Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by Jody and Ari Storch.
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Okay. Yalla. Let’s do this.
Welcome to part 2 of our 3-part series on the Suez Crisis. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, now’s the time to do it.
A week is a long time, so we’re gonna recap briefly. Think of this as a “previously, on “Unpacking Israeli History.” (I never understood folks who skip the recap at the start of a weekly TV show. I need that stuff to really understand what’s going on!)
So. Previously, on Unpacking Israeli History….
In 1956, the Middle East was simmering, about to boil over.
In Cairo, a young, charismatic colonel-turned-president’s star was rising. Gamal Abdel Nasser was fast becoming the voice of the Arab world. He preached Arab unity, sketching a vision of a pan-Arab nation state stretching across the Levant. This pipe dream, of course, did not include Israel. From Mosul to Morocco, Nasser’s voice echoed across the shortwaves, reminding the Arab nations of their purpose.
“Israel is a malignant imperialist Zionist implant,” he thundered. “It is an artificial state, which must disappear!”
And he was getting a head start on that whole erasing project by funding, arming, and training Palestinian guerillas to infiltrate Israel. Between 1948 and 1956, these so-called fedayeen – or as Nasser called them, “heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam” – murdered upwards of 400 Israelis.
And Israelis were sick of it.
The whole point of a sovereign Jewish state was to feel free and safe. But every day brought the possibility of another attack. For so many of the civilians who lived near the border, freedom and safety were illusions. A beautiful fairy tale for other people, who weren’t surrounded on all sides by countries that hated them.
The status quo was untenable. Something had to change, and fast.
Escalation Dominance had been a part of Israeli military strategy since the very early 50s. We’ve talked about this before, in our episode on Qibye and Unit 101. But just to recap, escalation dominance is the theory that if someone attacks you with X, you hit them back with X+1. The idea is to establish deterrence, making it difficult and costly to mess with you.
So retaliation became policy. Escalation became strategy. And Israeli reprisals against the fedayeen were leaving Egyptian and Jordanian soldiers in body bags. The Israeli-Arab conflict was in full swing. No, not the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Egypt controlled Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank. There was no PLO, no unified Palestinian leadership. There was no military occupation. There was just Israel versus All Her Neighbors, All the Freaking Time.
Which put Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in the hot seat. He needed to respond to the rising death toll – not to mention Egypt’s increasing belligerence. And they had the hardware to back up their boasting. In September of 1955, the USSR had sold Egypt $320 million worth of MiG jets, T-34 tanks, artillery, and submarines. And when a country that thunders “we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel’s death” suddenly gets $320 million of shiny new Soviet weapons, the Israelis sit up and pay attention.
As Ben-Gurion warned of a coming showdown, Moshe Dayan began preparing. Every speech, every raid, every military flex was another signal: come at us, bro. We’re ready. And then, in July 1956, Nasser made the ultimate boss move.
Okay, recap over. Let’s be real, that might have been more for me than for you. But in any event, we’re finally ready for part two of our story, which I’m calling Combustion. Because things really are about to get fiery.
Here we go.
Part Two: Combustion
Every authoritarian has a dream for his country, and Nasser’s was the Aswan High Dam, a massive, massive gleaming symbol of Egypt’s postcolonial future, a steel-and-concrete promise to bring a once-great empire (and my lord, it was a serious empire!) into the modern age. The Aswan Dam would tame the Nile’s floods, irrigate vast stretches of land, and light up Egyptian cities with hydroelectric power.
All this for the low, low price of $1 billion US dollars, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 billion today. There was no way Egypt could pony up the funds all on her own, so the major Western powers pledged to help fund the project, via loans from the World Bank. This was classic Cold War carrot-dangling, and the US and UK hoped that the money would be enough to lure Nasser out of Moscow’s orbit.
It wasn’t.
The US really, really didn’t like Nasser’s little weapons deal with the USSR, via Czechoslovakia. (Nerd corner alert: less than a decade before their deal with Egypt, the Soviets had arranged for Czechoslovakia to arm another Middle Eastern country. Can you guess which one? Yup, Israel owed a lot to a Soviet-brokered Czecheslovakian arms deal back in 1948. But that’s politics: one day you’re being wooed by imperial forces, the next they’re arming your next door neighbors who prefer you don’t exist.)
