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Map of Middle East |
CIAO DATE: 6/99
Democracy and Preventive War: Israel and the 1956 Sinai War *
Jack S. Levy and Joseph R. Gochal
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
One of the questions that has attracted the most attention in the international relations literature during the last decade is the extent to which the foreign policy behavior of democratic states differs from that of other states. Among the most widely-discussed propositions are that democratic states rarely if ever go to war with each other, that democracies get involved in wars no less often than do non-democratic states, 1 that democracies usually win the wars they fight, and that the commitments of democratic states are more credible than those of other states (Doyle, 1986; Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995; Lake, 1992; Fearon, 1994).
Another proposition about democratic war behavior is that democracies do not fight preventive wars—wars that are motivated primarily by the perception that one’s military power and potential are declining relative to that of a rising adversary and by the fear of the consequences of that decline. The fear is that relative decline leads to the deterioration of the status quo, the erosion of one’s bargaining power, and the risk of a war under worse circumstances later. The temptation is to fight a war, or take military action short of war, under relatively favorable circumstances now in order to block or retard the further rise of the adversary and avert the consequences of decline (Levy, 1987). The idea can be traced to Thucydides (1954:1/23) argument that “what made the Peloponnesian War inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”
The proposition that democracies do not fight preventive wars is most closely associated with Schweller (1992), and is notable for the unconditional manner in which it is formulated. Schweller (1992:238) claims that “only nondemocratic regimes wage preventive wars against rising opponents. Declining democratic states ... do not exercise this option.” 2 This argument has been widely repeated in the literature, often in the strong form in which Schweller proposes. Mansfield and Snyder (1995:21), for example, assert that “mature democracies ... do not fight gratuitous ‘preventive’ wars.” 3 This argument is not entirely new. Fifty years ago George Kennan asserted that “A democratic society cannot plan a preventive war,” and Bernard Brodie wrote that “A policy of preventive war has always been ‘unrealistic’ in the American democracy” (cited in Schweller 1992:242-44).
There are several historical cases, however, that appear to contradict the unconditional proposition that democracies do not fight preventive wars. Israel’s 1981 attack against the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq is almost universally interpreted as a preventive strike. 4 The United States has also undertaken military action that can accurately be described as preventive. In August and December of 1998 the U.S. launched air strikes against Iraqi military installations for the stated purpose of “degrading” Iraqi military capability, particularly its weapons of mass destruction. This certainly sounds like a preventively-motivated military strike. The United States also came very close to a military strike against North Korea in the 1994 crisis over the North Korean nuclear program (Sigal, 1998), and the preventive logic was similar. Finally, some argue that the American initiation of an air war against Iraq in the 1990/91 Persian Gulf War was motivated in part by the aim of destroying Iraq’s nuclear capability before it became operational. If this interpretation is correct, the preventive motivation for war was a contributing factor to the American use of force against Iraq.
These examples are not meant to suggest that democracies frequently initiate preventive wars or preventive military action short of war, or that they take such actions as often as nondemocracies do, but only that the unconditional statement that democracies never initiate preventive wars is untenable. The more appropriate question is one of the conditions under which democratic states are likely to take preventive military action.
This question is important for reasons of policy as well as theory. With increasing concern in the United States and much of the advanced industrial world about the possible use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups or rogue states, it is important to understand the conditions under which the U.S. or others might respond to these threats with military force in an attempt to “degrade” those capabilities before they are used for destruction or extortion—the defining characteristic of preventive action.
Our aim in this paper is to raise questions about the empirical validity of the proposition that democracies do not fight preventive wars. We do so through a detailed examination of Israeli behavior in the 1956 Sinai War. 5 Although a single case or even a small number of cases is generally not sufficient to falsify an hypothesis, a proposition that posits necessary or sufficient conditions for a given outcome can be seriously called into question by a small number of properly selected case studies (Dion, 1998).
We examine a single case rather than several cases because it allows us to conduct a more detailed investigation, make a more convincing argument that the preventive motivation was in fact a primary factor leading a democratic state to go to war, and to deal with alternative explanations. Less detailed studies of a larger number of cases would have the advantage of demonstrating more violations of the hypothesis in question, but at the cost of providing less compelling arguments that in each case the preventive motivation, and not other factors, was the primary causes of military action.
We focus on the Sinai War for several reasons. It was a war, rather than military action that falls short of the threshold required for war, and thus has greater bearing than the latter for the specific hypothesis that “democracies do not fight preventive wars. ” It also has the merits of not being an obvious case. Few mainstream international relations scholars describe the Sinai War as a preventive war. Although Schweller (1992:264) concedes that Israeli is a deviant case for his hypothesis, he suggests that the 1956 war was not preventive. 6
We begin with a conceptual clarification of the idea of preventive war, for the term is often used rather loosely in the literature. We then consider the theoretical argument that underlies the hypothesis that democracies do not fight preventive wars, and recast this argument as specifying the theoretical conditions under which democratic states might undertake different forms of preventive military action. We then turn to the 1956 case. We argue that the fear of an adverse shift in the dyadic balance of power between Egypt and Israel was a necessary condition for the Israeli decision for war in 1956. We assume that the classification of Israel as a democracy is not problematic (Sartori, 1976; Lijphart, 1994; Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, and Przeworski, 1996; Shimshoni,1982; Medding, 1990).
The Concept of Preventive War 7
The use of military force for preventive purposes is a fairly common practice in international politics. Schroeder (1972: 322) argues that “preventive wars, even risky preventive wars, are not extreme anomalies in politics... They are normal, even common, tools of statecraft...” There is a tendency, however, to use the term rather loosely, so that a wide variety of wars is included under the preventive war umbrella. A.J.P. Taylor (1954:166) argues that “Every war between Great Powers [in the 1848-1918 period] started as a preventive war, not a war of conquest.” Michael Howard (1983:18) suggests that the causes of most wars can be found in “perceptions by statesmen of the growth of hostile power and the fears for the restriction, if not the extinction, of their own.” Similarly, Schweller (1992:254) identifies twenty great power wars from 1665-1945 that he calls preventive. This amounts to 70-80% of all great power wars during that period (Levy, 1983:88-92). This is quite implausble and represents an excessively broad conception of preventive war. 8
The problem is not with Schweller (1992:254) operational definition, which is quite reasonable: a preventive war is one in which “the decision to wage war for either offensive or defensive reasons was based on elites’ perceptions, real or imagined, of an unfavorable power shift.” The problem is with Schweller’s application of this criterion to individual cases. In some of Schweller’s cases the state to which preventive action is attributed was increasing, not decreasing, in relative power. This applies to France on the eve of the Revolutionary Wars in 1792, Prussia on the eve of Bismarck’s initiation of war against Austria in 1866, and France in nearly all of the wars of Louis XIV. 9 With regards to the latter, even historians who argue that Louis’ later wars were defensive in motivatation concede that the Devolutionary War of 1667-68 and the Dutch War of 1672-78 were more aggressive and driven by Louis’ quest for gloire (Lynn, 1999; Wolf, 1970:48-51). 10 In other cases there is little evidence that concerns over power shifts were an important factor in decisions for war. The standard interpretation of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, for example, is that it was, for England, a trade war (Levy, 1999). 11
Another problem that plagues some applications of the concept in the literature is the tendency to confound the preventive motivation for war with other sources of better-now-than-later logic, particularly the preemptive motivation. Whereas prevention involves fighting a winnable war now in order to avoid the risk of war under less favorable circumstances later, preemption involves the initiation of military action because it is perceived that an adversary’s attack is imminent and that there are advantages in striking first, or at least in preventing the adversary from doing so. Preventive wars differ from preemptive wars in many important respects, including their causes, their relative frequency of occurrence, 12 their normative legitimacy, 13 and their anticipated consequences (Levy: 1987:90-93; Van Evera, 1984:64n). Leaders anticipate that the failure to preempt will result in an immediate war, whereas the failure to take preventive action will result in a continued decline of relative military power and bargaining strength. Because of these and other differences it is important to maintain the analytic distinction between the two concepts. In some cases, however, both the preventive and preemptive motivations may each be influential. 14
Although we have been conforming to standard practice in referring to the concept of “a preventive war,” this usage is in fact quite problematic. It implies that preventive war is a type of war (Van Evera, 1984b:72-76), one that is defined in terms of its cause. The problem with this is that it confounds cause and effect in a single concept, and it raises the problem of how to classify cases in which the preventive motivation is just one of several contributing causes of war. This probably includes the vast majority of historical cases involving the preventive motivation for war.
Although preventive war is defined in terms of power shifts, not all power shifts lead to war and not all power shifts that lead to war involve the preventive motivation, for sometimes the rising state will initiate the war. 15 Moreover, one can have a “preventive war” based on leaders’ perceptions of a power shift that has no objective basis. It is precisely because there is no perfect correlation between power shifts and war that it is most useful to focus on the preventive motivation for war as a causal variable, one that intervenes between power shifts and war, rather than on preventive war as a type of war.
