Aggression in Galilee

On a black, rainy night last week, 300 heavily armed Israeli infantrymen converged stealthily on a network of five Syrian border strongpoints along the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. One assault party landed from small boats, conceivably near the place where Jesus stood when He called to Peter and Andrew to abandon their nets. A second column forded the icy River Jordan and advanced by land up the coast. At the zero hour, a Syrian sentry cried out: "Min hada (Who is there)?" And the night answered with fire. The Israelis fell upon the 200 men in the strongpoints with grenades and Tommy guns at point-blank range.

The Syrians were caught so completely by surprise that three of their officers were killed before they could get up from a card game. The Syrians fought back savagely, nevertheless. The battle raged for two hours in and around their concrete pillboxes, barbed wire and connecting trenches, until they were finally overwhelmed. The Israelis then methodically destroyed every military installation in the area and withdrew before dawn with 30 prisoners. Said a tired, mud-spattered but jubilant Israeli soldier: "We gave them a lesson they won't forget for ages."

Ulterior Motives. United Nations observers provisionally put the casualties at 41 Syrian dead, including a number of civilians who lived in a farming settlement in the combat zone. Cost to the Israelis: six dead, ten wounded.

The Israeli government made no bones of the fact that it had ordered the attack. Its official excuse for its aggression was that it was in retaliation for sporadic Syrian firing at Israeli fishermen in the Sea of Galilee. This was plainly only part of the story: not a single Israeli fisherman has been killed for a year; incidents on the Sea of Galilee make little stir even in the Israeli press. A likelier explanation was an attempt to convince the Syrians that their new military pact with Egypt might be more of a liability than an asset; and additionally to scare neighboring Lebanon out of joining the pact.

Shocked Friends. Whatever the explanation, many of Israel's best friends were shocked, especially in the U.S. Senator Herbert H. Lehman of New York, speaking to 18,000 people at an Israeli bond-drive meeting in Madison Square Garden, warned Israel to "show restraint." The New York Times called the border raid "deplorable." The incident appeared likely to delay, if not to block, a favorable reply to Israel's request for U.S. arms to match Communist shipments to Egypt.

At a special session of the U.N. Security Council, ten nations, including both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, expressed sympathy for the Syrians. In Cairo, Premier Nasser talked of going to war against Israel, in the event of similar forays in the future against either Syria or Egypt.

In Israel itself, after the first satisfaction, misgivings began to be heard. The independent newspaper Haaretz took note of the fact that the raid happened while Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, a moderate, was out of the country, and accused tough-minded Premier David Ben-Gurion of an unconstitutional act in ordering the raid without consulting a single Cabinet member in advance. This, said Haaretz, "brought Israel dangerously close to dictatorship by the chief of government . . . How can Israel succeed in persuading the world that she resorts to force only when her security and integrity are at stake?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.