So Nasser had already ticked off the US by making this arms deal. Strike one. (That’s a baseball reference.) To make matters worse, Nasser had officially recognized Communist China, a middle finger to Eisenhower’s America. Strike two. The US and Britain were getting twitchy—was Nasser even reliable? Could he be trusted? As Cairo cozied up to the Soviet bloc, London and Washington became increasingly certain that Nasser was playing them. Strike three. You’re out.
So, on July 19, 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles officially rescinded the offer to fund the Aswan Dam. The US wasn’t gonna waste its carrots on some two-timing socialist authoritarian in bed with the Soviets!
Which, of course, made said two-timing socialist authoritarian absolutely furious.
The Aswan Dam was Nasser’s dream, a symbol of Egypt’s rebirth. As he saw it, the West had shattered that dream — punishing Egypt for daring to chart an independent course, a slap in the face to Egyptian sovereignty and pride.
But Nasser was immensely popular for a reason, and he wasn’t about to let the West get away with treating Egypt like a plaything. A week after the US’s announcement, Nasser hit back. Hard.
July 26, 1956. All of Alexandria seemed to be out in the street, roaring and electrified, waiting for Nasser’s speech. It didn’t disappoint.
0:09 – 0:27
In the stifling July heat, Nasser makes his way to Alexandria’s main square, where he is to deliver his speech. Once again, his people wait to hear if he will respond to the West’s denial of funding for the Aswan Dam. At 9pm, Nasser climbs the podium. [Ambient Arabic]
[back to Noam]
And what he said next transformed history. Because Nasser announced that he had just nationalized the Suez Canal. “This Canal is an Egyptian canal…it is the property of Egypt.”
And that’s a big freakin’ deal.
Ever since construction was completed on the Canal in 1869, it had been in the hands of the Anglo-French company that built it. Suez was one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, linking Europe and Asia by sea and bypassing the slower, much-less convenient route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. You may have learned about this in like 6th grade social studies class, I dont know. But back in the 1860s, when the Canal was completed, it was more or less a rule of life that colonial powers would roll in and extract resources from weaker countries. Empires gonna empire, right?
But by the 1950s, Egypt was fully independent. And Nasser had no interest in sharing a canal that belonged to his country, on his territory, built by Egyptians for Europeans. So he nationalized the Canal and declared that all the revenue it generated would be used to finance the Aswan Dam. Mic. Drop. It was one of the boldest acts of post-colonial defiance the world had ever seen.
“We shall build the High Dam. We shall restore our usurped rights. We shall build it to defend our dignity, freedom and pride, and to eradicate humiliation and submission….
Egypt – the whole of Egypt – one unified, national front. We shall not let war mongers, imperialists or those who trade in human beings dominate us. We shall depend on our hands and on our blood. We shall build a strong and dignified Egypt, the Arab Egypt. We go forward towards political and economic independence. We shall march forward united…one nation confident in itself, its motherland and its power.”
The crowd, heck, the entire Arab world went nuts. In minutes, Nasser became the face of Arab resistance: a modern-day Saladin, standing up to European usurpers. At least, that’s how the Arab world saw it.
And listen. I am here to “steel man” this, that’s what I like to do, not straw man, steel man. No, not because Nasser is some hero, especially not to Jewish people. But he’s also not merely the villain in this story, either, not entirely. Take a breath, take a beat. This history – or history in general – is more complicated than that. Because let’s face it, in this case, the guy kiiiiinda had a point.
The Canal ran entirely through Egyptian territory. It had been built by Egyptians, many of whom were conscripted, en masse and against their will, to toil in brutal conditions that ultimately cost tens of thousands of lives. Plus, Nasser promised to keep the Canal open to all shipping, as per international law (though, of course, he did not apply that law to Israel. But more on that later.)
Honestly, in theory, except for the whole “constantly punishing Israel” thing, this all sounds pretty fair to me.
England and France, however, begged to differ.