The preventive motivation for war almost aways occurs in the context of other contributing causal factors. Only in rare cases is the preventive motivation for war a necessary condition for the outbreak of a particular war. This would mean that the war in question would not have occurred in the absence of an anticipated power shift and fear of its consequences, at least not at that time. This implies that existing conflicts of interests, domestic incentives for war, misperceptions, and all other factors are not in themselves important enough (i.e., jointly sufficient) for war. One clear case is the Israeli attack against Iraq in 1981. 16
It is even more rare that the preventive motivation is a sufficient condition for war in a particular case. This would imply that relative decline and fears about the future alone lead to war, quite apart from any existing hostilities or conflicts of interest. This causal relationship might fit a strong form of structural realism, in which changing power structures are all-determining and intentions are inferred from and endogenous to the distribution of power. Kydd (1997:148), who rejects various forms of “offensive realism” and who argues that states that seek security but nothing more never fight each other, 17 claims that “preventive wars sparked by fears about the future motivations of currently benign states almost never happen.” Although one would have to be very careful in testing Kydd’s claim, 18 his argument is quite plausible. We have a hard time finding unambiguous cases in which the preventive motivation for war was a sufficient condition for war or military action short of war.
The most useful question is not whether a war is a preventive war or not, but rather what is the importance of the preventive motivation relative to that of other variables in the processes leading to war, and how the preventive motivation interacts with those other variables (Levy, 1987: 86-88). 19 We might still refer to situations in which the preventive motivation is a necessary or sufficient condition for war as particularly strong forms of the preventive motivation, but we should recognize that these situations have only rarely arisen in history.
There are other conceptual and terminological issues that continue to plague the literature. Although it is common to speak of the “initiation of a preventive war,” the definition of preventive war does not technically require that the preventer actually initiate the war. The preventer wants war, but under some conditions it might prefer, for diplomatic or domestic political reasons, that the adversary initiate the war, and it may attempt to provoke a war rather than initiate it. The preventive motivation was an important factor in Germany’s strong preference for a Austro-Serbian war or even a continental war in 1914, but German leaders were determined not to be the first to mobilize (Fischer, 1961; Levy, 1990/91).
Note that not all cases of preventive war involve real or anticipated power transitions. There is nothing in the definition of the preventive motivation for war that restricts it to cases in which the state in relative decline expects to be fully overtaken by its rising adversary. There are “rapid approaches” (Wayman, 1996) as well as power transitions, and states may fear significant increases in adversary power—whether gradual or step-level in nature—that fall far short of a power transition but that cross some critical threshold. Israeli fears of the completion of the Iraqi nuclear program is a good example.
There may also be cases, however infrequent, in which preventive action is taken by the weaker rather than by the stronger state. It may perceive that its position will worsen even more over time and conclude that this is its last opportunity for war, however risky it might be. Incentives for war under these circumstances may be increased by the tendency toward risk acceptance in the domain of losses, as prospect theory suggests (Levy, 1999). Many interpret Japanese behavior in 1941 in these terms (Iriye, 1987; Levi and Whyte, 1994).
Although we have defined the preventive motivation in terms of political leaders’ perceptions of relative decline with respect to a particular adversary and its fear of the consequences, we should note that perceptions and calculations involving third states can also be important. The state in relative decline might be concerned about threats that the rising state will pose to its allies or to regional stability as well as to its own interests. The U.S. fear of the consequences of the completion of the Iraqi nuclear program has more to do with the stability of the Middle East and potential threats to Israel than to any direct Iraqi challenge to American power.
It is also conceivable that the threat posed by a rising adversary might only be serious when judged in the context of other threats. German decision-makers in 1914, for example, never doubted their ability to defeat their rising Russian adversary in a bilateral war, but they feared the implications of Russia’s rise for Germany’s ability to defeat Russia and France together in a two-front war by 1917 or so, and the preventive motivation for war was important for Germany in this context.
Another possibility is that the source of the threat is not an increase in the relative power of a particular adversary but rather the anticipated formation of a hostile coalition. Here, however, the threat is often one of an imminent war as much as the gradual erosion of one’s power and bargaining strength, and incentives for military action before the coalition can form may be more preemptive than preemptive. An interesting example here is Frederick the Great’s invasion of Saxony in 1756. Frederick learned from informers that a hostile coalition would form against him the following year, perceived war as inevitable though not imminent, failed to secure a promise from Maria Theresa of Austria for assurances that she would not attack, and concluded that his only hope was to “break up the conspiracy before it becomes too strong” (in Vagts, 1956:277). Frederick’s invasion has been described as “the most famous preventive war in history” (Anderson, 1966:34). Although shares some elements of prevention, it more closely resembles preemption (Levy and Collis, 1984).
Why Democracies Do Not Fight “Preventive Wars”—the Argument
Schweller (1992:240) defines democracy to include (1) scheduled elections held periodically with free participation of opposition parties, in which (2) at least thirty percent of the adult population is able to vote for (3) a parliament that either controls or enjoys parity with the executive branch. (4) The government must be internally sovereign over military and foreign affairs and be (5) stable, operationalized as enduring for at least three years. To these fairly standard criteria (Doyle, 1986; Ray, 1995), Schweller adds (6) the existence of private property and a free-enterprise economy 20 and (7) citizens who possess juridicial rights.
Scholars have advanced a number of theoretical arguments as to why democracies do not fight preventive wars. Many of these arguments imply not only that democracies do not initiate preventive wars, but also that they should be substantially less likely to get involved in any kind of war. These arguments are somewhat suspicious, because most of the evidence shows that although at the dyadic level democracies rarely if ever go to war with each other, at the monadic level democracies are as likely to get involved in wars as are nondemocratic states (Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995). Even if future research forces a modification of this finding, any differences between democratic and nondemocratic states in their war behavior at the monadic level are extremely unlikely to be strong enough to provide support for the argument that democracies never fight preventive wars while nondemocratic states frequently fight preventive wars.
The recognition that democracies are frequently involved in wars and in fact frequently initiate wars leads Schweller (1992:241) to suggest that the key variable is the expected costs of wars. This goes back to Kant’s (1977:438) argument that because in republican regimes “the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide whether there should be war or not,” the people will “hesitate to start such an evil game” by voting to send themselves off to war. This leads Schweller (1992) to argue that the pacifying effect of public opinion that precludes democracies from fighting preventive wars is “somewhat contingent, however, on the expectation that the war will be costly.” This is a function of the dyadic balance of power and related factors, and this leads Schweller (1992:248) to restrict his argument to situations of “power shifts between states of roughly equal strength.” This qualification is rarely acknowledged by those who cite Schweller’s argument that democracies never fight preventive wars.
There has not been much systematic empirical research on the actual expectations of the costs of wars by leaders of democratic states, but there is substantial evidence that democracies usually win the wars that they fight (Lake, 1992). This finding is consistent with the expectations argument because it implies that democracies carefully select the wars that they fight. It is possible, however, that the pattern of a disproportionate number of democratic military victories can be explained by alternative explanations—for example, the link between democracy and capitalism, and the military potential inherent in capitalist economies—and more research is necessary to explore these alternative explanations.
Expectations of the high costs of war did not deter either the United States government or the Confederacy from fighting a bitter and costly war in the 1860s. Nor did they deter the Western democracies from entering World War I with considerable popular enthusiasm, or from fighting that war in a way that demonstrated very little concern with minimizing casualties. One gets the sense that arguments about the concerns of democratic states with the costs of war and the need to minimize casualties is excessively shaped by contemporary American political culture. These arguments may have more general validity, but far more empirical research is necessary before we can accept that claim.
The expected costs of war may have a greater impact on decisions regarding preventive wars, for which the direct threat to the national interest lies sometime in the future rather than in the immediate present. This is a slightly different argument, one based on policy legitimacy rather than the expected costs of war, although there may be interaction effects between the two. 21 The argument is that leaders of democratic states are more constrained than are leaders of nondemocratic states by the need to legitimize their policies to their domestic publics. Although democratic political leaders can mobilize popular support for war, even high cost wars, in the face of direct and immediate threats to the national interest, they have more difficulty mobilizing support for preventive military action. Leaders of nondemocratic states are less constrained. This is the basis of
Brodie’s (1965:237-39) argument with respect to the United States that “war is generally unpopular and the public mood inclines to support really bold action only in response to great anger or great fright. The fright must be something more than a sudden new rise in [the adversary’s] capability.”
The difficulty of securing popular support for preventive war is related to the fact that preventive wars are generally considered to be more difficult to justify in moral terms. Morgenthau (1967: 203) argues that preventive war is “abhorrent to democratic public opinion” because of the moral condemnation of war in the West in this century. The United Nations Charter, as Schweller (1992:247) notes, has a very restrictive view of the right to use military force in self-defense, defined in terms of actual or imminent violations of territory boundaries. This basically prohibits anticipatory acts of self-defense. Preemption may be a possible exception, but the conditions under which preemptive attack is considered justifiable has been restricted in the twentieth century, beginning with the “no first shot” doctrine of the Kellog-Briand Pact (Johnson, 1981:30).
Walzer (1977:80) argues for “the moral necessity of rejecting any attack that is merely preventive in character, that does not wait upon and respond to the willful acts of an adversary.” He is more willing, however, to treat preemptive strikes (including the 1967 Israeli attack against Egypt) as legitimate under certain conditions. In particular, there must be a “sufficient threat” in terms of a “manifest intent to injure,” a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a positive danger,” and “a general situation in which waiting, or doing anything other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk” (Walzer, 1997:80-85). 22
The argument, then is that preventive wars are difficult to justify in moral terms, that this makes it difficult for democratic leaders to mobilize public support behind preventive military action, and that this domestic constraint precludes democratic leaders from taking such preventive actions. This almost certainly overstates the influence of qualms regarding the morality of preventive war. As Schweller (1992) argues, democratic leaders are deterred only from preventive wars that they expect to be costly, not from relatively inexpensive preventive military actions or wars.
