Diplomatic Stalemate and the Sèvres Protocol (August-October 1956)

The ledger sat open on a polished desk in Cairo, its columns filled with neat Arabic script recording the tolls collected from the ships that continued to pass through the Suez Canal. It was early September 1956, six weeks after the nationalization, and the waterway was operating with a quiet efficiency that confounded every dire prediction made in the chancelleries of Europe. The Egyptian pilots, many of them trained by the old Suez Canal Company but now working for the newly established Egyptian Canal Authority, guided vessels through the narrow channel with the same practiced skill they had always shown. The transit times, carefully logged, showed no deterioration. The revenue, once siphoned off to a Paris boardroom, now flowed into the Egyptian treasury. In Alexandria, on September 9, the first full month’s accounts were audited: over three million pounds sterling had been collected without a single incident of delay attributable to Egyptian management. The physical reality of the canal—its dredgers, its buoys, its traffic control stations—had become an instrument of sovereign will, and the ledger was its quiet, damning testimony.

This bureaucratic artifact represented something far more significant than efficient administration. It was the tangible refutation of a central Western assumption: that Egyptians were incapable of running the canal, that the intricate machinery of global commerce required European hands. That assumption had been the unspoken premise of the diplomatic offensive now underway. In London, Prime Minister Anthony Eden had convened an international conference of twenty-two maritime nations in mid-August, a gathering designed to isolate Egypt and reclaim control of the waterway under the guise of international management. The conference produced a proposal, crafted largely by John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, for a Suez Canal Users Association—SCUA—that would collect tolls, manage traffic, and effectively strip Egypt of the operational control it had just seized. It was a clever legalistic construct, dressed in the language of cooperation but designed to achieve through multilateral pressure what could not be achieved through direct force. Dulles, ever the lawyer, believed that a combination of economic leverage and diplomatic isolation would force Nasser to capitulate.

He did not understand that the ledger in Cairo was not merely a financial document; it was a political declaration, and Nasser had no intention of surrendering it. The man chosen to deliver this ultimatum to Cairo was Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, a bulky, confident lawyer of the old imperial school. Menzies arrived in Egypt in early September as the head of a five-nation delegation, tasked with presenting the SCUA proposal directly to Nasser. He was a formidable advocate, steeped in the traditions of Westminster advocacy, and he believed that rational argument, delivered with sufficient force and clarity, would prevail. He prepared his case meticulously, framing it as a matter of international law and practical necessity. The canal, he would argue, was an international waterway, not an Egyptian possession; its management required the confidence of the users; Nasser’s unilateral action had shattered that confidence; only an international body could restore it. The logic was impeccable within its own closed system of assumptions.

But Menzies, like Eden and Dulles, failed to grasp that Nasser was operating within an entirely different system of meaning, one in which the canal was not a legal abstraction but a wound that had been cauterized, a symbol of a century of humiliation now reversed. The meetings took place in the Tahra Palace in Cairo, a grand building that had once housed the harem of Khedive Ismail. The setting was charged with historical irony: Menzies, the representative of the old imperial order, sat in a room built by the dynasty that had sold Egypt into debt and then into occupation, negotiating with the man whose revolution had finally broken that cycle. Nasser received the delegation with elaborate courtesy, offering coffee and cigarettes, listening intently as Menzies laid out his case. He spoke for over an hour, his voice rising and falling with the practiced cadences of a courtroom advocate. He invoked the Constantinople Convention of 1888, the sanctity of treaties, the interdependence of nations. Nasser listened, his face impassive, occasionally nodding. When Menzies finished, there was a long silence.

Then Nasser spoke, quietly, almost conversationally. He did not engage with the legal arguments. Instead, he talked about the 120, 000 Egyptians who had died digging the canal, about the decades in which Egypt had received almost nothing from the waterway that cut through its own territory, about the moment in Alexandria when he had announced the nationalization and felt, for the first time, that Egypt was truly independent. The canal, he said, was not an international waterway; it was an Egyptian waterway that the world was welcome to use, provided it respected Egyptian sovereignty. The SCUA proposal, he concluded, was a form of collective imperialism, and Egypt would not submit to it. Menzies was stunned. He had expected negotiation, bargaining, perhaps some concession on tolls or management structure. He had not expected a flat rejection delivered with such serene confidence. In his subsequent cables to London, his frustration was palpable. He described Nasser as a man living in a fantasy world of anti-colonial rhetoric, immune to reason. But Menzies had misread the situation completely.

