Israel in Trouble
On Monday The Times published a comment by General Glubb, of the Arab Legion, on alleged Arab infiltration into Israel. On Tuesday tension in Jerusalem and at various points on the common frontier was reported. At the same time the explosion of a bomb in the Soviet Legation at Jerusalem started a train which ended on Wednesday with a rupture of diplomatic relations between Russia and Israel. And the Jordan-Israel Truce Commission, appointed by the United Nations, found Israel responsible for two recent frontier inci- dents. The border between Jordan and Israel was drawn by the accidents of war and has no merits whatever as a politic frontier. Villages are cut off from their fields, roads zigzag from one country to the other, and what eight years ago was innocent trading has now become illicit smuggling. Forays back and forth across the border have come to be a natural part of existence in this part of what was once Palestine, just as they used to be along the borders of England and Scotland until the eighteenth century. It is when relations between the States of Jordan and Israel are bad, as they are at present, that the border incidents take on a new gravity. The deterioration in relations between these two neighbours (who are, after all, Still strictly speaking at war with each other) is due partly to a growing impatience in both States with an unsatisfactory status quo and partly to the increasing influence which the former Palestinians now exercise in Jordanian affairs. Frontier rectification between Jordan and Israel would go a long way to stop border fighting, if the two governments were not too proud to admit it.'
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