To the British and French, the Suez Canal wasn’t just a shipping route — it was the last artery of empire. A vital link to the oil fields of Iraq and Iran, and to the colonies of Africa and Asia. 80% of Western Europe’s oil flowed through that canal. It sustained trade. It connected continents. And now it was in the hands of a dangerously popular anti-Western strongman. Behind closed doors, Prime Minister Anthony Eden compared Nasser to Hitler. But it was the French who really took this whole thing personally. I’ll explain.
Back in 1954, the French occupied territory of Algeria had declared war on its metropole. The Algerian rebels knew they had no hope of winning a traditional fight on a regular battlefield, so their goal wasn’t to defeat France militarily. It was to make life so unpleasant that the French just… left Algeria. Small, roving guerilla bands attacked every symbol of France they could find, from military convoys and infrastructure to cafes and bars and police stations. And if they killed civilians, so much the better. Because why would French citizens live in such uncertain, dangerous conditions when they had a safe home to return to in France? (Side note: if this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same logic Hamas uses every time they detonate a bomb in a crowded place. They haven’t yet figured out that Israelis are not European colonists who will just “go back home,” but returnees to their original and ancient homeland. But I digress. Important digression, but nonetheless.)
Anyway, by 1956, the French had their hands full with this uprising. They were cracking down hard, using all the usual imperial tactics – torture, collective punishment, forced relocations. But that only hardened the rebels’ resolve. After all, they had Egypt’s backing. Yep, that’s right: Nasser wasn’t just sponsoring fedayeen raids against Israelis. He was also funding the Algerian rebels that were making life a living hell for the French. So France already had a reason to be frustrated with Nasser. His nationalization of the Canal was the last straw.
But across the continent, another empire was thrilled by Nasser’s announcement. Almost immediately, the Soviets stepped in, eager to win friends and influence people. You need money for your dam, Comrade Nasser? We’ve got rubles and blueprints to go with those fancy fighter planes we just sold you – and for a great price too, might we add. That’s how I envision Nikita Khrushchev’s inner dialogue, by the way. Sort of slick and conniving. No one correct me, please; I’m having fun with it.
Meanwhile in Washington, President Eisenhower was watching closely. The second-to-last thing he wanted was the USSR wooing Cairo and getting a toehold into the Middle East. But the very last thing he wanted was a global crisis, which would, among other things, hurt his chances of getting re-elected. So he warned his allies – Britain and France – not to escalate.
They ignored him. Behind closed doors, they began quietly exploring military options, dusting off contingency plans. Plotting, you could say, in a callback to their Sykes-Picot plan of 40 years before. (Deep cut reference there! Link in the show notes, of course.)
You can’t just walk into another country and take over their property, at least not in 1956. That’s imperialism in HD, and by the 1950s, imperialism was out and decolonization was in. Britain and France needed a cover story. A casus belli. A justification.
In other words, they needed Israel.
Welcome back! When we left off, Britain and France were scheming to retake the newly-nationalized Suez Canal from Nasser. But they couldn’t just invade and start a war over the Canal. That would be impolite (to put it mildly), plus expensive and stressful and maybe illegal.. And the optics would really not be great.
So they turned to a country who had every reason to go to war with Egypt, and not because of some imperialist fantasy. Yep, the mighty European superpowers turned to a tiny, desperately poor, embattled strip of land only 9 miles wide at its narrowest point with fewer than 2 million civilians at the time, and said hey. Would you help us put a country 46 times your size with 12 times the population in its place?
That tiny country was, of course, Israel. That massive country was, of course, Egypt. And the Israelis said… sure, okay.
Right now, you might be thinking to yourself: hold up. Why was Israel joining the imperialist forces of Britain and France, who wanted to invade Egypt for skeezy imperialist reasons? You gotta admit, it doesn’t look great for Israel. Was my student’s law school professor right all along?
Well… no. And here’s why.
By late 1956, Israel was a nation on edge. Reports were flooding in, each grimmer than the last: Egypt’s military was ballooning with Soviet tanks, planes, and heavy artillery. Israeli generals warned that by 1957, Egypt’s new arsenal could outmatch Israel’s forces completely. All the while, Nasser’s fedayeen kept streaming across the border, and the bodies were piling up.
