‘I wish Gaza would be swallowed by the sea’: Ben-Gurion’s 1956 warning revealed

Seventy years after Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, newly released Israeli military records reveal stark warnings from then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion about the dangers of retaining Gaza, the moral and strategic cost of international isolation and the far heavier toll he expected Israel to face in its next war. The archive also includes records of Shimon Peres, then director-general of the Defense Ministry, describing Israel’s early diplomatic isolation and the extraordinary efforts required to obtain weapons abroad.

The IDF and Defense Establishment Archive released the material Sunday as part of a new digital collection devoted to the Sinai Campaign, known in Israel as Operation Kadesh. The project includes original documents, maps, more than 4,500 photographs and information on 149 commanders who had begun their military careers during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and went on to form part of the IDF’s early leadership. The road to the 1956 war had begun years earlier.

After Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power in Egypt in 1954, tensions along Israel’s southern border intensified. Fedayeen raids, many launched from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip and backed by Egyptian intelligence, became increasingly frequent, while Israeli retaliatory operations inflicted heavy losses without ending the attacks. Tensions escalated further in 1955 as Egypt restricted Israeli navigation through the Straits of Tiran, effectively blocking Israel’s southern maritime route through the Red Sea.

On July 26, 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company after the United States withdrew support for financing the Aswan High Dam. Britain and France, which had extensive interests in the canal, began preparing military action against Egypt and sought to remove Nasser from power. Britain, led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, was more hesitant about military action. France, under Prime Minister Guy Mollet and already fighting an anti-colonial insurgency in Algeria that it believed Nasser was supporting, was far more determined.

Paris increasingly coordinated with Israel, culminating in the secret arrangement among Israel, France and Britain that preceded the war. Israel launched Operation Kadesh on October 29, 1956. Within days, the IDF had taken most of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, while British and French forces attacked Egypt in an effort to seize control of the Suez Canal. Heavy international pressure, particularly from the United States, forced the offensive to end.

Israel withdrew from the territories it had captured within months, returning Sinai and Gaza to Egyptian control. ‘Not just refugees’ Several months after the campaign, Ben-Gurion addressed senior IDF commanders about the lessons Israel should, and should not, draw from its victory. He criticized the United Nations pressure that had forced Israel to withdraw and returned to a dilemma he had raised before the fighting: what Israel should do about Gaza.

“The Gaza Strip is an embarrassing objective,” Ben-Gurion said. “We have to take it. It stands in our way. If I believed in miracles, I would wish it would be swallowed by the sea.” For Ben-Gurion, Gaza presented both an immediate military threat and a much deeper political problem. Before Israel captured it, he said, Egyptian forces based there could potentially push rapidly toward the heart of the country in a surprise attack. But Gaza’s population posed an entirely different challenge.

Ben-Gurion noted that around 300,000 Arabs lived in the narrow coastal enclave, including roughly 180,000 to 190,000 refugees. Many, he emphasized, were Palestinians whose homes, fields and villages had been inside what had become Israel in 1948, including areas around Ramla, Rehovot and southern Israel that were now occupied by Jewish residents. During the brief period of Israeli control after the 1956 campaign, Ben-Gurion said, the authorities appeared capable of maintaining order, but they were already aware of an Egyptian underground operating inside the territory despite the absence of formal Egyptian military or police forces.

He also urged his commanders to understand how Gaza’s residents themselves viewed Israel. They were not simply an abstract hostile population, he said, but people who believed their land and homes had been taken from them and were now occupied by people they regarded as strangers. And Israel would not be confronting Gaza’s population alone, he warned. The Arab world stood behind them, while the United Nations and much of the international community regarded continued Israeli rule there as illegal.

Ben-Gurion argued that the consequences were not only diplomatic or military, but moral. If Israel remained in Gaza while facing prolonged resistance and condemnation from abroad, he said, the damage could ultimately undermine the country from within. “The state could not withstand it,” he warned. The danger, he said, was not necessarily military destruction but moral erosion. Israel’s existence depended in part on maintaining what he called its moral right to exist, both in the eyes of its own citizens and internationally.

If that disappeared, he argued, Israel itself could not remain secure. ‘Not soldiers, but women and children’ The future of Gaza was already at the center of Israel’s strategic debate in 1956. Ben-Gurion described the Strip as a problem under virtually any governing arrangement, whether controlled by Israel, the United Nations or some combination of the two. Egyptian rule, he said, was the worst option, but permanent Israeli control could also prove unbearable.

If Israel stayed in Gaza while becoming an international pariah, he warned, it would inevitably face terrorism and be forced to suppress it. Such a conflict, he believed, could inflict greater long-term damage on Israel than earlier waves of Palestinian violence had managed to do. Ben-Gurion told the officers that he understood the anger of Israelis living in communities near Gaza, including Nahal Oz and Nirim, where residents had endured infiltrations, theft and attacks by fedayeen guerrillas crossing from Gaza and other neighboring territories.

But he argued that national strategy could not be dictated solely by the suffering along the border. That was why, he said, he had opposed demands to annex Gaza from the outset. Israel did not need to absorb another 300,000 Arab residents, particularly a population that was deeply hostile to Israeli rule. Nor, he argued, could Israel assume responsibility for Gaza’s refugees indefinitely if international aid agencies withdrew and told Israel to support them itself.

The danger of isolation went beyond diplomacy. Ben-Gurion feared that a country ostracized internationally might find itself unable to obtain weapons when the next major war came. A decade later, in 1967, Israel would again go to war with its Arab neighbors and again capture Gaza. If the Arab states eventually believed they had the strength to destroy Israel, he said, the crucial question would be whether Israel could still obtain the arms it needed.

Israel might nevertheless win against enemies equipped with better aircraft, bombers and tanks, he said, but the price could become intolerable for a small country with a limited population. That concern shaped his broader warning to the IDF leadership. Operation Kadesh had been a military success, but Ben-Gurion cautioned against assuming that its relatively favorable conditions would be repeated. The campaign, he argued, had been deliberately planned to minimize Israeli casualties.

“The next war will not be like this,” he warned. “Tel Aviv will be bombed, Haifa will be bombed, and people will be killed. Not soldiers. Women, children.” The Defense Ministry archive separately records Ben-Gurion describing the Sinai operation as a “deluxe war” and warning commanders that it would be dangerous to treat it as a template for the future. Israeli Defense Ministry Archives Fear of the final victory The newly released material also includes remarks by Shimon Peres, then the Defense Ministry’s director-general and one of Ben-Gurion’s closest aides.

Peres looked back at Israel’s isolation during the 1948 War of Independence and the difficulties the new state encountered in acquiring weapons, a lesson that remained highly relevant as Israel emerged from the Sinai campaign. The world, Peres said, had appeared horrified by the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, and it might therefore have seemed natural to expect support for the Jewish people’s effort to establish an independent homeland.

Yet when the newly created state was attacked by Arab armies, he said, Israel found itself largely alone against a much larger surrounding population and several established militaries. Military assistance came primarily from Czechoslovakia, Peres said, and Israel paid for the weapons it received. Other arms were obtained discreetly and through complex arrangements from France, Italy, Switzerland and even Britain. Peres also recalled one of Ben-Gurion’s central strategic arguments about Israel’s conflict with its neighbors.

Wars, Ben-Gurion believed, could not solve the fundamental problem between Israel and the Arab world because even a decisive Israeli battlefield victory would not necessarily be the last war. An Arab victory, however, could be.