ABSTRACT
Shall We Go to War? And If We Do, When? The Genesis of the Internal Debate in Israel on the Road to the Sinai War
Motti Golani
This essay attempts to analyse the process that ultimately led to Israel's entry into a joint offensive with Britain and France against Egypt in 1956. In doing so it assesses the centrality of various senior figures in the decision to go to war, focusing in particular on the roles of three individuals: Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. It shows the antagonism between Prime Minister Sharett on the one hand and Defence Minister Ben-Gurion and Chief-of-Staff Dayan on the other, in the years preceding the Sinai War, and argues that it was the latter two who guided Israel's security policy in the face of opposition from within the political establishment and the government.