Plus, there was the whole blockade thing.
Yup. Nasser had never let the Israelis near the Suez Canal. And he placed some very unpleasant restrictions on the Israelis’ use of the Straits of Tiran. But in September of 1955, Nasser decided to up his game. He went further than restrictions, fully blockaded the Straits of Tiran, blocking Israel’s access to the Red Sea and cutting off the Jewish state’s maritime lifeline to Asia and Africa.
Why does this matter? I’ll explain. This meant he was cutting off Israel’s oil, 90% of which came from Iran (yes, wild looking back on it…history is pretty crazy…) via the Red Sea. The blockade strangled Israel’s economy. Oil imports were down. Exports were down. Eilat’s port became a dead zone. At the time, Israel was not exactly the high-tech Western country we know today, with skyscrapers and AI and fine dining, but an under-resourced, desperately poor place bursting at the seams with penniless immigrants and refugees. That’s something that people don’t understand. If you want to understand the state of Israel, it is a country full of refugees. That’s what it is. Holocaust refugees, refugees from North Africa, from the Middle East. Especially at this time, that’s what it was. It was a country that was desperate. Austerity was the order of the day. Certain foods were rationed. Some people couldn’t even afford to buy rice, which is why so-called Israeli couscous exists. No, seriously. It was a response to chronic food shortages. And when all other countries hate you, and you have austerity as the order of the day, and you’re not some technologically superpower that you think of right now, you have to think of the context.
So the country really, really, REALLY could not afford an economic blockade.
If Nasser kept up this stranglehold on the Straits of Tiran, the country would eventually collapse.
Foreign diplomats warned Nasser he was risking war, to which I have to assume he responded, yeah, duh. Like, thanks, Sherlock. Because Nasser wanted a fight. Egypt hadn’t managed to defeat Israel in 1948, and Nasser was dying to finish the job that King Farouk had botched.
So Israeli civilians began preparing for war.
It had been a whole eight years since their last existential threat, but apparently it’s just like riding a bike. In towns and kibbutzim across the Negev, volunteers were digging trenches. Parents and teachers were drilling kids in air raid procedures. Israelis dusted off their old boarded-up bomb shelters, which had not been used since the last war. Newspapers ran public appeals for money, or labor, or time, or supplies. Whatever people could spare, the government would take it to build shelters, or buy weapons, or train the next wave of soldiers. Radio broadcasts carried an anxious, crackling energy. People walked around with transistor radios glued to their ears.
Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats tried to solve this crisis in creative ways. Which is what brought future prime minister Shimon Peres and Squadron Commander Mordechai Hod to the sleepy Parisian suburb of Sèvres in October of 1956.
This wasn’t an official state visit. There was no press, no photographers. Just a few guys in suits slipping into a private villa, one by one, almost like they didn’t want to be noticed. Because everyone at this meeting knew that what they were planning was totally not kosher.
But Britain, France, and Israel had a shared enemy. And a shared interest in taking that enemy down.
From that villa, they draft a secret pact: the Sèvres Protocol. A step-by-step, carefully coordinated plan to launch a joint war on Egypt… and pretend it’s not a joint war.
Guys, I know it sounds like a movie, but this is real.
The plan went something like this.
Step 1: Israel would invade the Sinai Peninsula, sweeping eastward toward the Suez Canal. Totally cool, totally legitimate, because the Israelis felt they had ample casus belli – what’s the plural of casus belli, asking for a friend. There was the blockade, of course – both of the Straits and of the Canal. There were the constant fedayeen raids sponsored by Egypt. Plus, Nasser was building up his military infrastructure in the Sinai Desert. An invasion, Israel felt, was both morally and legally justified.
So far, so good.
But here’s where it gets a little devious.
Step 2: Britain and France, acting as faux peacekeepers, would issue a public ultimatum: Egypt and Israel must stop fighting and withdraw from the Canal Zone. They were banking, of course, on Egypt’s refusal. Which brings us to Step 3.
