The Suez Crisis, 1956: nine days that ended empire

By Khalid Al-Harbi

On 26 July 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser stood in Alexandria and announced that Egypt was nationalising the Suez Canal Company. The crowd roared. In London and Paris, the speech landed like a declaration of war. Within three months, Britain, France and Israel had hatched a secret plan to seize the canal by force — and within four, their troops were landing at Port Said. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was a military success and a political catastrophe: in nine days of fighting, the old imperial powers won the battlefield and lost the world. It ended Britain and France’s pretence to great-power status, made Nasser the hero of the Arab world, and handed the United States and the Soviet Union the keys to the Middle East.

Origins: a canal, a dam and a century of resentment

The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, was the most valuable ditch ever dug: a 193-kilometre waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, cutting the voyage between London and Bombay by thousands of miles. It was built by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps with Egyptian labour — tens of thousands of Egyptian workers died in its construction — yet the profits flowed to the Universal Company of the Maritime Canal of Suez, a French-chartered firm whose shares were mostly held in London and Paris. Egypt owned a minority stake until 1875, when the indebted Khedive Ismail sold his shares to the British government, giving Britain a financial foothold that soon became a military one. In 1882, Britain occupied Egypt outright, ostensibly to protect the canal and restore order after a nationalist revolt. The occupation, presented as temporary, lasted more than seven decades.

For Egyptians, the canal became the standing symbol of foreign domination: Egyptian soil, Egyptian labour, foreign profit, foreign soldiers. Generations of nationalists demanded its return. The 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty allowed Britain to keep troops in the Canal Zone to guard the waterway, and even after the Second World War, some 80,000 British soldiers remained stationed there — the largest British garrison anywhere in the world. When a group of young army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew King Farouk in the revolution of 1952, the evacuation of British troops became their first great cause. In 1954, after long negotiations, Britain agreed to withdraw its forces from the Canal Zone, and the last British soldiers left in June 1956. Egypt was, for the first time in 74 years, free of foreign troops. What remained foreign was the canal itself.

Nasser’s government had staked its legitimacy on a second great project: the Aswan High Dam, a vast hydroelectric and irrigation scheme on the Nile that would tame the river’s floods, expand farmland and power Egyptian industry. The dam was to be financed by Britain, the United States and the World Bank. But by 1956, the Western powers had grown hostile to Nasser. He had refused to join the Baghdad Pact, the Western-backed anti-Soviet alliance, and had instead championed neutralism and Arab nationalism. He had bought arms from Czechoslovakia — effectively from the Soviet bloc — in 1955, breaking the Western monopoly on weapons sales to Egypt. And he had recognised the People’s Republic of China in May 1956, angering Washington. On 19 July 1956, the United States abruptly withdrew its offer to finance the dam; Britain followed two days later. The American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, delivered the news in language Nasser found humiliating, pointedly questioning Egypt’s economic prospects.

Nasser answered a week later. On 26 July 1956, before a huge crowd in Alexandria, he delivered a three-hour speech recounting Egypt’s humiliations at foreign hands — and announced that Egypt would nationalise the Suez Canal Company, using its revenues to pay for the Aswan Dam. The crowd’s jubilation was genuine and overwhelming. Legally, Nasser’s move was defensible: the company’s concession was due to expire in 1968, and nationalisation with compensation was an accepted sovereign right. He promised compensation to shareholders at market value and guaranteed freedom of navigation through the canal. The canal kept operating under Egyptian management, smoothly and without interruption. But in London and Paris, the nationalisation was received not as a legal act but as a theft — and, worse, as a challenge that could not be allowed to stand.

The road to war: London, Paris and the decision for force

Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden, had been foreign secretary through the long decline of British power and had come to see Nasser as a new Mussolini — a comparison he made repeatedly, in public and in private, casting the crisis as a rerun of the 1930s in which the dictator had to be stopped early. For Eden, the canal was not only a commercial artery carrying much of Britain’s oil; it was the spinal cord of what remained of the British Empire, linking Britain to its bases and markets east of Suez. If Nasser could seize the canal and get away with it, Eden argued, no British interest anywhere would be safe. France’s premier, Guy Mollet, had his own grievance: he believed Nasser was arming and financing the Algerian nationalists fighting France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria, and he saw the destruction of Nasser as the key to winning in North Africa. Both men concluded, within days of the nationalisation, that Nasser had to be removed by force.

The problem was the United States. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, facing re-election in November 1956, was adamantly opposed to using force. He believed a negotiated settlement was possible, warned Eden repeatedly against military action, and refused to join any coalition against Egypt. The American position was shaped by principle and interest alike: Washington did not want to be seen crushing Arab nationalism, and it did not want a colonial war to hand the Soviet Union a propaganda triumph across the developing world. Eden, convinced that Eisenhower would ultimately accept a fait accompli, pressed ahead without American backing — one of the great misjudgements of modern British foreign policy.

