The U. N. Experience in Gaza

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IT would be wrong to call the United Nations experiment in administering the Gaza Strip a failure; the experiment was never made. Some preparations for it were made. Civilian experts were assembled and dispatched to Gaza on the heels of the United Nations Emergency Force. Before they could get their bearings, while they were still searching for beds and desks, Egypt had stepped in again. Everybody except the Egyptians professed to be surprised, and many were, for there had been wide hope that the enterprise in Gaza might, if successful, set a precedent for future police actions by the United Nations in troubled areas. The hope proved unjustified. The commander of the United Nations Emergency Force retired more or less into the background soon after he had brought his troops into Gaza, and his team of civil administrators, unnoticed while they were there, faded unnoticed away. If the United Nations experiment in Gaza failed, it was a failure by default.

There had been strong support in the West for the view that the United Nations should administer the Gaza Strip for a considerable period of time, at least long enough to use it as a focus of international strength while an attempt was made to face up to the Israeli-Arab problem as a whole, specifically the fundamental questions of frontiers, refugees and the equitable use of the Jordan waters. For years the United Nations had been debating this complex of problems and passing resolutions about them; for years some of its members had been giving unselfish service and large sums of money to mitigate the human misery involved. The United Nations was bound to see that Israel withdrew to the lines from which she had begun her aggression in October; it was not bound, many persons thought, to restore the precise situation which had produced the conflict. For although Israel had begun the actual aggression, responsibilities for the conflict had been divided. The United Nations shared in them. It had allowed its resolutions and warnings about frontiers and refugees to remain unheeded. Despite its admonitions, border incidents and fighting had continued. Its declaration that the prolonged state of technical belligerency between Egypt and Israel was unjustified had been flouted. Only an exceedingly narrow concept of the functions of the United Nations could be satisfied with a simple return to the status quo ante...