Triumph and catastrophe: in continuing the discussion begun in the July/August 2002 Humanist regarding the origins of the strife between Israelis and Palestinians, events in Israel's first decade as a nation firmly drew the lines of conflict - Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

On May 15, 1948, the sun rose for the first time on Medinath Yisrael, the infant state of Israel, and widespread Zionist rejoicing was accompanied by wailing, rage, and utter disbelief of the Palestinians, already demoralized by their crushing defeat in a civil war. Some sixty-six years had passed since the first aliyah ("going up" to Israel) of immigrants who sought to escape the czarist pogroms of 1881. Finally, the moment of victory had arrived--or was it more like a new stage along an uncertain road? Were there any patterns in the events of those sixty-six years to help us anticipate what would follow? Perhaps.

In the period just before World War I, seduced by the misleading Zionist slogan "A land without people for a people without land," tens of thousands of new immigrants were disillusioned to discover themselves a small, unwelcome minority among the longtime inhabitants--even some who were Jewish. Many of the immigrants who had come from urban environments were dismayed by the harsh climate and primitive rural conditions they encountered. Before long, most of them left Palestine for other havens or even returned to Europe. Later, waves of immigrants were impelled by a "secular Zionist" vision of a modern nation state, combined with a more urgent fear of racist persecution at home on an unprecedented scale. They came to Palestine committed to stay despite any hostility their presence might inspire. Idealism gave way to realistic determination.

The Arabs also identified with colonial peoples worldwide who yearned for a degree of freedom from their imperial masters and even outright independence. This was evident early on in the Egyptian desire to be rid of British control and the Arab resistance to Ottoman rule. These feelings only grew in intensity under the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the two world wars. The various regional movements toward independence often clashed with each other, especially when the British or French were perceived as favoring one side unfairly.

By May 1948 all the countries neighboring Palestine were at least nominally "independent," though their independence was hemmed in during and after the war by treaties and the continuing presence of French or British forces. Egypt, which at one time had enjoyed a prolonged autonomy, had lost it through indebtedness brought about by the costs of constructing the Suez Canal. Egypt was occupied by Britain in 1882, became a British protectorate at the start of World War I, and finally won formal "independence" in 1922, though Britain continued to assert its control over the Suez Canal. Because of this history and the canal's proximity to Israel, Egypt was to play a major role in the future of the new Jewish state. Iraq, which had been given slowly increasing autonomy under the Hashimite King Faisal in 1921, was granted formal independence in 1932. Faisal's brother, Amir Abdullah of Transjordan, was crowned king of an independent Transjordan in 1946. He profoundly distrusted both the Syrians and the Palestinians under the mufti's leadership. Abdullah had long hoped Transjordan might be able to assimilate the "West Bank" of Palestine, the region proposed under partition plans for a Palestinian government, and courted British support for this idea. Syria and Lebanon--formally independent since 1941--were taken over by the pro-Axis Vichy government during the war. After the war in 1946, a reluctant Charles de Gaulle finally permitted the withdrawal of French troops from Syria and then Lebanon.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the Arabs regarded the immigration of Jews as an attempt by Europeans to prolong colonialism. This suspicion was only strengthened by expressions of cultural imperialism such as that in 1896 by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat, who wrote: "We shall form part of Europe's fortified wall against Asia, and fulfill the role of cultural vanguard facing the barbarians." Similarly, when Winston Churchill in 1921 tried to cheer up the Arabs by telling them that a Jewish home in Palestine would be not only good for the world, good for the Jews, and good for the British Empire but also "good for the Arabs," he was, to them, merely piling egregious insult upon injury.

The secular Zionist David Ben-Gurion, one of the earlier immigrants who hadn't left, was never in doubt about the basic paradox of Zionism. In 1939, during the Arab rebellion against the British mandate, he told the political committee of the Land of Israel Workers' Party (MAPAI), "When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves--that is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves.... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves." Benny Morris, who quotes this passage in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-200I, adds, "Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement." To those Zionists who interpreted Genesis 15:18 literally, Jahweh had promised the children of Abraham all the land in between the Nile and Euphrates rivers--and even the secular Zionist majority, which clearly didn't believe in Jahweh, looked on this biblical promise as a useful unifying narrative.

