H20-Diplo Article15 Review

H-Diplo Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and H-Diplo Diane Labrosse

H-Diplo Article Reviews Web and Production Editor: George Fujii

No. 531 Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Published on 10 June 2015

Guy Laron. “The Domestic Sources of ’s Decision to Launch the 1956 Sinai Campaign.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42:2 (2015): 200-218. DOI: 10.1080/13530194.2014.993848. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2014.993848

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR531

Reviewed by Avshalom Rubin, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State1

uy Laron’s article is a well-researched, provocative, and largely convincing revisionist take on Israel’s road to war in 1956. Laron does not see Israel’s decision G to align itself with Britain and France against primarily as a response to Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s September 1955 decision to purchase arms from the Soviet bloc. Like Moti Golani, another prominent scholar of the 1956 conflict, Laron believes that Israel’s Sinai campaign had its roots in Prime Minister David Ben- Gurion and the Israeli military leadership’s regrets over not having conquered more territory in 1948.2 Yet, Laron argues, “The domestic context is an important and overlooked aspect of this significant episode in Israeli history” (200). Specifically, scholars have not adequately explained how Ben-Gurion and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff managed to convince the Israeli cabinet to support their drive for a preventive war. Since, as Laron points out, “major decisions, such as going to war, could not have proceeded without the support of the cabinet,” an “inquiry into the balance of power between hawks and doves within the cabinet” can provide valuable insight into Israel’s foreign policy during this crucial period. (202) Laron draws upon a wide variety of archival sources in order to analyze the domestic political backdrop to Israel’s decision for war, including cabinet minutes, minutes of IDF General Staff meetings, minutes of the party (Land of Israel Workers Party) political committee, and minutes of the

1 The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or the United States government.)

2 See Moti Golani, Tihiyeh Milhamah ba-Kayitz: Ha-Derekh le-Milhemet Sinai, 1955-1956 (: Ministry of Defense, 1997). A much shorter English-language version of Golani’s book was published as Israel in Search of a War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955-1956 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998).

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Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee meetings. Many of these sources were declassified after scholars like Golani, Michael Oren, David Tal, Mordechai Bar-On, and Benny Morris published important studies on Arab-Israeli relations during the 1949-1956 period.3 Laron argues that neither Ben-Gurion nor the IDF brass felt satisfied with how the 1948 war had ended. During the final months of the war, the IDF was at the peak of its power, and could have conquered the entirety of - and perhaps more. The Israeli government chose not to go further primarily because they feared that Britain might intervene to help their Arab enemies. After the guns fell silent in 1949, Ben-Gurion and his generals remained unhappy with the armistice lines that separated Israel from a hostile Arab world. To make sure that Israel consolidated its hold on the land it already had, Ben-Gurion launched a massive effort to resettle Jewish immigrants in peripheral areas. Yet he and the IDF leadership had not given up hope that Israel would get a chance to redraw its narrow boundaries if another war broke out. Accordingly, Ben-Gurion sought to build up the IDF’s offensive capabilities rather than spend money on static defense measures designed to block cross-border infiltration. The IDF developed a military doctrine that emphasized preemptive, and later, preventive action.

The problem, however, was that Ben-Gurion’s efforts to resettle large numbers of immigrants on Israel’s frontiers and prepare the army for a ‘second round’ drove the Israeli economy to the brink of collapse. To fund Ben-Gurion’s grand designs, the government imposed tough austerity measures resented by veteran, middle-class Ashkenazi Israelis. Many of these middle-class voters deserted MAPAI for the more centrist General Zionists, who won 20 seats in the 1951 elections and subsequently became part of the governing coalition. By 1953, General Zionist ministers in the cabinet had united with MAPAIniks worried about losing votes to oppose Ben-Gurion’s security policies and divert resources from the border settlements. That December, a frustrated Ben-Gurion retired to his kibbutz in Sdeh Boqer, leaving Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett in his place as Prime Minister.

Laron’s analysis of Sharett’s premiership is the most interesting and original feature of his article. Since Sharett’s diaries were published in 1978, several historians have praised him for his desire to integrate Israel into the international community and his faith in a diplomatic solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sharett’s scholarly boosters have depicted him as a noble figure whose efforts to reach out to Egypt were scuttled by the hawkish IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, both of whom Ben-

3 In addition to the books by Golani cited above, see Michael Oren, The Origins of the Second Arab- Israeli War: Egypt, Israel and the Great Powers, 1952-1956 (New York: Frank Cass, 1992); David Tal, Tefisat ha-Bitahon ha-Shotef shel Yisrael: Mekorotehah ve-Hitpathutah, 1949-1956 (Be’ersheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1998); Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Mordechai Bar-On, The Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Sinai and Back, 1955-1957 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

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Gurion appointed before he retired.4 While Laron acknowledges Sharett’s struggles with Dayan and Lavon, he depicts the Prime Minister as a rather inept and aloof politician whose downfall resulted in large part from his inability to manage his own party.

Not only did Sharett’s fellow MAPAIniks quickly grow impatient with his diplomatic efforts, they deeply resented his reliance on the support of the General Zionists to implement his foreign policy. While Sharett was happy to keep the dovish General Zionists in his government, MAPAI’s bosses were furious that their coalition partners were egging on white-collar workers who opposed MAPAI’s efforts to hold down salaries. Many figures within the MAPAI leadership concluded that the only way that they could keep the party faithful loyal and keep workers’ wages in check was to promote a sense of national emergency. Sharett’s party rivals got their chance in August 1954, when the Egyptians uncovered an Israeli spy ring in Cairo. The ensuing political crisis allowed the MAPAI elders to force the hapless Sharett to replace Lavon with Ben-Gurion, whom they believed would inspire middle-class Israelis to rally around MAPAI once more. And indeed, when Ben-Gurion became Prime Minister again in November 1955, he “gave several speeches in which he called for white collar workers to relinquish their demands for indexation due to the mortal danger in which Israel found itself” (215). Over the next several months, the white-collar wage crisis was resolved, giving Ben-Gurion the intra- party support he needed to sideline Sharett and eventually force him out of the government. By the fall of 1956, Ben-Gurion could feel confident that his cabinet would support him if he wanted to go to war with Egypt.

Laron does an excellent job illuminating how party politics and class conflict impinged upon the better-known story of Ben-Gurion and the IDF General Staff’s struggle with Sharett over the direction of Israeli foreign policy. Historians may quibble over the relative importance that one should assign to domestic developments when considering why Israel went to war. I found myself wishing that Laron had more directly addressed the question of how the role of domestic politics and political economy should be weighed against the military and diplomatic factors that have preoccupied other scholars. What was ultimately more important in determining Israel’s decision for war: changes in the balance of power within the cabinet, or the more favorable international context provided by Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal? In fairness, however, Laron has not set out to supplant the more traditional diplomatic narratives, but to force us to look at those accounts in a new light. He has succeeded quite admirably in doing so.

Avshalom Rubin received his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from the University of Chicago in 2010. He is a historian at the U.S. Department of State, where he works on

4 See especially Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World Since 1948 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Gabriel Sheffer, Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

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Foreign Relations of the United States volumes on the Middle East. He is completing a book on the role of the West Bank in the Arab-Israeli conflict during the 1950s and 1960s.

© 2015 The Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

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