Paul Sann Journalism, Letters , Writings

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New York Post Sunday, November 6, 1955

(This is an assortment of notes and pictures left over from The Post executive editor's recent trip to the Middle East. Today's mixture winds up a series of 12 articles.)
Egypt's military dictatorship is somewhat informal as those things go. Here is a for instance:
nasser

An American Senator was visiting one day with Gamal Nasser when the phone rang. The Premier, supreme ruler of Egypt's 22,000,000 and a big dealer on the world scene since he found playmates in the Kremlin, picked it up.
This is what the Senator heard--in English:
"No, this is Gamal."
Pause.
"No, Gamal."
Pause.
"Who? No, I said, it's Gamal. You have the wrong number."
The Premier put the receiver down, softly, and turned back to the Senator.
It could only happen in Cairo, and it did--in the dirty, sand-colored office building with the slow self-service elevators where Premier Nasser conducts the business of Egypt. * * * ISRAEL, 1955--The Chief Chaplain of the Jewish State's armed forces is Rabbi Shlomo Goren, just turned 40. He had the option of taking a special commando course or making five parachute jumps as part of his military conditioning. He elected to jump.
As he was unstrapping his 'chute after the first drop, someone asked the stocky Rabbi whether he was scared as he floated to earth in the silks.
"No," the Rabbi said, stroking his beard, "I don't think so. I found the parachute the ideal place for meditation." arab villagers

* * * STREET SCENE IN CAIRO--Before Nasser, Egypt's GI Joe drew as little as $1.50 a month. Came the revolution, army pay went to $12 a month--more for men with dependents.
Now there are British Centurion tanks on display in Cairo's crowded public squares with microphones blaring out a remarkable offer:
"Forty dollars a month for tank drivers!"
That's a large bundle in Egypt, where laborers earn as little as 45 cents a day and teachers only make $42 a month.
But the $40 offer applies only to youths with the equivalent of two years' high school education. The army is short on literate soldiers who can learn the complexities of big tanks--especially the Stalin models coming from Moscow.
Egypt's students only do a year under the draft. Nasser wants them in for the long pull--on a volunteer basis. But the students generally come from wealthy families and they seldom want their boys in uniform. They used to buy draft exemptions for $60 a head--legally.
That's over now but Nasser still has a problem. * * * Army pay runs from $4 to $8-a-month for enlisted men in Israel. Gen. Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff, only gets $90 a month more than Egypt is offering tank drivers. * * * DOCTOR? LAWYER? NO . . . Bus Driver. That's the thing in Israel. The bus driver is the aristocrat. He's in one of the oldest unions and makes close to $50 a week--sky-high pay there. israeli children

* * * WHO'S AGAINST NASSER? The best observers in Cairo list five possible reasons why the 37-year-old Premier is turning gray:
The old army brass--the conservatives who stood above the "Young Officers'" revolution when it sent Fatso Farouk into a crap-shooter's happy exile on the Riviera.
The supporters of Maj. Gen. Nohammed Naguib, who was Nasser's front man until he began to play President for real. Naguib is tending his chickens--and maybe a little underground politics on the side--in a big country house in El Marg.
Some of the pashas--the wealthy landowners. They liked the old regime better.
egyptian children

Some of the effendis in the civil service. They made out better under Farouk because they could steal anything he didn't get to first. Nasser's people say he has cut graft by 85 percent.
The Moslem Brotherhood. Nasser ran a little blood bath for the terrorists after one of the boys took eight shots at him last year but everybody concedes that the organization is not quite dead. Naguib may have some chums in its ranks, too.
You have to add a sixth group: those among Nasser's high-riders who are smarting under Israel's retaliation strikes and want war now, not later.
And you thought it was a lark being a dictator, didn't you? You didn't know about the wrong numbers and the schemers in the woodwork.   * * *   On the cultural front, Israel and the Arab world are both ahead of the U.S., Britain and Russia in one respect: No TV.     * * *   MOVIES, ANYONE? The Israelis are high on Hollywood. Any Danny Kaye picture, even a lemon, will run for months. The hoss-operas also are strong, as well as crime epics, spectacles and the occasional long-hair effort out of the film factories.
The movies run in English with sub-titles in Hebrew and French. The theaters charge from 30 to 75 cents and you line up, maybe for hours, to get in.
The stars that are box office in the U.S. are also hot there:
John Wayne, Grace Kelly, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, Doris Day, Marilyn . . . no, not Marilyn. She hasn't got it made in Israel. I didn't find out why. I asked lots of people but I was too broken-up to get the story straight.                                                               * * * AH, FAME! Speaking of the movie kings and queens, there's another guy doing very well in Israel. An elderly fan identified him to me as "you know, the one that was married to Ava Gardner." Turned out the woman meant Sinatra. I told her he was a large name in his own right before, during and after Ava.                  * * * YOU THINK NEW YORK IS BAD?--I began to long for the smooth, swift quiet traffic of Manhattan (tricky thing, memory) after a few days in Israel, where the few motorists live dangerously and the cops are just as nasty as ours.
But in Cairo later I began to long for the wild streets of Tel Aviv.
In Cairo, there's a standard method to driving: you get in your car, slap a fist on the horn, and then take your chances with the buses, taxis, donkey carts, trolleys, bikes, scooters, pushcarts, trucks, the occasional herd of cattle on the way to slaughter--and the pedestrians, of course.
  There are no lanes and no rules--except the survival of the fittest.                      * * * nazareth

