De Suez Crisis 1956

De Suez Crisis in 1956 was de eerste keer dat Israelische strijdkrachten zich als een terroristische huurlingenleger liet gebruiken voor het beschermen van Westerse belangen, toen het onverwacht Egypte aanviel.

'A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is theRemembering the Suez Saga


As History Is Repeated

October 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of an important event of modern world history that is going conspicuously unobserved. The Suez crisis of 1956, which should be remembered as a saga of resistance in the Middle East to Western hegemonism, is being pushed into organized oblivion by the current powers and their puppets precisely because of the striking contemporary relevance of the subject.
Noticeably absent among the matters discussed at the Havana summit of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in mid-September was the anniversary, which should actually have been high on its agenda. Suez was one of the major issues to inspire and unite the movement founded just two years before the crisis. The event of half a century ago seemed to belong to a hoary past for Egypt, which was at the center of the storm over the Suez. And India, whose first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had then spoken up for Egypt's "sovereign rights," was busier now wrangling support for its nuclear deal with George Bush and watering down the NAM resolution on Iran.
It is mainly sections in Britain, which emerged badly bruised out of the crisis, that are recalling Suez. These recollections - regardless of the political opinions reflected - are also records of remarkable parallels between the situations in the battered region now and then. Whichever way one looks at it, clearly, the lesson of the war lost by a colonialism in its last gasp is primarily one for today's world - conquerors in Washington, whose forebearers played an apparently different role 50 years ago.
To recapitulate the episode briefly, what started it all was the rise to power in Egypt of Abdul Gamal Nasser and his nationalization of the Suez Canal (the narrow, man-made water strip linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea). The step was intended, not as an economic policy of enlarged state control, but as an angry assertion of a nation's sovereignty over its natural resources. This snowballed into the famous Suez crisis, as Britain (which had lost Egypt as a protectorate) and France saw an opportunity to stage a neo-colonial comeback.
The colonial couple brought Tel Aviv into the conspiracy, thus beginning the process of enlarging the Israel-Palestine conflict into an Israel-Arab confrontation. The United States, then at once anti-colonial and anti-communist, intervened to contain and counter the combined anti-Nasser offensive. Under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an "anti-neutrality" or anti-NAM fanatic, however, the US did so only to become the dominant Western power in the region. It continued to play the part to find itself today, as many commentators now point out, in pretty much the same trap as the former colonialists.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102106B.shtml