The Palestinian Arabs were thoroughly humbled by the British during the 1936 to 1939 Nab rebellion, becoming in effect wards of the Arab states. Yet the British White Paper of 1939 had held out to them the promise of an independent Palestinian state after another ten years, during which Jewish immigration was to be drastically reduced. They became even further divided during World War II, however, when the mufti fled to exile in Berlin. And in 1947 when it became clear that the British were unable to keep their 1939 promise, the Palestinian Arabs remained stateless and ineffectual, totally dependent on the outside Arabs. The "Nab Liberation Army" (ALA) threatened the Yishuv (Jewish Settlers) during the first three months of 1948 but had few Palestinians among its members and wasn't considered an effective force.

In the minds of the Palestinians, just as the British Empire had replaced the Ottoman Empire as the prime occupying force in Palestine, Israel was about to replace the British Empire. This view was for them amply confirmed by the exodus of tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians who left their homes in the weeks before May 15, 1948, to escape the fighting, most of them expecting to return just as soon as the Zionists were expelled. To this Ben-Gurion countered:

   Now history has shown who is really attached to this country, and for whom
   this country is easily given up. So far, not a single Jewish settlement,
   however remote, helpless, or isolated, has been abandoned. The Arabs, on
   the other hand, have abandoned entire cities, like Tiberias and Haifa, with
   the greatest of ease, after their very first defeat. Despite the fact that
   they did not have to fear destruction or massacre. Indeed, it has now been
   made amply clear which people is deeply attached to this country.

This interpretation was at best disingenuous since most of the Arab refugees had gone to live with friends or relatives while the Jews obviously had no alternative to staying put. Rumors of impending massacres of Arabs were spread by both sides and some actually occurred, terrifying the villagers. The Yishuv authorities also issued veiled threats such as "You may stay, but we cannot promise you food."

So it was inevitable that May 15, 1948, was a day that for the Palestinians and most other Arabs would "live in infamy" as al-Nakba, "The Catastrophe" (with a connotation perhaps rendered more sensitively by the Semitic superlative "The Catastrophe of Catastrophes"). The armies of all five of Israel's Arab neighbors, in a desperate effort to reverse or at least forestall further Zionist colonization and expansion, lined up at or inside the borders of Palestine, intent on a war of liberation. The army of Transjordan, known as the Arab Legion, was the best equipped and had a British commander, General John Bagot Glubb ("Glubb Pasha"). The small Lebanese army entered Arab-occupied Galilee, the Syrians stayed at the border, the Arab Legion and Iraqis moved into the West Bank north of the Dead Sea (the Arab Legion ordered the ALA north into Galilee, out of its way), and the Egyptians entered from the south toward the Gaza Strip and Beersheba. Two days earlier the Israeli army (Haganah) commanders had estimated the odds of an Israeli victory at "fifty-fifty."

The Arabs had long been accustomed to thinking of the British as their oppressors and the sole protectors of the Jewish minority. It isn't surprising, therefore, that they saw the departure of the British army as an opportunity to eliminate the Jews from Palestine not only easily but once and for all. The Egyptian army reported to its government that a war would be "a parade without any risks whatsoever." The reality, however, was that nobody on either side knew the strength of the other, and the Arab armies (except for the Arab Legion) had never prepared for war, thinking that one way or another war would never be necessary. They were ill-trained, poorly equipped, and utterly uncoordinated.

It won't serve our purpose here to describe in detail the battles that ensued. Since our focus is on the attitudes that gave rise to the events and the attitudes that flowed from them, we'll merely summarize the war and its main consequences. First, the Lebanese had little stomach for fighting, and the powerful Maronite Christians were dead set against it, and had apparently been advised by American and French diplomats to stay out. Elsewhere, the actual fighting took place in three stages separated by truces of one month and three months. In the first stage--from May 15 to June 11, 1948--the fighting was extremely intense with casualties in the thousands, but the Israelis came out ahead because little territory changed hands. On May 20, 1948, the United Nations Security Council sent Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden (who in 1945 led the rescue of five thousand Jews from concentration camps) to mediate a speedy ceasefire and find a long-term solution to the conflict. Bernadotte arranged a one-month truce from June 11 to July 8, 1948, but both sides rejected his suggestions for peace, including a renewed call for partition. The truce was vitally important for the Israeli side, which used it to mobilize recruits and war veterans from inside and outside Israel and to bring in large quantities of armaments. By July 8, 1948, the strength of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), built up from the old Haganah, had increased from around thirty-five thousand to sixty-five thousand well-equipped personnel--a very different army from the one that had entered the war.