Nasser was not being unreasonable; he was being strategically astute. He knew that the canal was operating flawlessly. He knew that the Soviet Union had declared its support for Egypt and would veto any Security Council resolution imposing sanctions. He knew that Eisenhower, facing a presidential election in November, was deeply reluctant to endorse any action that might be portrayed as imperialist aggression. And he knew, above all, that time was on his side. Every day that ships passed through the canal without incident, every day that the Egyptian flag flew over Port Said and Suez, the Western position weakened. The diplomatic theater in London and Cairo was not a negotiation; it was a performance, and Nasser understood that the audience—the watching nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—would judge the outcome not by legal arguments but by results. The Menzies mission collapsed in mid-September. The Australian Prime Minister returned to London, his faith in rational persuasion shaken. The SCUA proposal limped on for a few more weeks, but it was effectively dead.

Dulles continued to make public statements about the importance of international cooperation, but behind the scenes, American diplomats were beginning to distance themselves from the increasingly bellicose rhetoric coming from London and Paris. Eisenhower, in particular, was growing alarmed. He had made clear from the beginning that he opposed military intervention, believing it would inflame the entire Middle East and hand a propaganda victory to the Soviet Union. In a private meeting with his advisors, he remarked that if Britain and France went to war over Suez, they would do so without American support—and likely without American oil. This was not yet a public threat, but it was a clear signal that the Western alliance was fracturing under the strain of imperial nostalgia. For Nasser, these weeks were the absolute zenith of his political career. The failure of Western diplomacy to reverse the nationalization confirmed his status as an invincible anti-colonial leader across the Global South.

In Cairo, his portrait hung in every government office; his speeches were broadcast across the Arab world; his name was chanted in streets from Damascus to Khartoum. He had faced down the combined pressure of Britain, France, and the United States and had not yielded an inch. The canal was operating, the revenue was flowing, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its own territory was now an established fact. The material bill for this ideological victory—the hollowing out of the military’s readiness, the overextension of a fragile economy—was not yet due. For now, the mythos was sufficient. Nasser had become what he had long aspired to be: the voice of a continent demanding its freedom. But that very success was driving his adversaries toward a desperate and clandestine alternative. In London, Anthony Eden was not celebrating. The Prime Minister’s health, already fragile from a botched bile-duct operation in 1953, was deteriorating under the strain. He was taking heavy doses of amphetamines and barbiturates, swinging between manic energy and exhausted collapse.

His political judgment, once sharp, had narrowed into a consuming obsession with Nasser. Eden saw in the Egyptian leader not a nationalist asserting his country’s rights, but a new Hitler bent on destroying British interests and dominating the Middle East. He had told his cabinet that Nasser must be “destroyed,” not merely contained. The failure of diplomacy at the London conference and the Menzies mission convinced him that legal mechanisms were useless. Only force would do. In Paris, Premier Guy Mollet reached the same conclusion through a different route. For France, the Suez crisis was inextricably linked to the war in Algeria. The French government was convinced that Nasser was the primary backer of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), providing weapons, training, and diplomatic support to the rebels fighting French rule. To lose Algeria was to lose France’s place as a great power; to destroy Nasser was to cut off the head of the rebellion. Mollet’s government was a fragile socialist coalition, but on this issue there was little dissent: Nasser had to be humiliated and overthrown.

The French military, still smarting from its defeat in Indochina two years earlier, was eager for a decisive victory. By late September, French defense planners were already exploring the possibility of a military operation against Egypt—and they had found a willing partner. That partner was Israel. The Jewish state had its own urgent reasons for wanting Nasser removed. Since 1955, Egypt had been sponsoring fedayeen raids across the Gaza border, killing Israeli civilians and undermining security. Nasser had also closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, blockading the port of Eilat and strangling Israel’s access to the Red Sea and Asian markets. Moreover, Israel’s military intelligence watched with alarm as Egypt absorbed large shipments of Soviet arms—tanks, aircraft, artillery—acquired through Czechoslovakia in 1955. If Nasser were allowed to consolidate his power and integrate these weapons fully, Israel’s strategic window for a preemptive strike would close. David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, had long believed that only a decisive military blow could secure Israel’s borders and break Nasser’s growing encirclement.

