The Penguin History of the World

The bearing of these changes was still not very evident in the last Middle East crisis of the 1960s, which began when a much more extreme government took power in Syria in 1966, and obtained Soviet support for its aims. The king of Jordan was threatened if he did not support the Palestinian guerrillas (organized since 1964 as the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO). Jordanian forces therefore began to prepare to join in an attack on Israel with Egypt and Syria. But in 1967, provoked by an attempt to blockade their Red Sea port, the Israelis struck first. In a brilliant campaign they destroyed the Egyptian air force and army in Sinai and hurled back the Jordanians, winning in six days’ fighting new borders on the Suez Canal, the Golan Heights and the Jordan. For defence, these were far superior to their former boundaries and the Israelis announced that they would keep them. This was not all. Defeat had ensured the eclipse of the glamorous Nasser, the first plausible leader of pan-Arabism. He was left visibly dependent on Soviet power (a Soviet naval squadron arrived at Alexandria as the Israeli advance guards reached the Suez Canal), and on subsidies from the oil states. Both demanded more prudence from him, and that meant difficulties with the radical leaders of the Arab masses.

Yet the Six Day War of 1967 solved nothing. There were new waves of Palestinian refugees; by 1973 about 1,400,000 Palestinians were said to be dispersed in Arab countries, while a similar number remained in Israel and Israeli-occupied territory. When the Israelis began to plant settlements in their newly won conquests, Arab resentment grew even stronger. Even if time, oil and birth rates seemed to be on the Arab side, not much else was clear. In the United Nations, a ‘Group of 77’ supposedly non-aligned countries achieved the suspension of Israel (like South Africa) from certain international organizations and, perhaps more important, a unanimous resolution condemning the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem. Another called for Israel’s withdrawal from Arab lands in exchange for recognition by its neighbours. Meanwhile, the PLO turned to terrorism outside the disputed lands to promote their cause. Like the Zionists of the 1890s, they had decided that the western myth of nationality was the answer to their plight: a new state should be the expression of their nationhood, and like Jewish militants in the 1940s, they chose terrorism – assassination and indiscriminate murder – as their weapons. It was clear that in time there would be another war, and therefore a danger that, because of the identification of American and Soviet interests with opposing sides, a world war might suddenly blow up out of a local conflict, as in 1914.

The danger became imminent when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in October 1973. The Israelis for the first time faced the possibility of military defeat by the greatly improved and Soviet-armed forces of their opponents. The Egyptians advanced into Sinai, and their opponents had great difficulties forcing them back. But by 20 October Israeli forces had advanced to within 60 miles of Cairo and less than 25 miles of the Syrian capital Damascus. Once again the Israelis won, though only after the Soviets were reported to have sent nuclear weapons to Egypt and the Americans had put their forces on the alert around the world. This grim background, like the obvious chance that the Israelis themselves had nuclear weapons they would be prepared to use in extremity, was not fully discernible to the public at the time.

This, however, was not the only way in which the crisis transcended the region. The problems of the Ottoman succession left behind in 1919, of which Israel’s emergence was only a part, had been successively further poisoned, first by the inter-war policies of Great Britain and France, and then by the Cold War. But it was now to become clear that there had been a much more fundamental change in the Middle East’s world role. In 1945 the world’s largest oil exporter had been Venezuela; twenty years later this was no longer so and most developed economies depended for much of their oil on the Middle East. In the 1950s and for most of the 1960s the British and Americans had been confident of cheap and assured supplies from the region. They had managed what once had looked to be a possible threat to their access to Iranian oil in 1953 by overthrowing a nationalist Iranian government, exercised an informal controlling influence in Iraq until 1963 (when a Ba’ath regime seized power there) and had no difficulty in retaining Saudi Arabian goodwill.