On October 30, 1956, around mid-day, the ambassadors of the Security Council suddenly sensed the depth of the perfidy of the British and French. Israeli troops had stormed across the Sinai peninsula the day before to join their paratroopers dropping near Suez while other Israeli troops headed northward toward Ismailia on the Suez Canal and southward toward the outpost of Sharm al-Sheikh that blocked Israeli shipping through the Gulf of Aqaba. American Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a resolution demanding that the Israelis withdraw behind the armistice lines that had been accepted under Ralph Bunche's mediation seven years earlier. But British Ambassador Person Dixon informed Lodge in advance that he could not support the resolution. "We were astonished," President Eisenhower chided his old friend Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, in a cable signed "Ike E." During the Security Council debate, Soviet Ambassador Arkady Sobolev interrupted to read the ambassadors an Associated Press news dispatch from London. The dispatch make it clear that the British and French had embarked on a strange imperial adventure.
Prime Minister Eden, according to the dispatch, had informed the House of Commons that he and French Premier Guy Mollet had issued an ultimatum to both Israel and Egypt to halt their fighting or face a British-French seizure of the Suez Canal. The ultimatum was worded in such a way that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser could never accept it. The British and French pronouncements were less an ultimatum than a prelude to armed attack. Many critics soon suspected that the Israelis had acted in collusion with the British and French and that the Israeli aggression was no more than a pretext for the impending British and French air strikes and ground assaults. The suspicions would prove well founded.
The Suez Canal crisis was a defining moment in the twentieth century- much like the fall of the Berlin Wall more than thirty years later-and it defined the end of traditional imperialism. The crisis exposed the British and French, masters of the two greatest empires in the world, as important blusterers, unable to face up to the condemnation of the United Nations, the United States and indignant citizens at home. Although the British and French would manage to hold on to many of their African and Asian colonies several more years, their empires actually died at Suez. The Suez crisis also enhanced the reputation of Dag Hammarskjold, who worked incessantly to carve out a peaceful exit for the thrashed colonial powers and to create the first UN peacekeeping force. And the crisis demonstrated that the United Nations, no matter how imperfect a body, possessed a moral force of its own, steeled with surprising strength.
From United Nations: The First Fifty Years, by Stanley Meisler. Copyright 1995 by Stanley Meisler. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
