Less & Less Chance

One night last week, while shots rang in the distance, a little man hurried furtively through the streets of Jerusalem with a parcel under his arm. He stopped at the house where the advance party (two men and two women) of the United Nations Palestine Commission was staying. Glancing quickly about him, he rang the doorbell, handed in his parcel, and dashed off. In the package were a chicken, a leg of lamb, carrots, lettuce, eggplant and two loaves of bread.

The man was a British policeman who had taken it upon himself to keep the advance party alive. For five weeks they had received no official food, could buy no food from nearby Jewish shops which had none to spare, or from the Arabs who have boycotted the U.N. representatives. Their plight was a measure of U.N.'s ineffectiveness in Palestine.

"What Are We Here For?" The U.N. General Assembly, meeting at Flushing Meadows last week to wrestle a third time with the Palestine problem, seemed as paralyzed as its bewildered representatives in Jerusalem. Uruguay's Delegate Dr. Enrique Rodriguez Fabregat asked irritably of his gloomy fellow delegates: "What are we here for?" By week's end there had been no answer from U.S. Delegate Warren Austin, to whom the assembly looked for a new plan to replace partition. Behind the scenes, however, the U.S. was trying to work out a temporary U.N. trusteeship. But before any plan could work, there must be peace in Palestine and a spirit of conciliation between Jews and Arabs. In Palestine, however, talk of truce sounded hollow. There the Jews were bucked up by a week of military successes, Arabs whipped on by a new sense of desperation.

"If I Forget Thee . . ." In the battle for the Jerusalem roads (TIME, April 19), the Jews scored a victory. Guarded by 1,000 Haganah soldiers, a convoy of 300 trucks with 1,000 tons of food managed to reach Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. On one truck was printed a Biblical pledge: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."

In the north, on the edge of the Plain of Megiddo (Armageddon), Fawzi Bey Ka-wukji's Arab Army of Liberation had attacked the Jewish settlement of Mishmar Haemek. The Jewish Haganah, hoping to smash the Arab army, had thrown about 2,000 men into the battle. Kawukji sent an anxious appeal to the Arab League Political Committee, meeting in Cairo. Ka-wukji's army, it turned out, had suffered less than 100 casualties. But the Jews had driven the Arabs back, seized nearby Arab villages, firmly blocked the road into Arab Haifa from the southeast. Some Jews disguised as Arabs were caught trying to get through Kawukji's lines. Grinning with a calm ferocity that showed his gold molars, Kawukji said: "I have some Jewish prisoners, but intend to kill them all."

Arabs looked more & more for help from King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, who had become the man-of-the-hour in the Arab crisis. Last week armored cars of his British-trained Arab Legion supported an Arab attack on Neve Yaakov, a Jewish village three miles from Jerusalem. Said Abdullah: "The Arab Legion is not going to be withdrawn from Palestine."

The U.N. delegates on Long Island, unwilling to impose trusteeship by force, had less & less chance of getting a truce by agreement.

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