Step 3: If Nasser refused to come to the table – which, of course, he would refuse – Britain and France would step in. It was the perfect pretext to invade Egypt and eventually retake the Canal. And who knew? Maybe they’d even manage to topple the strongman himself.
They struck a deal. There were no official signatures. No leaks. No paper trail. No evidence. For years, Britain denied it ever happened. But each country had its own reasons for wanting Nasser gone.
Britain wanted their empire back — or at least the illusion of control. Prime Minister Eden was obsessed with restoring British prestige… which, when you think about it, makes him kind of the perfect foil to Nasser, whose every move was calculated to restore a long-gone Egyptian prestige. I wonder if they ever noticed the parallels. Probably not.
Sure, the Canal was strategic. But it was also symbolic. Nasser had humiliated Britain, snatching the Canal and waving it in London’s face. For Britain, this was worth going to war.
Not that I’m judging – but okay, I’m totally judging – France had a slightly more understandable reason to go after Nasser. He was arming the rebels that made their lives in Algeria miserable. Again, not at all saying France should have been in Algeria in the first place, but we can kinda get where France was coming from. For them, this was personal.
It was personal for Israel, too. But Israel wasn’t fighting over symbolism or prestige or to protect a colonial outpost. As it has since its inception, it was fighting for security, for protection, for the ability to live like a normal country. If all went well, the invasion would accomplish three things:
- Smash the Egyptian-sponsored fedayeen networks operating out of Gaza.
- Break Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran.
- Defang Nasser’s growing Soviet-backed army before it became unstoppable.
For Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Sèvres was a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
And, it was also a massive gamble.
On the one hand, tiny Israel finally had the backing of two global powers, with the influence and firepower to help Israel break its isolation, reverse its economic downturn, and even open the door to long-term security partnerships. Remember, every single one of Israel’s neighbors would have been happy to wipe them off the map. And when you’re in a hostile neighborhood, allies can be the difference between life and death.
On the other hand, if this plan ever got out, Israel would look exactly like what the Arab world claimed it was: a Western colonial project in the Middle East, another outpost of empire. A secret pact with colonial powers wouldn’t exactly help Israel beat the allegations.
But the opportunity was too good to pass up. So Ben Gurion said yes.
Back at Sèvres, Peres and Hod laid out the whole invasion plan, complete with maps and timelines. Israel would strike fast, reach the Canal in 48 hours, and set the stage for the European intervention. But Ben-Gurion did insist on one key condition. He needed to know that France and Britain would hold up their end of the bargain. He expected full military intervention: jets in the skies and boots on the ground. Israel would not be left holding the bag. Because the worst-case scenario would be disastrous. Syria and Jordan could join the fight. And so could the Soviets.
The Europeans agreed. Operation Musketeer was on. As in, the three musketeers: Britain, France, and Israel.
But the Israelis had a different and highly symbolic name for the operation: Mivtza Kadesh, in honor of the Biblical encampment of Kadesh-Barnea in the Sinai, where the Israelites had spent 38 years before entering the Promised Land. The name was a reminder: the people of Israel were rooted to this place long before their current enemies showed up. Long before Britain or France existed. They’d endured the Sinai before, and God had provided. Now they were ready for a reunion tour. And it would be lightning-fast and devilishly ambitious.
As the day of the invasion inched closer, Israeli commanders finalized their invasion routes, including a daring paratrooper drop deep into the Sinai, led by Ariel Sharon. French and British bombers were on standby. Carrier groups steamed toward the Mediterranean. (Nerd corner: a carrier group might sound like a genetic condition, but it’s basically a bunch of ships surrounding an aircraft carrier and armed to the teeth. I’m talking fighter jets, surveillance aircraft, helicopters, guns, torpedoes, submarines, even supply ships. All the instruments of war, clustered conveniently on the surface of the ocean.)
And then, hours before Israel was set to invade, disaster struck.
Tensions had been high for a while, and the Israeli military worried about a surprise Egyptian attack, even a wider Arab uprising. So they tightened the restrictions on Israeli Arabs, who were already living under military rule. Effective immediately, curfew would begin at 5pm.
