THE TABLET February 9th. 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6090
THE TABLET
A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Published as a Newspaper
Pro Ecdlesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
FEBRUARY 9th, 1957
NINEPENCE
The Urge to Emigrate : Escape from Levelling Down
A l l Election in. Ireland : The Economic Background. By Declan Costello, T.D-
Catholics and the Polish Revolution : The A ttitu de of Cardinal Wyszynski
Policy for the West: Bidding for Asia and Africa. By Christopher Hollis
Living O n a Bridge : The Hungarians in Austria. By Stella Musulin
1heology in English : A Need of Our Time. By Dom Edmund Flood, O.S.B.
Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
KING SAUD SATISFIED
lVIR. DULLES is approaching a crisis. Mr. Ben Gurion
A and his Cabinet, with a strong public opinion supporting them, are showing themselves quite recalcitrant about holding on to the land they have taken round the Gulf of Aqaba. They argue that it is vital to their economy, while there is no guarantee that the United Nations will be any more successful in the future than it has been in the past in inducing Egypt to let Israeli ships through the Canal. But the Egyptians, and all the Arabs, say that at all costs, if they are to have any confidence in Mr. Dulles, the Israelis must not be allowed to profit by their military action in defiance of the armistice agreement and the United Nations. That Israel should renounce military advantages is the irreducible preliminary to negotiations on the future ordering of the Canal; and the more the Jews are allowed to keep, the more aggressive and exacting the Egyptians will need to be, to save prestige and show they have not let themselves be put upon just because there is a large Jewish and no Egyptian vote in American domestic politics. The signs are that Mr. Dulles will stand up to the Jewish pressure inside America; he has evolved very much as Ernest Bevin did, being helped to appreciate the weight of the fundamental Arab case against Israel by a realisation of the importance of Arab goodwill to the Western world.
In the end the State of Israel is so dependent on the United States and the United Nations for its place among the sovereign States that it will have to meet their wishes. But it is going slowly. Mr. Hammarskjöld is having a difficult time; all his credit, and that of the organisation, where too much rests on his shoulders, depends on Egyptian compliance, and it is becoming very doubtful how far that can be counted upon. Mr. Nehru's defiance, his announcement that there have been enough foreign troops in India— meaning the British and French from the eighteenth century, and his refusal to have a United Nations force, comes on top of the Hungarian-Russian refusal, and has been followed by a French reassertion that Algeria is part of Metropolitan France, an internal domestic issue like the
Hungarian revolt. Faced with all these precedents, it is very tempting for both the Syrian and the Egyptian Governments to show that they too are strong States, if the test of a strong State is to take no notice of the United Nations.
This is not a tendency that it is in the interests of either the United States or Great Britain to encourage. Their interest is just the opposite. The United Nations may fail altogether, after a brief moment of apparent cohesion and possible effectiveness, just as the League of Nations seemed for a short time in 1935 to be going to amount to something, only to fail in the test and disintegrate. The League failed because its strength was only the strength that Britain and France chose to lend it; and against Italy, in the face of the mounting German danger, the French were not prepared to do anything, and the British not very much. With the United Nations it is the United States that must provide the energy and the decision, with the added complication that the United Nations is a much less homogeneous body than the old League was. It is full of colour-conscious Asian and African peoples, who chiefly see it as an instrument for ending the remains of what they call Colonialism. They do not want to do anything about Hungary or about Kashmir, only about Algeria.
At Washington it seems the condition of American influence to underline at every turn that the United States has no connection with the old Imperial Powers. This has come out very clearly in the course of King Saud’s visit. The Americans are going to double the size of his army for him, from fifteen to thirty thousand men, with a few examples of modern motorised transport, armoured cars and aeroplanes. This is just what we did with the King of Jordan, as the point of a treaty that we are winding up, pulling out of Jordan as the Americans go into Saudi Arabia. This Saudi Arabian army would be useless against Soviet Russia. But it could help King Saud to establish himself, rather than Colonel Nasser, as the overlord of Jordan, with the larger possibility of the leadership of a great confederation of Moslem peoples which will be the prize of whatever Moslem
