ra s TABLET November 3rd, 1936. VOL. 20S. No. 0076

TH E TABLET

Published ta a Newspipei

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

NOVEMBER 3rd, 1956

NINEPENCE

File Freeing of the Cardinals: The National Reassertion of Hungary and Poland

Hungary S Rising: A fter Eleven Years of Indoctrination. By Bela Menczer

Safer in Western Europe : The Collapse of the Warsaw Pact. By Eugene Hinterhoff

BelloC S Family and Friends: At Home and Visiting. By Robert Speaight

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

WAR WITH EGYPT

Q1R ANTHONY EDEN has paid, on Britain’s account, ^ a very high price for the advantage of a lightning landing in the Suez zone, and has staked a very great deal on these landings achieving their essential purpose, the protection of the Canal and of British lives and property in Egypt. For the sake of this immediate seizure, he has been ready to allow Great Britain to be isolated, with Canada as well as the United States opposed, leaving us alone with a French Ministry which inspires but little confidence for its handling of its relations with the Moslem world.

The fighting between Israel and Egypt, Mr. Selwyn Lloyd told the House of Commons on Monday night, was getting too close to the Canal for it to be possible for Britain to wait on the Security Council ; not a moment must be lost in making the Canal itself a battleground. The Security Council had lost no time and was ready with its resolution calling on both sides to stop fighting ; but that resolution was vetoed by Britain and France, because it would also have precluded them from using force as they were resolved to do. It was a foregone conclusion that Colonel Nasser would refuse too abrupt an ultimatum. ■ When the 1954 agreement by which Britain evacuated rthe zone was signed, Egypt had already been at war with Israel for six years, and had every intention of remaining fct war ; so there was never any question that the EgyptianIsrael war was included in the clause that gave Britain the right to return in time of war. A war of a very different scope and kind was in the minds of both parties.

Of course, it must appear to the Arab world that Britain and France have seized a pretext for doing something that they have been poised to do for nearly three months p a s t ; even if they acquit us of having instigated the Israel attack in order to have a pretext for invading. We shall soon know the Arab reactions, but they are not likely to be more moderate because what has happened has happened in avowed and complete disregard of the United Nations, whose rules we are always and so rightly urging them and all other countries to observe most faithfully, whatever the provocations they feel they are having to endure. Certainly there is under United Nations rules an ultimate right of peoples to use force to defend themselves ; but it is very much an ultimate and last resource, for which the reasons must be exceedingly grave. It has always involved straining the meaning of this ultimate right to make it cover a possible loss of trade and income, a possible increase of prices, through the non-functioning or bad management of the Canal. We do not expect that the Government’s measures will, in fact, achieve their intention of keeping the Canal open ; we believe shipping will for a long time to come be warned to avoid trying to use it, and the British lives and property in Cairo and Alexandria are in more and not less danger since the swoop.

The Prime Minister justified the swoop by saying that there is £50 million worth of shipping now passing through the Canal ; a tribute to its normal working, three months after the Egyptian seizure of it, and something we may suspect Sir Anthony would have ridiculed if it had been predicted to him at the end of J uly.

The reasoning behind the military action of Britain now is one that we have heard from Ministers since the end of July ; the assumption that we had in our hand a trump card, force ; we try to avoid using it by all means, but we never forget we have it in reserve, and if we use it it is certain to do the trick. But when the 1954 agreement to evacuate was recommended to the House of Commons, the great argument was that force would not under modern conditions, given the state of local feeling, be able to maintain the necessary conditions of peace and confidence that the Canal users need ; that a hostile and humiliated Egyptian public opinion, supporting a hostile Egyptian Government, would maintain siege conditions; that the Canal begins and ends in Egyptian ports, with Egyptian populations with abundant opportunities for sabotage— considerations which retain as much force as they had when the Government accepted them two years ago.

Britain would have been in a much stronger position if we had waited either for the Security Council’s action to issue in a collective measure to send a United Nations force to keep the peace, or for a Russian veto to have stopped it. The Egyptians and their Arab allies might have resented and opposed the United Nations as an AngloAmerican device to protect the hated State of Israel, but we should have been on a broader and stronger basis, both morally and materially, and would have avo;ded the present