In general, fourteen or fifteen such incidents would accumulate before a response was considered necessary, and this ceaseless accumulation of terrorist sabotage incidents in the name of what was called “popular war,” together with responses which in the long run sometimes became inevitable, were for a long period the main focus of tension in the Middle East.
But then there came a graver source of tension in mid-May, when abnormal troop concentrations were observed in the Sinai Peninsula. For the ten years of relative stability beginning with March 1957 and ending with May 1967, the Sinai Desert had been free of Egyptian troops. In other words, a natural geographic barrier, a largely uninhabited space, separated the main forces of the two sides.
It is true that in terms of sovereignty and law, any state has a right to put its armies in any part of its territory that it chooses. This, however, is not a legal question: it is a political and a security question.
Experience in many parts of the world, not least in our own, demonstrates that massive armies in close proximity to each other, against a background of a doctrine of belligerency and accompanying threats by one army to annihilate the other, constitute an inflammatory situation.
To these grave sources of tension – the sabotage and terrorist movement, emanating mostly from Syria, and the heavy troop concentrations accompanied by dire, apocalyptic threats in Sinai – there was added in the third week of May the most electric shock of all, namely the closure of the international waterway consisting of the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. It is not difficult, I think, to understand why this incident had a more drastic impact than any other.
There was in this wanton act a quality of malice. For surely the closing of the Strait of Tiran gave no benefit whatever to Egypt except the perverse joy of inflicting injury on others. It was an anarchic act, because it showed a total disregard for the law of nations, the application of which in this specific case had not been challenged for ten years.
When we examine, then, the implications of this act, we have no cause to wonder that the international shock was great. To understand how the state of Israel felt, one has merely to look around this table and imagine, for example, a foreign power forcibly closing New York or Montreal, Boston or Marseille, Toulon or Copenhagen, Rio or Tokyo or Bombay harbor.
How would your governments react? What would you do? How long would you wait?
These then were the three main elements in the tension: the sabotage movement; the blockade of the port; and this vast and purposeful encirclement movement, against the background of an authorized presidential statement announcing that the objective of the encirclement was to bring about the destruction and the annihilation of a sovereign state.
These acts taken together – the blockade, the dismissal of the United Nations Emergency Force, and the heavy concentration in Sinai – effectively disrupted the status quo which had ensured a relative stability on the Egyptian-Israel frontier for ten years.
I do not use the words “relative stability” lightly, for in fact while those elements in the Egyptian-Israel relationship existed there was not one single incident of violence between Egypt and Israel for ten years. But suddenly this status quo, this pattern of mutually accepted stability, was smashed to smithereens.
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I have said that the situation to be constructed after the cease-fire must depend on certain principles. The first of these principles surely must be the acceptance of Israel’s statehood and the total elimination of the fiction of its non-existence. It would seem to me that after 3,000 years the time has arrived to accept Israel’s nationhood as a fact, for here is the only state in the international community which has the same territory, speaks the same language, and upholds the same faith as it did 3,000 years ago.
