Egyptian sponsorship for the Fedayeen resulted from Israeli raids into Egyptian territory. Even though Egypt occupied Gaza, as the US is learning in Iraq, it's extremely hard for most occupying armies to effectively control populations under their charge and to properly secure borders.lowing wrote:
good job picking and choosing paragraghs......please don't choose the 6 days war as your shinning example of Israel agression,you will lose.
also..........from your same source on the Suez...........
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip — a part of the former British mandate, now occupied by Egypt — became a haven for masses of Palestinian refugees and a hotbed for guerilla activity against the fledgling Jewish state. In response, from 1953–1956 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a number of strikes. These attacks were assisted by the future prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, who interrupted his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to become the military leader of the first special forces unit of the IDF: the elite Unit 101. This policy of reprisals was a major source of internal dispute between hawks, led by David Ben-Gurion, and doves, led by his successor for a short time, Moshe Sharett. It sometimes led to strong external criticism from the United Nations and even Israel's supporters.
The Gaza raid on February 28, 1955 marked yet another turning point in relations between the two enemies. In retaliation Egypt began to sponsor official Fedayeen and commando raids on Israel, sometimes through the territory of Jordan, which also officially opposed these raids, while still publicly discouraging Palestinian infiltration. There were secret talks, through various intermediaries and methods, between Egypt and Israel, but the escalating tensions between the IDF and the Fedayeen put an end to them.
Throughout 1956, tensions increased between Israel and Egypt, with Egyptian fedayeen launching frequent incursions into Israeli territory and Israel launching retaliatory raids into Egyptian territory.
As to your comment about the 1967 war, did I not just also post about Jordan's experience with Israel's "word" that they wouldn't attack. All of that happened before 1967.
And then there is the little matter of Israel's intentions for starting the attack, from Moshe Dayan (Defense Minister during the Six-Day War):
I can't post the Lexis link because it will ask for a password, but here's the information for the article:According to the published notes, Mr. Tal began to remonstrate, "But they were sitting on the Golan Heights, and . . . "
General Dayan interrupted: "Never mind that. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was."
General Dayan's resistance to storming the Golan Heights in the first days of the 1967 war is established history, as is his abrupt change of mind on June 9, the fourth day of the war, when he called the northern commander directly -- bypassing the Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol -- and ordered him to go to war against Syria.
The common wisdom is that General Dayan was wary of stretching military resources until the wars with Egypt and Jordan were settled and that he feared provoking the Soviet Union by an attack on its main client-state, and that the uncertain offensive would cost many lives. The swift victories over Egypt and Jordan then changed his mind.
But in the conversations with Mr. Tal, General Dayan raised another consideration. "What he told me, what is quoted in the conversation, is that he understood even in time of war that we would be compelled to return most of the territories that we won if we wanted peace with the Arabs," Mr. Tal said. In the Golan Heights, General Dayan anticipated that Israeli farmers would waste no time settling on the fertile land, making it difficult to withdraw.
General Dayan said in his conversations with Mr. Tal that the kibbutz leaders who had urgently demanded that Israel take the Golan Heights had done so largely for the land.
"The kibbutzim there saw land that was good for agriculture," he said. "And you must remember, this was a time in which agricultural land was considered the most important and valuable thing."
The New York Times
May 11, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
"General's Words Shed a New Light on the Golan"
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
DATELINE: JERUSALEM, May 9