Suez’s New Significance

History resonates through geography: Place-names conjure up events that changed the world. One of those names is Suez. Half a century ago this week, at a secret conference in Sèvres on October 24, 1956, the British, French, and Israelis agreed to invade Egypt, restore international control over the Suez Canal, and overthrow Gamal Nasser, the dictator who had seized this strategically vital waterway three months before and was threatening to unite the Arabs against the West.On October 29, Israel invaded Sinai. An elaborate diplomatic deception allowed the British and French to intervene under the guise of neutrality. Within days, Israeli troops occupied the canal zone, and an Anglo-French force landed by air and sea. Nasser’s regime appeared to be doomed. Then the whole operation was abruptly halted. The British and French withdrew, followed in due course by the Israelis, to be replaced by a United Nations peacekeeping force.What had happened? The British and French were still fighting the last war: They were haunted by the ghost of Munich. The prime minister of Britain, Anthony Eden, had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement. Now he saw Nasser as a new Hitler. Eden was an early casualty of the new politics of globalization. Events occurring simultaneously around the world had combined to thwart the Anglo-French plan. Taking advantage of the Suez diversion, the Soviet Union had invaded Hungary to crush the uprising against communist rule.In America, President Eisenhower — who had been kept in the dark by Eden and his French counterpart Guy Mollet — was on the eve of an election. He reacted to the deception by threatening to “pull the plug” on the pound sterling, which collapsed on the currency markets. Once re-elected on November 6, Eisenhower moved swiftly to force the British, French, and Israelis to halt the war by removing the American nuclear shield just as the Kremlin was threatening to attack the three states.For good and ill, the fiasco of Suez had far-reaching consequences. It was a humiliation from which the prestige of the European powers never recovered. France was forced to retreat from Algeria, and under de Gaulle reverted to its traditional pro-Arab and anti-American posture. Though smarting under Eisenhower’s threats of sanctions and expulsion from the U.N., the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, re-orientated Israel’s policy toward America. Despite his military defeat, Nasser emerged as a “non-aligned” hero, and he became a model for such monsters as Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Egypt, meanwhile, fell under Soviet influence and was lost to democracy. Nasser’s totalitarian ideology of Pan-Arabism, the forerunner of today’s Islamism, prevailed across the Muslim world.Though I was born the year after Suez, my generation was told next to nothing about it — it was best forgotten. The liberal consensus here treated it as a blessing in disguise because it accelerated the end of empire and forced the British to enter Europe. The inept diplomacy that exposed British weakness also bequeathed a folk memory of resentment against what was felt as an American betrayal.Fifty years is a long time, but Suez is still within living memory. Paul Johnson, my father, was then a young journalist on the left-wing weekly, New Statesman, of which he would later become editor. In a few days he wrote the first book to appear on the crisis, “The Suez War,” with a foreword by the leading critic of the Conservative government, Aneurin Bevan. It was, my father wrote, “a story of treachery, deceit and incompetence unique in the annals of British government.” Hugh Thomas also wrote a longer account of Suez a decade later. After examining the documents and interviewing the participants, he reached much the same harsh conclusion.Today, however, both historians see Suez rather differently. With the benefit of hindsight, and conceding that deceit and incompetence undoubtedly played their part, we may nevertheless regret the fact that the operation failed — or rather, was never given a chance to succeed. This was a unique chance to exclude the Soviet Union from the Middle East, where its malign influence and legacy continue to this day, and to demonstrate that the West would reward Arab democracies, not dictatorships.I was forcibly reminded of the proximity of Suez at a lunch at the House of Lords in London this week to celebrate Hugh Thomas’s 75th birthday and his latest book. Seated among the glittering company of writers and academics was the Countess of Avon, the octogenarian widow of Anthony Eden.This was a human link with a key player in those dramatic days. Among the most glamorous and dashing of all British statesmen, Eden had been a youthful foreign secretary but then found himself overshadowed by Churchill. He had been the great man’s heir apparent for too long by the time he took over in 1955, and he was impatient to leave his mark on history. Pro-Arab and anti-Semitic by background and temperament, there is certain irony in the fact that his fate was bound up with that of the greatest Zionist of them all, Ben-Gurion.Eden was seriously ill at the time of Suez, with a temperature of 106. As it happens, my maternal grandfather was one of the physicians consulted during the crisis. His advice, and that of his medical colleagues, was that the prime minister was too ill to carry on. Two weeks after the ceasefire, Eden took the doctors’ advice and went to Jamaica to convalesce. He resigned early in 1957, a broken man.One disastrous consequence of Suez still with us today is the French attitude toward Israel. The French foreign ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, has always seen France as “a Muslim power” and hence was hostile to Israel — which is why it was kept out of the loop while the Suez operation was planned. After Suez, France reverted to its pro-Arab, anti-Zionist policy and bullied Europe to follow suit. Successive presidents, from de Gaulle to Chirac, nurtured the PLO on the international stage and allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to launch the Iranian revolution from a Paris suburb.And now the French chickens have come home to roost, as their cities are set alight by an Islamist insurgency that shows no sign of abating. David Pryce-Jones has burrowed into the French archives to tell the story in a brilliant new book, “Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews” (to be published next month in New York by Encounter Books).Suez was one of the great might-have-beens of history, marred by myopia. In the 1950s, the main threat to the democracies came from communism, not from a resurgent Islamic world. We now know that Khrushchev would probably not have risked the invasion of Hungary, with all its lethal consequences, if NATO had not been divided and preoccupied by European imperialism’s last hurrah. It was impossible to make the case against Soviet aggression while America’s closest allies were attacking Egypt. Only now, in the post-9/11 world, has Suez taken on a new significance: as a missed opportunity to halt the rise of a new and even more terrible danger — a nuclear-armed jihad against the West.

Suez’s New Significance

Suez’s New Significance

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