TWO POINTS OF VIEW--In Rome, en route to Tel Aviv, I met an Israeli who was a fighter pilot in 1948 and asked him what he thought about Nasser's arms deal (cut-rate) with the Russians.
"It doesn't mean a thing," the flier said. "We have a secret weapon of our own--the Arab soldier."
I asked him what he meant.
"The Arab has nothing to fight for," he said, "and we have. That's the difference. In 1948, they had medium bombers at the start and we had to throw grenades at them from Piper Cubs and we won. They started with every kind of superiority in the air and on the ground--except in fighting spirit. It will be the same way next time."
This is not an uncommon point of view among Israelis, particularly with those who were in the '48 war. In Tel Aviv, I asked another veteran of '48 about it--Major Dan Gov, 34, spokesman for the Israeli Army. He didn't like the way the flier had talked.
"The Arab soldier isn't our secret weapon at all," Gov said. "We know their training is better than it was--look at the Fedayeen on the Gaza Strip. They've put a lot of money and a lot of brains into their training.
"The Arab soldier is 100 percent better than he was seven years ago--even if he is far from perfect. He should not be underestimated.
If Israel has a secret weapon it is not the Arab soldier but the Israeli soldier. That's what we have to count on--that and some kind of even break on heavy weapons."   * * * THE BIG CITY--In New York, the Civil War tenement is only around the corner from the luxurious duplex in the brand new apartment house.
In Cairo, there are penny-poor Arab families living in miserable one-room shacks atop office buildings across the street from the best hotels.
  Israel is no different. It is only two minutes from the ultra-fashionable, Miami-style Accadia Grand Hotel outside Tel Aviv to the rotten tin huts of a colony of Oriental immigrants.
The city is the same everywhere.                       * * * Israel has a tolerance problem. The sabras--what you might call Israel's Mayflower families--used to look down on new arrivals. Then each wave of immigrants tended to look down on succeeding waves. Now there are some who speak of the dark-skinned Moroccan Jews coming from North Africa as "schwarzes" (blacks).
Perhaps it's like all melting pots: Not everything melts.                    * * * naomi

GIRL FROM BROOKLYN--In the orthodox kibbutz of Saad, on the Gaza Strip, I met pretty Naomi Illan, 22, daughter of Cantor Elchonan Wiseman of Brooklyn.
Naomi came to Israel three years ago with a Zionist choral group and fell in love--first with the country and then with Bezalel Illan, a tractor driver at Saad. They got married.
The Gaza plain was quiet then but the firing started very soon. I asked the bright little brunet, now the mother of a 14-month-old son, whether she longed for the peace and security of Brooklyn.
"No," she said, "In the beginning it was frightening, but you get used to it. It's just part of your life, of course. I miss my family back home but the spirit here, the attitude, is so wonderful. You can't go away from it. I can't, anyway."                     * * * THE REFUGEE QUESTION--Is there any way to settle the argument over the Palestine Arabs? Those are the answers I got from Messrs. Sharett and Nasser:
SHARETT--"Israel cannot take back any refugees now that Egypt has admitted that they have been kept on the border only as a force to fight us."
NASSER--"The refugees must go back. It is their right to go back. They don't like to come here. They prefer to return to their motherland."                        * * * CRIME AND PUNISHMENT--Israel is growing in every way, and so are its police problems. The state has been spared mobsters in the U.S. style, but juvenile delinquency is on the rise.
  So are sex crimes, such as rape. "Even in this respect we've become what you might call 'normal'," Inspector General Yeheskel Sahar told me.
There's some prostitution, too, centered in Tel Aviv and the Port of Haifa, the police chief said. Brothels (pleasure palaces with two or more women for sale) are illegal, and so is street soliciting. Otherwise Israel lets the ladies of the evening alone--or with their clients, as the case may be.
Procuring is something else. Sahar hounds that breed but the law only provides light sentences--up to three years. There are no call house operations to speak of, Sahar said--"We are very backward in that respect, fortunately."        * * * FOOTNOTE--Nobody wants to wind up a thing like this with any bad feelings, but I'm a little disappointed in Mr. Nasser's roly-poly Minister of National Guidance Abdel Kader Hatem.
When the Premier told me that his real mission was to defend the Arab world against an "international Zionist conspiracy," he referred me to Col. Hatem for documents to support his charge. He said he had thrown his last report on the "conspiracy" into his trash basket but Col. Hatem had bundles of them.
The Colonel said he sure did and he'd be glad to get the stuff translated from the Arabic and shoot them to me in New York via diplomatic pouch.
Well, either he never did that or some double agent heisted the hot pouch.
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