Suez Crisis: Encyclopedia II - Suez Crisis - Background

Suez Crisis - Background

The Suez Canal was opened in 1869, having been financed by France and the Egyptian government. In 1875, the British government bought out the Egyptian share, giving it partial control over the canal. In 1882, during foreign intervention in Egypt, the United Kingdom took de facto control of the canal. The canal was of strategic importance, being the ocean trade link between Britain and her colonies in India, the Far East as well as Australia and New Zealand. The area as a whole was strategic to North Africa and the Middle East.

The importance of the Canal was clear during both World Wars. During the first, it was closed to non-Allied shipping by the British and French. During the Second World War, it was tenaciously defended during the North African Campaign.

Daniel Yergin, a historian of the oil industry, has written:

[I]n 1948, the canal abruptly lost its traditional rationale. For the year before India became independent, and control over the canal could no longer be preserved on grounds that it was critical to the defense either of India or of an empire that was being liquidated. And yet, at exactly the same moment, the canal was gaining a new role — as the highway not of empire, but of oil. The Suez Canal was the way most of the swelling volumes of Persian Gulf oil got to Europe, cutting the 11,000 nautical mile (20,000 km) journey around the Cape of Good Hope to Southampton down to 6,500 nautical miles (12,000 km) . By 1955, petroleum accounted for two-thirds of all the canal's traffic, and in turn two-thirds of Europe's oil passed through it. Flanked to the north by Tapline and the Iraq Petroleum Company pipelines, the canal was the critical link in the postwar structure of the international oil industry.^[1]

British troops were withdrawn from Palestine in 1947 and the state of Israel was formally established in 1948, shortly followed by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which further established Israel's independence. See history of Israel, history of Egypt.

In 1952, officers in the Egyptian army overthrew the monarchy under King Farouk. Abandoning policies co-operative with European powers, the new government asserted an independent and Arab nationalist identity. This led to conflict with the European powers over the Suez Canal. Especially once Israel's port of Eilat was completed in the mid 50's, conflict also heated up over the only gateway to it, the Straits of Tiran. Egypt interfered with Israeli shipping and shipping destined for Israel to varying degrees in both these waterways after 1949, in part depending on the international political situation at the time.

From 1953–1956 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a number of major retaliatory strikes, designed in part to emphasize Israel's military capability. This policy of reprisals was a major source of internal dispute between hawks, led by David Ben-Gurion, and doves, led by his successor for a short time, Moshe Sharett. It sometimes led to strong external criticism from the United Nations and even Israel's supporters, like the United States. Paradoxically, some of the biggest and most widely criticized strikes occurred during Sharrett's term, with the IDF's hawkish new chief of staff Moshe Dayan hoping to provoke war and gain territorial and military objectives.

Between 1949 and 1956 from the Palestinian refugees there were many "unarmed 'economic' and social infiltrators" into Israel. While there were some violent fedayeen, sometimes organized by the Mufti in Gaza, and funded by other Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan publically discouraged Palestinian infiltration into Israel, although there were some Egyptian sabotage and intelligence missions. The Gaza raid on 28 February 1955, in which the IDF killed forty Egyptian soldiers, was the turning point in relations between Egypt and Israel. Following this incident Egypt began to sponsor official Fedayeen and commando raids on Israel, sometimes through the territory of Jordan, which still officially opposed these raids, while still discouraging "private" Palestinian infltration. There were secret talks, through various intermediaries and methods, between Egypt and Israel, but the Gaza raid and finally the later Khan Yunis raid put an end to them.

Throughout 1956, tensions increased between Israel and Egypt, with Egyptian fedayeen launching frequent incursions into Israeli territory and Israel launching retaliatory raids into Egyptian territory. On July 26, 1956, Egypt, under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the canal, a vital trade route to the east, in which British banks and business held a 44% stake. This was done in order to raise revenue for the construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River. Previously, the United States and Britain had agreed to help pay for this project, but cancelled their support after Egypt had bought tanks from communist Czechoslovakia, then under the control of the Soviet Union, and extended diplomatic recognition to Communist China. The better relationship with the Chinese was the result of the Bandung Conference in 1955, where Nasser had asked the Chinese to use their influence on the Soviets to supply Egypt with the necessary arms.

The British Prime Minister of the time, Sir Anthony Eden, tried to persuade the British public of the need for war and so, perhaps in an attempt to recall World War II-era patriotism, he compared Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal with the nationalism of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler twenty years earlier. However, it is interesting to note that the very first comparisons between 1930s dictators and Nasser during the crisis was made by the opposition Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell and the left-leaning tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror. Eden had been a staunch opponent of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement and he claimed that a display of force was needed to prevent Nasser becoming another expansionist military threat.

In the months that followed Egypt's nationalisation of the canal (actually the company that operated the Canal, Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez), a secret meeting between Israel, France and Britain took place at Sèvres, outside Paris. Details only emerged years later, as records of the meeting were suppressed and destroyed. All parties agreed that Israel should invade and that Britain and France would subsequently intervene, instruct the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw their forces to a distance of ten miles (16 km) from either side of the canal, and then place an Anglo-French intervention force in the Canal Zone around Port Said. It was to be called "Operation Musketeer".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki