Continuing tensions

Despite its victory in the 1948 war, Israel soon faced new and severe threats. Arab refugees infiltrated the armistice lines seeking to reclaim fields and houses. Soon, irregular Arab forces, drawn from refugee camps outside Israel’s borders, began to attack Israeli villages, farms, and road traffic. Israel also contained a sizable minority of Arabs (then roughly one-sixth of the population), who were kept under military rule in certain areas until 1966 and, in some cases, were relocated away from border zones.

The Israelis intensively cultivated the land on their side of the border, while the Arabs tended to leave their side barren—hence the phrase “green line,” referring to the border between the two sides. The green lines themselves were difficult to defend; only 12 miles (19 km) separated Jordanian army positions from the Mediterranean, and the road connecting Jerusalem with the rest of the Israel was within rifle range of Arab sharpshooters. Israel’s potential allies, including the United States, were preoccupied with the Cold War and were willing to placate Arab leaders in order to limit Soviet influence among the Arab states, especially Egypt, which looked to Moscow for help against Britain and France, the remaining colonial powers in the region.

Israel’s best chance for peace was King Abdullah of Jordan, but in 1950 Palestinian and Arab opposition forced him to abandon a secretly negotiated nonbelligerency agreement. When the Egyptians tried unsuccessfully to establish a rump Palestinian state in Gaza under al-Husseini, Abdullah announced the annexation of the West Bank, which his country had occupied two years earlier. Then, in July 1951, the Jordanian king was assassinated on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. His grandson, the future King Hussein, barely escaped injury and was to continue Abdullah’s policy of clandestine contact with Israel but, like his grandfather, never felt politically strong enough to make a separate peace.

In the period 1949–53 Arab attacks killed hundreds of Israelis, four-fifths of whom were civilian. In early 1953 Israel decided to take the offensive against Arab guerrillas who were infiltrating from Jordan and the Egyptian-run Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escalated retaliations, fighting pitched battles not only with guerrillas but with regular Jordanian and Egyptian army units. The Israelis also launched undercover operations, one of which, the so-called Lavon affair, was a botched attempt by Israeli intelligence to hurt Egypt’s reputation in the United States by staging attacks on U.S. facilities in Egypt and blaming Arab extremists.

The Suez War

The Israeli raids humiliated Egypt’s nationalist government headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a veteran of the 1948 war and leader of the group that had overthrown King Farouk in 1952. Nasser sought to lead the Arabs in expelling British and French imperial influence and regarded Israel as a symbol of foreign aggression. After he failed to obtain American arms to repel the Israeli attacks, Nasser trumped both Israel and his Western adversaries when in October 1955 he signed a security agreement with the Soviet Union and a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia that threatened overnight to erase Israel’s tenuous margin of military superiority, especially in aircraft. He also announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran, the outlet of Israel’s southern port city of Eilat.

Ben-Gurion, exhausted by political struggles, had left the premiership in late 1953 to Moshe Sharett, who hoped that vigorous international diplomacy might relieve Israel’s insecurity. It did not. Ben-Gurion had a different approach, and returning as prime minister in late 1955 after the Czech-Egyptian arms deal, he soon began to plan a preemptive attack against Egypt before that country’s new weaponry gave it strategic superiority. The preparations for an Israeli attack coincided with the Anglo-French decision to regain the Suez Canal, which Nasser had nationalized in July 1956 despite agreements putting it under international control. The French brokered a secret alliance with Israel and Britain, and in October IDF troops, under the leadership of Moshe Dayan, swiftly broke the Egyptian lines in the Sinai. The Israeli attack provided the cover for a ruse in which the British and French invaded the canal zone under the pretext of protecting it. This duplicity infuriated American Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who compelled the British and French governments to withdraw their troops, effectively ending much of the influence of those two countries in the region. Israel was also compelled to return to the old armistice lines, but not before the United States had agreed to placing a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also promised in writing that the United States would treat the Strait of Tiran as an international waterway and keep it open.

These arrangements did not lead to peace negotiations, but they did impose a calm over Israel’s southern border for nearly a decade. A regional arms race began in the absence of any movement toward peace, and Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion’s deputy defense minister, found France to be a willing supplier. The French-designed nuclear reactor in Dimona was widely suspected of being the kernel of an Israeli nuclear weapons program, while French Mirage jets became the backbone of Israel’s air force. The Israelis also obtained a large indirect supply of arms from the United States, with West Germany as the intermediary. Israel, under the leadership of IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, turned its military into a highly professional organization.