WEST ASIA-The Yom Kippur War in Retrospect

of a promising manifesto, there is developing instead a tendency to live with what Wilson and Healey call the facts of economic life. The Labour left has, under Wilsonian manipulation, which keeps Benn in the Cabinet and secures agreement from the powerful, old men in charge of the unions at every step, become a protest pressure group whose every demand is flouted by the moves that its government in power makes. If the Labour left is to recover its image of a few months ago, of a credible group with an economic programme for the country, its best bet is to return MORE than two years have elapsed since the surprise Arab attack on Israel, and defence experts and political analysts of all nations have had time to draw their conclusions. Recently, the Israeli Strategic Institute, Tel Aviv, organised an internationl symposium in Jerusalem on the military aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The whole show was obviously arranged to impress upon the Western experts that Israel had come out more or less un- scratched from the Yom Kippur War and there was nothing wrong with the Israeli strategy of politics, so that the same intransigent policy towards the Arabs could go on. The symposium began with Israeli and Western, notably American, experts talking about the possible application elsewhere of what had been learnt from the Yom Kippur War; it ended with boasting accounts of Israeli generals.