Please read it. (k/t: LadyB)
Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
...Jump-switch to the 1950s and here again we have Bird vilifying the Israelis and getting most of it wrong. Before 1956, he tells us, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted peace and “asked for minor territorial adjustments along the Sinai-Israeli border. And they said they needed a land link through the southern Negev to Jordan.” But “negotiations commenced in earnest only after” the moderate Moshe Sharett took over from the hawkish Ben-Gurion as prime minister in late 1953. The Egyptians were willing to accept compensation instead of repatriation as a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, but then the dastardly Israeli defense establishment muddied the waters with “Operation Shoshanah,” the plot to blow up Western installations in Egypt in order to prevent the planned British evacuation of the Canal zone—or, as Bird speculates in a very Middle Eastern way, “the implementation of Susannah [Shoshanah] may have been specifically designed to scuttle Nasser’s secret talks with Sharett.” And yet “a window to a real peace settlement was still open in 1955. In Nasser, Israel had a popular Arab leader who was willing to shoulder the political risks of dealing with the Jewish state … He undoubtedly would have insisted that Israel … agree to recognize the 1948 [sic, should be 1949] armistice lines as final borders.”
But alas, Nasser was stymied by the return of Ben-Gurion to power, first as Defense Minister in February, then as prime minister. Israel reverted to militancy and the chance for peace was lost. Moreover, Operation Shoshanah had led to resurgent anti-Semitism in Egypt and massive Jewish emigration from the country.
Let me offer another—and, in my view, more accurate—reading of what actually happened in the 1950s. There were intermittent Israeli-Egypt peace contacts between 1949 and 1952, when the Farouk regime demanded that Israel give up half its territory, the Negev Desert, in exchange for some form of settlement (it was never clear whether Egypt meant real peace or some form of non-belligerency). The Egyptians never gave up the demand for massive refugee repatriation. Contacts, though far less frequent and direct, were renewed between the two countries after Nasser’s revolutionary junta took over in Cairo in the summer of 1952. But there were never any “negotiations,” and never any direct or substantive high level talks between Nasser and the Ben-Gurion-Sharett governments. (Such exchanges between the two countries did not occur until the Sadat peace initiative of 1977.) [that was the Begin initiative, more properly - YM]
Nasser, in a number of unsigned missives and oral transmissions through third parties between 1952 and 1955, hinted at a willingness to enter into a peace process in exchange for various economic and political benefits (for example, Israeli help in persuading the British to evacuate Egyptian soil). He and his emissaries always said Egypt wanted all or large chunks of the Negev, and not “the armistice lines,” as final borders. (Where on earth did Bird get this from? Not even Avi Shlaim, whose Iron Wall is highly sympathetic toward Nasser, makes such a claim.) But Nasser never offered Israel “peace,” and he was not interested in Israel’s continued existence or in peace, which in any case he probably felt unable to deliver as it would have raised hell in the Arab world, which he sought to gain leadership over. Getting the British out was his main foreign policy priority. Confronting Israel militarily, while his army was weak and while British forces sat astride his lines of communication eastward, was not an option. At the same time, maintaining relative quiet along the Israeli border while making pacific noises in order to keep Washington and London happy made perfect sense.
Operation Shoshanah and the Israeli raid on Gaza in February 1955, both of which Nasser always trotted out as reasons for his subsequent belligerence toward Israel, probably had very little to do with the substance of his policies between 1954 and 1956 (though the latter incident without doubt prompted him to energetically pursue Soviet armaments). And Egyptian Jews steadily left the country in the years following Egypt’s attack on Israel in 1948 (many hundreds of prominent Jews were incarcerated and fined by the Egyptians, and there were a series of murderous attacks on Jewish pedestrians and businesses during that war)—and following the Israeli-British-French assault on Egypt in 1956. There was no wave of emigration following Operation Shoshanah: this is pure invention.
To be sure, between 1949 and 1956 the infiltration into Israel by Palestinians, mainly 1948 refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza, was a source of constant Israeli-Arab friction. There were many thousands of such illegal border crossings each year, most of them for economic and social reasons—to reap crops, to recover goods, to visit relatives, to resettle in former villages, to steal. But alongside these individual incursions there were a very small number of terroristic infiltrations. Much of this terroristic infiltration, certainly from 1954 on, was organized by the Egyptian government. The fedayeen units were recruited, organized, and sent on their way, from 1954, by Colonel Mustafa Hafiz, who headed the Egyptian army’s intelligence bureau in the Gaza Strip. Yet Bird writes: “[Nasser] … allowed Palestinians in Gaza to organize irregular guerrilla units called fedayeen—self-sacrificers.” Israel responded to fedayeen strikes in 1954-1956 with retaliatory raids, almost exclusively targeting Jordanian and Egyptian military and police facilities.
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