by Ray Lyman
All nations are born in violence, which is the midwife of every national existence, including our own. It is in the nature of the tribal, ethnic, and religious minorities of mankind to want a little piece of the planet to call their own and to put up a sign at whatever perimeter they can claim and defend as a border that reads “Keep Out.” The very worst condition of anyone in the world is to be stateless, a person without a country. It may seem romantic and idealistic to call yourself a citizen of the world, but more often than not in the real world, it just makes you vulnerable and homeless.
Such was the fate of the surviving Jews of Europe after World War II. There is nothing that gives people anywhere a sense of national identity as much as persecution. The more severe that persecution, the greater the common identity that develops. The systematic persecution and industrial genocide of the Jewish population of Europe from 1939 to 1945 was an unprecedented example of this, a state of existential war between the most powerful nation in Europe and its satellites and collaborators against 10 million European Jews. The state of Israel was born not through in a United Nations vote in November 1947, but rather in the fiery ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in April–May 1943, where the future flag of Israel was unfurled for the first time in battle. The U.N. partition vote merely made what was already a nation in the hearts of men and women a legal reality.
There was no reason for any objective person to expect that the modern state of Israel, born on May 14, 1948, would survive more than a few months, certainly not for 65 years. The U.S. State Department, then under George Marshall, no friend of Zionism, urged Harry Truman to refrain from an early recognition of any Jewish state that might emerge from the U.N partition vote of November 1947. There were good reasons to adopt this wait-and-watch policy. Zionists were not regarded by Western governments as moderate, rational people who could create and sustain a nation and protect the lives of the half million Jews in Palestine. From 1944 to 1948, they were seen by many as fanatical terrorists who had planted bombs in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, assassinated U.N. envoy Count Folke Bernadotte, and staged armed prison breaks to release compatriots jailed by the British.
Zionism was also perceived, perhaps not inaccurately, as a leftist cause that might present Josef Stalin with a beachhead in the Middle East. Indeed, the Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize Israel. Finally, an independent Zionist state with few friends and none of the resources required to prevail against its heavily armed neighbors, promised to be a humanitarian disaster, as Arab leaders across the Middle East threatened and pledged in the most explicit manner to finish the job that Hitler started a decade earlier. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — the religious and nationalist leader of the Palestinian Arabs, the Haj Amin al-Husseini — had even spent the war years in Berlin as a personal and privileged guest of the Third Reich, recruiting Muslim volunteers in the Balkans for the SS as his way of paying back his hosts.
Then there was oil, or petroleum, the essential commodity of which postwar economists and geologists were predicting that the world would someday run out. Until 1960, the United States was largely energy self-sufficient with the oil wells of Texas and Oklahoma supplying all the black gold needed by the nation and its allies to fight and win World War II. Hard as it is to believe, we were once the world’s leading petroleum-producing and -exporting country, and might soon be again. Still, the domestic reserves were starting to run low by 1948, and the United States needed to look elsewhere to ensure its supply in the great struggle with world communism and to keep America on wheels at home. Secretary of State Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal warned President Truman that recognizing a Jewish state in Palestine would jeopardize American relations with oil-rich Arab states and possibly drive them into the Russian orbit.
In mid-February 1945, on the way back from the Big Three conference at Yalta, President Roosevelt had met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the cruiser U.S.S. Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal and reached an unwritten understanding that continues to this day. It is one of the least known and yet one of the most consequential heads-of-state meetings in U.S. history and the last of FDR’s presidency (he died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months later). The Saudi king, who had won the Arabian heartland for the House of Saud in a 1925 tribal war, arrived aboard the Quincy with a retinue of black slaves, favorite wives, astrologers, and a small flock of sheep, and pitched his tent on the warship’s deck, delighting the exhausted and dying American president. By all accounts, FDR and Ibn Saud became fast friends and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. The king was so impressed with FDR’s wheelchair that the president presented him with one to use at home along with a personal C-47 transport plane fitted with a revolving throne that always faced Mecca.