In an effort to strengthen military discipline under a unified IDF, Ben-Gurion attempted at this time to disband two "renegade" terrorist organizations that scared both friend and foe during much of the later British mandate. These terrorist organizations were the Revisionist Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and the even more radical LEHI, or "Stern Gang," led mainly by Yitzhak Shamir. They challenged Ben-Gurion's attempt June 21, 1948, when the IDF sank an Irgun boat from France that refused to follow IDF orders. Both the Irgun and the Stern Gang continued to operate in Jerusalem, which wasn't strictly a part of Israel, and their presence there would soon have tragic consequences in September 1948.

When the fighting resumed, it lasted only ten days. The Security Council ordered a second truce, which began July 18, 1948, and continued until October 15, 1948. Again the IDF used the opportunity to scale up its defenses, ending up with eighty-eight thousand troops, tanks, and artillery, and even a dozen or so Czech Spitfires and sixteen bombers. The big issue for Israel was whether to resume the fight in the neighborhood of Jerusalem and the West Bank, as Ben-Gurion urged, or in the south against Egypt. The cabinet decided in favor of the second alternative, mainly because of the greater threat from the more powerful Egyptian army. The Arab Legion, the only real obstacle to the IDF capture of the West Bank, suffered very serious casualties early in the war and had almost no ammunition left. This decision would have political repercussions later when Ben-Gurion would say that it had caused the "loss" of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

A further incentive to engage the Egyptians was created by a new peace plan by Bernadotte, which included proposals that the whole Negev (the "south" from Beersheba to the Gulf of Aqaba) be given to the Arabs and that Jerusalem be internationalized. This plan so enraged the Jewish terrorist groups in Jerusalem that Yitzhak Shamir led a small group of Stern Gang members in the assassination of Bernadotte on September 17, 1948. The peace plan wasn't made public until two days later, when it immediately came to be honored as a martyr's political testament, which the Israelis felt urgently driven to defy. Ben-Gurion also ordered both the Irgun and the Stern Gang to be disbanded, but he never denounced terrorism as a weapon. And although more than two hundred people were arrested for the assassination nobody was ever tried. Both Begin and Shamir were widely regarded as heroes, and both would be elected prime ministers of Israel three to four decades later.

On December 1, 1948, six weeks after the fighting resumed, King Abdullah agreed to a ceasefire with Israel. On December 28, 1948, the IDF crossed the international border into the Sinai Peninsula, threatening not only the Egyptian army but also a 1936 British treaty with Egypt to defend the Suez Canal. According to Benny Morris in Righteous Victims, Britain notified the United States, and President Truman expressed his "deep" concern that this invasion tended to "prove... Israel's aggressiveness" and "complete disregard of the United Nations." Ben-Gurion, insisting that the IDF had already been ordered to return to Israel (it had not), added, "I am surprised by the harsh tone. Is there any need for a friendly power to approach a small and weak nation in such a tone?"

On January 5, 1949, Egypt asked for armistice negotiations after more IDF incursions and Egyptian defeats and under British pressure. The next day the Israeli ambassador in Washington reported that opinion there had turned "almost hostile," implying that further financial support was threatened. That night the IDF blew up an Egyptian train carrying hundreds wounded soldiers, and the following day Israel agreed to an immediate ceasefire.

With the end of the war in sight, on January 25, 1949, Israelis held elections for a Constituent Assembly instructed to establish the new government of Israel. It created a parliamentary knesset ("assembly") of 120 members and constituted itself the first Knesset. The first cabinet, a centralist coalition, was confirmed on March 10, 1949, with Ben-Gurion as the first prime minister. To replace Bernadotte as mediator, the UN appointed Dr. Ralph Bunche, an African American. Over the next several months, under his adroit leadership, a series of armistice agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt on February 24, 1949; Lebanon on March 23, 1949; Transjordan on April 3, 1949; and finally Syria on July 20, 1949. Bunche was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts.