But not everyone got the message, and 47 people were killed by the Israeli border police in the village of Kfar Qasim, near the Jordanian border. I spoke about this awful, awful tragedy in a lot more detail way back in Season Four, so be sure to check it out. Israeli officials have since apologized, attending the yearly memorial ceremonies. But on that awful day, apologies were a long way off. The nation’s attention was elsewhere.
In the early evening of October 29, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai. The mission: seize the eastern approach to the Mitla Pass, a vital mountain pass about 30 miles from the Suez Canal. The objective: choke off Egyptian reinforcement routes and sow confusion in the enemy’s rear flank.
Guided by radio beacons, 400 Israeli paratroopers marched through the darkness toward the looming Jebel Giddi mountains. By midnight, they were dug in on the east side of the narrow Pass, blocking the road from Suez.
And then they waited.
The Israelis were only lightly armed, essentially a lone battalion sitting deep in enemy territory. The longer they sat, the greater the risk. But their orders from Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan were clear: hold position. Do not advance until the armored reinforcements show up.
But as we’ve covered in previous episodes, some Israeli commanders are allergic to orders. Side note, if we’re being honest, Israelis in general don’t love being told what to do. I think that’s fair to say. Moshe Dayan himself was no stranger to flouting the rules. And neither was Ariel Sharon, who was leading the mission through the Mitla Pass.
You might remember that name from previous episodes – including Part 1 of this series. When we last left Sharon – or Arik, as he was affectionately called – he was leading deadly counterattacks into Gaza, smashing the Fedayeen and their Egyptian military handlers, and making Nasser very, very angry. And, of course, dumbfounding his supervisors.
A year earlier, Moshe Dayan had floated a purely theoretical question to Sharon. Did he think the IDF could capture a few Jordanian soldiers to trade for Israeli POWs?
Sharon didn’t wait for clarification. That very day, he grabbed a buddy, jumped into a pickup, and drove straight to the Jordan River. Posing as a farmer searching for stray cattle, he waded into the water, struck up a conversation with two Jordanian troops — and quickly disarmed them. With their hands bound and eyes covered, the prisoners were loaded into the truck. Sharon’s friend rode shotgun with a pistol aimed at their heads. But when they reached HQ, Dayan was out. So Sharon left him a note answering his theoretical question: “Moshe — the mission is accomplished, the prisoners are in the cellar. Shalom. Arik.”
(By the way, we took that story from a 1981 Jpost profile that characterized Sharon in these glorious terms: “He is a man for whom prudence is a foreign, perhaps a nonexistent word. Rather than carry out orders, he preferred to create his own reality.”) He’s that classic person who doesn’t ask for permission, just forgiveness, and probably doesn’t do that that much. To PM David Ben Gurion, Sharon was, and I quote, “the greatest field commander in the history of the IDF.” He was both fearless and unrelenting, a bold and often ruthless operator who took action while others hesitated – sometimes with devastating consequences. But he was also the kind of brave that borders on crazy – the perfect guy to send on your most difficult, dangerous mission.
Like, say, dropping 400 paratroopers into the Mitla Pass to sit and wait, exposed on the flat open ground east of the mountains, sitting ducks for an Egyptian patrol.
By the morning of October 31, Sharon was getting worried, itching to move his men into the pass itself, which offered better defensive ground. So he got permission to send a “reconnaissance patrol” into the pass. Two full companies, supported by a few light tanks, entered the mouth of the pass.
The gorge was eerily quiet. Until the bullets started flying. Suddenly, a storm of gunfire and grenades poured down from the heights, where the Egyptian Second Brigade had been secretly positioned, waiting patiently for their prey. Sharon’s “patrol” was pinned down almost instantly, as what was meant to be a quick probe turned into a desperate fight for survival. For seven hours, Israeli paratroopers huddled behind boulders and in ditches, returning fire as best they could as their casualties spiraled. It couldn’t possibly get worse, they thought. And then the air strikes began. The remaining men begged for help. Finally, under cover of darkness, the reinforcements made their way into the pass. Later, Sharon described the battle, quote: “Enemy soldiers hidden in the heights swept the wadi with machine-gun, mortar, and anti-tank fire as my paratroopers advanced. We fought desperately, climbing the rocky walls under fire to outflank Egyptian positions…”
And desperate fights called for desperate measures. How do you stop an ambush when you don’t even know where the bullets are coming from?