The Saudi Royal House was intensely anticommunist and more than willing to allow U.S. oil companies to develop the vast sea of oil under the Arabian desert that American and British geologists had discovered in the 1930s. All the king asked in return was that the United States guarantee its territorial integrity from covetous and radical neighbors and not object too much, preferably not at all, to the absolute monarchy and fundamentalist theocracy of the Saudi kingdom. Ibn Saud listened to FDR explain the need for a Jewish homeland after the recent genocide in Europe and offered his own solution to the refugee problem: since Germany was responsible for this terrible crime against the Jews, let the Germans pay the price and give the European Jews Bavaria or the Rhineland as their national homeland. FDR was not able to argue against the logic of this argument and let the issue rest. The cajoling American patrician from Hyde Park was surprised and disappointed by the rigid resistance from the Saudi potentate to any proposal for a Jewish national homeland carved from the British Mandate of Palestine. Perhaps it even made FDR consider just for a moment the idea of a Zionist state in the Bavarian Alps.
America’s special relationship with Israel started with President Truman and would not have happened without him, certainly not in the same manner or to the same extent. The former haberdasher and machine politician senator from Missouri, who had been elevated to the presidency by political compromise at the 1944 Democratic Convention and FDR’s failing health, was a keen student of history, self-taught through voracious reading, and held a Midwestern conviction that the morally right side was the side the United States should always take in any international dispute. Truman’s old partner in the haberdashery business, a fellow World War I veteran and a Jew named Eddie Jacobson, persuaded Truman to meet with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the international Zionist movement, at the White House in March 1948, and, as any lobbyist will tell you, access is everything. Truman was converted to the Zionist cause by Jacobson and Weizmann and ignored the advice of the Arabists in the State and Defense Departments. The U.S. recognized Israel shortly after midnight on May 15, 1948, just as Egyptian bombs were falling on Tel Aviv and the armies of five Arab nations moved to invade the nascent Jewish state and wipe it off the map.
Formal recognition was not followed by an end to the U.N. arms embargo that, in theory, applied to all the belligerents in the region and not a single piece of military hardware ever came from the U.S government during Israel’s war of independence, or indeed until the late 1960s. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents seized any private arms shipments destined for Palestine that they could lay their hands on. Aside from recognition and a seat at the United Nations, the Israelis were on their own, facing better-armed and far more numerous opponents with makeshift weapons and a smorgasbord of arms and equipment clandestinely imported from all over the world. An arms embargo always benefits the side that is best armed before the conflict begins, and more often than not, as in the Balkans during the 1990s or in the Sudan, leads to genocide and massacre by the side that starts the war with the guns, tanks, and aircraft. Nothing rewards an aggressor or enables crimes against humanity like an effective arms embargo. People armed with adequate weapons are seldom massacred. They may lose in a conflict, but they survive to fight another day.
When the last truce was signed in January 1949, concluding a cease-fire with Syria and ending Israel’s war of independence, the territory held by each side at the time of the U.N.-sponsored cease-fires established the permanent border of pre-1967 Israel, and what an impossible border it was! Israel in 1949 lacked the most important military asset that any nation can possess (something Americans take for granted): strategic depth. The United States has more strategic depth than any great power in history — an ocean on each coast; mountains, deserts, wilderness, and rivers to impede any nation or combination of nations foolish enough to invade; and a weak neighbor to the south and a sparsely populated one to the north. There is little wonder that we sometimes take for granted our invulnerability or want to retreat into splendid isolation.
Israel has no such luxury, as it has virtually no strategic depth with a long frontier of more than 200 miles, a 9-mile waist that can be cut in an hour, and all her cities within range of rockets and artillery fire — not to mention hostile neighbors committed to her eventual destruction and the expulsion or even massacre of her population. One’s perspectives on such things as war and survival are profoundly affected by lack of strategic depth, and any illusions one might have about the essential goodness of human nature and universal values of justice and peace are dangerous myths that are too expensive to entertain. Americans in great numbers can and do entertain such myths, but then again we could afford to do so . . . at least we did until 9/11.
