In his article "Lesson of history" in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Israeli writer Tom Segev disclosed that Israel planned in 1955 to occupy Cairo and Damascus to expand its borders. The plan was supposed to be put into effect during the Tripartite Aggression, but France opposed that. The Israeli Military Staff had the same plan in 1967 and implemented the first phase, which enabled the Israeli forces to reach the beach of the Suez Canal.
Segev disclosed new military documents that were mentioned in a research partly published in the Middle East Journal.
On the eve of October 29, 1956, Israel attacked Egypt and started the war on Sinai (the Tripartite Aggression), which lasted 100 hours and resulted in the death of 170 Israeli soldiers. After all these years, Israeli researchers and historians do not know yet the real reasons that pushed Israel to take part in that war. An Israeli researcher says that the main motivation that pushed Israel to occupy Sinai was its desire to expand its borders at the expense of its neighbors.
The researcher relies on military documents that have been kept secret until recently, including minutes of meetings of the Israeli General Staff. On October 26, 1955 – a year before the Tripartite Aggression – the Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan held a meeting and informed his generals of a phased plan to expand the borders of Israel, starting with a pre-emptive strike against Egypt.
The plan aimed to occupy the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula as far as the eastern shore of the Suez Canal. The second phase of the attack would then aim to occupy Cairo. With regard to the West Bank, the Israeli forces would reach the city of Hebron in the first phase and the Jordan River in the second. As for Syria and Lebanon, Israel was supposed to stop at the Litani River and move to the north of the Golan Heights to occupy Damascus!
The researcher adds that Israel's participation in the Tripartite Aggression was unjustified, especially as Tel Aviv could have achieved all its objectives at the time without being involved in a war. The Israeli objectives at that time were to stop the resistance operations and to overthrow Nasser's regime, but the Israelis took part in the war to expand their borders at the expense of its neighboring Arab countries.
Israel held many discussions and consultations during the 11 years between the 1956 and 1967 wars. Those discussions focused on the necessity of expanding its borders as soon as the war could break out. Tel Aviv waged the war driven by this desire. The researcher describes the Israeli way of dealing with Egypt as schizophrenia.
According to the Israeli intelligence, the Israeli army could easily defeat Egypt. Although this was a sufficient reason not to participate in the war, the Israeli leaders insisted on taking part in the conflict to expand their borders. They were driven by the Egyptian weakness.
There were many discussions among the generals of the Israeli General Staff on Nasser's stances, on whether he really intended to attack Israel or whether he was only focusing his efforts to secure Egypt against any Israeli attack. The Chief of the Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi was convinced that Nasser was planning to attack Israel, but Dayan asserted that Nasser would not do that. The controversy became fiercer after the signing of the Czech arms deal and the arrival of Czech experts to Cairo to train Egyptian pilots. According to serious military documents unveiled by this research in the Czech capital Prague, the Czech experts were determined to return to their country, but their commander insisted on staying. The Czech experts claimed that their commander insisted on staying because he was involved in the smuggling of crystal from the Czech province of Bohemia to Egypt, where it would be sold. Therefore, nobody was interested in training Egyptian pilots and some planes crashed.
Although the Israeli intelligence had such information and delivered it to its leaders, the Israeli army had been willing to take part in the war. Dayan, who was known as an uncertain man, suddenly changed his mind in April 1956 and said that the Egyptians were planning to attack Tel Aviv. It seems that he did so to persuade Ben-Gurion to order the army to get ready for the war.
Segev disclosed that a series of strange lies dominated the meeting of the General Staff on April 10, 1956. Speaking to the generals, Ben-Gurion said that Egypt would attack Tel Aviv and that if it succeeded, Israel would end, as Jordan would control Jerusalem and Syria would attack Haifa. Although Israel had no evidence to support that, Ben-Gurion became prisoner of this nightmare. The generals tried to calm him down and told him that the Israeli army was strong enough to defeat the Arab countries, but Ben-Gurion insisted that Israel could not win the war alone, so it had to seek the help of Britain and France. Ben-Gurion hoped to occupy the West Bank, but the French strongly refused, so Israel occupied only the Sinai Peninsula.
Segev concludes his article by stressing that Israel did not participate in the Tripartite Aggression for fear of a real Egyptian threat, but to expand its borders at the expense of the Arab States.