These armistice agreements weren't formal peace treaties, however the borders they specified weren't originally considered to be permanent, and have never been so considered by most of the Arab states. But over time the Israeli position has been to treat them as settled de facto. The principal changes in land area brought about by what the Israelis usually call the "War of Independence" and the Arabs call the "War for Palestine" were that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was annexed by Transjordan (which then became "The Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan," or simply "Jordan"); West Jerusalem was occupied by Israel; Egypt retained the Gaza Strip; and Israel increased its total area to about eight thousand square miles--or eighty percent of the former Palestine mandate. (The population of Palestine was estimated in 1946 at 1.2 million--one-third of them Jews and two-thirds Arabs.)

A major corollary of these changes is that from 1949 on the Palestinian Arabs, for the first time in modern history, had no "Palestine" to call home. It was abundantly clear that they could no longer look to their Arab neighbors to protect them from Israel. Worse yet, some of the Arab states seemed more interested in their territory than in them. Lands that might have. been part of a Palestinian homeland under various partition plans of the past were now controlled by Israel, Jordan, or. Egypt. Properties formerly owned by Palestinians in Palestine were now under one of these jurisdictions and, since their former owners had abandoned many of them in great haste during the war, many of them had been claimed by new owners in the meantime. According to British estimates in February 1949 the total number of former "Palestinians"--those who remained behind and those who fled--was around 900,000 of which 320,000 (who were offered Jordanian citizenship) now lived in the Jordanian territory in the West Bank or across the Jordan; 210,000 of them lived in camps in Gaza; 100,000 in Lebanon; 75,000 in Syria; a few in Egypt and Iraq; and about 150,000 in Israel. The analogy to the situation of Jewish "displaced persons" in Europe after World War II is startling.

Who were the Palestinian displaced persons, why had they left, where did they go, and what, if anything, as to be done about them? Sharply conflicting answers have been given to such questions by the various parties, depending on whose interests were best served by which. Briefly, the displaced persons left their homes under fear of extermination, according to the Arabs; left voluntarily or left based on the advice of the Arab armies, according to the Israelis. Most left the former Palestine for other countries; many others elected to remain in refugee camps--as a public relations move according to Israelis, or because they had nowhere else to go according to the Arabs.

Whichever version was closer to the truth, neither side did much to alleviate the predicament. The Arab view was that Israel usurped the properties of the refugees and owed them full compensation, the right to return to their homes, or some combination of these. Israel argued that the refugees were the Arabs' problem, since the Arabs had consistently refused to consider partition of Palestine. In any case Israel would enter into negotiations about the refugees only as a part of a comprehensive peace treaty, so it was in the interest of both sides to drag their feet. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was left attempting to do what it could to ameliorate the lot of the refugees.

It should be emphasized that, practically from its beginning, the Zionist movement sought a "Jewish state." It wanted not merely a country that would admit Jews as equals but a state that would be safe for Jews and therefore, by implication, controlled by Jews in perpetuity. To maintain such control it would presumably be necessary to maintain a clear and effective Jewish majority despite differences in rates of net immigration, birth, and death. This view wasn't always made explicit but, spoken or unspoken, it underlay frequent discussions of the eventual need for a policy of "transfer"--that is, voluntary or forced emigration of non-Jews. Chaim Weizmann had argued in 1941 for voluntary transfer, saying that, as a first step, "if half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place," and that the Arabs would be transferred "only into Iraq or Transjordan ... conditions in Transjordan weren't very different from those of the Palestine hill country." In the same year, however, Ben-Gurion, the realist, wrote in Outlines of Zionist Policy: "Complete transfer without compulsion--and ruthless compulsion at that--is hardly imaginable." There is ample evidence that later, during the 1948 to 1949 war, helplessness and fear were a significant part of the motivation of those Palestinians who left their homes. Chaim Weizmann was somewhat less than candid, therefore, when he described these events as the "miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel's task."

