Introduction

This chapter traces the diplomatic process spearheaded by the United States during the War of Attrition—a round of the Egyptian –Israeli conflict that has not received adequate scholarly attention and has been more or less pushed out of the Israeli historical memory. It deals with the arrival of the Nixon administration in January 1969 and the outbreak of the War of Attrition that March. The dominant tendency in scholarship is to address the Middle East crisis of 1967 to 1973 from the superpower perspective, without much attention to the Egyptian and Israeli facets. For President Nasser of Egypt, the frozen situation was tantamount to acknowledging his defeat, while also giving Israel valuable time to establish facts on the ground that might work against the eventual return of the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. On the Egyptian side, however, there are multiple and divergent perspectives on the years between 1967 and 1973.