The absence of the constraining effects of democratic public opinion on preventive wars that are expected to involve a minimal of costs is evident in the Israeli attack on the Iraqi reactor in 1981. It is also evident in the the processes leading up to the U.S. decision to initiate an air and then a ground war against Iraq in 1991. The Bush Administration decision for war may have been influenced in part by the fear that Iraq was developing a nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capacity and by the determination to set back that effort, particularly the nuclear one, before it became operational. Even if this was not an actual reason for the American air war, it was clearly a rationalization for war. The Bush Administration used fears of Iraq’s development of a nuclear capability as a way of selling the war to the American public, based on evidence that the public was more responsive to this issue than to any other. 23 This use of the fear of the rising power of a hostile state by political leaders to influence public opinion is clearly inconsistent with the spirit of the argument that democracies do not fight preventive wars because such wars are harder to justify to domestic publics.
The case of the U.S. in the Gulf War needs to be explored in more detail, but our main focus here is on the Israeli decision, with British and French suppport, to initiate a war against Egypt in 1956.
Israel and the Suez War
The Israeli invasion of the Sinai in October-November 1956 represents a relatively clear-cut case of the preventive motivation playing a significant role in the initiation of war by a democracy. Israeli leaders were driven by the fear of a significant shift in the dyadic balance of military power between Israel and Egypt as a result of the 1955 Soviet arms sales to Egypt and the full integration of those arms into the Egyptian arsenal. Israeli leaders feared that this would negate Israel’s qualitative military advantages and create a situation in which Egypt would come to hold both a quantitative and qualitative military advantage over Israel. These fears, in conjunction with perceptions of current and future Egyptian bellicosity toward Israel, led Israeli leaders to take preventive military action. 24
After a brief review of the history of Israeli-Egyptian relations and relevant domestic political developments in each country from the end of the 1948 war through the mid-1950’s, we examine the nature of the arms transfers, their impact on the dyadic balance of power and threat to Israeli security as perceived by Israeli leaders, the process of Israeli decision making that led to the the initiation of war in October 1956, and the role of Britain and France in that process.
Historical Background
We begin at the domestic level with important changes in political leadership in both Egypt and Israel after the informal armistice that ended the 1948 War of Independence. An Egyptian military coup lead by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew King Farouk in late July 1952 following months of civil unrest and increasing anti-European sentiment. 25 Nasser’s “revolutionary junta” began to implement a massive modernization and nationalization program that included such projects as the beginning of plans for the Aswan high damn and the British “evacuation” of the Suez Canal. 26
In Israel, David Ben-Gurion retired as the first Israeli Prime Minister in early November 1953. He was succeeded by the more moderate Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion was brought back into the government in February of 1955 as Defense Minister, six months before the announcement of the Egyptian arms deal in October. Though in November 1955 Ben-Gurion regained his position of Prime Minister, the brief tenure of Sharett should be kept in mind when analyzing events up until that time for, as shown below, Sharett probably acted differently in the weeks and months following the announcement of the Egyptian arms deal than Ben-Gurion would have.
It is against this backdrop of changing leaderships that we should examine Israeli-Egyptian relations in the early 1950’s. This relationship was characterized by sporadic and sometimes violent border conflicts and a constant search by both countries for external sources of armaments. Egypt and Israel initiated or sponsored numerous small-scale raids into one another’s territory, with Israel launching attacks into Gaza and Egypt sponsoring armed attacks into Israel’s Negev desert. In addition to initiating cross-boarder raids, Egypt also began a policy of maritime blockade of Israeli by denying Israeli travel through the Straits of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqauba and eventually through the Suez canal (Love, 1969; xv-xxiii).
The second important factor that influenced the Israeli-Egyptian relationship was that of an ever-increasing search conducted by both states to increase the quantity and quality of their military arsenal through external purchases. While this competing quest for more and better external arms may not have been an “arms race” in the full sense of the term, 27 it nonetheless did lead to an intense rivalry for foreign and especially Western arms suppliers (Oren, 1992: 77). This search for external armaments helped lead to the “Tripartite Agreement” among France, the UK, and the United States. This Agreement set up a multinational committee based in Washington to carefully monitor and control western arms sales to the Middle East. 28 It was through this system that Israel and Egypt did most of their searching arms in the early 1950’s.
The pace of arms deals was quite intense and exacerbated by technological innovations in weaponry in the 1950s, particularly in fighter aircraft, which led to a spiraling competition for the latest weapons that high technology could produce. As soon as one state acquired a the newest fighter from one Western power, then the other began a search for aircraft that could match their rivals in terms of capabilities. As Oren (1992: 78) notes, the acquisition of these weapons represented a quantum leap in prestige and offensive capability. This process was a competition in quality more than a competition in quantity. 29 Thus Israeli-Egyptian relations in the first half of the 1950’s were marked by both overt conflict and subtle and not so subtle armament posturing.
These tensions between Israel and Egypt led to a serious discussion within the Israeli cabinet in the middle of 1954 concerning calls, especially on the part of Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, for a substantial military strike against Gaza,(Oren, 1992: 130).
These talks were brought on by the continuing border skirmishes emanating from the area, broader territorial disputes, and expectation by some Israeli officials that Nasser was contemplating increasing such hostile actions. Dayan and other supporters of this policy believed that by seizing Gaza from Egypt, Israel could hold it as a “bargaining chip” in future negotiations with Egyptian officials over the status of borders and shipping (Golani, 1998: 9-10; Shimshoni, 1988: 82-83). 30
Sharett was able to resist calls for an attack on Gaza (Oren, 1992: 130) but in doing so angered the more hawkish elements of the Israeli cabinet, and in February 1955 the Prime Minister was forced to bring Ben-Gurion back into the Cabinet as Defense Minister in order to counter mounting criticism. Ben-Gurion was more favorable to a Gaza strike than was his predecessor. Indeed, the question of a military strike was so salient in Ben-Gurion’s strategic thinking that he “remained bitter over the defeat [of the Gaza plan] and vowed to implement the plan once Sharett was removed from government” (Oren, 1992: 132). It was around this time that Ben-Gurion instructed Dayan to draw up tentative plans for a strike on Gaza and the eastern Sinai, even though Sharett and Ben-Gurion’s disagreements over the issue continued to grow (Shlaim, 1983).
With Sharett’s domestic political fortunes in decline, Ben-Gurion and his allies were able to gain an increasing say in defense and security policies. The July 1955 elections returned Ben-Gurion to the office of the Prime Minister and demoted Sharett to Foreign Minister (both changes effective in December), and as a result the idea of a Gaza raid gained even more official backing, to the point that Bar-On (1992:133) argues that the elections “served to intensify the war mood in Israel.”
In summary, both Israel and Egypt experienced a change in leadership in the early 1950’s, although the former Israeli leader was slowly working his way back into the government by the summer of 1955. On the international level, Israel and Egypt frequently clashed both physically and diplomatically over issues such as boarders and international territory rights. Most importantly, though, was the burgeoning arms rivalry between the two states. This rivalry, traditionally managed by American, British, and French cooperation, took on a new dimension in the summer of 1955 when Egypt broke with Tripartite “regime” and purchased vast amounts of quality arms from the Soviet Union.
The “Czech” Arms Deal
For a variety of reasons Egypt felt increasingly isolated from major Western arms suppliers by 1955, and Egypt therefore turned to the Soviet Union for arms. This culminated in an agreement between the two countries (May 18-22, four days after the creation of the Warsaw Pact) on a massive sale of Soviet arms to Egypt. 31
This deal, when publicly announced, was referred to by both Egypt and the Soviet Union as being one between Egypt and Czechoslovakia, hence the popular label of the “Czech” arms deal. As Love (1969:98) argues, however, “it was the Russians who made the decisions” (Love, 1969: 98). Nasser insisted on the masking of the actual source of the arms, for he believed, quite correctly as it turned out, that the fact that this was an arms deal with the Soviet Union would greatly alarm the Israelis (Brecher, 1974: 257; Love, 1960: 90).
The “Czech” arms deal included large quantities of technologically advanced tanks, planes, artillery pieces, surface ships, submarines, and miscellaneous small arms. Although there is some disagreement as to the precise numbers and kinds of weapons involved, most estimates place the quantities within the ranges given in Table 1.
| Table 1: The “Czech” Arms Deal | ||
| Armored Vehicles: | 400-500 | |
| Artillery Pieces: | 575-600 | |
| Aircraft- | ||
| Mig Fighters: | 100-150 | |
| Alation Bombers: | 50-70 | |
| Alation transports: | 20 | |
| Ships- | ||
| Destroyers: | 2 | |
| Torpedo Boats: | 12-20 | |
| Minesweepers: | 4-15 | |
| Submarines: | 2-6 | |
| Radar Stations: | 2 | |
| Small arms, spare parts, general equipment- |
“Considerable amounts” |
|
The $450 million “Czech” arms deal was notable for both the quantity and quality of weapons that were to be sold to Egypt, for as a result the Egyptians would have not only “substantially more” arms than the Israelis, but better arms as well (Morris, 1993: 277). Most of the tanks that Egypt purchased were T-34 medium tanks and Stalin-III heavy tanks that were rated as being near the top of the Soviet arsenal. Also, the fighters were mostly relatively advanced Mig-15’s with the remaining being the even more superior Mig-17’s. 32
The impact of the arms deal on the military balance between the two states is striking in terms of both the quantity and quality of weapons involved. The deal would raise the number of Egyptian tanks from approximately 170-200, which already outnumbered Israel’s arsenal by maybe up to 40 in the summer of 1955, to well over 500, once the weapons were delivered to Egypt and once the Egyptian military integrated those weapons into its arsenal (Bar-On, 1994: 17; Brecher, 1974: 230). It would also gave the Egyptian tank fleet an infusion of new technology that would surpass that of the outdated World War II tanks currently in their possession. Although Israel had recently completed an arms deal with France that called for the integration of 30 French AMX-III tanks into the IDF in 1956, the Israeli lead in technology that would follow would be challenged by the Czech arms deal (Bar-On, 1994: 17).
