The 1956 Suez War And The New World Order In The Middle East

The 1956 Suez War, fought between Egypt and the improbable coalition of Britain, France, and Israel, was a key point in the history of the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict. A blitzkrieg-style Israeli victory proved that Israel's victory in the 1948 war was not an accident to be swiftly fixed by Arab armies, and gave the country eleven years of relative peace until the next major conflict. An Anglo-French blunder marked the decline of British and French influence in the Middle East, to be replaced by Soviet and US involvement. Egyptian defiance of the great powers of the past marked the high point of Arab nationalism. Despite the importance of the Suez conflict, almost no comprehensive military history of it exists. This book changes this by presenting a clear, comprehensive narrative of the conflict with a special emphasis on the military decisions and the short- and long-term results of the conflict, both tactical and strategic, military and political.

Recently declassified documents and new scholarship have prompted this reassessment of the collusion between Israel, France and England which drove the 1956 War. International aspects, Israeli involvement, the plot which sparked off hostilities, and the Egyptian losses and gains are analyzed.

Golani, a historian at the Department of Israeli Studies at the U. of Haifa and a revisionist "new" Israeli historian, uses recently released secret papers to argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the 1956 war was not imposed on Israel by its enemies but deliberately sought by Israel in pursuit of other objectives, including the consolidation of the alliance with France, territorial expansion, the overthrow of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the establishment of a new political order in the Middle East. Paper edition (unseen), $29.50. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A lively, revelatory popular history that tells the story of both the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower—which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today. The year 1956 was a turning point in history. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November of that year, the twin crises involving Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. Blood and Sand delivers this story in an hour-by-hour account through a fascinating international cast of characters: Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, caught in a trap of his own making; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bold young populist leader of Egypt; David Ben-Gurion, the aging Zionist hero of Israel; Guy Mollet, the bellicose French prime minister; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American president, torn between an old world order and a new one in the very same week that his own fate as president was to be decided by the American people. This is a revelatory history of these dramatic events and people, for the first time setting both crises in the context of the global Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Blood and Sand resonates strikingly with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism, and international unity that face the world today, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern Middle East and Europe. Blood and Sand includes 25-30 black-and-white photographs.

This is an analysis, based on newly available evidence, of the Suez crisis of 1956, its origins, and its consequences. The contributors are all leading authorities, and some, like Mordechai Bar-On, Robert Bowie and Adam Watson, were active participants in the events of the time.

Delving into archival material from six countries, Laron offers a much deeper, nuanced perspective of the Suez Crisis. Origins of the Suez Crisis describes the long run-up to the 1956 Suez Crisis and the crisis itself by focusing on politics, economics, and foreign policy decisions in Egypt, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Based on Arabic source material, as well as multilingual documents from Israeli, Soviet, Czech, American, Indian, and British archives, this is the first historical narrative to discuss the interaction among all of the players involved—rather than simply British and U.S. perspectives. Guy Laron highlights the agency of smaller players and shows how they used Cold War rivalries to advance their own economic circumstances and, ultimately, their status in the global order. He argues that, for developing countries and the superpowers alike, more was at stake than U.S.-USSR one-upmanship; the question of Third World industrialization was seen as crucial to their economies.

Diane Kunz describes here how the United States employed economic diplomacy to affect relations among states during the Suez Crisis of 1956-57. Using political and financial archival material from the United States and Great Britain, and drawing from pers

"Egypt figured prominently in U.S. policy in the Middle East after World War II because of its strategic, political, and economic importance. Hahn explores the triangular relationship between the U.S., Great Britain, and Egypt in order to analyze American policy both in the region and within the context of a broader Cold War strategy."--"Book News, Inc."