More On Jews And Arabs (5)

It was both a misfortune and, possibly, an opportunity for the new Nation of Israel that it came into existence just as the European colonial system was dissolving into chaos. As the Europeans and the Americans pulled back from or were thrown out of the vast territories they had controlled, bloody civil wars and revolutionary wars broke out all over Africa, Asia and even Latin America.
In the decades after World War II, just in the Near and Middle East, the following (often violent) changes occurred. 1943: the French pulled out of Lebanon and Syria, 1948: Britain pulled out of Jordan and Palestine, 1952: King Farouk of Egypt (seen as a British puppet) overthrown by a coalition of former Axis allies, Egyptian colonels Naguib, Nasser and Sadat.
While Naguib and Nasser wrestled for ultimate control, the new revolutionary Egyptian government forced Britain out of its Suez Canal holdings in 1954. In 1955, the Egyptians signed an arms deal with Communist Czechoslovakia. Aghast, the United States withdrew her offer to build the Aswan High Dam.
( US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles admitted later that he ordered the offer withdrawn while he was under the influence of the then not well understood condition called “jet lag”. In other words, he wasn’t doing his best thinking at the moment.)
In charge, finally, Nasser asked for Soviet help with the dam—thus orienting Egypt toward the Soviet block for the next couple of decades. The French secretly approached both England and Israel with the suggestion that they take out this new Soviet ally—and, just incidentally, get the Suez Canal back and reopen it to Israeli shipping—by launching a military assault on Egypt. On October 29, 1956 Israel struck across the Sinai and two days later France and Britain came by sea.
A brilliant Jewish veteran of the Jewish Brigade swept across the Sinai as if Egypt did not exist. French and British troops took the canal. Their victory was extremely short lived. The whole world went up in the air. Nasser was saved by the Russians and the Americans.
Eisenhower was enraged that the French and British had acted behind his back. He dressed down the French and British governments as if they were a couple of errant corporals. (He had a temper.) His rage came because the French/British/Israeli allowed Russian gunboats to move through the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean—something western foreign policy had prevented since 1815.
Also the move on Suez allowed the Russians to send masses of troops to reoccupy Poland and Hungary, which were in the throes of an apparently successful anti-Soviet revolt that fall. As the Russians crushed the pro-Western revolts, all we could now do was look on and try not to sound too hypocritical.
Ike ordered everybody out of Egypt—the Soviets filled the air with bellicose threats and got a lot of the credit for the withdrawal. Hungary and Poland would not be free for 35 more years, France and Britain had made their last attempt at governing the planet (as they had for 200 years or more) for all time. A one-eyed Israeli general named Moshe Dayan became a national hero and symbol.
The United Nations created an emergency force (UNEF) to occupy the Sinai and keep the Egyptians and Israeli away from each other. This was a partial victory for Israel—while Egypt remained its most powerful and dangerous enemy—the line between them was now reasonably peaceful. No more grenades through the windows at night on this front.
Nasser began a new Arab tactic. You get your backside kicked by Israel, and then you proclaim to the world loudly and often enough that you won—and you come out looking like a hero. (Nasser would do this one more time, leading up to 1967, and really alter power realities between Arabs and Israel!) Sadat would do it to great and good effect in 1973.
In fact Nasser looked like such a hero that the Syrians that they came to him in 1958 and asked if they could unite Syria and Egypt under Nasser. Thus was formed the briefly lived United Arab Republic, the UAR. That same year, Nasser and his allies turned their full fury on Britain’s remaining Arab friends.
A series of uprisings arose intended to destabilize every pro Western Arab state in the region. In some cases it worked. The Hashemite (a British appointment in 1922) king of Iraq was killed; his body was dragged through the streets of Baghdad behind a jeep. The Hashemite king of Jordan survived with the help of British troops flown in to prop him up. A political group that included young Saddam Hussein took over Iraq—with an undying hatred for both Jews and America.
(The Hashemites came from a kingdom in western Arabia that the Saudi’s overthrew in 1924. This left the former princes free to assume roles in kingdoms created by the British after the fall of the Turkish Empire in World War I. Both were quite dependent on their relationship to the West—the King of Jordan remains so to this day.)
But the Jordanian king Hussein was forced to relieve the British soldier who commanded his best troops—Pasha Glubb. Without Glubb, Jordan’s troops would fight as miserably as every other Arab army. This would cost Jordan terribly in 1967.
American marines landed in Lebanon to prop up the Marionite Christian government created by the French (to give this small, surviving remnant of pre-Muslim Christianity a homeland) in 1943. Somehow the nation would hold together until it destabilized completely in the 1970s, becoming a permanent home for some dangerously anti-Israeli radicals with lots of rockets.
For Israel life went on pretty much as before. Only now the nations surrounding them were even more hostile. It wasn’t just that the Jews were non-Muslims, they were now seen as friends of the increasingly hated United States—as much of the near East allied with Russia.
In 1967, the Arab world would turn upside down once again.