Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sixth Day. The desert blitz ended. Israeli forces marched triumphantly into the ancient and grubby city of Gaza, where blinded Samson pulled down the pillars and destroyed the temple. They found only a handful of dull-eyed, curious Arabs, the raveled remnants of an Egyptian division, and the unhappy Egyptian Governor General of the Gaza Strip. He put his name to the surrender papers and handed over to Israel some 325 square miles of disputed real estate and the perplexing responsibility for some 250,000 ragged, ill-housed, ill-fated Palestinian refugees...
...Israeli invasion, although their presence might also give Israel the pretext for invading Jordan. By expanding eastward to the Jordan River, Israel could, at Jordan's expense, straighten out its borders (at one point only seven miles wide). That would leave Jordan with a wide stretch of desert, and not much to live on. One of the fears agitating Jordan was that the friends who came to help might stay on to batten on the pieces...
...sponsors wondered whether it would find its peaceful place in the Middle East or develop into a "nasty little Sparta." Its 650,000 people, with the help of a sympathetic world, had elbowed their way to a place in a hostile part of the world. They performed prodigies of desert pioneering. But they never succeeded in winning the tolerance or the trade of their neighbors...
...little state would cave in. There were many in Israel too (and among U.S. Zionists) who argued that Israel had to learn to live peacefully with its neighbors if it was to survive as a nation. In 1953 Ben-Gurion suffered an election setback and retired to a pioneer desert community. Into office went Moshe Sharett, a modest, cautious lawyer who made some effort to diminish Arab hostility, to settle the problem of the 900,000 Palestinian refugees, to let some of them back into Israel and to join with Arab states in diverting Jordan water to desert land...
Turning Point. Convinced that neither the U.N. nor the big powers would ever win for Israel what they might win for themselves, the Israelis preferred to make their own way in the world. Said Ben-Gurion: "Israel will stand or fall by what is achieved in Israel." If desert settlers were to be protected from the endless sneak raids of Arab infiltrators, Israel must attend in its own way to its border security. Ben-Gurion returned early last year from the Negev desert to active duty as Defense Minister. Just eleven days later Israeli armed forces carried out a smash...