The answer, it turned out, was bait: A soldier crazy or brave enough to drive a jeep at full speed through the canyon, drawing enemy fire and revealing the Egyptians’ position. It was suicide, of course. But it was necessary. According to official accounts, Yehuda Kan Dror volunteered for the mission. But at least two witnesses have gone on record saying that he was ordered into a suicide mission – and that he went bravely. Yehuda’s commander described it much later, quote: “The lone jeep of course received a heavy burst of fire from many positions, but that gave us enough intelligence for the night attack.”
Yehuda, of course, did not survive. But his sacrifice turned the battle in Israel’s favor.
They knew where the enemy was. And they decided to pay the Egyptians a surprise visit. Fifty men scaled the steep rock ledges on either side of the pass, eventually ascending behind the Egyptians. Israeli bayonets flashed in the dark, as the stream of machine gun fire dwindled. The fight was brutal, hand to hand combat in close quarters. By the end, the bodies of 38 Israeli paratroopers and over 200 Egyptian soldiers lay splayed and bleeding on the rocks.
It was a devastatingly high price to pay for control of the Mitla Pass, and the IDF’s top brass was furious. Dayan accused Sharon of overstepping orders and engaging in a needless battle – and he wasn’t the only one. But Sharon defended his position to the end, later writing in his autobiography, quote:
“Some in IDF High Command argued that I had exceeded my orders and that the battle was unnecessary. I understood their anger—the operation had cost many lives—but I defended my decision. I explained that once my men were ambushed and trapped, I had no choice but to fight through to save them. I could not leave my soldiers behind under fire. If that was ‘unauthorized aggression,’ so be it.”
I’m not a military historian. I’m not gonna speculate as to whether the battle was “necessary.” But I can tell you this: in 1956 Israel, the story of the paratroopers’ valor under fire spread like wildfire, a national myth in the making. I mean, the story writes itself: Deep behind enemy lines, brave commandos had brutally wiped out their ambushers, secured a strategic pass, threatened Egyptian supply lines, and even cut off Egyptian communications, destroying telephone lines with their plane propellers.
But if the Israelis were awed at their soldiers’ bravery, the Egyptians were nervous. And as they began to retreat west, the IDF pushed through the rugged, rocky hills where the Negev meets the Sinai, cracking open terrain everyone thought was impassable.
The Egyptian outposts barely understood what hit them. In less than twelve hours, Israel punched three separate holes in the Egyptian line, securing a key position on the coast of the Red Sea. But the fight has just begun. They know what they have to do.
Bypass resistance. Encircle when possible. Reach the canal within 100 hours.
No easy task, considering the terrain: endless sand and rocks winding through hills and highlands. The Israeli assault didn’t look particularly formidable. Their guard included civilian buses manned by volunteer bus drivers still wearing their work jackets. But they covered ground fast, destroying one Egyptian position after another, using a simple but brutally effective play: feint at the front, then swing wide and strike from the side or rear.
At the start of the battle, the Sinai had seemed endless. But in less than 100 hours, nearly the entire peninsula was in Israeli hands. A desert the size of West Virginia, captured in under a week by a country smaller than New Jersey. Ten miles from the Suez Canal, IDF reconnaissance units stared across the water at Africa.
But in the north, a different battle was raging.
Israel hadn’t gotten into this war just for the Suez Canal. And they weren’t all that interested in holding the Sinai. No, the most important objective, as I keep reminding us over and over, was to shut down the fedayeen raids.
And that meant taking Gaza.
Just before midnight, under a moonless sky, Israeli combat engineers crawled forward on their stomachs in total silence towards Rafah. Inch by inch, they cleared narrow paths through the sand, which was seeded with mines. It’s painstaking work, with no room for error.
