It's a very old story.
    It was written 700 years before Christ by the Prophet-statesman Isaiah:
The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad;
And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose . . .
For in the wilderness shall waters break out,
And streams in the desert.
And the parched land shall become a pool, and
    the thirsty ground springs of water . . .
    All this and more, much more, came to pass in Israel. There is bloom on the desert, but Isaiah's prophecy went further:
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
And come with singing unto Zion,
And lasting joy shall be upon their heads . . .
    We have seen the return, and intermittent singing too, but where is Isaiah's vision of lasting joy?

    What joy there is in the homeland is tempered by very hard considerations. You have to look beyond the map to understand Israel's situation; you have to look at the social, economic and political structure of the Middle East.
    Israel is a little pilot plant of democracy in a vast area of feudal kingdoms and dictatorship.
    Never mind the hardships of day-to-day life in the Jewish State: compared to his Arab neighbor, the Israeli is swimming in oceans of prosperity. Never mind the low pay and high prices: compared to his neighbors all around him the Israeli abounds in material goods. Never mind such uncommon viands as eggs or meat for the family: compared to the peasants across the border, living in squalor and degradation, the Israeli is the best-fed human being on earth.
    Above all, the Israeli enjoys a precious privilege. He has a vote that counts; he can turn out the government he doesn't like.
    +In the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, right next door, would King Hussein want his subjects to feast their eyes upon the Israeli way of life? Far from it, clashes between Jordan and Israel from 1949 up to this past summer cost more hundreds of lives--on both sides--than all the other border fighting put together, including the much-headlined Gaza Strip exchanges.
    +Would King Saud of Saudi Arabia, which is rich in Twentieth Century oil but otherwise more akin to the Dark Ages, want his people to savor the living standards of their Israeli neighbors?
    +Would Lebanon or Syria want their millions exposed to the high levels of health and welfare in Israel?
    +Would Egypt, with or without Gamal Nasser's revolution, want its 18,000,000 landless to feast on the shining example across the way?
    (Premier Nasser's handouts all talk about democracy but it is a couple of years overdue now and in all its shining prose it's shadow democracy at best. Egypt isn't even talking about letting all the people vote.)
    So there is a big point.
    The land blockade against the Jewish State not only locks out an unwanted neighbor but also its dangerous ideas. What it locks out is the vision of free men and women. That way the rulers of the Arab world count themselves more secure on their thrones; what their people don't see won't give them any fancy notions.     Israel is in trouble for a more global reason, too.
    It happens to be in a corner of the world coveted by the two great forces of the century--East and West.
    The Middle East is the land bridge between Asia and Africa. It is on the Soviet route to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, and even, conceivably, to the North and South Atlantic oceans. And it abounds in oil--the oil that runs war machines.
    So the eyes of the men in the Kremlin point to the Middle East all the time and, naturally, so do the eyes of the men in Washington, London and Paris. They don't want the Russian paw in that door.
    Premier Nasser was able to make his cut-rate arms deal with the Russians because it opened the door. Syria and Iraq can make the same deal. So, very likely, can any other Arab country. And the terms are pretty good--trade or slow pay--and the Russians don't mind sending along men to show the skinny, poorly-trained Arab soldier how to use his fine new weapons of destruction.
    The Big Three powers must of course counter these moves by the Soviet. The Middle East until now could be counted in the "safe" column. The Arab countries always loathed and feared the Russians too much to do business with them--until Nasser pointed the way.
    What can the Big Three do? It can be nice to the Arabs, nicer than before. Washington, London and Paris doled out arms in some sort of equal measure to the Arab states and Israel for years, striving for a kind of balance.
    Can the West now sell Israel enough firepower to counter the fresh flow to Egypt from the Iron Curtain countries? Can the West do anything that might conceivably push the Arabs closer to the Soviet?
    Nice questions, particularly when you bear in mind the time-honored military maxim that "whoever controls the Middle East controls the world."
    Very bad for little Israel but all a matter of simple geography and the power politics of our times.
    Now go back to the map again and some plain economic facts:
    Except where the Mediterranean washes against her narrow shoreline, Israel is surrounded by Arab nations that tried to stamp her out seven years ago and swore to come back and try again.
    Lebanon is on the North and Syria on the Northeast, Jordan is on the East, and sword-rattling Egypt on the Southwest.
    The world has seen what this means. Boycotted by all of its neighbors from the day it was born, Israel has no land borders at all. The infant state is locked--in an artificial man-made island, made by angry men.
    On the sea, except for the Mediterranean port of Haifa, Israel is sealed off by Egypt's blockade of the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, lifeline to a potentially lush trade with Africa and the Far East through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
    In the air, the Arab states enforce a third boycott--no plane that touches Israel's soil may land in any Arab country. This cuts hard into Israel's air traffic.     All these things, of course, come down finally to dollars and cents. What hurts the most at the moment is the water blockade, which the UN has condemned as illegal on the grounds that the Suez is a free international waterway.
    The blockade not only means millions of lost commerce but millions more in higher costs on both exports and imports--notably oil, which Israel has to haul from South America, 6,000 miles away, because the way to nearby markets is closed.
    The blockade cost so much that Israel has threatened to run it--soon, and with the help of land, sea and air units if necessary.
    The Gaza Strip is ablaze so much of the time, and the war of words so loud at other times, that little attention has been paid to the situation on the water. But this is one of the explosive areas where the Arab-Israeli showdown could come.
    If it does, the UN may have a nice question to decide.
    Suppose an unarmed Israeli merchantman tried to come through the Gulf of Aqaba into the Jewish State's Port of Elath? Suppose Egyptian shore batteries fired on it and Israeli forces hit back?
    Who started it?
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    TOMORROW: Portrait of Israel, one eye on peace, one eye on war.