The Pullout

There was anger in Israel as the Knesset met to debate Premier David Ben-Gurion's decision to pull his country's troops out of Gaza and Egypt's Gulf of Aqaba coast. But the barbed-wire barricades that police threw around the Parliament building last week proved an unnecessary precaution. The 5,000 Jerusalemites who turned out for the right-wing opposition Herut Party's mass-protest rally listened to speeches, shook their fists only when the newsreel cameras were on them, and shuffled off home without more than a jeer or two at the cops.

In the Knesset, unruffled by boos and yells of "Resign!", Ben-Gurion was as frank as his opponents to acknowledge that he had won no ironclad guarantees: "I must state that there is no certainty and there is no clear and authoritative undertaking that Egyptians will not return or be restored to the Gaza Strip . . . As for the straits [of Tiran] there is no express U.N. decision that the U.N. force must remain until a peace settlement and safeguard freepassage." Nonetheless Ben-Gurion was ready to settle: "The problem of Israel's security has become a question of conscience for very many states . . . The President of the U.S. has assumed a moral responsibility toward Israel." On the showdown no-confidence motion, the Prime Minister won a decisive 84-to-25 victory.

The same day, Israeli tanks started rumbling north out of Gaza, while the first convoy of a 2,600-man, six-nation U.N. Emergency Force clattered in to take over the strip "for the purpose of maintaining quiet during and after" the Israeli withdrawal. At midnight Israel's one-eyed Army Chief Moshe Dayan met Lieut. Colonel Carl Engholm, UNEF commander in Gaza, in the town square. "Everything is going well," said Engholm. Less than 48 hours later, fast-moving General Dayan handed over the wrecked Egyptian gun positions overlooking the Gulf of Aqaba narrows, and Israel's army was gone from Egypt after a 126-day stay.

There were no inhabitants along the treeless gulf shore to cheer the Israeli pullout, but Gaza's 300,000 Arabs (220,000 of them Palestinian refugees on U.N. relief) more than made up for it. In Rafah crowds danced all day, shouting "Good Hammarskjold, good Abdel Nasser." After U.N.forces freed 120 political prisoners from Gaza's jail, thousands of Arabs paraded carrying such slogans as: "Welcome as guests but not rulers," and "We do not accept any rule except Egypt's." But the UNEF's taciturn commander, Canada's Major General E.L.M. Burns, ordered his headquarters moved forward from Suez to Gaza and proclaimed: "Until further arrangements are made, the UNEF has assumed responsibility for civil affairs in the Gaza Strip."

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