Cease-fire-for how long?

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33383, 15 November 1973, Page 12

Cease-fire-for how long?

Vietnam is too close, in memory and experience, to encourage over-optimistic hopes that the cease-fire agreement represents a positive first step towards peace in the Middle East. But at least the signing of the agreement makes a beginning; and on the Israeli side, if Mrs Meir interprets Israeli feeling accurately, there is an earnest desire to make it work. The Israeli High Command seems to have acted generously on terms for getting the exchange of prisoners started, since the figures favour Egypt. Israel, it appears, would be required to hand over some 9000 Arabs in exchange for fewer than 500 Israelis. Only the Syrian attitude gives cause for suspicion; complete silence on the number and names of Israeli prisoners suggests that reports of shootings and torture — supported, Mrs Meir says, by photographic evidence — are far from groundless. But at any rate President Sadat seems to recognise al last the need for direct talks between Arab md Israeli military delegations, under United Nations auspices. Such talks must be held to make the ceese-fire conditions workable. If that can be done, with cease-fire lines mutually determined, the goal of talks at the political level, aimed on Israel’s part at settling the question of sovereignty once and for all, will be brought a shade nearer. There is still no definite undertaking by Cairo that the naval blockade at Bab el-Mandeb, at the neck of the Red Sea, preventing the movement of shipping to and from Israel’s port of Eilat, will be lifted as part of the cease-fire. Assurances by United States spokesmen that Egypt will lift the blockade implies firm knowledge of Cairo’s readiness to do sa. Many Israelis still doubt, however, that the fighting is all over. In the Knesset, the Opposition professes, to dislike what it regards as the Government’s too-ready- acceptance of the cease-fire conditions'. Mrs Meir may be able to present a clearer picture when she reports on her unexpected visit to Washington. Unfortunately, the realities of the situation tend to be overlooked in Israel in the electioneering now under way. Many Arabs — as Dr Kissinger will have discovered in his recent travels — bitterly resent the cease-fire. Syria's stand against the truce has been endorsed by Libya: Colonel Gadaffi insists that it is necessary to defeat Israel militarily, not compromise on peace terms. The political waverings towards the cease-fire on both sides add to the difficulties of making the cease-fire effective. The dismantling of a United Nations checkpoint by Israeli soldiers, because the truce conditions said nothing about giving up control of the Cairo-Suez road, is a case in point. The commander of the U.N. force should be able to allay Israeli fears that the checkpoint concerned “isolated” an Israeli position. In the meantime it is the spirit in which the two sides attempt to make the cease-fire effective that matters, if it is in fact to become a stepping-stone towards a permanent Arab-Israeli accommodation.