Word: aqaba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shifting Pressure. Even as the U.S. enacted the doctrine, the U.S. and the U.N. were pressing the step-by-step, inch-by-inch progress toward easement of the Middle East's internal problems. One day Israel got out of Gaza and the Aqaba Gulf positions, and the blue-helmeted soldiers of the U.N. Emergency Force moved in. Another day Syria agreed to start repairing oil pipelines sabotaged during the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, through which Iraqi oil can be pumped to Mediterranean ports en route to Europe. Even Nasser's Egypt, still dickering on complexities like...
...read the excitable pronouncements in the kept Cairo press, Egypt is unyielding about everything: gives the U.S. and U.N. no credit for getting Israeli troops out of Egypt (something the Egyptians could not do for themselves), and renews its intransigent attitude about Israeli rights in Gaza, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Suez Canal. The optimistic drew comfort from the fact that Nasser himself had not yet said all these things, and might not be so unreasonable as his noisy propagandists...
Unconditional Conditions. With the injection of Gaza and Aqaba into the debate, the optimist began a war of nerves that was to last for six tense and confusing weeks. Nobody mobilized or signed up "volunteers" in embassies around the world, but diplomats frantically shuttled about, going without sleep, drafting and redrafting documents that never reached public print. Chiefs of state engaged in heavy cannonading in a rivalry for favorable world opinion...
...kept trying to say to the Israelis that it understood their demand for guarantees in Gaza and Aqaba and in some ways supported them, but-the Israelis must not expect the U.S. to say so too explicitly. So began a semantic battle requiring a conditioned Israel withdrawal involving what could not be described as conditions. The happy substitute that emerged was the word assumptions. On Feb. 11 John Foster Dulles handed Israel's Ambassador Abba Eban an aide-memoire. As soon as Israel pulled out, Dulles said, the U.S. would 1) itself proclaim the right of innocent passage...
Israel's government, Ben-Gurion said, welcomed Washington's willingness to dispatch U.S. ships through the Gulf of Aqaba to establish the right of "innocent passage," but did not consider this sufficient protection against subsequent Egyptian interference with Israel's ships-"as she openly proclaims her intention to do." For this reason, Israel would withdraw from Aqaba only if replaced by U.N. Emergency Force troops that would remain along the Gulf's shores until "peace is concluded with Egypt or until some other reliable and effective arrangement is made to this end." As for the Gaza...