A similar development can be seen in examining the aircraft situation. While the deal represented a quantitative increase in Egyptian jet fighters from around 80-100 (already around 30-50 more than Israel) to over 200, it also replaced Egypt’s “first-generation” Vampire jets with more advanced Mig’s that rivaled, if not surpassed, the quality of the Israeli Meteor and Ouragan fighters (Bar-On, 1994: 17-18; Brecher, 1974: 230 fn 1). It is fair to conclude that the Czech arms deal had the potential to significantly alter the military balance between Israel and Egypt. As we will see, it was the qualitative dimensions of the military balance that most concerned Israeli decision-makers (Bar-On, 1994: 18).
Israeli Perceptions,Summer 1955-Summer 1956
Egypt officially announced the existence of the Czech arms deal in late October 1955, a day after British officials gave information to the press regarding the sale. Israeli intelligence was aware of Egypt-Soviet contacts during the summer of 1955 and had concluded by September that they had agreed to some sort of arms deal (Love, 1969: 98, 101). It was not for another couple of months after the announcement of the deal that Israel learned the full extent of the situation and were able to grasp its seriousness (Bar-On, 1994: 16). Indeed, it appears that until early October most Israeli officials, including Ben-Gurion, were little concerned with the purported arms sale (Bar-On; 1994: 37; Golani, 1998: 13).
As the Israeli leaders began to construct a more complete picture of the scope and details of the arms purchase, their perceptions changed dramatically from relatively little concern in October to growing fear by December. Israeli decision-makers were particularly concerned about the qualitative edge the deal would have gave to the Egyptians (Bar-On, 1994: 18). Many inside and outside the government, while sometimes differing radically in their ideological views, reached a shared consensus that the deal was a “watershed” development in Israeli-Egyptian relations (Barzilai, 1996: 27, Morris, 1993: 277).
Although Israel never enjoyed a numerical advantage over or even parity with Egypt in terms of military supplies, it had always been able to rely upon its ability to continually update its arsenal with new and better weapons and on its perceived advantage it quality of personnel (Bar-On, 1994: 17). The Czech arms deal dramatically changed this situation. It was no longer clear that Israel could base its security on technological superiority as it had in the past (Bar-On, 1994: 17).
Sharett, who was a “lame duck” at this point, viewed the impact of the arms deal not as a “difference between varying degrees of gray” but instead as “the difference between black and white” (quoted in Bar-On, 1994: 3). Similar perceptions led the more hawkish Israeli leaders to conclude that the deal “essentially eliminated any chance of restoring even a general arms balance” between their nation and the Arab states, and to become more receptive to a military solution (Oren, 1992: 88).
Sharett, however, was more optimistic. Over objections from the hawks, the Prime Minister decided on a course of merely warning Nasser of the grave consequences of the situation while embarking on a massive search for Western arms that would reduce the technological gap that existed between Israel and Egypt (Bar-On, 1994: 3; Oren, 1992: 88). This process proved to be difficult. The United States, under the advice of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was unwilling to provide Israel with more arms, and Britain and France were still concerned about breaking too drastically with the protocol outlined in the Tripartite Agreement (Bar-On, 1994: 17; Love, 1969: 101; Oren, 1992: 90).
When the more hawkish Ben-Gurion became prime minister in November 1955, many believed that Israeli policy towards Egypt would focus less on Sharett’s calls (now from the foreign minister’s office) for long-term plans for Israeli arms purchases and more on an increasingly hostile tact. As Barzilai (1996:28) points out, ever since Independence the strategic thinking of Ben-Gurion, and that of the hegemonic Mapai party in general, centered on the belief “that Israel should consider launching a war when a menacing concentration of political and military events threatened to destroy Israel.”
Israeli leaders believed that the situation in Egypt in late 1955 fit this description, and in the month in between the announcement of the Czech deal and Ben-Gurion’s reclamation of the prime ministership, the long simmering security disputes between Ben-Gurion (supported by Chief of Staff Dayan) and Sharett became more and more heated. Whereas Sharett continued to favor a more cautious and optimistic approach (Shlaim, 1983: 193, 195), in the winter of 1955-1956 Ben-Gurion gave every impression that that he would not hesitate to drastically alter Israeli policy. He is purported to have claimed that “the Czech-Egyptian arms deal transformed Israel’s security situation for the worse at one stroke. The quantitative inferiority of our military equipment, which had existed since the War of Independence, became a dangerous position of qualitative inferiority as well.” (quoted in Brecher, 1974: 247).
Ben-Gurion was particularly worried about the effects that the Egyptian acquisition of advanced MiGs would have on Israeli security. Cabinet records quote him as saying in early October of 1955 that “if [the Egyptians] really get MiGs—I will be for bombing them”, while later in December as prime minister he ominously referred to “destruction ... in the cities ... A heavy price in blood, a lot of blood ... The price will be greater and more terrible than we paid in 1948” (quoted in Morris, 1993: 278). In fact, Ben-Gurion told the American ambassador to Israel in January of 1956 that “the real danger [of the Czech deal] is of an air attack” (quoted in Morris, 1993: 278).
This great fear of an aerial bombardment of Israeli cities derived from the fact that Israel’s qualitative aerial edge had disappeared and that Egypt would be free to strike vital population centers once the Soviet-built planes came on-line. Indeed, others shared Ben Gurion’s fears. The prime minister’s concerns—especially of the Ilyushins—may have been amplified, however, by certain psychological considerations relating to experiential learning, for Ben-Gurion had been in London during the Blitz of 1940, and this experience played heavily on his thinking (Golani, 1998: 61; Morris, 1993: 277). Due to the nature of such fears, Brecher (1974: 257) claims that Czech deal was more than a mere strategic problem for Ben-Gurion and had “entered into the psychological environment” of the Prime Minister. Whatever the roots of his fears, the Czech arms deal represented “the turning point for Ben-Gurion; it caused a fundamental change in his thinking about the nature and scope of dangers from Egypt” (Troen, 1990: 181; see also Love, 1969: 102).
Once coming back into power, however, Ben-Gurion initially pursued a policy similar to that of Sharett. Over the sometimes contentious objections from Dayan, Ben-Gurion refused to implement any one of the various military options that the chief of staff was offering him and instead chose to make the buying of western arms the “central theme of Israeli defense policy” (Golani, 1998: 25). Concluding that an attack on a Soviet armed Egypt would be futile unless the Israeli Defense Forces first received its own infusion of advanced western armaments to at least partially make up the difference incurred by the Czech deal, Ben Gurion stated that “there is nothing to do but [purchase] arms, all efforts [must be] concentrated on this” (quoted in Golani, 1998: 24). This decision was not without contention within Ben-Gurion’s own Cabinet, as Dayan in particular was much more open to war at that time (Bar-on, 1994: 3-5; Golani, 1998: 36, 59; Love, 1969: 99, 108; Oren, 1994: xvii).
Despite the sometimes heated debates between the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff, throughout the winter of 1956 Israeli defense and security policy centered on the search for arms. Sharett concentrated on acquiring arms from the United States, while Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres, Defense’s Director General, focused their efforts on France. Sharett was almost completely unsuccessful in his attempts to gain weapons from the Eisenhower administration, and this contributed greatly to his leaving the government in June of 1956 (Golani, 1998: 24).
It was in their attempts to buy weapons from France that Israel was most successful their search for arms. Following a complicated path of secret diplomacy Israeli officials were able to get French assurances on the sale of numerous tanks and military aircraft to be delivered secretly from July through early 1957 (Golani, 1998: 28). Israeli officials, including Dayan, had high hopes for the French arms deals as the French seemed as willing to sell their arms as Israel was willing to buy them (Golani, 1998: 36, 46).
As Brecher (1974: 230) writes, however, “the further flow of Western weapons did not alter the balance appreciably.” One factor contributing to this failure was further Egyptian purchases of Soviet fighters in December of 1955 and the spring of 1956 (Love, 1969: 117; Oren, 1992: 117). Furthermore, Israeli arms purchases were generally not as technologically advanced as those of Egypt. Thus, when the new Soviet weapons are counted in the Egyptian arsenal, Egypt would still hold a considerable advantage over Israel in quantitative and, more importantly, in qualitative terms. Israeli officials believed that Egypt would be able to integrate these weapons sometime between October of 1956 to early 1957(Bar-On, 1994: 19).