But regardless of the detailed explanation of the origin of the refugee problem, there is no dispute that the world has failed for fifty-three years to find a solution for it. And it remains perhaps the most dangerous, intractable, and (some would argue) ultimately unnecessary problem in the entire Middle East, if not the whole world. The refugee problem is particularly dangerous because it is both real and symbolic--it is the most visible symbol of the crushing humiliation of a seemingly overwhelming number of Arabs by a comparatively small Israeli nation, indeed, as with Goliath by David. One Israeli version of the story was that 600,000 Jews defeated forty million Arabs. (In fact, the armed forces of the two sides were far more closely matched in size). Immediately after these events, waves of outrage and recrimination began to roll through the Arab world and heads began to fall, both literally and figuratively. Coups and counter-coups followed in succession for more than a decade as Arab intellectuals and leaders searched for acceptable explanations and solutions to their nightmare. This interval has been called the period of the "Arab cold war" and the "radicalization of Arab politics."

Late in 1948 the prime minister of Egypt, Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi, was assassinated, reputedly by members of the twenty-year-old Muslim Brotherhood, for not prosecuting the war vigorously enough. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, was in turn assassinated the next year, presumably in retaliation by agents of the Egyptian government. Riyadh al-Sulh, prime minister of Lebanon, who had argued strenuously in favor of war but then hadn't committed Lebanese forces to the fight, was also assassinated. In Syria, a military coup overthrew civilian President Quwwatli in March 1949. In July 1951 King Abdullah of Jordan was shot to death on the steps of Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian refugee while in the presence of his grandson, Hussein. (The Hashimite dynasty survived, however, when Hussein assumed the throne in 1953 at the age of eighteen. He remained king until his death February 7, 1999, and was succeeded by his son Abdullah.) Politically the most far-reaching effect of the Arab defeat occurred on July 23, 1952, when King Farouk of Egypt, who had committed his troops to fight against Israel, was deposed and the new Republic of Egypt was proclaimed, by a coup of army officers, most of whom had fought in the war. Their leader was Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose rise and fall would dominate the remaining years of the present history.

The second major influence during those years was the persistent vulnerability of Israel. In 1950 the Arabs imposed an economic boycott against Israel, and when Nasser rose to power he closed the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Because the armistice agreements weren't peace treaties, and because the refugees' fates remained unresolved, the new Israeli state remained far from secure within its borders. Three quarters of its population lived in a strip of coastal plain, ten miles wide at its narrowest point, and the corridor connecting it to Jerusalem. Many Israeli cities were fewer than twenty miles from an Arab state. Incursions by refugees and other Arabs were continual occurrences and gradually became more serious, leading to a cycle of increasingly violent Arab raids and Israeli army reprisals. In the first major retaliation in 1953, Ariel Sharon led a new army unit into a Jordanian village, destroying fifty houses and killing sixty Jordanians. Despite Jordanian efforts to prevent Arab raids, invasions and reprisals continued. Further troubles afflicted the Syrian and Egyptian borders. The Egyptians executed two Israeli sailors in the Suez Canal, prompting one particularly large and successful Israeli attack on an Egyptian post in Gaza. UN attempts to control such violence and start peace talks were generally ineffectual.

The Gaza defeat convinced Nassar that he needed more arms from the outside but this position was influenced by the fact that his main interest was to free Egypt from British domination over the Suez Canal. All over the globe the drive for independence was bearing fruit--India and Pakistan had become independent in 1947, Yugoslavia in 1948, and Indonesia and the Chinese People's Republic in 1949. Israel's independence could be included here except that it was obtained at the expense, at least for now, of the Palestinian Arabs' own dreams. Why should Egypt not be next?

The Cold War was creating new power alignments, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954. A major concern, of course, was oil. Besides the deposits in Iran and Iraq, those in Saudi Arabia (the world's largest known reserves) were just beginning to be exploited because they had been only discovered in 1939. The Iranian parliament had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown two years later in favor of the Shah by Britain and the United States--a fact Iranians would never forget. The stakes were extremely high; the United States tested a hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the Soviet Union did the same a year later. In between, Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced Harry Truman as president of the United States. This was the new world into which Nasser came to power.

Nasser's rise after 1952 was rapid and served as a symbol to many Arabs of hope for a better future. He became prime minister in 1954 and was soon recognized among the Arabs, though sometimes grudgingly, as an effective leader. During 1954, for example, Britain agreed to replace the 1936 treaty, which had given Britain control over the Suez Canal, with a new treaty in which British troops would be evacuated within twenty months. This agreement, however, contained the very important proviso that Britain could reoccupy the Canal Zone in the event of an attack on a member of the Arab League or on Turkey. Nasser then requested arms from the United States in order to achieve parity with Israel, but the request was denied.