Through August, September and October 1956, a slow diplomatic dance played out. An international conference in London proposed an international board to run the canal; Nasser rejected it as a return to foreign control. The United Nations debated; the British and French kept their military preparations — Operation Musketeer — moving forward, assembling a vast invasion fleet in Malta and Cyprus. Egypt, meanwhile, ran the canal efficiently, undermining the Anglo-French claim that Egyptian management would strangle world trade. By October, the British and French governments faced an uncomfortable truth: they had no legal case, no American support, and no negotiated path to what they wanted. So they chose a secret one.

The secret pact: Sèvres

The missing piece of the Anglo-French plan was a pretext. Britain and France could not simply invade Egypt to seize a canal; they needed a war to intervene in. Israel supplied it. Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had his own reasons for war: Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran had closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, Egyptian-backed fedayeen raids were killing Israelis from Gaza, and Nasser’s growing prestige and Soviet-supplied arms alarmed Jerusalem. Israel wanted to break the blockade, destroy the fedayeen bases and smash the Egyptian army in Sinai. France, which had been supplying Israel with advanced weaponry including Mystère fighter jets, acted as the broker between Jerusalem and London.

From 22 to 24 October 1956, in a villa in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, the three powers sealed their conspiracy. The Protocol of Sèvres, signed by Ben-Gurion, Mollet, Eden’s foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd and others, laid out the choreography: Israel would attack Egypt across the Sinai on 29 October, driving toward the canal; Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum demanding that both sides withdraw ten miles from the canal — a demand aimed at Egypt, which would have to abandon its own territory; when Egypt refused, as it must, Anglo-French forces would invade the Canal Zone on the pretext of “separating the combatants” and protecting the waterway. The plan was a fraud, and its authors knew it. The protocol was kept so secret that even much of the British cabinet was not told, and Eden denied its existence for the rest of his life. It was only confirmed decades later, when the documents finally surfaced and the participants confessed.

The Sèvres agreement is the moral heart of the Suez story. It turned a war of choice into a war of deception: three governments conspired to manufacture the very conflict they claimed to be policing. When the truth leaked — and it leaked almost immediately, as such secrets do — the effect on world opinion was devastating. Britain and France were no longer defending an international waterway; they were caught staging a war. The cynicism of the scheme did more damage to their cause than any Egyptian gun ever could.

The war: nine days in Sinai and Port Said

On 29 October 1956, Israeli paratroopers dropped near the Mitla Pass in Sinai, and Israeli armour surged across the desert. Operation Kadesh, commanded by Moshe Dayan, was a swift and brutal success: within days, Israeli forces had routed the Egyptian army in Sinai, reached the canal, and captured Sharm el-Sheikh, reopening the Straits of Tiran. The Egyptian forces, outgunned in the air and outmanoeuvred in the desert, fought bravely in places but collapsed as an organised army in Sinai. On 30 October, Britain and France issued their prearranged ultimatum. Egypt, predictably, rejected it.

On 31 October, Anglo-French bombers began striking Egyptian airfields, destroying much of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground and bombing Cairo, Alexandria and the Canal Zone. On 1 November, Nasser ordered the canal blocked, sinking ships laden with cement and debris in the waterway. On 5 November, British and French paratroopers dropped on Port Said and Port Fuad at the northern end of the canal; the next day, seaborne forces landed from the sea. The fighting in Port Said was fierce and bloody: Egyptian soldiers and civilians resisted street by street, and the Anglo-French bombardment killed large numbers of civilians. By the time the ceasefire took effect, the invaders held Port Said and a strip of the canal — but they had not taken the canal itself, and they never would.

The military balance, narrowly understood, favoured the invaders: they were better equipped, better trained, and their air power was overwhelming. Israel lost 172 soldiers killed and 817 wounded; Britain lost 22 killed and 96 wounded; France lost 10 killed and 33 wounded. Egyptian losses were far heavier — an estimated 1,650 to 3,000 killed, around 4,900 wounded, and thousands captured, with roughly 1,000 civilians killed, most of them in Port Said. But the war was never decided by the casualty count. It was decided in Washington, Moscow and New York, where the political ground collapsed beneath the invaders in a matter of days.

Superpower pressure: the week the world said no

The invasion produced one of the rarest spectacles of the Cold War: the United States and the Soviet Union on the same side, both furious, both demanding a stop. The timing could not have been worse for the invaders. On 4 November, Soviet tanks were rolling into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising, and Moscow was desperate to deflect world attention from its own aggression. The Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, sent threatening letters to Eden, Mollet and Ben-Gurion, hinting darkly at rocket attacks on London and Paris and offering “volunteers” to fight for Egypt. The threats were almost certainly bluff — Moscow had no intention of starting a world war over Egypt — but in the fevered atmosphere of November 1956, with nuclear weapons newly in play, they landed hard.