This is evident from Table 2, which provides a rough breakdown of the nature of both Israel and Egypt’s tank and aircraft arsenal in the summer of 1956, after the Egyptian arms purchases from the Soviet Union and subsequent Israeli acquisitions from Western arms sales (Brecher, 1974: 230 fn1; Dayan, 1991 [1966]; 4-5; Oren, 1992: 93).
| Table 2: Changes in Israeli and Egyptian Tank and Fighter Arsenals | |||||
| Tanks | |||||
| EGYPT: | |||||
| Pre-Czech Deal: | 170-200 | (mostly Sherman Mark III’s, some Centrions) | |||
| Czech Deal: | 400-500 | (mostly T-34 medium, some Stalin- III heavy) | |||
| Subsequent Deals: | 40 | (French AMX-13) | |||
| Approximate Total (Summer 1956): |
510+ 33 | ||||
| Type Breakdown: | |||||
| Light: | 40 | (Remaining Shermans) | |||
| Medium: | 410 | (T-34’s, AMX-13’s,some Centurions) | |||
| Heavy: | 60 | (Stalin-III’s) | |||
| ISRAEL: | |||||
| Fall-Winter 1955: | 150 | Shermans 34 | |||
| 30 | AMX 13’s (yet to be delivered) | ||||
| Spring 1956 Deals: | 210 | (mostly AMX 13’s) | |||
| Approximate Total (Summer 1956): |
345+ 35 | ||||
| Type Breakdown: | |||||
| Light: | 155 | (mostly Shermans) | |||
| Medium: | 190 | (AMX 13’s) | |||
| Jet Fighters: | |||||
| EGYPT: | |||||
| Pre-Czech Deal: | 80 | (Meteors, Vampires, Furies) | |||
| Czech Deal: | 100-170 | (mostly Mig-15’s, Ilyushin-28, possibly some Mig-17’s) | |||
| Subsequent Deals: | 150 | Mig-15’s and 17’s | |||
| 70 | Ilyushin-28 fighter-bombers | ||||
| Approximate Total (Summer 1956): |
245+ 36 | ||||
| ISRAEL: | |||||
| Fall-Winter 1955: | 50 | (Assorted including one squadron of Ouragans) | |||
| Spring 1956 Deals: | 58 | Mystère-IV’s 37 | |||
| 24 | Canadian Sabres | ||||
| Approximate Total (Summer 1956): |
114 38 | ||||
The data in Table 2 clearly supports the claim that by the summer of 1956 Israel had not effectively countered Egyptian quantitative gains in key weapons systems. Although it would take some time for Egypt’s new weapons from the Czech deal and from subsequent purchases to be incorporated into the Egyptian arsenal, these figures show that “Egypt [was] in a position of marked superiority in every area” (Oren, 1992: 93-94).
In terms of tanks, Egypt’s modest quantitative advantage over Israel before the Czech arms deal was significantly enhanced by the Czech arms deal and only partially compensated by new Israeli acquisitions, so that by the summer of 1956 Egypt had increased its quantitative advantage over Israel. In qualitative terms, Egypt’s superiority over Israel increased even more dramatically. While both Israel and Egypt had only light, World War II-style tanks in the summer of 1955, a year later Egypt had around 450 new medium and heavy tanks compared to Israel’s 190 medium tanks. Not only did Egypt increase its lead in “strong” tanks, but the T-34 was viewed as being superior to its western counterpart, the M-3 (Morris, 1993: 277). To summarize, from summer 1955 to summer 1956 Egypt made a modest gain over Israel in terms of numbers of tanks and a very substantial gain in terms of the technological quality of those weapons.
A comparison of the jet fighter forces of each side generates a similar pattern. Before the Czech deal, Egypt had about 80 fighter jets relative to Israel’s 50, and within a year Egypt had 245 fighters to Israel’s 114, which was a modest increase in Egypt’s quantitative advantage. Again, however, static comparisons of numbers only tell part of the story. It is generally agreed that the Mig-15 was a class above the Meteor and Ouragan and that it also outperformed the Mystère (Morris, 1993: 277, fn 51; Oren, 1992: 94;). It is clear that from summer 1955 to summer 1956 Egypt had increased its lead over Israel both in the quantity of tanks and jet fighters and the technological sophistication of those weapons systems.
By the summer of 1956 it was indeed true that the plan of countering Egyptian weapons purchases by finding sufficient Western forces, pushed strongly by Sharett and with less intensity by Ben Gurion, was a failure. This failure contributed to Sharett’s leaving the Cabinet in June 1956. Also contributing was Sharett’s strong disapproval of the breadth and nature of Israel’s arms deal with France (Golani, 1998: 24). After Sharett left the cabinet Ben-Gurion indicated his frustration with the course of Israeli strategy over the past six months when he that “a negative attitude of ‘waiting it out’ is not enough. In the long run, doing nothing may be far more dangerous than any bold deed—such as fomenting a war” (quoted in Golani, 1998: 24).
Israeli Perceptions, July-October 1956
It is more difficult to establish exactly how Israeli decision-makers perceived the quantitative and qualitative balance of military power between Egypt and Israel. In his study of the events leading up to the Sinai war, Golani (1998:185) argues that in the minds of Ben-Gurion and Dayan, among others, the French arms “counterbalanced” the Czech deal. Morris also seems to argue this point, although he admits, somewhat paradoxically, the inferiority of the Israeli weapons obtained from the French (1993: 428, 277). 39
Golani’s (1998) makes the claim that the French arms “counterbalanced” the Czech deal in the context of his argument that the Suez War was really an aggressive war for Israel and not a war driven by fear of a deteriorating dyadic balance of power. Golani argues that the French arms allowed Ben Gurion to resurrect the idea, pushed in 1954 by Dayan and others but resisted by Sharett, for a large-scale operation against Egypt in Gaza, which had been rendered temporarily infeasible by the temporary shift in power following the Czech arms deal. This logic leads Golani (1998:183) to state that “the Egyptian-Czech deal did not push Israel into war: on the contrary, it put an end, for the time being, to Israel’s efforts to bring about war.” In Golani’s view, the arms imbalance was thus a deterrent in the minds of Israeli leaders rather than a stimulus, especially Ben-Gurion.
Golani exaggerates both the eagerness of Israeli political leaders for war prior to the Czech arms deal and the immediate impact of the Egyptian-Soviet agreement in deterring such an attack, and his emphasis on the effectiveness of Egyptian deterrence leaves him less able to explain the Israeli attack in October 1956. True, Dayan had advocated a major Gaza raid, but Prime Minister Sharett had opposed it, while Ben Gurion had adopted a position somewhere in between. Moreover, the arms agreement did not mean that the new weapons would immediately be available to Egypt. To be effective the weapons had to be integrated into the Egyptian arsenal; doctrine and war plans had to be modified to integrate the weapons with existing systems; and Egyptian soldiers and airmen had to be trained in their use.
How long this would take was uncertain, and how long Israeli leaders expected it to take is more uncertain. In Ben-Gurion’s view, the time frame in which Nasser would be able to integrate the Soviet arms into the Egyptian military and launch an attack ranging from as early as mid-summer to late autumn of 1956 (Oren, 1992: 133; Bar-On, 1994: 19 Morris, 1993: 289).
Although it is probably true that Ben-Gurion was unwilling to go to war with a Soviet supplied Egypt until Israel increased its arsenal with large amounts of Western arms, Golani exaggerates the extent to which Ben-Gurion, or many other Israeli officials, believed the Czech deal to be effectively and wholly counterbalanced by the French arms sent to Israel. If we examine the perceptions of Israeli leaders in the summer and fall of 1956, we find that Ben-Gurion and Dayan continued to be concerned about the risks to Israeli security brought about by the Czech deal, and that they perceived these risks to be primarily qualitative in nature, relating to the technological superiority of Egyptian forces.
If we turn again to Brecher’s analysis of the perceptions of the four key Israeli decision-makers, we can see that they were very concerned with the dynamics Israel’s relative military relationship with its Arab neighbors, although it is questionable as to what extent this relationship went beyond Egypt since none of the other Arab state bordering Israeli obtained significant amount of military machinery in 1955 or 1956. Brecher’s (1974:276) breakdown of Ben-Gurion, Peres, Dayan, and Meir’s “images” of this relationship from March to October of 1956 is as follows:
| Table 3: Decision-Makers’ Images of Israel’s Relative Military Capability: March-October 1956 (from Brecher, 1974: 246) | |||||
| Images of | Peres | Ben-Gurion | Dayan | Meir | Total |
| Increasing Israeli Power | 10 | 14 | 11 | 4 | 39 |
| Equal Israeli Power | 32 | 13 | 38 | 3 | 86 |
| Decreasing Israeli Power | 15 | 29 | 0 | 15 | 59 |
| Total | 57 | 56 | 49 | 22 | 184 |
Brecher’s analysis suggests that with the notable exception of Dayan, leading Israeli decision-makers were more preoccupied with the possibility of a relative decline in Israeli power than an increase in relative Israeli power. Whereas Dayan saw relative Israeli power as static or increasing, Ben-Gurion saw it as decreasing or possibly static, Peres saw it as basically static, and Meir saw it as decreasing.
Ben-Gurion remained very concerned over the ability of the Israeli air-defense system to repel an Egyptian attack by the new MiGs and Ilyushins, which became clear in the later discussion on French-Israeli collusion. As Shimshoni (1988: 105-106) points out, in the summer of 1956 Ben-Gurion was clearly aware that Israel’s security rested on only the most highly intangible properties such as courage and morale, yet even these bases of strength were placed into question now that Israel was placed at both a quantitative and qualitative disadvantage. The shift in the military balance after the Czech arms deal shattered the Israeli belief that the superior ability of its military personnel, when combined with superior technology, would be enough to deter and even defeat an Egyptian attack. As Bar-On, 1994: 18) writes, “even the most courageous of pilots could not outfly faster planes, and even the most daring of gunners could not hit tanks outside their range.”
For Ben-Gurion, the impact of the Czech arms deal on the qualitative and technological balance between Egypt and Israel was exacerbated by the fact that the arms originated in the Soviet Union. By buying Soviet arms, Egypt opened the door for the USSR to play a larger role in the Middle East. The possible introduction of Soviet influence was troubling because it was believed that “it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would feel bound by the restraints that had heretofore characterized Western arms suppliers (Bar-On, 1994: 3). The Tripartite Agreement had established a set of norms and expectations that lent a certain stability to a potentially dangerous arms competition, but the Czech deal was beyond the bounds of that agreement.
