The Insignificant Bomb

It was a quiet session of the Knesset. Only half the members were present, and four chairs at the Cabinet ministers' table stood empty. An Israeli M.P. was recalling the peril that faced his nation exactly a year before, when its troops stood ready to launch their attack on the Sinai Peninsula. A small object flew through the air from the direction of the visitors' gallery. Like the well-trained old soldier that he is, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion ducked to the floor as the missile hurtled past his snowy, hair, but nobody else moved. A second later, the tossed hand grenade exploded.

Wounded in foot and arms by the blast, Ben-Gurion tried to still panic. "Sit down, everybody, don't leave your seats," he cried. But the Parliament floor was already alive with activity. "Get an ambulance!", "Call a doctor!", "Don't crowd!" shouted some of the members, as others rushed for first-aid equipment. In the midst of the commotion, two doctor-parliamentarians found their way to Minister of Religious Affairs and Social Welfare Moshe Shapiro, whose blood was gushing from bad wounds in the stomach and head.

Foolish Son. Screaming ambulances arrived a few minutes later to carry Shapiro to the hospital. When he was gone, police took the doughty Premier, Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Transport Minister Moshe Carmel and Health Minister Israel Barzilai to the hospital in cars to have their lesser injuries treated.

That night police grilled the cowering, neurotic youth, Moshe ben Yaacov Dueg, who had thrown the bomb. "Why did you do it?" they asked. "Because," he answered in sullen, resentful tones, "the Jewish Agency robbed me." He was a worrying, ailing, ne'er-do-well full of fancied grievances against all officialdom; his grudge was a private one, unconnected with the seething political turmoil of the Middle East. "I know," Ben-Gurion wrote his parents, "that you regret, as does all Israel, the dastardly and foolish crime your son perpetrated. But you are not to blame. You are living in Israel, where justice reigns."

Quiet Content. To many an Israeli it came almost as a relief to learn that the Knesset bombing was not significant of renewed political strife. For one year after the Sinai campaign, Israel had cause for quiet satisfaction. The disapproval of the U.N., Israelis felt, had been lived down. But the swift efficiency of the assault had forced the Arabs to treat Israel's power with grudging new respect. It had reduced immeasurably the power and prestige of Egypt's Nasser.

Though they had complained bitterly of American refusal to make a ringing declaration defending Israel's right of transit through the Gulf of Aqaba, Israelis now recognized that the U.S.'s quiet insistence that the gulf was an international waterway until proved otherwise had achieved the same result and stirred far less Arab rancor. Israel had its port, was taking full advantage of its busy new trade route to Africa and the East. Nasser had even allowed some Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal. And at week's end Israel opened the Lake Huleh reclamation project, designed to drain 15,000 acres of malarial swamp that lie partly in the neutral zone along the Syrian border. In its six years of construction, Syria had repeatedly complained to the Security Council about the project. Last week the Syrians, chastened and preoccupied, raised not a murmur of protest.

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