Postwar

privileged access to a strategically crucial waterway, re-occupied the Canal Zone.

Within two years one of the revolutionary officers, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had become head of the government and was pressing for the departure of British soldiers from Egyptian soil. The British were disposed to compromise—they needed Egyptian cooperation. The UK was increasingly reliant on cheap oil, imported via the Suez Canal and paid for in sterling. If this supply was disrupted, or the Arabs rejected payment in sterling, Britain would have to use her precious currency reserves to buy dollars and get the oil elsewhere. Moreover, as Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, had advised the British Cabinet in February 1953: ‘Military occupation could be maintained by force, but in the case of Egypt the base upon which it depends is of little use if there is no local labour to man it.’

Accordingly, London signed an agreement in October 1954 to evacuate the Suez base by 1956—but on the understanding that the British military presence in Egypt could be ‘re-activated’ if British interests were threatened by attacks on or by states in the region. The agreement held and the last British soldiers were duly evacuated from Suez on June 13th 1956. But by then Colonel Nasser—who had declared himself President of Egypt in November 1954—was becoming a problem in his own right. He was a prominent player in the newly formed movement of independent states from Asia and Africa, which met at a conference in Bandung (Indonesia) in April 1955 and condemned ‘colonialism in all of its manifestations.’ He was a charismatic beacon for Arab radicals across the region. And he was beginning to attract Soviet interest: in September 1955 Egypt announced a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia.

By 1956, then, the British were coming increasingly to regard Nasser as a threat—both in his own right as a radical despot sitting athwart a vital waterway, and by the example he was setting to others. Eden and his advisers regularly compared him to Hitler; a threat to be addressed, not appeased. Paris shared this view, though French dislike of Nasser had to do less with his threat to Suez or even his growing friendship with the Soviet bloc, than with his disruptive influence on France’s North African subjects. The United States, too, was not well pleased with Egypt’s President. At a meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia on July 18th 1956, Nasser—together with India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—issued a joint statement of ‘Non-Alignment’, explicitly disassociating Egypt from any dependence on the West. The Americans took offense: despite having initiated talks in November 1955 on American financing for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam on the Nile, US Secretary of State Dulles now broke these off, on July 19th. A week later, on July 26th, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company.[110]

The initial reaction of the Western powers was a united front: Britain, the US and France convened a conference in London to decide on their response. The conference duly met, and on August 23rd drew up a ‘plan’ that the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was to present to Nasser. But Nasser rejected it. The London conferees then met again, from September 19th to the 21st, this time agreeing to form a Suez Canal Users Association. Meanwhile the British and French announced that they would refer the dispute over Suez to the United Nations.

Up to this point the British especially had taken care to align their own response to Nasser’s acts with that of Washington. Britain was still heavily indebted to the US, paying interest on outstanding loans; pressure on sterling in 1955 had even led London to consider seeking a temporary waiver of these payments. London was always more than a little skeptical of American motives in the region: Washington, it was believed, harbored plans to supplant Britain in the Middle East, which was why American spokesmen indulged in occasional anti-colonialist rhetoric, the better to seduce local elites. But relations between the two countries were generally good. Korea— and the dynamic of the Cold War—had papered over the mutual resentments of the 1940s, and the British felt they could rely on American sympathy for Britain’s international interests and commitments. And so, even though they had been told by Eisenhower himself that they were worrying altogether too much about Nasser and the threat he posed, British leaders took it for granted that the US would always support them if matters came to a head.

It was in this context that the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (who had succeeded the ageing Churchill the previous year) set out to deal once and for all with the troublesome Egyptian. Whatever their public posture, the British and French were impatient with the UN and its cumbersome procedures. They didn’t want a diplomatic solution. Even as the various conferences and international plans provoked by Nasser’s actions were being convened and discussed, the British governmentbegan secret negotiations with France, planning a joint military invasion of Egypt. On October 21st these plans were extended to include the Israelis, who joined the French and British in top-secret negotiations at Sevres. The Israeli interest was quite straightforward: the border separating Egypt and Israel had been secured by armistice in February 1949, but both sides regarded it as impermanent and there were frequent raids, notably across the frontier at Gaza. The Egyptians had blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba as early as July 1951, a restriction on Israeli trade and freedom of movement that Jerusalem was determined to remove. Israel was out to reduce Nasser and secure its territorial and security interests in and around Sinai.