Israel had no formal diplomatic relations with the USSR at the time, and this would make it difficult for Israel to diplomatically voice its opinions concerning Soviet actions in the region. Many Israelis were also concerned that Soviet policy in the region would be more reckless than that of Western powers, since the USSR was viewed to be lacking in “Western political constraints” (Bar-On, 1994: 16). Although Sharett also perceived the introduction of Soviet arms to be a damaging development (Bar-on, 1994:3), Ben-Gurion’s prior assessment of the extent of the potential Soviet threat to Israel was greater than Sharett’s, and this led Ben-Gurion to be more alarmed by the additional dangers created by the insertion of the Soviet Union into the Arab-Israeli conflict (Troen, 1990: 181). The “Sovietness” of the deal, therefore, played a large role in shaping Israeli, especially Ben-Gurion’s, perceptions of the gravity of the situation.
In terms of Egypt, Israeli decision-makers defined the threat to security in terms of their assessment of Egyptian intentions as well as the military balance per se (Bar-On, 1994: 15). Many Israeli leaders, including Ben-Gurion, had come to the conclusion that Egypt was intent on destroying the state of Israel (Bar-On, 1994: 20; Oren, 1992: 130). Not only had Egypt acquired vast amounts of new technologically advanced weapons, but it also was perceived to have embarked on a policy that marked by increasing “self-assurance” and “increasing assertiveness” (Bar-On, 1994: 20). As evidence of this new found “self-assurance” and “assertiveness,” Ben-Gurion and other hawks pointed to Nasser’s increasingly frequent calls for pan-Arabism, the rising number of Fedayeen attacks into Israel, and the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez canal in July of 1956. 40
The Egyptian denial of Israeli shipping to use the Suez canal and the Tiran straits in the summer of 1956 greatly aggravated the situation. Dayan (1991 [1966]: 22, 203) points to three factors influencing the Israeli decision on war: a) the procurement of Israeli shipping rights in the Gulf of Aquaba, b) an end of fedayeen attack, and c) the neutralization of the threat of attack posed by Egypt, and Syria to a lesser extent. Brecher (1974: 252-253) points out that various other Israeli leaders such as Peres, Meir, and Ben-Gurion relayed similar reasons for Israel’s decision after the war. Yet while the rising tensions over the straits and continuing concerns over the integrity of the borders did serve to create hostile environment, similar situations existed prior to 1956 without there being a war. Thus none of these developments can be viewed as a being the “trigger” of the Sinai war.
The importance of such developments, however, led to a belief in the inevitability and imminence of war on the part of Israeli officials. Although prior to the Czech arms deal Israeli leaders viewed a “second round” war as probably inevitable due to continued Egyptian demands for the abolishment of Israel, they did not see such a war as imminent (Bar-On, 1994: 23, 38). Egypt’s acquisition of Soviet arms changed this view and led to the belief of the foreign ministry and others that the deal represented “the obvious next step in Nasser’s campaign to lead the Arabs in the liberation of Palestine” (Oren, 1992: 88). Egypt thus became the immediate threat to Israel.
Another factor related to perceptions which influenced the Israel decision was that of historical learning from the 1948 war, as many Israelis viewed the developments of 1955-1956 through the lens of their experiences of 1948. Bar-On (1994:24) writes that for most Israelis, “their images had crystallized during the hostilities of 1948; if this was how one began reckoning history, then the conflict in the mid-1950’s could only be seen as one between a defensive Israel, protecting its very existence, and the belligerent Arabs, intent on Israel’s destruction.” Egyptian actions beginning with the Czech arms deal were perceived as analogous to its offensive posture in the 1948. This analogy could not have been missed by Ben-Gurion, who had led Israel during it War of Independence.
Given these various factors, Israeli decision-makers began to prepare for war. Soon after Ben-Gurion had returned to the prime minister’s office, the IDF had begun to prepare for an attack with exercises in the Negev desert. Ben-Gurion decided on war in July 1956 (Herzog, 1982: 113). Israel believed that time was working against them, and that it was necessary to act before Egypt was able to incorporate the new Soviet arms into Egyptian force posture and doctrine. The longer Israel waited, the greater the threat they would face(Oren, 1992: 146). To delay would have been to leave a hostile Egypt with both a quantitative and qualitative advantage over Israel. The Czech arms deal not only undermined Israel’s objective deterrent capability; it also undermined Israel’s confidence and self-image.
This interpretation draws considerable support from the historical literature. Oren (1992: 133; 148) argues that after the Czech arms deal “now Egypt enjoyed a decisive advantage over the IDF, in the air and on the ground. The event greatly strengthened the hand of those in the Israeli leadership who favored preemptive action...,” and Israel “sought to deter Egypt by decisively launching a preemptive strike. Similarly, Bar-On (1994: 40-41) argues that the “Israeli army could no longer rely on its defensive capability and preferred to take the initiative into its own hands by striking preemptively before it was too late.” Finally, Troen (1990:181) suggests that “Ben-Gurion defined his task as ensuring that the coming conflict would be conducted under conditions that would be most favorable for Israel”
Although Bar-On (1994) and others refer to the Israeli action as a “preemptive strike,” it is clear that they confuse preemption with prevention and that their argument is really one of preventive war. While Israeli leaders did believe that a second war with Egypt was inevitable, they did not believe that Egypt was on the verge of attacking Israel. Indeed, Nasser pulled most of his forces back from the border and the eastern stretches of the Sinai in the summer of 1956 during the crisis of the nationalization of the Suez. This was designed to signal to Israeli leaders that he had no intention of undertaking military action and to reduce any dangers of a war by miscalculation . This redeployment was known at the time to Israeli officials (Golani, 1998: 190).
Some argue that Israeli leaders believed that there was a good probability that an Egyptian attack might be forthcoming once the new armaments were fully integrated into the Egyptian arsenal. If this were true, the Israeli attack would still not be characterized as a preemptive strike in a technical sense. In such a situation the absence of an Israeli attack would not be an immediate war, and Israeli leaders were not making a tactical move to strike the first blow and strengthen the Israeli battlefield position for an imminent war. The motivation would still be primarily preventive, in that it constituted a large-scale strategic operation designed to shape the overall power relationship between the two states into the future. Still, it would involve some element of preemption, in that it was a response to the perception that war was certain within months rather than not years.
Bar-On (1992:315) presents a different picture. He argues that the 1956 war was not preventive in that it was not “provoked by fears that a given situation might take a turn for the worse,” for the Israeli acquisition of armaments from the French, he argues, made up the difference between Israel and Egypt. Bar-On argues that “the war was fought within the tensions and distensions between Israel and Egypt that had existed since the beginning of the 1950’s and they were aggravated in 1954 when Nasser set about putting his pan-Arab policies into action, including the signing of the agreement with Czechoslovakia.” Bar-On goes on to argue (p. 316) that “the 1956 war was launched mainly to effect a change in the status quo that the restrictive interpretation of the [1949] Armistice Agreements had created,” and that “one of the major goals of the campaign [was the] abrogation of the ambiguous intermediate status of neither war not peace.”
We have several disagreements with Bar-On’s (1992) interpretation. First, it underestimates the extent that the Czech arms sales gave Egypt a qualitative advantage in tanks and aircraft over the Israelis, and it overestimates the extent to which subsequent Israeli acquisitions from the French compensated for these disadvantages. Second, it fails to explain the timing of the Israeli attack against Egypt. The ambiguity of the 1949 Armistice had existed for seven years without war, and substantial tensions had existed between Israel and Egypt since the early 1950s. Those tensions had increased in 1954 when Nasser began to implement his Pan-Arab policies and again with the signing of the Czech arms deal, but war did not break out until 1956. Bar-On is correct about the importance of the ambiguity of the underlying status quo and about the persistence of Egyptian-Israeli tensions, but it was the Czech arms deal and the security fears that it provoked in Israel that helps to explain the outbreak of war in fall 1956 but not before. 41
French, British and Israeli Cooperation
We have argued that the preventive motivation was a primary factor leading to the Israeli decision for war in October 1956. Expectations of an adverse power shift were not sufficient for war, they interacted with perceptions of Egyptian hostility. Whether these two factors were jointly sufficient for war cannot be assessed, however, without considering the role of Britain and France in the processes leading to war.
As we argued above, in their support of an Israeli military strike to weaken Egypt while the opportunity was still available and before the new weapons could be fully integrated into the Egyptian system, Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders were extremely concerned about the vulnerability of Israeli territory and population centers to an aerial bombardment by Egypt’s new Soviet built planes. Thus to initiate an attack without proper air protection would be to run the risk of substantial civilian casualties.
Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders were also worried that an Israeli initiated war would run the risk of diplomatically and economically isolating Israeli from western powers, who were its most important allies and arms suppliers. The British-Israeli relationship had been tenuous at best since Israeli independence in 1948. Ill will between the two states over the British handling of its colonial power in Palestine in the years leading up to Israel’s birth was combined with conflicting foreign policy goals in the region. Jordan was a particularly troublesome issue and the source of a British-Israeli diplomatic crisis in the spring and summer of 1956 (Morris, 1993: 265). American leaders, especially Dulles, were not willing to inflame Arab opinion against the U.S., and while not openly opposing an Israeli initiated war the U.S. refused to give more than the most subtle and tacit approval of any such Israeli action (Troen, 1996). Israeli-French relations were better and grew stronger still after Israel began to purchase increasing amounts of French arms following the Czech deal. 42
Under these circumstances it would be risky for Israel to initiate a war without consultation with the western powers. Israel would have to fight alone without external support, and there would be some risk of international condemnation and isolation that could be potentially dangerous for a state in Israel’s position (Rodman, 1997:5).
