Word: suez
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...perennial Middle East threat to the peace re-emphasizes the need for a permanent solution to control of key international waterways. The Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba should be internationalized under irrevocable U.N. control. The world cannot permit Nasser to use those shipping lanes as instruments of national policy, to be turned on or off at will. Although Nasser wished to be the hero of a holy war of annihilation of Israel, the would-be tiger of the Nile has now earned the title of Papyrus Tiger...
...sympathy for Israel was strong.* Of 438 Congressmen who replied to an Associated Press poll, an overwhelming 364 urged that Israel be given assurances of national security and access to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal before withdrawing its troops from occupied Arab lands. The other 74 qualified their answers or refused to state a position, but not one urged Israel to withdraw without guarantees. U.S. officials-at least in private-also sympathize with Israel's demands for recognition by the Arab nations and a territorial realignment giving Israel defensible borders...
...strongest argument for Israel's need to protect itself. Since the U.N. has shown its inability to protect them, Israelis argue that they can give up the real estate they deem essential to their security only if the Arabs agree to peace-and to reality, transported to Suez and released, to go home. Some also got food and water from the desert's Bedouins-if they were willing to pay their fellow Arabs...
...Egyptian people had not yet been told of the extent of the debacle. There were no announced casualty figures, no lists of wounded or missing, no mention of the fact that Israel held the east bank of the Suez. Egyptian officials evacuated part of the population of El Qantara, site of a bridge across the canal, to prevent townsfolk from seeing the stream of ragged, bandaged soldiers dragging homeward. But the troops returned with tales, and the marketplaces of Cairo buzzed with rumors. In the streets of Cairo, people spat on their own army officers...
Another problem for the Arabs is that the world is not so dependent upon their oil or upon Egypt's Suez Canal as it was during the 1956 war with Israel. Since that time, other nations have developed flourishing oil industries. Venezuelan oilmen were actually licking their lips in prospect of finally being in a position to raise prices on the country's crude. Many Arabs seemed to recognize their untenable oil situation. And thus, although Radio Damascus called on workers to "blow up oil pipelines all over the Arab world," nobody showed up to light a match...