Israel in the 1950s desperately needed a powerful diplomatic and military ally from which it could purchase modern weapons and receive cooperation on technological, defense, and intelligence matters. That ally would not be the United States, which, under President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, hoped to create an anticommunist alliance along the lines of NATO in the Islamic world, a goal that was briefly achieved with the creation of the Central Eastern Treaty Organization (CENTO), at the signing of the Baghdad Pact in 1955. This alliance of the United States, Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan had no place for Israel, which remained a regional pariah even among the most pro-Western Islamic states.
Nor would that ally be the Soviet Union, despite early Russian hopes of gaining a valuable client state on the Mediterranean coast. The Zionists who founded Israel were certainly composed of old-fashioned leftists, many of Russian origin, with an addiction to the kind of Euro-socialism that stifles economic growth and nurtures poverty, but few of them were communists. The Russians soon determined that they would have far greater success in the Middle East courting secular Arab nationalists coming to power in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The decade of the 1950s was one long, turbulent Arab Spring, with similar unhappy results for Israel and the West. Israel’s first ally and patron would be a fading European empire, but still substantial power with the same pan-Arab nationalist enemies. That ally, of course, was the Fourth Republic of France.
In the summer of 1954, barely a few months after the loss of Indochina, France suffered another blow to her empire. French Algeria, legally an integral part of metropolitan France, erupted in revolt, a savage insurgency with many similarities to the American experience in Iraq a half century later. The nationalist FLN insurgents in Algeria, led by Ben Bella, found pan-Arabist Egypt to be a generous source of material and political aid in their struggle to wear down the French military and drive out the French settlers and European Arabs living in Algeria. The president of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser — a radicalized anti-Western army colonel who once hoped to welcome the liberation of Egypt by Rommel’s Afrika Korps — had staged a coup d’etat with the more moderate and easily-elbowed-aside General Mohamed Naguib that deposed the shamelessly corrupt King Farouk in 1952. Colonel Nasser, a veteran of the 1948 war, hated Israel and was devoted to the cause of its extinction and deeply resented the French and British colonialists who had dominated the Arab world since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. He established a one-party police state with a planned economy modeled on that of the Soviet Union, recognized Communist China to the chagrin of the United States, and welcomed with open arms Russian military and economic assistance, an endless flow of Soviet largess that would not end until his successor Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel at Camp David in 1978.
Nasser has endured as a revered figure in Arab world, despite his relentless and brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and secular vision for a pan-Arab Middle East under his own presidency-for-life. Aside from the Aswan Dam, built by his Soviet patrons, Nasser’s lasting legacy, since his death in 1970, has been the creation of state-sponsored terrorism as an Islamic weapon against Israel and the West, the permanent status of Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip as destitute refugees, and the introduction of weapons of mass destruction into the Middle East. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and French Premier Guy Mollet looked upon Nasser as another Mussolini, the fascist dictator who had started the wave of aggression in the 1930s that had led to war in 1939.
It was never Nasser’s intention to provoke a war in 1956; his armed forces were not nearly ready for one. It was his intention to get what he wanted without war. The Egyptian army had overrun the Palestinian Arab territory around the port of Gaza in 1948, an area that had become known as the Gaza Strip, an overpopulated sea of refugees surviving on food, medical care, and provisional housing provided by U.N. relief agencies and U.S. taxpayers. While never formally annexed by Egypt, Gaza was occupied and run as an Egyptian territory under an Egyptian military governor. No one in Gaza or in the Jordanian-annexed West Bank ever talked about creating a Palestinian state, not unless they wanted to spend time in one of Nasser’s notorious prisons or one of King Hussein’s crowded jails. The Palestinian refugees in the Gaza camps, and to a somewhat lesser degree in the West Bank, were saturated by government-run media with an endless diet of rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate propaganda, blaming the Jews and the West for their plight as refugees living in squalor.