These above factors led Israel, in the summer of 1956, to enter into talks about possible military cooperation with France in regards to a Sinai-Suez war. For Israel, western power cooperation would give it both tangible military support and the diplomatic backing that it desired. For France, a concerted military action against Egypt represented an opportunity to punish Nasser for his perceived support of anti-French Algerian insurgents and for his recent nationalization of the Suez canal (Troen, 1996: 125).
Despite these concerns and various other offers of French military assistance to Israel, French decision-makers were unwilling to enter into such a high-level arrangement without the direct support of Britain (Golani, 1998: 81, 86). It was no easy task for the French to induce Britain to join in an offensive alliance with Israel against Egypt. Although Nasser’s support of insurgencies in pro-British Arab countries and his nationalization of the Suez gave Britain some incentives to join in a war against Egypt, mutual distrust between Israeli and British leaders, especially on the part of Ben-Gurion, precluded any direct talks between the two states until October (Shimshoni, 1988: 91-92; Troen, 1996: 125).
This mutual distrust was so great that Britain had developed war plans for action against Israel while Ben-Gurion perceived Britain as a potential military adversary (Golani, 1998: 21, 105). In fact, this mistrust, along with continued Israeli raids into Jordanian territory, led to a rather serious diplomatic dispute between the two states in the months preceding the Suez crisis (Morris, 1993: 265; Golani, 1998: 105). Given this situation, France acted as a go-between for Britain and Israel in the summer and early fall of 1956, seeking to convince both sides to join in trilateral alliance against Nasser.
Despite numerous difficulties in these negotiations, after several months of discussions all three states agreed upon a specific course of action against Egypt. The result was the Sèvres protocol of 24 October, signed by Britain, France, and Israel. It called for joint Anglo-French action against Egypt four days after Israel launched an attack into the Sinai and along the western coasts of the Aquaba. 43 The protocol assured Israeli leaders—Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres in particular—that they could launch a war without fear of complete western isolation. Although British and French actions were nominally to be classified as quasi-peacekeeping action, their collusion in the agreement committed themselves to a pro-Israeli stance.
A second important feature agreed to at the conference was between only France and Israel, whereby France agreed to station a reinforced squadron of Mysteres IV fighter-bombers and two combat ships in Israel for defensive use. 44 This provided Ben-Gurion with the requisite air cover over Israeli cities and border regions to alleviate his concerns about civilian casualties from Arab air raids, and also with the external support that alleviated his concerns over diplomatic isolation. These had been the two major concerns that had held Ben-Gurion back from war, and in eliminating these concerns the tripartite agreement made war possible for Ben-Gurion (Troen, 1996: 127).
Another benefit of the Sèvres agreement for Israel was it’s expected impact on the United States. Ben-Gurion was concerned about the American reaction if Israel acted alone against Egypt (Brecher, 1974: 230), but he Ben-Gurion may have believed that the American response would have been tempered if Israel were jointed by Britain and France. 45
Would Israel have initiated a war without the air cover and diplomatic support provided for in the Sèvres agreement? Golani (1998:7) argues that Ben-Gurion had been searching for an ally for an offensive war as far back as February 1955. He also claims (p. 21) that Ben-Gurion was adamant that Israel “would not initiate a major military operation without significant support by one Great Power at least,” with the implication being that “support” meant direct military involvement. This line of thinking leads Golani to conclude (p. 186) that “the question of whether Israel would go to war against Egypt had depended, since July 1956 [the height of the Suez crisis and the end of the arms deals], more on France than on Israel.” 46 This appears to be consistent with Ovendale’s (1984: 163) claim that “the immediate origins of the Suez-Sinai war lie more in the diplomacy of Britain, France, and the United States than in the wish of Ben-Gurion and his colleagues for a preemptive strike against Egypt.” 47 Thus Golani’s, and apparently Ovendale’s, interpretation is that Israel’s decision for war was contingent on France’s decision, which as stated above was contingent on Britain’s decision on war; French and British cooperation were something of a necessary factor in this view.
This view underestimates the importance of the perception—of Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Peres, and other Israeli leaders—that the Czech deal represented a “watershed” change in the nature of Egyptian-Israeli relations. The Czech arms deal promised to increase Egypt’s quantitative advantage in tanks and fighter aircraft over Israel, and, more importantly, would provide Egypt with state-of-the-art weapons that undercut the qualitative technological advantages upon which Israel had always relied for its security.
These concerns had led Israeli leaders to draw up plans for an attack on Egypt before their qualitative advantage materialized in late 1955 and early 1956. What stopped Israel from attacking was the need for more arms to reduce Egypt’s qualitative superiority, the need for signals that Western states would not isolate Israel for initiating an unprovoked war, and the need for an effective aerial umbrella for the defense of Israeli territory.
The French arms deal was a major step towards dealing with the first problem. Although the Sèvres protocol and the associated commitment of military forces by France and Britain solved the second and third problems, it is not clear that this extent of French and British commitment was a necessary condition for an Israeli attack. Surely a much weaker statement of external diplomatic support would have satisfied Israel’s concerns about isolation. The question of security from air attack is more problematic, though Israel could have waited until its own air-cover was adequate enough to provide the level of protection that Ben-Gurion wanted. The only question here is whether that could be done before the new Egyptian arms became fully operational and integrated into the Egyptian forces.
Due to these possibilities, most observers conclude that the British-French military intervention was not a necessary condition for the Israeli decision for war. Troen (1990: 182) writes that “for Ben-Gurion then, this unexpected alliance influenced the timing and the character of the conflict with Egypt, but did not determine its occurrence.”
In other words, for the war to start when it did, British and French “signed” support was a necessary condition (Troen, 1996: 128; Oren 1992: 129). While Bar-On (1994: 247) is more ambiguous on this point in that he claims that the Sèvres agreement “tipped the scales in favor of Ben-Gurion’s positive decision” for war, he follows this statement by asserting that “but underneath it was one fundamental assumption that Ben-Gurion shared with most of the Israeli leadership in 1956: the inevitability of a confrontation between Israel and Nasser’s Egypt. It was in Israel’s best interest to ensure that it took place at a time under conditions most favorable to it.”
In sum, Ben-Gurion could have decided to delay a decision for war. Yet such a policy would have run the risk of allowing Egypt to fully integrate the Soviet arms thereby creating the very situation that Ben-Gurion had hoped to avoid. Thus, at most the Sèvres Protocol may have may have “tipped the scales” in favor of a war in late October, thereby making it a necessary factor in the timing of the war. Yet given Ben-Gurion and, especially, Dayan’s ideas on the dire need to launch war it is unlikely that without this level of British and French collusion that Israel would not have eventually launched a war before Egypt was perceived to have fully integrated the advanced Soviet arms.
Summary and Conclusion
We have seen that the 1955 Czech arms deal brought about a perceived change in the balance of arms between Israel and Egypt. By July of 1956, it was clear to Israeli leaders that they had lost the qualitative advantage in its military relationship with Egypt, an advantage that had been necessary for Israeli security because of the numerical imbalance of forces between Israel and Egypt that had existed since Independence. Israeli leaders, and especially Ben-Gurion, believed that once Egypt was able to fully integrate the Soviet arms into its military, Israel would be extremely vulnerable to such an attack. They also believed that given Egypt’s repeated demonstrations of its hostility toward Israel, such a “second round” of wars was inevitable.
We conclude that Israel went to war primarily in order to avert a decline in relative military power that would emerge from the integration of the new arms into the Egyptian military and result in a significant degree of Israeli military insecurity. Some form of external diplomatic support may have been necessary in order to prevent Israel’s diplomatic isolation, but this could have been satisfied by something short of joint military action by Britain and France. Some guarantee of protection of the civilian population against Egyptian air attacks may also have been necessary for Israeli action, though whether this could have been satisfied by something short of British and French participation in the land war against Egypt is more difficult to ascertain.
These conclusions have important theoretical implications. The significant role of the preventive motivation in Israel’s decision for war against Egypt in October 1956 runs contrary to the widely-cited proposition that democracies do not fight preventive wars. The fact that Israel and Egypt were approximately equal in military power, so that Israel had to expect substantial causalties in the war, means that this disconfirming case cannot be dismissed with the qualification that democracies might fight preventive wars if they expect to incur minimal costs from the war.
This is just one case, of course, but hypotheses that are stated in unconditional and deterministic rather than in probabilistic terms are quite vulnerable to disconfirmation in a relatively small number of cases. At a minimum, our findings raise some doubts about the proposition that democracies never fight each other and suggest that this question is important enough to warrant further exploration.
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Endnotes
*: Prepared for presentation at the 40th Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., February 16–20, 1999. Back.
Note 1: Scholars have recently begun to question this standard finding (Ray, 1997). Back.
Note 2: Schweller (1992:248) qualifies his argument by conceding that a democracy might initiate a preventive war against a much weaker opponent. This qualification is often missed by those who cite his argument that democracies do not fight preventive wars. We return to this point later. Back.
Note 3: See also Lynn-Jones, 1996:xxxii. Kydd (1997:150) states the proposition in probabilistic terms. Back.
Note 4: Schweller (1992:264-67) accepts this interpretation but treats Israel as a “deviant case.” Back.
Note 5: This is also known as the Suez War. Back.
Note 6: In a very brief editors’ note, Art and Jervis (1973:34) assert that the Sinai War was preventive. Back.
