Round Two in the Middle East: the Suez War

Abstract

The armistice agreements the United Nations helped to negotiate in 1949 between Israel and the Arab states had not brought peace to the area. The instability that had been so evident in 1949–50 (Volume 1, pp. 204–6) increased rather than diminished with time. Egypt did not relax her blockade of Israel, nor her refusal to allow Israeli ships and cargoes to proceed through the Suez Canal, despite the Security Council resolution to that effect. The Tripartite Declaration (under which Britain, France and the US had guaranteed the status quo in 1950) may have inhibited major efforts to overturn the settlement, at least over the short term; but it did nothing to pacify the frontiers themselves. And those frontiers, especially that between Israeli and Egyptian (or rather Egyptian-occupied)* territory at Gaza, became progressively more disturbed.