The Suez Crisis
Israeli paratroopers dig foxholes in the Sinai Desert near the Mitla Pass during Operation Kadesh.
Israel’s stunning victory in the First Arab-Israeli War sent shock waves through the Arab world in 1949. Nowhere was the loss felt more acutely than in the nations surrounding Israel which made up the bulk of the invasion force — Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria. In Egypt, King Farouk was disgraced in defeat, and some members of the senior military class were convinced that the monarchy was too corrupt and incompetent to govern. A dissident group within the officer corps formed the Free Officers Movement and met with the American CIA. The United States had become disillusioned with Farouk as well, and sought to pressure him into reform or replace him with a more progressive dictatorship. On July 23, 1952, the Free Officers made their move to arrest their political opponents and to force the king to abdicate, initiating a military coup that would eventually dissolve the monarchy and civilian government.
By the end of 1953, a young military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser had risen to leadership within Egypt’s ruling cabal. An adept politician and secularist, Nasser outlawed and suppressed the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party. He was also a nationalist who was intent on wiping out the vestiges of European colonialism, and the very symbol of that colonial spirit in the Middle East could be found in his country on the western border of the Sinai Peninsula. England had controlled the French-built Suez Canal since the 1880’s. Even after the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and Egypt’s independence in 1922, the British government had maintained its grip on the canal as a vital waterway which linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. In early 1956, Egypt adopted a new constitution and Gamal Nasser was elected president. After England and the United States withdrew their offer to finance the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River, Nasser announced on July 26 that Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal, claiming that the revenue from the canal would be used to finance the dam project.
On the same day that President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, he also closed it to all Israeli shipping. Egypt had already denied Israeli access to the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Aqaba in 1950. Closing the Suez Canal to Israeli ships was a major blow to the nascent Jewish State, effectively cutting it off from the continents of Africa and Asia. Likewise, Britain and France held a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company and were bitterly opposed to Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal, despite the Egyptian president’s insistence that the canal would remain open to all non-Israeli ships and that shareholders would continue to be paid. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed Nasser’s decision to nationalize the dam, on the condition that the canal would remain open to international shipping. But Britain, France and Israel refused to accept Nasser’s power grab, which violated a previous treaty. A delegation from the three nations met secretly in Sevres, France in late October, 1956. They negotiated the confidential Protocol of Sevres, a document which outlined a planned Israeli invasion of Sinai that would halt at the Suez Canal, followed by British and French military intervention, ostensibly for the purposes of securing the dam for the international community. The three allies would also seek to depose Nasser in favor of a more Western and Israeli friendly Egyptian leader. Plans for “Operation Revise” were finalized on October 25th, and were scheduled to commence just days later.
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On the afternoon of October 29th, 1956, Israeli P-51 fighter jets began striking targets in the Egyptian Sinai and cutting communications to Egyptian command. The air raids were softening Egyptian defenses ahead of the 809th Battalion of the Paratrooper brigade which dropped east of the Suez Canal and cut off the vital Mitla Pass. At the same time, Colonel Ariel Sharon, a veteran of the 1948 War of Independence, crossed the Green Line from Israel into the Sinai and raced to link up with the 809th. The maneuver was the first of several to occupy three strategic areas of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, thereby securing the peninsula. The IDF named the campaign “Operation Kadesh” in reference to the Torah narrative in which Moses and the Israelites were denied passage to the Promised Land from Kadesh by the King of Edom. Only this time, it was Nasser denying Israel passage from the Promised Land back to Egypt. As a result, two more infantry brigades engaged two of Israel’s strategic objectives in the Sinai, including Al- Qusaymah (near Biblical Kadesh) and Abu Uwayulah in the center of the Sinai. Meanwhile, Colonel Sharon linked up with additional brigades and continued his advance, routing Egyptian and Sudanese encampments and staving off raids by Egyptian Mi-G fighters, before defeating Egyptian ground forces in a battle near Mitla Pass. By the time Egyptian commanders in Cairo realized the scale of the Israeli offensive on October 30th, the IDF had already made significant progress.
Meanwhile, according to plan, the British and French governments began pressuring Nasser to allow their forces to secure the Suez Canal. Nasser refused, but the Europeans had anticipated this, already having built up an invasion force in Cyprus and Malta. On October 31st, British and French warplanes began bombing and strafing Egyptian positions along the canal, initiating the second phase of Operation Revise, intended to intimidate and terrorize Egyptian forces and the civilian population centers near the canal that supported them. Nasser responded by sinking all 40 ships inside the canal at the time, effectively cutting it off to all shipping, and declaring the crisis to be a “people’s war” for Egypt. Weapons were freely distributed to Egyptian civilians, while Egyptian soldiers took off their uniforms and blended into the civilian population. As a result, British commanders and England’s Prime Minister, Lord Anthony Eden, were caught between conflicting strategies of overwhelming Egyptian defenses along the canal while minimizing civilian casualties. It was one of the first examples of “urban warfare” in the post-war Middle East, and a harbinger of the conundrum that Western nations and the State of Israel have faced ever since.
