Star Over Jerusalem

Atop windblown Mount Herzl, a dozen beacons--one for each of the original tribes of Israel--illuminated the night sky over Jerusalem. At the floodlit Wailing Wall, Orthodox Jews, with their black hats and beards, linked arms, danced and sang with rugged paratroopers wearing red berets and toting Uzi submachine guns. In the streets of Jerusalem, thousands of young sabras frolicked away the day and night to the hypnotic strains of the hora, then tumbled exhausted onto sidewalks and park grass to sleep. As the highlight of the biggest military parade in Israel's history, marking its 20th year as a nation, 30 Israeli jet fighters flashed across the blue heavens to form a giant, glistening Star of David.

The display of armed might was held despite pleas from the U.N. Security Council to call it off. But the parade, which wound through both the Israeli and the former Jordanian sectors, produced none of the violence that its critics had feared. The reason was that Israeli troops effectively blocked all roads to Jerusalem and thus kept away Arab terrorists, just as they had during last year's Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Police also thoroughly searched car trunks for explosives, stationed men on rooftops and, long before the pageant began, arrested several Arabs suspected of being guerrillas. Israeli infantry and helicopters chased a sabotage squad of Arabs carrying a variety of explosives through the ravines of Judaea, killing 13.

99.98% Pure. Most of Jerusalem's 60,000 Arabs shut down their shops and went home in protest against the parade. Some watched the parade on TV behind shuttered windows; others, excited by the blare of loudspeakers and the roar of jets, came out on their balconies to watch. Radio Amman charged Israel with buying 20,000 Arab kaffiyehs (headdresses) beforehand with the aim of having dark-complexioned Israelis wear them in the streets and thus making it look as if Jerusalem's Arabs were joining the celebration. The few Arabs who did mingle in the crowds, however, seemed genuine enough.

The Arabs elsewhere were much less subdued. Hordes of demonstrators in Damascus chanted "Jerusalem is ours, Palestine is ours!" Thousands of Lebanese youths in usually nonmilitant Beirut took to the streets and shouted "Arms, arms!" and "Draft us!" In Egypt on the day of the Israeli parade, 7,300,000 voters went to the polls and, by an affirmative vote of 99.98%, which is even purer than Ivory Soap, endorsed President Gamal Abdel Nasser's reform program in a ritual that he described as "louder than the thunder of 300 tanks in Arab Jerusalem." Though the vote was ostensibly on a series of domestic reforms, Nasser had also asked the people to make it a ringing endorsement of his policy of renewed holy war against Israel--even though he knows that Egypt is not yet ready for such a war.

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