In 1955 the Baghdad Pact was formed among Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, and Great Britain, with the United States as an unofficial partner, to cover the southern border of the Soviet Union with the Middle East. Nasser rightly felt that his leadership of the Arabs was being threatened. In April 1955 he attended the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Indonesia and became enamored of the idea of "positive neutralism." In September 1955 he announced a huge purchase using Egyptian cotton as payment for Soviet arms from Czechoslovakia. The effect was monumental. Until now the Soviet bloc had been the. principal supplier of arms to Israel, many of whose leaders had come from Eastern Europe and were either socialists or communists. Through Nasser's deal the Soviet Union managed to circumvent the Baghdad Pact, and Egypt obtained arms for use against Israel. Nasser's stock among the Arabs soared. A few months later Syria also made an arms deal with the Soviet bloc.

In an attempt to recover some of its influence with the Arabs, the United States suggested a few months later that it would give Egypt financial aid to help build a huge dam on the Nile River at Aswan. Heavy lobbying against this plan in the United States by cotton farmers and Israeli supporters, combined with Nasser's recognition of Communist China on May 4, 1956, caused U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to change his mind and withdraw the loan offer on July 19, 1956. One week later Nasser angrily announced that, in order to get money to build the Aswan dam, he would nationalize the Suez Canal!

At this prime ministers Anthony Eden of Great Britain and Guy Mollet of France lost whatever patience they still had with Nasser. France had its own problems with Nasser, who was supporting Algerian rebels against France, and the French socialists felt a certain kinship with the Israeli pioneers. Consequently, in 1954 France had become the first Western national to supply modern arms to Israel. Now Britain and France, together with Israel, hatched a curious plot that in hindsight was almost farcical. Israel would attack Egyptian forces in the Sinai, giving Britain a pretext to invoke its 1954 treaty with Egypt and reoccupy the Canal Zone with French assistance. Accordingly, on October 29, 1956, Israeli paratroops dropped on central Sinai, and the Egyptians defended their positions with vigor so that a full-scale war was soon in progress. The next day Britain called for an immediate cease-fire and an Egyptian withdrawal from the canal, but the Egyptians simply refused. British and French planes then attacked Egyptian air bases, while ground troops followed up slowly and timidly. The troops were under intense pressures from the Soviet Union and even more so from the United States to withdraw, which caused the British and French to arrive on November 5, 1956, without clear plans about how to proceed. Israel had conquered all of Sinai to the canal, but little else had occurred when, on the following night, Britain agreed to a ceasefire, and France and Israel went along. All three withdrew under orders from the UN, but Israel, genuinely worried about a future threat from Nasser, did so reluctantly and very slowly. Israel began its withdrawal the last week of November 1956 and finished on January 15, 1957, but not before destroying all Egyptian military properties along the way, mining some areas, plowing up roads, and dismantling railroad tracks and transporting them back to Israel.

For Britain and France, having infuriated their allies and lost all credibility with the Arabs, the whole affair was a ghastly blunder. In the end no territory changed hands, although Israel obtained the presence of a UN emergency force in Gaza to act as a buffer between Israel and Egypt, and refused until March 1957 to evacuate Gaza and Sharm ash-Sheikh. Nasser became an instant hero for all the Arabs. He had stared down both the British and the French, with justifications from both the United States and the Soviet Union, and had also retained control of the Suez Canal in the bargain. The prestige of the Soviet Union grew among the Arabs. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned in mid-January 1957, and the Times of London called him "the last British Prime Minister to believe that Britain was a Great Power and the first to confront a crisis which proved beyond doubt that she was not."

Israel's first decade as a sovereign nation ended with its position in the world consolidated--but in an environment of Arab radicalism that would soon intensify. Nasser's power and influence would also develop. Then, in combination with other elements, all of these trends would combine to bring about a definitive confrontation between Israel and its neighbors in 1967.

David Schafer is a consulting editor for the Humanist and a recently retired physiologist who now devotes most of his time to humanist research, writing, and teaching.

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