50 years ago, peace was also near
FIFTY YEARS AGO this week, the streets of Cairo were awash with outrage. Earlier in the summer Egypt's strongman, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and the French were threatening war, and I can remember the chanting crowds of thousands coursing down the dusty streets and broad avenues of the Egyptian capital shouting their defiance of the West and approval of their leader. Every night in that long-ago August we would have practice blackouts in anticipation of air raids. A lone Britisher on our hotel rooftop terrace would light his glowing pipe during blackouts, as the Egyptian staff hissed its disapproval.
I can vividly recall conversations with Egyptians in which I said that they were wrong to think that the British and French would resort to war, and that all their fears of an Israeli invasion was preposterous. I haven't been so wrong since then until the day I wrote that Colin Powell's expose of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the UN was convincing.
I have in front of me a yellowing and crumbling copy of the Egyptian Gazette, dated Aug. 15, 1956, which I read on that morning half a century ago, and somehow kept. The British were organizing an international conference in London to decide what to do. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was quoted on the front page as saying he was ``confident of a peaceful solution of the Suez Canal dispute." In a way, Dulles had helped to precipitate the crisis by withdrawing loans to build the high dam at Aswan because of Nasser's deal to buy arms from the Soviet Bloc.
British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd's radio address to his nation was the lead story in the Gazette that day. He too hoped for a peaceful solution, but ``the rule of law must prevail," he said. ``We are not bellicose. . . . With Britain force is always the last resort." In fact the nationalization of a foreign-owned asset was perfectly legal, but Lloyd warned that Nasser was a dictator who ``maintains himself in power" by the same methods as did Mussolini and Hitler. Regime change was in the air.
The head of the Suez Canal Company warned that the canal might close to traffic if all its non-Egyptian workers left, as they had said they would, and the Congress for the Liberation of Islamic
Inside, near an ad for P&O Line ``sailings from Port Said," was a report on an article written by a Colonel Anwar Sadat saying that relations between East and West had always been marked by the East's suspicions and the ``desire of the West to impose its domination on the East."
Nasser had said earlier that ``Egypt has decided to dispatch her heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam and they will cleanse the land of Palestine. . . . There will be no peace on Israel's border because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel's death." His ``fedayeen" infiltrators were raiding into Israel from Gaza.
In the end Britain and France cooked up a secret deal with Israel whereby Israel would invade the Sinai, and the British and French would impose a ceasefire by placing themselves between the warring forces by re-occupying the canal.
All three invaded Egypt in the fall of 1956 until President Dwight Eisenhower said no. The British and French halted their intervention. Ike ordered the Israelis out too, but the fedayeen raids stopped.
The French never again really trusted the British or the Americans, and set their course on organizing a Europe that could counter-balance American power. The British never again let their foreign policy diverge from that of the United States, even in today's disaster in Iraq.
And no American president ever again said no to the Israelis, albeit President Bush's father did refuse a loan guarantee in order to discourage settlements in the occupied territories.
Eleven years after Suez, the Israelis would take back the Egyptian Sinai, as well as Gaza and the West Bank, and 10 years after that I was in Jerusalem to witness Anwar Sadat bringing peace between Egypt and Israel.
Nasser's infiltrating fedayeen were replaced by the Palestine Liberation Organization, however, who have, in turn, been replaced by Hamas and Hezbollah, who allow no tranquility on Israel's borders. One would have thought with Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and Lebanon these new fedayeen would have left Israel in peace, but Nasser's nationalism has given way to Islamic jihad, and there is little that is fair about the Middle East.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