Note 7: This section builds on Levy (1987). Back.
Note 8: At the other extreme, Wolfers (1973:34), using an excessively restrictive conception of preventive war, claims that “there seems to be no case in history in which a country started a preventive war on the grounds of security.” The wide variation of meanings attributed to the concept of preventive war makes it imperative that we clarify the meaning of the concept. Back.
Note 9: See the graphs of relative army size and naval power in Rasler and Thompson (1994). On France in the late seventeenth century see Lynn (1997). Back.
Note 10: Schweller (1992) is probably right that Louis’ decision to go to war in 1688 (the War of League of Augsburg) was primarily preventive in motivation (Levy and Collis, 1984). Back.
Note 11: It is important to note that Schweller’s (1992) rather broad use of the concept of preventive war does not directly undermine his argument that democracies do not fight preventive wars, because each of the cases mentioned above, and in fact all of Schweller’s cases of great power preventive wars since 1665, involve nondemocratic preventers. In fact, in the analysis of cases of potential prevention by democratic states a broader definition of prevention might be desirable. It would in principle make Schweller’s hypothesis easier to falsify, so that the failure to find cases of prevention would be all the more compelling. We should note that after acknowledging that Israel is a “deviant case,” Schweller (1992:265) interprets Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon as preventive because it aimed to “eliminate the long-term threat posed by the military and political presence of the PLO in Lebanon.” This is problematic, because Schweller did not include the “military and political presence” of other actors as part of the conditions for preventive war or explain why these factors are relevant. Back.
Note 12: Whereas states occasionally undertake preventive military action, Reiter (1995) argues, probably correctly, that preemptive wars are quite rare. Back.
Note 13: Just war theorists and others generally argue that preventive military action is much more difficult to justify than preemptive action (Walzer, 1977; Osgood and Tucker, 1967). Back.
Note 14: The German decision to mobilize after the Russian mobilization in July 1914 probably fits here. Back.
Note 15: This was Organski’s (1958) original hypothesis in his formulation of power transition theory, though subsequent power transition theorists have suggested alternative paths from power shifts to war (Kugler and Lemke, 1996; DiCicco and Levy, 1999). Back.
Note 16: Another possible example might include Japan’s decision for war against the United States in 1941. Back.
Note 17: On the distinction between “offensive,” “defensive,” and other forms of realism see Frankel (1996). Back.
Note 18: The operational definition of “benign” is particularly critical. If the threshold for being benign is too demanding—i.e., set at a low enough level of conflict or hostility, then Kydd’s hypothesis might be confirmed, but only by making it nearly tautological; there would be few preventive wars against currently benign states because there are few currently benign states. Back.
Note 19: We suspect, however, that because the concept of preventive war is so engrained in the literature, and also because it simplifies the prose, scholars will continue to use it. Back.
Note 20: This point deviates from most of the literature on the democratic peace. Back.
Note 21: The important question of policy legitimacy has attracted relatively little attention in the literature (George, 1980). Back.
Note 22: Although Walzer includes the “intent to injure,” the problems in assessing the adversary’s intent lead us to define preemption and prevention in terms of leaders’ motivations and perceptions, regardless of the objective accuracy of those perceptions (Levy, 1987). Perceptions of decline or of the adversary intent to attack can be, in Schweller’s (1992:254) terms, “real or imagined.” Back.
Note 23: A Gallup poll taken on the 15 th and 16 th of November 1990 and again on the 6 th and 7 th of December shows that the prevention of the ability by Iraq to threaten the region with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons was supported by well over 70% of the respondents as being a good reason to go to war with Iraq, as opposed to 57-60% who supported a war on grounds of preventing threats to the US economy (Mueller, 1994: 254, Table #133). Likewise, a CBS/ New York Times poll of 13-15 November shows that 54% of the respondents favored “military action” against Iraq in order to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons, as compared to 31% in favor of protecting the oil supply and 35% in favor of restoring the Kuwaiti government and defending Saudi Arabia (Mueller, 1994: 255, Table #134). Furthermore, a Los Angeles Times poll of 14 November shows that 34% of respondents felt that the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear and chemical capabilities justified a “ major war”; no other rationale for the initiation of a major war was rated so highly (Mueller, 1994: 253, Table # 131). For the argument that the Bush Administration’s statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were designed primarily for their domestic political impact see Freedman and Karsh (1993: 241). Back.
Note 24: As we will see, our argument receives substantial but not universal support in the historical literature. This comparability of others’ interpretations with our own is somewhat obscured by the tendency of many historians to refer to a “preemptive war” when they really mean preventive war. Few scholars argue that Israel expected an imminent first strike by Egypt. Back.
Note 25: For a detailed timeline of the history Egypt-Israeli relations from 1798 to 1969 see Love (1969; xv-xxiii). All dates in this section come from this source. Back.
Note 26: Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 had important military and political implications for both the Israeli-Egyptian relationship and the British and French decisions in 1956. We argue, however, that the Suez issue played a secondary role in the Israeli decision for war, and that British and French support affected the timing but not the certainty of the Israeli attack. Back.
Note 27: On arms races see Siverson and Diehl (1989). Back.
Note 28: The workings of the Tripartite Declaration were rather complex. Each of the three Western states was primarily responsible for its own “zone” based on either former colonies and/or perceived vital interests. The breakdown of this system with the introduction of Soviet arms had a major effect on the military balance in the Middle East in both the short term and the long term. Back.
Note 29: See Huntington (1958) on the distinction between qualitative and quantitative arms races. Back.
Note 30: Although Israeli leaders used the term “preemptive” in the context of the contemplated Gaza raid, that is technically incorrect, as there was no expectation of an imminent Egyptian attack. Nor would a raid have been preventive in motivation, as it was not based on fears of an adverse shift in military power between Israel and Egypt. Back.
Note 31: The deal was not formalized until mid-September. The actual reasons for Nasser’s decision to buy such a large amount of arms are not clearly known. Shimshoni (1988: 111-112) and Morris (1993: 279, 291) both speculate the arms may have been intended to bring about a favorable Arab reaction to Nasser’s position within Arab politics. Back.
Note 32: Note that Oren (1992: 87) is the only author who includes Mig-17’s in the 1955 Czech arms deal. His total number of fighters (150) is also higher than other estimates (Bar-On, 1994: 16-17; Dayan, 1991 [1966]: 4-5). This may be due to Oren counting the planes received in a second deal in the summer of 1956, although he does mention this transaction elsewhere (1992: 92). We mention the second arms deal latter in this paper. Back.
Note 33: Oren (1992: 93) gives the 510 number. Adding up the three preceding totals gives us a minimum of 610. However, if Oren’s numbers are correct, then some tanks, probably the Shermans, were decomissioned. For the sake of simplicity, we use 510+. More importantly though, these are the numbers that Israeli leaders used in figuring out the situation (Oren, 1992: 93). Back.
Note 34: Observers give a wide range of estimates. We use the average. Back.
Note 36: See previous note. This number represents Oren (1992: 93) total for fighters and bombers. Also, notice that this number is less than then sum of the new acquisitions which means that Oren’s number is wrong, the range of estimates for the sales is wrong, the initial 1955 number is wrong, or that Egypt gave some planes away. This final point does have some support. See ???. Until this number can be proven to wrong to such an extent that it endangers the validity of the results, I will continue to use it for the sake of simplicity. Back.
Note 37: Oren (1992: 91) does not mention what make the other 36 jets were although since they were bought in another French deal only a few months after the purchase of the other 24 it is probably safe to assume that the majority, if not all, of the 36 are Mystère-IV, or at the very least, the latest version of Ouragan. Back.
Note 38: See previous notes . Also, it is not clear whether or not Israel received 24 French F-86 from France (see Oren, 1992: 93). Back.
Note 39: Some evidence of this position is provided by Brecher’s “advocacy statement scale” which measures the frequency that Ben-Gurion, Peres, Dayan, and Golda Meir (Foreign Minister after Sharett) expressed nine various strategic reasons as to why Israel should take action against Egypt from March to October of 1956 (1974: 249-252). This analysis, not cited by Golani but certainly in the spirit of his argument, shows that the variable statement corresponding most directly to armaments—“we must not permit Egypt to acquire superiority in weapons”—was only mentioned in 4 out of the 96 statements examined, which suggests that it was not a major concern of Israeli leaders (Brecher, 1974: 251, Table 9). Back.
Note 40: See Love’s timeline (1969: xv-xxiii) for a chronology of Fedayeen raids . Back.
Note 41: Bar-On (1994: 323) appears to contradict his argument when he claims that Israel’s war was “fundamentally a war of self-defense.” Given that there was no immediate threat of an attack on Israel, any claim of self-defense would have to be based on fears of future insecurity due to an adverse change in relative military power or the intentions of the adversary. Back.
Note 42: Rodman (1997: 5) goes so far as to describe France as Israel’s “patron” Back.
Note 43: A copy of the agreement can be found at the end of Troen (1996) . See also Oren (1992: Appendix VI, 186). Back.
Note 44: See Troen (1996: 135) for a copy of this annex. Back.
Note 45: See Bar-On (1994: 246-247) for other Israeli motivations leading to the agreement. Back.
Note 46: This conclusion is hard to reconcile with Golani’s (1998: 186) insistence the Czech deal was wholly counter-balanced by the French deals of 1956, which would seem to eliminate the need for external air cover. Back.
Note 47: It is not clear whether Ovendale might allow for the influence of a perceived power shift by refering to the “immediate” origins of the war. Back.
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