On November 5th, elements of the British “Red Devils” 1st Paratrooper Division, experienced veterans of the War in Europe, dropped near Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal. Then the British Royal Marines landed on the shores of Port Said the next day, followed by French paratroopers at Port Faud on the opposite side of the canal. British and French forces quickly engaged the Egyptian defenders, inflicting heavy losses while securing their objectives with minimal casualties. French paratroopers showed no quarter, executing Egyptian POW’s rather than taking prisoners. By the evening of November 6, the Anglo-French-Israeli campaign appeared to be a stunning success, but it was a different story in the court of public opinion.
Lord Eden’s government immediately received strong opposition to the so-called “Tripartite Aggression,” both domestically from British populace, as well as from the international community. Although the British public at first accepted their government’s narrative that the invasion force was to secure the canal in a war between the Egyptians and Israelis, unaware of the backroom deals struck in Sevres, the Labor opposition and the war-fatigued nation was unwilling to accept military intervention. Demonstrators streamed in to Trafalgar Square in London, and parliament ministers in favor of the operation were branded as “criminal” in the media. International pressure was even worse. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was enraged, having been left in the dark about the Sevres Protocol, and threatened economic sanctions against the British government by dumping US reserves of the Sterling Pound. The United States had already responded to a plea from Gamal Nasser by calling emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, drafting a resolution that demanded an immediate Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. After the British and French campaign began, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding a ceasefire, withdrawal and arms embargo against both sides of the conflict. Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev even threatened war on Britain, France and Israel. Stunned by the wave of condemnation, the British and French governments balked, and both sides accepted the UN ceasefire plan by the morning of November 7.
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On the morning of November 7, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion addressed the Israeli Knesset, claiming victory in Operation Kadesh. However, due to US and Soviet pressure in the UN, the Jewish State and its British and French allies were headed for a diplomatic fiasco. Ben-Gurion’s allusion that Israel might annex the Sinai only exacerbated the crisis. The very next day, Ben-Gurion signaled his willingness to the Americans to disengage from the Sinai. All British and French forces evacuated from Egypt by December 22nd, and the Israelis pulled back to the Green line by March, 1958. It was a dramatic reversal, portending a geopolitical shift in the Mideast region, and even larger changes in the global order. The British and French occupation was replaced by the first United Nations peacekeeping mission, the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), which was deployed throughout the Sinai Peninsula, made up of a volunteer force from European and Asian nations. The force remained in Sinai until they were expelled by Nasser in May, 1967 in advance of the planned Arab invasion of Israel.
The Suez Crisis signaled the end of British and French colonial dominance in the Middle East, and the onset of Cold War dynamics in the Arab world, as the United States and the Soviet Union rushed to fill the vacuum left by the European powers in the region. President Eisenhower requested and was granted authority from US Congress to fund Arab governments that were friendly to the US, and to intervene in Middle Eastern conflicts as needed to prevent Arab alignment with the Soviet Bloc. These initiatives became the foundation of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which would shape US foreign policy across the globe until the Vietnam War. Chairman Khrushchev, emboldened by the international response to his threats of nuclear war, would continue to employ the same strategy in other standoffs with the West, precipitating the Berlin Crisis in 1958 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Gamal Nasser was emboldened by his seeming victory over the combined forces of Britain, France and Israel, even if the victory was more diplomatic than military, leading to what one historian called an “inflated view of his own power.” Nasser emerged from the conflict as a nationalist hero across the Arab world, leading him to believe that he could rally Syria and Jordan to decisive victory against the Israelis in a future conflict. It would be another decade before his confidence would be dashed by the disastrous outcome of the Six-Day War. For Israel’s part, although the Sinai and Gaza campaigns were ultimately a failure, it was not for lack of military prowess. The IDF gained valuable combat experience and confidence that it could overwhelm the Egyptian military in a surprise attack, a strategy that would be critical in the next war. And although the IDF was pressured to withdraw from the Sinai, the United States also pressured Egypt to reopen the Straits of Tiran to Israel in the Gulf of Aqaba, restoring Israeli access to the Indian Ocean. In the end, the Suez Crisis created more geopolitical dilemmas than it solved. The issues of Arab nationalism, territoriality, economic sovereignty and Cold War influence would continue to stoke the fires of conflict, ensuring that the Second Arab-Israeli War would not be the last.