At 2am, the night exploded. Israeli artillery cracked the sky open, tanks surging through the dunes. But instead of driving into the bunkers, as the Egyptians anticipated, the IDF raced around them through the cleared lanes, gunning for a point deep behind enemy lines, known as Crossroads 12. By morning, they’d punched through, and the Egyptian perimeter buckled, as soldiers fled or surrendered. Surrounded and outflanked, the Egyptian Brigadier General ordered a retreat back into Sinai.
By noon, Rafah was in Israeli hands. The road to Gaza was open. Khan Younis fell the next day. By the time Israeli troops entered Gaza City, civilians were weary. The IDF encountered almost no opposition, and white flags bloomed from rooftops and windows. By November 3, the entire Gaza Strip was under IDF control, the military systematically dismantling the fedayeen infrastructure. Just like that, the threat of cross-border raids evaporated.
And obviously, I can’t help but picture today’s Gaza, blasted and destroyed. Back in 1956, it took three days to capture all of Gaza. Imagine if this war, since the 7th the of October, had ended in three days. If there were no underground terror tunnels, or civilians weren’t being used as pawns, or hostages, or international outrage. If people just said enough, enough of Hamas, enough.
Now Hamas didn’t exist at the time, in 1956, but what a different world that would be.
But the Israelis had two more destinations to conquer. First up was El-Arish, Egypt’s last major stronghold in northern Sinai and the main hub connecting the Egyptian army to the coast road, which was now riddled with mines. A sergeant in the IDF armored corps later said of the battle for El-Arish: “we took a pounding.”
But that pounding didn’t last for long. That night, the Egyptians abandoned their post. Only one frontier remained: the coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
At the very tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where rust-colored cliffs tumble into the glassy blue of the Red Sea, sits Sharm el-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only maritime gateway to Asia and Africa. For the past year, Egypt’s blockade at Sharm has strangled Israeli shipping. So this was no ordinary military target, but a national chokehold the Israelis had to break if they wanted their economy to survive.
But Sharm was a tough nut to crack. There were no proper roads to get there, just 150 miles of twisting wadis, rocky ridges, and soft sand that could swallow a truck whole. By day, the Israeli column battled scorching heat and endless mechanical problems, as trucks broke down and mechanics stripped parts from one vehicle to keep another running. By night, drivers with their headlights off navigated the pitch-black desert by moonlight and memory. The whole operation was a rolling patchwork of dust, sweat, and improvisation. Simultaneously, the Israeli navy was working overtime, disassembling their landing crafts in Eilat, dragging the parts across the desert, and reassembling them on the coast, where they ferried tanks and artillery by sea while the infantry slogged forward.
By November 4, they’ve reached Sharm’s jagged hills, and the battle began that night.
It didn’t look good for Israel. Not at all. The Egyptians were ready, and after four punishing hours, the Israelis pulled back, dragging their wounded and their dead. But at first light on November 5, the Israelis tried again. At 6:00 am, they unleashed a massive artillery barrage as fighter jets dropped napalm – yes, napalm – towards the rocks.
The assault was brutal. And it worked. Three and a half hours after that first salvo, a white flag rose above the main bunker, and Sharm el-Sheikh lay in Israeli hands. Israeli soldiers let out exhausted cheers, some even breaking into dance on the sands. They’d done it, finally. They’d opened the Straits of Tiran, at a cost of ten Israelis and roughly 100 Egyptians. The rest of the garrison – 864 Egyptian soldiers – were now prisoners of war. Dehydrated and shell-shocked, some looked almost relieved to finally be out of the firestorm.
Israeli medics passed around water. Engineers cleared mines and obstacles from the waterway. And someone sent out a radio transmission that was so classically Israeli, I think we should add it to our theme song.
“Sharm el-Sheikh—beseder.” Sharm el-Sheikh is all right.
In fact, everything was all right. Or almost everything. It’s hard to be fully all right when you’ve lost comrades in battle. But the fedayeen threat had been smashed. The Israelis had access to the Red Sea. It was a massive psychological and strategic victory. Israel had held up its end of the bargain. Now it was time for Britain and France to make their move. Which they will, next week, in the third and final installment of our series on the Suez Canal Crisis. Don’t miss it.
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This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Simon Apfel, Hona Dodge, Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for listening, see you next week!