Young Palestinian Arabs in Gaza proved to be eager recruits for the Fedayeen guerrillas who crossed the frontier into Israel at night to murder kibbutzim farmers, attack school buses, and, on occasion, even ambush a soldier guarding the border. More than a thousand Israelis were killed in Fedayeen raids between 1948 and 1956. Israeli commandos retaliated in cross-border operations, but the murder raids continued through the 1950s with Nasser’s support and encouragement. The Fedayeen raids were a low-cost and relatively effective way to take advantage of Israel’s lack of strategic depth, or the absence of distance and time from Israel’s hostile frontier to her vulnerable civilian population. It is a vulnerability that still exists for Israel. Anywhere else in the world this kind of state-sponsored terrorism would be an act of war, but in the Middle East of the 1950s (and today), it was a way of life with which people in Israel learned to live and endure . . . until the time was ready to strike back.
Colonel Nasser provided that opportunity in the summer of 1956. When the British Army pulled its last garrisons out of Egypt early in 1956 after 74 years in country, they left with an agreement that the Suez Canal was to be run by a Franco-British company and controlled by Britain, which regarded the Suez Canal as a vital part of its imperial and commonwealth defense and essential to its survival as a great power. Without Suez, Great Britain became just an island with pretensions off the coast of northern Europe. The British lease on the canal still had another dozen years to run, and the British government of the postwar period was never inclined to let the sun set on the Union Jack if it could help it. On July 26, 1956, Nasser ordered his army to seize the Suez Canal zone and close the canal to all Israeli shipping and any shipping coming to or from Israeli ports. For Britain, France, and Israel these were acts of war that could not be tolerated. For the first time in its history, Israel would be fighting a war with allies, even though there was no official collusion between them.
In the next few months secret high-level talks between Israeli military and diplomatic envoys and their British and French counterparts took place in the Paris suburb of Sevres. The talks produced the Protocol of Sevres, signed on October 24, which in effect gave Israel the green light to attack Egypt. It was an absurdly complicated scheme, which was patently designed to give the Anglo-French coalition a pretext for occupying the canal zone. When Israeli Defense Forces advanced to within a few miles of the canal zone, the British and French would issue an ultimatum to both sides to pull back from the Suez Canal to keep the vital waterway from becoming a war zone and ensure that global commerce would not be interrupted. In the process, Britain would regain control over the canal and bring about regime change in Egypt that would depose Nasser. At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.
From this collaboration of Israel, Great Britain, and France was born the Suez Crisis, a fiasco that demonstrated to everyone that Britain was no longer a great power and that Israel had learned all the hard lessons from her war of independence. Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, thanks to Israeli access to French arms, possessed fast, hard-hitting armored forces; a modern air force; and an effective national mobilization plan in which every citizen knew where he or she had to go during a crisis and what to do when they got there. Purchases of AMX-13 light tanks and Super Sherman M50 medium tanks from France gave Israel superb armored forces with an offensive tactical doctrine that would have been familiar to the panzer commanders of the German army during the years of blitzkrieg. Additionally, Israel’s acquisition of state-of-the-art Dassault Mystere fighter jets and older Ouragan fighter-bombers offset the advantage Egypt had possessed with her Soviet-built MiG-15 fighters over the P-51 Mustangs, Spitfire Mk.IXs and Gloster Meteors that had been the mainstay of Israel’s fledgling air force in the early 1950s.
Moshe Dayan launched Operation Kadesh, the Israeli attack on Egypt in the Sinai, on October 29, with a parachute drop on the Mitla Pass that opened a path to the canal zone. The Super Shermans, upgraded from the original Detroit Lend-Lease models, were fitted with 75mm high-velocity guns and new French engines for better performance in the desert. Israeli forces cut off the Gaza Strip on the first day of the war, as Fedayeen fighters proved to be of almost no value in conventional warfare. The Egyptian governor-general signed a surrender document soon after and entered captivity with his entire garrison. The port of El Arish on the northern coastal highway and Sharm El Sheik at the southern tip of the peninsula fell as organized Egyptian resistance collapsed in the Sinai. In the next few days 3,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed and another 5,000 taken prisoner. Israeli losses amounted to a few hundred dead and wounded. It was an astonishing military success that left the victors with five times the territory of prewar Israel. The only question remaining was how long they would be allowed to enjoy the security of this buffer between themselves and Nasser.
