KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: Suez and the arrival of the Cold War in the Middle East

In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup d'état in Egypt and overthrew the monarchist regime. For Israel, Nasser's Arab nationalism made Egypt a threat. Egypt was home to one of the world's most important transportation systems: the Suez Canal. But it was owned by Britain and France and very few of the huge profits made on the Canal ever found their way into the Egyptian economy. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, bringing it under his control. Enraged, Britain and France plotted to win back the waterway.

There can be no agreed settlement which leaves the Canal in the unfettered control of one man or one government. Israel colluded with Britain and France in a plan to retake Suez. Israel jumped on the bandwagon of this war. The one thing that all three participants agreed on was that Nasser was a bad thing, and one of the aims of all three was to try and topple Nasser by defeating his army. But there was no imminent Egyptian military threat to Israel. Israeli troops invaded Egypt and came within ten miles of the Suez Canal. This was the pretext for the British and French to intervene. It prompted an international crisis. America condemned the attack at the United Nations. The US was furious at being kept in the dark by Britain and France and had no intention of supporting their ambitions in the area. Eventually, the UN worked out a deal with Egypt and Israel in which Israel would withdraw. So Israel withdrew, but for them the Suez Crisis was a military triumph. David Ben-Gurion showed the world that Israel was here to stay. Britain and France were humiliated. They would never recover their power in the region. That power vacuum was filled by the Cold War rivals: America and the USSR.

It wasn't until 1956 that it became clear, with the outcome of the Suez war, that they had supplanted the British and the French and that these were the new big boys on the block. Behind the superpowers' interest in the territorial wrangling of the Middle East lay a shared overriding motive: oil. The Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf is by far the richest energy resource in the world. It has the largest reserves, the most easily accessible. It's been understood for a long time, certainly since the Second World War, that control of the energy resources of that region is a very powerful leader of world control. To promote their own strategic and economic interests, both powers looked for friends in the region. Relations were built on arms deals and loans as much as on ideological solidarity. The local states in the Middle East were happy for this to happen. They imported the Cold War because they saw the possibility of playing off the superpowers against one another. President Nasser of Egypt was particularly opportunistic in trying to play off the superpowers, but as America was uncooperative and refused to supply arms, he ended up as a close ally of the Soviet Union.

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The US used the same tools to build a relationship with Israel. The post-WWII period has to be seen not only in terms of the impact of the Holocaust but also in terms of a sophisticated understanding on the part of the most acute Zionist leaders that the United States was the world power with whom they should align themselves. And this paid off. Israel assumed the role of America's regional policeman. This and the continued influence of the Zionist lobby on successive US governments serves to increase Arab hostility towards Israel.