The question was not whether to fight Egypt, but when and with what allies. The convergence of these three interests—British, French, and Israeli—was not accidental. It was the logical outcome of a diplomatic stalemate that had left each party feeling cornered and convinced that time was working against them. In late September, secret contacts began between French and Israeli military officials. The French offered to provide Israel with air cover and naval support for an attack on Egypt; in return, Israel would provide the pretext for an Anglo-French intervention to “protect” the canal. The British were initially cautious—Eden was wary of being seen colluding with Israel, given Britain’s traditional ties to Arab monarchies like Jordan and Iraq—but by early October, his desperation overwhelmed his caution.

On October 14, French General Maurice Challe presented a plan to Eden at Chequers: Israel would attack Egypt across the Sinai; Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum demanding both sides withdraw from the canal zone; when Egypt inevitably refused, Anglo-French forces would intervene as peacekeepers to occupy the canal and remove Nasser from power. Eden listened and then quietly nodded. The conspiracy was now fully formed. The final details were hammered out in a series of meetings held between October 22 and 24 in a rented villa in Sèvres, a quiet suburb on the western edge of Paris. The location was chosen for its anonymity: no government buildings, no official records, no secretaries. The British delegation was led by Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, a man whose personal discomfort with the whole enterprise was visible in every strained smile. The French were represented by Foreign Minister Christian Pineau and Defense Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury.

The Israelis sent an unusually high-powered team: Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan with his iconic eyepatch, and Shimon Peres, then director-general of the Defense Ministry. The atmosphere in the villa was tense and conspiratorial. The windows were kept shuttered; meals were brought in from outside; participants spoke in low voices, aware that they were constructing a deception of breathtaking scale. The negotiations were fraught. Ben-Gurion distrusted the British deeply—he remembered their hostility during Israel’s war of independence in 1948—and he demanded written guarantees that Britain would not abandon Israel once the operation began. He also wanted assurance that the Royal Air Force would neutralize Egyptian airfields before Israeli troops advanced. Lloyd, bound by Eden’s instructions to avoid any written record that might embarrass Britain later, resisted. At one point, Ben-Gurion threatened to walk out. It was only through French mediation—and Mollet’s personal promise to Ben-Gurion that France would stand by Israel regardless—that an agreement was finally reached.

The resulting document, known as the secret Sèvres Protocol, was typed out in three copies on plain paper. It laid out a precise sequence of events: On October 29, Israel would launch a full-scale attack on Egyptian positions in the Sinai Peninsula, driving toward the canal. On October 30, Britain and France would issue an ultimatum demanding that both Egypt and Israel cease hostilities and withdraw their forces ten miles from the canal. Knowing that Egypt would never accept such a demand while Israeli troops were on its territory, the ultimatum would provide the legal pretext for Anglo-French military intervention. On October 31, British and French aircraft would begin bombing Egyptian airfields and military installations. Within days, ground forces would land at Port Said to occupy the Canal Zone. The protocol explicitly stated that the ultimate objective was “the fall of Nasser and the establishment of a friendly government in Egypt.” The signing ceremony was brief and grim. Ben-Gurion signed first, his hand steady. Pineau signed for France. Then Lloyd picked up the pen.

He hesitated for a moment—aware, perhaps, that he was committing his country to an act of collusion and aggression that violated both international law and Britain’s treaty obligations under the UN Charter. Then he signed. Immediately afterward, Lloyd asked that all copies of the protocol be destroyed to eliminate evidence of British participation. The French agreed to destroy their copy; Ben-Gurion kept his. Lloyd’s request itself became part of the historical record: a confession disguised as a security measure. As the participants slipped away from the villa into the October night, the machinery of war was already turning. In Cyprus and Malta, British paratroopers began loading their equipment onto transport planes. French warships steamed out of Toulon toward the eastern Mediterranean. In Israel, Dayan issued mobilization orders to reserve units; tank crews checked their engines; infantry assembled near the Negev border. The countdown to invasion had begun. In Cairo, Nasser received fragmentary intelligence reports of unusual Israeli military activity along the border and of Anglo-French naval movements in the Mediterranean.

