown up the extent of Soviet penetration in the Middle East by capturing huge stockpiles of tanks, guns and motorized equipment. They have shown up the hollowness of Nasser's vaunted four-power pact, signed just-before the Sinai invasion, by which Syrian, Saudi and Jordanian troops were supposed to march under Egyptian command. And the first frightened session of desert kings that convened after the Sinai rout in Beirut last November signaled a shift which may well make last week's Cairo session the last get together of "positive-neutrality" Arabs.
The Fruits of Retreat. Finally, in any assessment of what the Israelis win or lose by giving in, their most significant gain may be the degree to which President Eisenhower has now committed the U.S. in the Middle East. Lacking a steadfast and mature Middle East policy, the U.S. in the past tended to follow the British lead there long after it ceased to in other parts of the world. All that ended in the wreckage of Suez and the U.S. has moved to fill the Middle East "power deficit" (the State Department avoids the word "vacuum" as offensive to Arab nationalist pride). The new U.S. policy, of which the Eisenhower Doctrine is the core, is by far the most important extension of foreign policy enunciated by the present Administration. In one sense, what Ben-Gurion accepted last week was worth more than what Dulles had suggested back on Feb. 11. What had begun as another several-sided statement by a Secretary of State had been reinforced and made authoritative by the public affirmations of the President of the U.S.
