ABSTRACT
Having decided to wait three weeks to test the international efforts under US leadership to open the Straits, the government might have been expected to be exempt for the time being from the army’s unremitting pressure to attack at once. Once a decision was taken, the army was obliged to obey it, albeit unwillingly. However, the pressure did not ease, and the government, and in particular the Prime Minister, were not accorded a single moment of grace. They were flung together with the entire political establishment into a vortex of growing public demands for a government of national emergency. The government’s decision, the veil of secrecy over its considerations and Eshkol’s faltering speech to the nation, robbed it of its remaining credit. The demand focused on the replacement of the Minister of Defence, and the remainder was of secondary importance. The idea of establishing an emergency government began to take shape on 22 May, and gathered momentum as the crisis deepened, and Eshkol and his ministers appeared increasingly baffled and helpless. The political leadership tried for ten days to manoeuvre between various possibilities: bringing in the opposition, establishing an advisory security team for the Prime Minister, exchanging portfolios among ministers, reinforcing the government, and finally even entrusting the defence portfolio to Yigal Allon. It was all to no avail. The pressure was coming from below, from the street, from the ranks of the army, and it focused on one charismatic personality: the man with the eye-patch, the hero of the Sinai Campaign – Major General Moshe Dayan. Four days after the decision was taken to wait, and after every effort and manoeuvre to avoid it had failed, Eshkol bowed to the inevitable.1
