HOLDING THE LINE ON THE SUEZ CANALIn August 1972, two Soviet officers were taken on a tour of the defenses at Port Fuad
and told that it had remained in Eg yptian hands in June 1967 thanks to a determined
local governor who had rallied the local home guard and held off the Israelis with
shotguns and hunting rifles. The Russians doubted this and considered that a legend
had already developed, which certainly was the case about the subsequent events.^44
With the issue of control and navigation on the canal still unresolved, the importance
of its northern gateway was obvious, and on 1 July 1967 it became the scene of the
first pitched battle after the Six-Day War.
According to the contemporary Israeli version, it was the Eg yptians who violated
the ceasefire by crossing the canal to reestablish an emplacement at Ras el-Ish, some
6 miles south of Port Fuad on the narrow causeway between the east bank and the
swamp. The IDF sent in an armored force to displace them. Eg ypt claimed that an
Israeli tank column advancing on Port Fuad was halted by a thirty-man special-forces
platoon that had been there all along, bearing only small arms. Even at the time, a
CIA report was hard put to choose between the “conflicting Israeli & Eg yptian ver-
sions.” The report concluded that due to the terrain,
it seems highly unlikely that the Eg yptians chose [this] as the site of a major penetration
... It seems more probable that the Israelis stumbled on a pocket never evacuated by the
Eg yptians and decided to clean it out, or that the Eg yptians were engaging in a gesture for
propaganda purposes.^45Twelve years later, however, the memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin appeared to confirm part
of the Eg yptian version: as IDF chief of staff in 1967, he had ordered an advance to
secure the east bank up to the outskirts of Port Fuad, against the opinion and obstruc-
tion of Defense Minister Dayan.^46 During the war, Dayan, more than anyone in the
Israeli leadership, had consistently feared provoking the Soviets into direct intervention.
He had tried to stop the IDF’s advance before it reached the canal bank, though in his
testimony before the Agranat Commission, he belittled this as mere “advice.”
While it receives but passing (if any) mention in foreign histories, the Ras el-Ish
incident took on heroic proportions in Eg yptian lore as proving that “the defeat of
June 1967 had not blunted the will of the Eg yptian warrior, who could win if given
an equal chance. The battle also showed that the Israeli soldier was no legend as pre-
sented by malicious Zionist propaganda.”^47 On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
massive canal crossing in 1973, this minor cross-canal operation was still listed first
among the milestones toward restoring Eg yptian self-confidence.^48
The new Israeli aggression that was needed to justify a Soviet intervention was thus
provided. Was the Israeli probe toward Ras el-Ish deliberately provoked by the Soviets
and Eg yptians in a scaled-down replay of the plan that had failed in June? On 11 July,
Brezhnev told the Budapest conference that the Soviet leadership had been “sud-
denly” alarmed into action on the evening of 8 July. But besides the speed of the
ensuing Soviet naval action, a number of circumstantial indications point at least