But he could not assemble these fragments into a coherent picture. His intelligence services, still immature and riddled with rivalries, lacked the analytical capacity to detect a tripartite conspiracy of this kind. More fundamentally, Nasser could not believe that Britain and France would collude openly with Israel—the state they had once opposed—in such a blatant violation of international norms. He assumed that any Israeli attack would be a limited border raid, not a full-scale invasion coordinated with European powers. The strategic logic of his adversaries had become so twisted by desperation that it was, quite literally, beyond his imagination. On October 25, four days before the planned attack, a British reconnaissance plane flew low over Port Said, photographing Egyptian defensive positions. The pilot’s camera captured anti-aircraft guns pointed skyward, soldiers drilling on parade grounds, ships lining up to enter the canal. Everything looked normal. The film was developed in a mobile darkroom aboard an aircraft carrier and rushed to command headquarters in Cyprus.

There, officers marked maps with red arrows showing the routes of advance: 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment to drop on Gamil airfield; 45 Commando to land by helicopter at Port Said; French forces to secure Port Fuad on the eastern bank. The timetable was precise down to the minute. The signed protocol lay folded in Ben-Gurion’s breast pocket as he flew back to Tel Aviv. He did not take it out to read; he did not need to. Every clause was already etched into his memory. When his plane touched down at Lod airport in the early hours of October 25, he was met by his military secretary with a single question: “Is it done?” Ben-Gurion nodded. “It is done,” he said. “Now we wait for zero hour.” The clock was ticking, and Nasser’s Egypt—still basking in its diplomatic triumph—had no idea that its greatest test was only days away.

The strategic logic that had brought these three unlikely partners together was, in retrospect, almost overdetermined. Each had arrived at the same conclusion—that Nasser must be removed—but through distinct corridors of grievance that only partially overlapped. For the French, the Algerian war provided the emotional and political fuel. The FLN’s urban bombing campaign in Algiers had intensified through the summer of 1956, and French intelligence services had traced the supply lines directly to Egyptian training camps in the Nile Delta. Intercepted radio traffic, decoded at a French listening post on Corsica, revealed Egyptian officers instructing Algerian recruits in demolition techniques and urban warfare. Mollet’s cabinet circulated photographs of captured FLN weapons stamped with Egyptian military markings. The evidence was circumstantial but, to French minds, conclusive: Nasser was not merely a sympathizer but an active belligerent in France’s most painful colonial conflict. To destroy him was to sever the head from the insurgency. French military planners, many of them veterans of the Indochina debacle, spoke of Suez in explicitly therapeutic terms—a chance to restore the honor lost at Dien Bien Phu.

For Israel, the calculus was even starker. The fedayeen raids were not abstractions discussed in cabinet minutes; they were a bloody reality measured in funerals and shrapnel wounds. In the first nine months of 1956 alone, over 200 Israeli civilians had been killed or wounded in cross-border attacks from Egyptian-controlled Gaza. The psychological toll was as severe as the physical one. Israeli parents in border kibbutzim slept with rifles beside their beds; children walked to school through trenches. Ben-Gurion’s military advisors warned that Egypt’s absorption of Soviet-bloc weaponry—including MiG-15 fighters and T-34 tanks—would reach operational integration by early 1957, at which point Israel’s qualitative edge would evaporate. The blockade of the Straits of Tiran was, if anything, even more intolerable because it was bloodless but existential: it severed Israel from the Indian Ocean, from Asian markets, from the oil supplies that might one day flow from Iran. Ben-Gurion saw the Sèvres conspiracy not as an opportunistic land-grab but as a preemptive war of national survival.

Britain’s motivations were the most complex and, in their way, the most irrational. Eden had no equivalent of the Algerian insurgency or the fedayeen raids to justify his obsession. Britain’s direct interests in the canal were largely financial and symbolic, not existential. Yet it was precisely the symbolic dimension that consumed him. Eden had spent his entire career in the shadow of Winston Churchill and the memory of appeasement. He had resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1938 over Neville Chamberlain’s negotiations with Mussolini; that act of principle had defined his public identity. Now, two decades later, he saw Nasser as the reincarnation of the dictators he had once opposed. The analogy was historically dubious—Nasser commanded no panzer divisions, had no territorial designs on Europe, and posed no threat to British soil—but it provided Eden with a moral framework that transformed a commercial dispute into a civilizational crisis. His private secretary recorded in a diary entry from early October that Eden had said, “I will not be the man who lost the Middle East as Chamberlain lost Czechoslovakia.”