This corner is edited by: Ziyadeh Awwad

The Events of the Arab World Occupy International Circles

Among the most important ques-tions that claimed the attention of international circles during the first month of the new year was Egypt's abrogation of the British-Egyptian agreement concerning the evacuation of Suez, signed in 1954. This abrogation was then met by a British reaction, issued immedi-ately thereafter, to the effect that one party to a contract cannot abrogate the treaty on its own, and that Britain consequently refuses to recognize the legality of the Egyptian decision.

Alongside this new crisis in the international situation came President Eisenhower's submis-sion of his plan for the protection of the Middle East and for aiding it militarily and economically.

Nor was it to be expected that Egypt would stop at any limit in the measures she was preparing in order to confront the Western moves: she announced the nationalization of the British and French banks and financial insti-tutions, while all the rest were granted a period of five years, outside the scope of the nation-alization, whose effect applied immediately to the institutions of France and Britain — this, until the resources of Egyptian shareholders become equal to those of the other foreigners.

When we take in all these suc-cessive events, we see that direct or indirect reactions to President Eisenhower's plan were inevitable. Some of the Arab states welcomed it with reserva-tion; others saw in it a modern form of American influence, filling what the Americans in particular, and the Westerners in general, call "the vacuum" in the Middle East region. One result of this was that King Hussein paid a visit to Saudi Arabia in the middle of last month, then returned with His Majesty King Saud to Cairo, where the Prime Minister of Syria, Sabri al-Asali, joined them. They deliberated on the common questions of the four countries, and their talks resulted in a four-party Arab agreement providing for the grant to Jordan of financial aid to take the place of the British aid to Jordan, amounting to approxi-mately 120 million Lebanese lira each year, for a period of ten years. All this took place while the other Arab capitals went on studying the new American plan and concerning themselves with the present situation in the Middle East, in the light of Israel's dallying in withdrawing her soldiers from Sinai and Gaza, and of the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations and its adoption of a nearly unanimous draft resolution requesting Israel to withdraw her forces from the territory of Egypt and from Gaza within five days, ending on January 25.

But Israel was not prepared to accept this resolution, and put forward a demand for guarantees of the freedom of her ships to pass through the Gulf of Aqaba, and for the supervision of the affairs of Gaza, internally and externally, under the authority of the United Nations.

Here Egypt announced that she would reconsider the presence of the international emergency forces on her territory, and the work now in progress to clear the Canal.

Parallel to all these events came the meetings and visits that took place between Presidents Nehru and Shukri al-Quwatli in New Delhi, and between President al-Quwatli and the leaders of the government in Pakistan, and the meeting of Bulganin and Chou En-lai in Moscow, and the broadcasting of joint communiqués — all of the soporific kind, amounting to no more than a Communist reaction to President Eisenhower's plan for the Middle East. These questions will be the subject of careful study in Washington between the American President, the Saudi monarch, Emir Abdul Ilah, Crown Prince of Iraq, and Dr. Charles Malik, the Lebanese Foreign Minister, who led the way with visits to Cairo, Athens, Rome, Paris, and London, and then Washington, where he heads Lebanon's delegation to the meetings of the General Assembly of the United Nations.