In 1956 the world held it’s breath. Israel invaded Egypt, penetrating to within ten miles of the Suez Canal – a key choke point for the world economy. The Egyptians struggled to stem the Israeli tide of shrapnel-spewing steel. The British and French threatened to intervene. The United Nations fell into an uproar. The Soviet Union crushed a Hungarian rebellion against Communist rule. We covered the Hungarian rebellion in episode 26: here. The Middle East was exploding and all eyes were fixed on this one spot – the Canal, the irreplaceable, vital Canal. It’s war. It’s diplomacy. It’s Battlecast.

This is part two of a multiple part series. You can find the first episode in this series here: episode 44

Download episode 45 here: download

Maps:

References:

The Arab-Israeli Wars by Chaim Herzog

American Judaism by Nathan Glazer

A History of Israel form the Rise of Zionism to our Time, 3rd edition by Howard Sachar

A History of the Jews in the Modern World by Howard Sachar

A History of the Jews in America by Howard Sachar

A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson

A History of the Jewish People by Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson et al. 

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

An Introduction to Judaism by Nicholas Robert De Lange

The Israel/Palestine reader by Alan Dowty et al. 

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict by Benny Morris

The other Israel : voices of refusal and dissent by Jonathan Shainin, Roane Carey, et al.

The peace movement in Israel, 1967-87 by David Hall-Cathala

The Israel-Arab reader : a documentary history of the Middle East conflict by Walter Laqueur and Dan Schueftan (editors)

The Israel-Palestine conflict: one hundred years of war by James Gelvin

The war of atonement: the inside story of the Yom Kippur War by Chaim Herzog and Michael Herzog

Israel in search of a war : the Sinai Campaign, 1955-1956 by Mott Golani 

The two o’clock war : the 1973 Yom Kippur conflict and the airlift that saved Israel by Walter Boyne and Fred Smith

The Yom Kippur War : the epic encounter that transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich

The Yom Kippur War 1973 (two volumes) by Simon Dunstan

The Six Day War 1967: Jordan and Syria by Simon Dunstan

The Six day War 1967: Sinai by Simon Dunstan

A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield

Lebanon: A History, 600 – 2011 by William Harris

Syria From The Great War To Civil War by John McHugo

Syria: A Modern History by David Lesch

Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak by Tarek Osman

A History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times to the Present by Jason Thompson

A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel by Walter Laqueur

Why the Jews? by Dennis Prager, Joseph Telushkin, et al.

Making Israel by Benny Morris

The Arab-Israeli Conflict by Efraim Karsh

100 Hours to Suez by Robert Henriques

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe

The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk about the Six-Day War by Avraham Shapira

The Hope by Herman Wouk

“Into the Valley of Death” by Zen Read. Haaretz.com. https://www.haaretz.com/1.4962016

Great World Religions: Judaism. Twelve-part video series by Isaiah Gafni

Great World Religions: Islam. Twelve-part video series by John Esposito

Likud leaders: the lives and careers of Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon by Thomas Mitchell 

Netanyahu and Likud’s leaders: the Israeli prince by Gil Samsonov 

Israel’s wars: a history since 1947 by Ahron Bregman

The evolution of operational art: from Napoleon to the present by Martin Van Creveld and John Andreas Olsen 

The land of blood and honey: the rise of modern Israel by Martin van Creveld

Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education by Nurit Peled-Elhanan 

Brother against brother : violence and extremism in Israeli politics from Altalena to the Rabin assassination by Ehud Sprinzak

Secularism and Religion in Jewish-Israeli Politics by Yaacov Yadgar

Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel by Anita Shapira

The Palestine Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000 by As’ad Ghanem

Israel and Palestine: The Complete History by Ian Carroll