The Suez Crisis of 1956 has been commonly seen as a turning point in post war world history, the moment when Britain's pretension to world power status was stripped away, and when Egypt became the leader of the Arab world, an event which triggered a radical change in the relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The impacts of the Suez crisis are, however, perhaps more ambiguous than would appear at first sight, especially when one examine the background of the crisis. Indeed, since the Second World War, we can notice that the British Empire weakened, the United States developed new global interests, in Egypt, and in the Middle East, the forces of nationalism were emerging and that the tensions of Arab-Israeli conflicts were already strong. After such examinations, we are lead to wonder whether the Suez Crisis really triggered changes in Britain, Egypt and Israel or if the crisis only reflected a former trend and accelerated these transformations. We will thus examine for each country what the impacts of the crisis were, and if these were really caused by the Suez Canal crisis.
[...] On the whole, as Albert Hourani declared in Suez 1956: the crisis and its consequences, crisis had been in Egyptian eyes, a kind of declaration of independence. Egypt had shown that it was determined and able to pursue its own interests.'[7] Indeed, from the Suez Canal crisis derived the increased revenues, the appropriation of foreign private interests and the support for the High Dam by the Soviet Union gave rise to the hope of greater freedom of action and greater economic growth. [...]
[...] Indeed, the Conservative Party, which supported the government's action during the crisis, seemed to stop supporting the ‘gunboat policy' of the government and to forgive the Americans for their hostility to the Suez operation while the impact of the crisis on the Labour Party was to strengthen its anti-imperialist sentiment. Moreover, we can notice the effect of the crisis through the economic and financial crisis that it created in the British's budget and which forced MacMillan and his chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, to take drastic measures to balance the budget. [...]
[...] Contemporaries were divided as to impacts of Suez, some, for example Brian Lapping, argued that Suez was at the origin of these radical changes in British policy and others such as Anthony Low claimed that the only impact of Suez was perhaps to accelerate changes that were already in train, that is to say that Suez had little or no effect. Finally, what can be said with certainty is that Britain was weaker after Suez precisely because the crisis revealed to all in a lightening flash” Britain's weakness. [...]
[...] In this case, it seems that the Suez crisis did not engender this new kind of relation but really reflected the fact that the general community of nations considered Israel as a “special case” not subject to the general principles regarding the navigation in the canal. The crisis also had some impacts in Israel's relation with Arab states. Indeed, Israel's attack on Egypt seems to have changed the nature of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. After Suez, it changed from a quarrel related to the question of the disposition of Palestine into an inter-state conflict for regional hegemony. [...]
[...] About this subject, the view of the American journalist Donald Neff is that Great Britain, France and Israel discredited themselves in the Suez Crisis and, as he claims, longer after Suez, could the West assert that it was uniquely to be trusted as the champion of man's aspiration for a just world”[3]. As regards to Britain's role in the world, we can notice that the decade following the Suez crisis saw the rapid decolonisation of Britain's Empire in Africa and the withdrawal from bases East of Suez. [...]
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