Eisenhower’s fury was more consequential. The president had been kept in the dark by his closest allies; he learned of the invasion almost as it began, and he regarded the deception as a personal betrayal. On 30 October, the United States introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council demanding a ceasefire; Britain and France vetoed it — the first time two permanent members had vetoed a resolution aimed at themselves. The United States then took the issue to the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” procedure, where on 2 November the Assembly adopted Resolution 997 demanding an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal, by 64 votes to 5. The moral isolation of Britain and France was nearly total: the entire developing world, the Commonwealth, and both superpowers lined up against them.

Then came the financial strangulation. The United States refused to support sterling, which came under heavy selling pressure as the crisis deepened. The American Treasury signalled that it would not release emergency IMF funds to Britain until Britain agreed to a ceasefire, and it declined to supply oil to make up for the closure of the canal and the sabotaged pipelines. Britain’s reserves were draining; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, told the cabinet that the country faced devaluation and economic ruin if the war continued. This was the decisive weapon — not Soviet rockets, but American dollars. On 6 November, Eden, ill, exhausted and out of options, announced a ceasefire. It took effect at midnight. The Anglo-French force had been on the ground for barely a day.

Ceasefire, withdrawal and the birth of UN peacekeeping

The ceasefire left the invaders in an impossible position: they held Port Said, but the canal was blocked, the world demanded their departure, and their own governments were collapsing. The United Nations moved with unprecedented speed. On 4 November, the General Assembly had asked Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld to produce a plan for an international force; on 7 November, it adopted Resolution 1000 creating the first-ever United Nations Emergency Force — UNEF. The idea, credited largely to the Canadian foreign minister Lester Pearson, who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for it, was revolutionary: a neutral force, drawn from countries not party to the conflict, interposed between the armies to supervise a withdrawal and keep the peace. It was the birth of modern UN peacekeeping, an institution that would become one of the defining instruments of international order.

British and French troops withdrew from Port Said in December 1956, replaced by UNEF contingents from Denmark, Colombia and others. Israel, which had occupied Sinai and Gaza, resisted longer, but under relentless American pressure — including threats to cut off aid and support UN sanctions — it withdrew in stages, completing its pullout from Sinai and Gaza by March 1957, in exchange for guarantees on navigation through the Straits of Tiran and the stationing of UNEF along the Egypt-Israel border. The canal itself, cleared of wrecks by a UN salvage operation, reopened to shipping in April 1957 — under full Egyptian control, with Egypt collecting the tolls. Everything Nasser had wanted, he had got.

Key figures

Gamal Abdel Nasser — Egypt’s president, architect of nationalisation, and the crisis’s great winner. A former army officer who led the 1952 revolution, he turned military defeat into political triumph and became the voice of Arab nationalism for a generation.

Anthony Eden — Britain’s prime minister, whose career was destroyed by Suez. A gifted diplomat broken by illness and misjudgement, he resigned in January 1957 and spent the rest of his life denying the Sèvres conspiracy.

Guy Mollet — France’s socialist premier, who saw Nasser as the puppeteer of the Algerian revolt and Suez as the key to saving French Algeria. He was wrong; Algeria won its independence six years later.

David Ben-Gurion — Israel’s founding prime minister, who won the Sinai campaign and the Straits of Tiran, then bowed to American pressure and withdrew. His gamble bought Israel a decade of quiet on its southern border.

Dwight D. Eisenhower — the American president who stopped the war. His refusal to back his own allies, and his use of financial pressure rather than force, was a defining act of Cold War statecraft.

Dag Hammarskjöld — the UN Secretary-General who turned crisis into institution, creating the first armed peacekeeping force and setting the template for decades of UN missions.

Lester Pearson — Canada’s foreign minister, whose proposal for UNEF earned him the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize and gave Canada its defining diplomatic myth.

Consequences: the end of empire, the rise of Nasser, the American century

The Suez Crisis is remembered as the moment the old world ended. For Britain, it was a humiliation that exposed the gap between imperial pretensions and actual power. The country that had ruled a quarter of the globe could not sustain a one-week war against a middle power without American permission. Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan, drew the lesson explicitly: Britain would never again act militarily without American support, a rule that has held ever since, from the Falklands to Iraq. The “special relationship” survived, but on new terms — Britain as junior partner, not co-equal. The crisis also accelerated decolonisation: within a decade, most of Britain’s African colonies were independent, and the empire east of Suez was on its way out.

For France, Suez compounded the trauma of Algeria. The humiliation fed the conviction that France could not depend on Anglo-American leadership — a conviction that shaped Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy when he returned to power in 1958, from the withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command to the building of an independent French nuclear deterrent. The Fourth Republic, already dying over Algeria, was finished off in part by Suez’s disgrace.

