On Oct. 28, 1956, the eve of Operation Kadesh, Israeli prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet that Israel had to take the Gaza Strip. Then he added: “The Gaza Strip is an ‘embarrassing’ target […] we must take it. … If I believed in miracles, I would want it to be swallowed by the sea.”
The remarks are part of a new website from the IDF Archive at the Defense Ministry marking 70 years since the Sinai Campaign. It brings together more than 4,500 photographs, documents and maps, most of them never before shown to the public.
Why he took it
Operation Kadesh opened on Oct. 29, 1956, after a period of attacks from the Gaza Strip, Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran and its nationalization of the Suez Canal. Under Egyptian rule, Gaza had become a staging ground for guerrilla raids into Israel.
Ben-Gurion later told officers that the Egyptian forces massed in Gaza had threatened Israel even before the operation, and in a surprise attack could have reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Why he didn’t keep it
In April 1957, after the IDF had withdrawn from Gaza and Sinai, Ben-Gurion repeated the “swallowed by the sea” line at a conference of senior officers, and explained his reasoning during the conflict.
“We know that the Gaza Strip is trouble under any regime,” he said. It would be trouble under Israeli rule, under Israel plus the UN, or under the UN without Israel. Egyptian rule was the worst option. But staying, with the world shunning Israel and terror that had to be suppressed, was beyond Israel’s capacity. “This terror would destroy us,” Ben-Gurion insisted.
He said he had opposed annexing Gaza “with all my force” from the first moment, because another 300,000 Arabs was “not what Israel is missing.” He also warned that prolonged rule might destroy Israel morally rather than militarily, and that if Israel lost its moral right to exist in the eyes of its own people and the world, it would not survive.
Israeli armor advances through Gaza City along the main road on November 2, 1956, during Operation Kadesh, the Sinai Campaign. Photo: Bamahane photographer / Bamahane, Series 1. Courtesy of the IDF and Defense Establishment Archive
Israel never wanted it
Israel’s critics accuse her of colonialist ambitions in Gaza. But Yitzhak Rabin said something very similar to Ben-Gurion in 1992: “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found.”
Ben-Gurion withdrew from Gaza within months of Operation Kadesh. He was under heavy American pressure, to be sure, but by his own account he had never wanted to stay. Rabin launched the Oslo peace process with the expressed intent of trading land, including Gaza, for peace. When that didn’t work, Ariel Sharon unilaterally removed every Israeli soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005.
But leaving Gaza, even with all its troubles, proved a blunder. Less than two years after Sharon’s misadventure, Hamas seized control of the coastal enclave, turning it into a base for routine rocket and cross-border attacks on southern Israel, culminating in the events of Oct. 7, 2023.
Seventy years later, the debate over who should govern Gaza after Hamas runs through the same list of unworkable options that confronted Ben-Gurion. Israelis want to rule two million Gazans no more than he wanted to rule 300,000. They just no longer believe that leaving makes the problem go away.
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