At Sevres the plotters reached agreement. Israel would attack the Egyptian army in Sinai, pressing forward to occupy the whole peninsula, including the Suez Canal on its western edge. The French and British would issue an ultimatum requiring that both sides withdraw and then, ostensibly as disinterested third parties acting on behalf of the international community, France and Britain would attack Egypt: first by air and then by sea. They would seize control of the Canal, assert that Egypt was incompetent to run so important a resource fairly and efficiently, restore the status quo ante and fatally undermine Nasser. The plan was kept very secret indeed—in Britain only Eden and four senior cabinet ministers were aware of the protocol signed at Sevres after three days of discussion, October 21st-24th.

At first everything proceeded according to schedule. On October 29th, two weeks after the UN Security Council failed to agree on a solution for Suez (thanks to a Soviet veto), and just one week after the Sevres meeting, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai. Simultaneously, British vessels sailed east from their base in Malta. The following day, October 30th, Britain and France vetoed a UN motion calling for Israel to withdraw, and issued an ultimatum to Israel and Egypt, disingenuously calling on both sides to cease fighting and accept an Anglo-French military occupation of the Canal Zone. The next day British and French planes attacked Egyptian airfields. Within forty-eight hours the Israelis completed their occupation of Sinai and Gaza, ignoring a UN General Assembly call for a cease-fire; the Egyptians for their part sank boats in the Suez Canal, effectively closing it to shipping. Two days later, on November 5th, the first Anglo-French ground troops landed in Egypt.

And then the plot began to unravel. On November 6th Dwight Eisenhower was re-elected President of the United States. The Administration in Washington was furious at the Anglo-French deception and deeply resentful at the lies it had been told about its allies’ real intentions: London and Paris had patently ignored both the letter and the spirit of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, which committed Britain, France and the US to acting against the aggressor in the event of any Israel-Arab conflict. The US began to place considerable public and private pressure on Britain in particular to put a stop to its invasion of Egypt, even threatening to ‘pull the plug’ on the British pound. Shocked at such direct American opposition, but unable to withstand the accelerating run on sterling, Eden hesitated briefly but then capitulated. On November 7th, just two days after the first British paratroopers landed at Port Said, the British and French forces ceased fire. That same day the UN authorized the dispatch to Egypt of a Peacekeeping Force, which Nasser accepted on November 12th, provided that Egyptian sovereignty was not infringed. Three days later the UN Peacekeeping Force arrived in Egypt and on December 4th it moved into Sinai.

Meanwhile the British and French announced their own withdrawal from Suez, a retreat that was completed on December 22nd. Britain, whose sterling and dollar reserves had fallen by $279 million in the course of the crisis, was promised American financial aid (and received it in the form of a $500 million line of credit from the US Export-Import Bank); on December 10th the IMF announced that it had approved a $561.47 million loan for Britain, and a stand-by commitment for a further $738 million. Israel, having secured a public US commitment to its right of passage through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran, withdrew its own troops from Gaza in the first week of March 1957. Clearance of the Suez Canal began a week after the completion of the Anglo-French withdrawal and the Canal was reopened on April 10th 1957. It remained in Egyptian hands.

Each country took its own lesson away from the Suez debacle. The Israelis, despite their dependence on French military hardware, saw very clearly that their future lay in aligning their interests as closely as possible with those of Washington—the more so following the US President’s announcement of the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ in January 1957, stating that the US would use armed force in the event of ‘International Communist’ aggression in the Middle East. Nasser’s standing in the non-aligned world was greatly enhanced by his apparent success in