The historical place of the Czech‐Egyptian arms deal, Fall 1955

Abstract

A virtual axiom of the literature on the Arab-Israeli conflict is that when the news was received, in late September 1955, of an arms deal on an unprecedented scale between Egypt and Czechoslovakia, key players on the Israeli side began thinking in terms of a preventive war. 'Against the background of the Czech-Egyptian deal, the growing threat from the south, and the blockade of the Straits of Tiran,' wrote Michael Bar-Zohar, 'Israel embarked upon a road that led to a preventive war.' Both Bar-Zohar and, afterward, Bar-On, emphasize that a sense of emergency and a feeling of dread gripped the public when the arms deal became public knowledge. The British historian K. Kyle also accepts this description. As evidence of the war fever that was whipped up in Israel in the wake of the arms deal, Kyle quotes a remark made by Israel's ambassador to the United States at that time, Abba Eban, to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: 'Let's not sit here like a rabbit waiting for the kill.' In the historiography of the period there is almost universal agreement on this point. Nevertheless, this 'axiomatic assumption' merits closer examination. The most important contribution to the historiography of the Sinai Campaign and its run-up is the articulate and comprehensive study by Mordechai Bar-On, The Gates of Gaza. Bar-On laid the research foundation for the argument that the Sinai Campaign should not be seen as 'the late realization of the proposal to launch a preventive war'. In other words, Israel had good reason for concern about events in Egypt even before the idea to initiate a war was conceived in Bar-On's view, following the Egyptian arms deal. Bar-On also explains why it took Israel a full year to launch a war after the deal's existence became known: Israel, he says, needed time to arrange a counter-deal of its own, and then the Suez crisis broke at a convenient time. Still, Bar-On's study rests on the conventional wisdom that the arms deal was what prompted Israel to think in terms of a preventive war. 'The Sinai Campaign,' he writes, 'was intended to deal with the motives for the Czech deal, that is, the causes of the tension and dispute between Israel and Egypt which had existed already at the beginning of the 1950s...' Bar-On, then, does not claim that the discord between the two countries was generated by the arms deal. His argument is that the deal was a watershed, a crucial