The answer was not very long. In accord with the Protocol of Sevres, the Anglo-French allies assembled the largest non-American naval force that the Mediterranean had seen since World War II and issued their ultimatum to Egypt and Israel on November 2. The Israelis pulled back from the canal, but Nasser defiantly refused to do so, becoming an anti-colonialist hero throughout the Third World as his prestige soared across the Middle East. Ignoring American warnings to refrain from using military force, British Red Berets and French Foreign Legion paratroopers dropped into the canal zone on November 5, as British and French aircraft bombed Egyptian airfields and military installations and British warships bombarded Port Said in the early hours of Operation Musketeer. It was not the Egyptian armed forces that would stop the Europeans and save Nasser’s embattled regime, but an unlikely benefactor — U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower and Dulles were infuriated that Britain and France were acting as if they were still world powers and old-fashioned imperialists. Did they not understand that it was now a bipolar world and they were no longer players with the assets and wealth to act independently of the United States? The Americans also entertained hopes of luring Nasser away from the Russians, a forlorn hope if ever there was one. Nasser had already decided on which side to be on in the Cold War and that side was the Eastern Bloc, which cared little or nothing for the lives of a million or so Jews struggling to build a state in Palestine.
The day after Operation Musketeer began, Eisenhower ordered the U.S. Treasury Department, which owned a healthy share of Britain’s enormous national debt, to begin selling the British pound sterling in global currency markets. Britain faced monetary catastrophe and a run on the pound; her Chancellor of the Exchequer urged Prime Minister Eden to accede to Eisenhower’s demand for a cease-fire. U.S. warships in the Med were put on war alert, causing one confused American admiral to ask, “Who’s the enemy?” and providing the always-opportunistic Russians with a cover to invade Hungary, their rebellious Warsaw Pact satellite. Eden and Mollet bowed to U.S. pressure and backed down, leaving Nasser in possession of the canal, which aside from tourism and foreign aid was Egypt’s only major source of revenue (a fact that remains true today).
Anthony Eden resigned as leader of the Tory Party a few months later, to be replaced as prime minister by Harold Macmillan. It was said of Eden that he was the last British prime minister to believe that Britain was still a great power and the first to prove that it was not. After Suez, Britain would rarely act as an independent player on the world stage. The retreat from Empire continued at an even more rapid pace with the decolonization of all imperial possessions in Africa and the Far East by the end of the 1960s. Defense cuts required to support the expanded social welfare state reduced the size of Britain’s armed forces to that of a second-rate power, leaving Britain reliant on America to take the lead in any future military interventions.
For France, the Suez fiasco was just one more defeat to add to the long list of debacles for the Fourth Republic since 1945, a litany that included Dien Bien Phu, the loss of Indochina to the Communists, independence for Tunisia and Morocco, and the frustrating FLN insurgency in Algeria. France needed a savior, and he appeared in the person General Charles de Gaulle, who returned from retirement to lead the Fifth Republic as its first president in 1958. De Gaulle, who strengthened the usually weak executive branch of the French government, defied his own conservative military to reach a peace agreement with the FLN in Algeria, granting full independence in 1962. Looking to the future and France’s need for Arab oil, the general changed the foreign policy of France from one that was closely allied to Israel to a more neutral position in the Middle East and later to a pro-Arab one. After the 1967 Six Day War, De Gaulle ended all arms sales to Israel, and the relationship has been a cold one ever since.
Nasser’s prestige was never higher than after the Suez fiasco. His grandiose plan for a pan-Arab Middle East actually seemed possible for a short period in the late 1950s. In 1958 Egypt and Syria united to form a single Arab state called the United Arab Republic, or the UAR, with Nasser as president. It lasted just five years, until Syria pulled out of the UAR in 1963. Nasser’s other obsession, the annihilation of Israel, remained the central focus of his regime until his death in 1970. To this end, he imported former Nazi rocket engineers to develop long-range guided missiles for striking Israel’s cities; spent enormous resources to develop chemical and biological weapons; sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under a 35-year-old Cairo-born Palestinian Marxist named Yasser Arafat in 1964; and plotted to destabilize any moderate Arab government that might make peace with Israel or favor the Western powers over the Soviet Union.