For Egypt and the Arab world, the outcome was electric. Nasser, who had lost the war on the battlefield, won it in the history books: he had defied three armies and survived, kept the canal, and forced the empires to retreat. His prestige soared across the Arab world; his face hung in coffee houses from Baghdad to Casablanca, and his vision of Arab unity — Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, non-alignment — became the dominant ideology of the region for a decade. In 1958, Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic, the high-water mark of Nasserism, though the union collapsed three years later. Nasser’s triumph also had a darker edge: it entrenched military rule in Egypt, and the authoritarian habits of his regime would outlive his pan-Arab dreams.

For the superpowers, Suez was a transfer of authority. The United States emerged as the dominant Western power in the Middle East, a role it formalised in January 1957 with the Eisenhower Doctrine, pledging American aid to any Middle Eastern country resisting communist aggression — in practice, a promise to fill the vacuum left by Britain and France. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, gained its great opening in the Arab world: Egypt became a major recipient of Soviet arms and aid, and Moscow’s standing as a friend of Arab nationalism was secured. The Cold War’s centre of gravity in the Middle East had shifted from London and Paris to Washington and Moscow, where it would remain for the rest of the century.

For the United Nations, Suez was a founding success. UNEF — 6,000 troops from ten countries, wearing blue helmets and operating with the consent of the parties — became the model for peacekeeping missions that followed, from the Congo to Cyprus to the Sinai itself. The crisis also established a principle that would echo through later decades: that even great powers could be stopped by a combination of international law, global public opinion and financial pressure. That principle has often failed since, but it has never been forgotten.

Finally, for the canal itself, the story came full circle. Egypt ran the waterway successfully for a decade until the Six-Day War of 1967 closed it again for eight years. Today the canal remains Egyptian, and its tolls remain a pillar of Egypt’s economy. The company Nasser nationalised is gone; the nation that took it back is still collecting the revenue. In that narrow, material sense, Nasser’s gamble paid off for seventy years and counting.

Timeline

• 1869 — The Suez Canal opens; the operating company is French-chartered, with Egyptian labour and mostly European shareholders.
• 1882 — Britain occupies Egypt, ostensibly to protect the canal. The “temporary” occupation lasts 74 years.
• 1936 — The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty permits a British garrison in the Canal Zone.
• July 1952 — The Free Officers, led by Nasser, overthrow King Farouk.
• 1954 — Britain agrees to evacuate the Canal Zone; the last troops leave in June 1956.
• 19 July 1956 — The United States withdraws its offer to finance the Aswan High Dam; Britain follows.
• 26 July 1956 — Nasser announces the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company in Alexandria.
• 22–24 October 1956 — The secret Protocol of Sèvres: Britain, France and Israel agree on the staged invasion.
• 29 October 1956 — Israel invades Sinai (Operation Kadesh).
• 30 October 1956 — Britain and France issue their ultimatum; the US resolution at the Security Council is vetoed by London and Paris.
• 31 October 1956 — Anglo-French bombing of Egypt begins (Operation Musketeer).
• 2 November 1956 — UN General Assembly Resolution 997 demands a ceasefire (64–5).
• 5–6 November 1956 — Anglo-French airborne and seaborne landings at Port Said and Port Fuad.
• 6 November 1956 — Eden announces a ceasefire; it takes effect at midnight. Soviet tanks crush the Hungarian uprising the same week.
• 7 November 1956 — UN Resolution 1000 creates UNEF, the first UN armed peacekeeping force.
• December 1956 — British and French troops complete their withdrawal from Port Said.
• January 1957 — Eden resigns; Macmillan becomes prime minister. The Eisenhower Doctrine is announced.
• March 1957 — Israel completes its withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza.
• April 1957 — The canal reopens under Egyptian control. Lester Pearson wins the Nobel Peace Prize for UNEF.

Sources and further reading

• Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2011) — the definitive narrative history of the crisis.
• Wm. Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (I.B. Tauris, 2006).
• Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).
• US Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Suez Crisis, 1956” (Milestones in the History of US Foreign Relations) — history.state.gov.
• United Nations, General Assembly Resolutions 997 (ES-I), 998 (ES-I) and 1000 (ES-I), November 1956 — digitised in the UN Digital Library.
• United Nations, “UNEF I — Background” (peacekeeping.un.org) — the UN’s own history of the first Emergency Force.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Suez Crisis” — britannica.com.
• The National Archives (UK), Cabinet papers CAB 128 and CAB 129, October–November 1956 — declassified minutes of the Eden cabinet.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (Doubleday, 1965) — the president’s own account of the American decision.
• Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail: Suez Through Egyptian Eyes (André Deutsch, 1986).

The legacy