In the summer of 1958, Nasserite subversives in Lebanon and Jordan attempted to depose the governments of both pro-Western states. The United States and Britain had no choice but to act in concert and send troops into both countries to restore order and keep them out of Nasser’s and Khrushchev’s orbit. U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Lebanon, while British paratroopers came to aid of young King Hussein in Jordan. Eisenhower had long since regretted his support for Nasser during the Suez Crisis. American had entered the fray of the Middle East and would be there in hot and cold wars for the next half century with no end in sight.
Facing near universal opprobrium from the international community, Israel agreed to a U.N. cease-fire and agreed to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula within four months. In return, the Suez Canal would be reopened to Israeli-flagged shipping, Israel’s access to the Red Sea through the Straits of Tiran would be guaranteed, and a small U.N. peace-keeping force would be placed in the Sinai as a buffer between Egypt and Israel. The Sinai withdrawal was completed in March 1957, but Nasser violated his agreement almost at once and continued to bar ships sailing to and from Israeli ports from using the Suez Canal.
In May 1967 Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, blocking Israeli access to the Red Sea from the port of Eilat, and ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai. Armed with massive quantities of the latest Soviet military hardware, the armies of Egypt and Syria joined in a military pact with Jordan and massed their armored and mechanized infantry forces on Israel’s vulnerable borders. Nasser promised that this time he would drive the Jews into sea. Some Middle East historians believe his threats were just jingoistic rhetoric to keep the Arab masses on the streets of Cairo in a state of thrall to the failing dream of his pan-Arab nationalism and charismatic one-man rule. Israel, lacking the strategic depth necessary to absorb an invasion, could not take that risk.
In the early hours of June 5, 1967, more than 200 Israeli air force aircraft, many of them advanced third-generation Dassault Mirage II fighters purchased from France, struck 25 Arab air bases in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, annihilating or rendering unusable 350 Arab combat aircraft. This was shock and awe as the world had not seen since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Israel would have total air superiority in the six days of war to follow, which left Israel in occupation of the entire Sinai peninsula, the West Bank with East Jerusalem, and the Syrian Golan Heights.
For the Soviet Union, the humiliating defeat of their Arab client states and the destruction and capture of so much of their latest military hardware meant a loss of prestige and a propaganda success for the West in a Cold War it intended to win. Restraining its contempt for what it perceived to be incompetent and cowardly Arabs, the Soviet Bloc began to immediately replace and indeed augment the air and land forces of Egypt and Syria with new and better tanks, combat aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, and the latest Warsaw Pact bridging equipment. By 1972, the Soviets had more than made up for Egyptian and Syrian losses in the Six Day War and provided both Arab states with enough military hardware to risk another conventional war with Israel, a war that would erupt on Yom Kippur in October 1973.
For the United States, bogged down in the quagmire of Vietnam, Israel’s lightning victory in June 1967 seemed to prove that you can win wars decisively, at least if they are fought in deserts. After De Gaulle cut off the sale of armaments and spare parts to Israel, Lyndon Johnson and even more so Richard Nixon, whose massive airlift saved Israel from probable defeat in 1973, stepped in to replace France as Israel’s patron and to preserve the balance of power in the Middle East. The special relationship with Israel that both major U.S. political parties endorse and claim as their own began in those heady days of Cold War confrontation and has survived to the present day.
In the face of Iranian nuclear ambitions, a possible ground offensive in Gaza, and Israel’s existential dilemma, that relationship will likely be strained and tested in the months ahead. How far will the United States go to preserve the security of Israel is an open question that Israelis will no doubt be asking themselves in the days, weeks, and months ahead. The answer will shape the future of the Middle East and the course of American strategic policy in the 21st century.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical question, especially military history. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.