1956 White Manuscript Political Cartoon, Suez Crisis Aftermath

Reviving Shipping after the Suez Crisis

This is a 1956 George White manuscript political satire cartoon map referring to the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis of that year, in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt after Gamel Abdel Nasser, that country's president, nationalized it. The cartoon refers to the period after a ceasefire had been signed and efforts by the United Nations were underway to clear the canal of debris to make it usable again.

A Closer Look

White takes the term 'bottleneck' literally by cleverly depicting a ship stuck inside a bottle, trying to get out of the too-narrow spout. A team of workers from U.N. salvage crews are making some headway by hitting the bottleneck with sledgehammers and pulling on the ship to free it. At this time, such salvage crews were indeed working frantically to free the canal of ships and other debris deliberately put there by the Egyptians at the start of the conflict, but even still the work would continue for nearly six months before the canal was fully cleared.

The Suez Crisis and Its Aftermath

The context of this piece is the 1956 Suez Crisis and its immediate aftermath. The Suez Crisis is also known by several other names, including the Second Arab-Israeli War, the Tripartite Aggression in the Arab world, and the Sinai War in Israel. One of the tensest and most notorious incidents in the early Cold War, the crisis was set off by an invasion of Egypt by Israel, followed closely by the United Kingdom and France, in an effort to gain control of the Suez Canal. This came after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar nationalized the canal in response to Britain withdrawing funds for the planned Aswan High Dam (afterwards completed with Soviet assistance). Looking to brandish his nationalist and pan-Arab credentials, Nasser closed the canal to Israeli ships and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. The British felt that this violated a 1954 treaty regarding the canal and feared that nationalization would threaten their position in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and could lead to a full-embargo of oil going to Europe. Much of British animus, however, was due to the personal obsessions and enmities of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, an Oxford-trained Persianist and Arabist before entering politics, who personally hated Nasser and was suspicious of his pan-Arab ambitions. For its part, France was irritated that Nasser was supporting independence fighters in Algeria and many in the French military and diplomatic circles mistakenly saw the entire Algerian independence movement as an Egyptian plot.

The active part of the conflict lasted from October 29, 1956 - November 7, 1956. Following a pre-arranged plan, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula on October 29 (Operation Kadesh), and the U.K. and France immediately issued a joint ultimatum for a ceasefire. According to the three countries' pre-arranged conspiracy (the Protocol of Sèvres), the Israelis were meant to be in the vicinity of the canal by the time the Franco-British ceasefire ultimatum was issued, so that the Europeans could seize the canal on the pretense of creating a buffer zone (which conveniently overlapped with the canal zone) between the Israelis and Egyptians. But due to unexpected difficulties, the Israelis were nowhere near the canal at the time, a fact which was not conveyed to the French and British, leading them to farcically demand the Israeli and Egyptian armies to withdraw from the canal zone, which they were nowhere near, revealing their conspiracy to the world. If there was any doubt about collusion, the French and British gave the Egyptians only 12 hours to respond to their ultimatum (it was rejected) before they started bombing Egyptian airbases. After some additional bombing, Britain and France landed paratroopers along the Suez Canal on November 5, who seized Port Said and defeated the Egyptian forces guarding the canal.

Though militarily successful, the Franco-British-Israeli invasion was a geopolitical catastrophe. It coincided with and distracted from the Soviets' crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and destroyed any attempt by the West to claim moral superiority. The U.S. Eisenhower Administration, which was not consulted about the plan and had explicitly told the British not to undertake military action in Egypt, was absolutely livid. Eisenhower attempted to get the United Nations to impose sanctions on Israel and, even more forcefully, ordered his Secretary of the Treasury to prepare to sell part of the US government's sterling bond holdings, a move which would have destroyed the British economy. In response, Eden quickly announced a ceasefire on November 6 without consulting France or Israel. United Nations troops (the United Nations Emergency Force) were brought in and French and British troops gradually withdrew from the canal zone, although the Israelis occupied the Sinai Peninsula until March 1957. Over the next twenty-five years, Israel and Egypt fought over the Sinai Peninsula in the course of several conflicts, until finally moving towards peace and negotiated Egyptian sovereignty over the peninsula as part of a wider rapprochement. In the end, the Suez Crisis humiliated Britain and France, hastened the decline of their empires, and underlined the dominance of the Americans over the Western world. It also achieved the opposite of one of their stated goals: instead of removing Nassar from power, the Suez Crisis only strengthened his position.

Although the conflict had reached a military and diplomatic settlement by the end of 1956, the canal itself was unusable. Nasser had ordered ships to be sunk and bridges collapsed into the canal once it was obvious that the British and French intended to seize it. Thus, when the troops of the U.N. Emergency Force arrived in November 1956, much of their work was involved with clearing the canal, a task completed not completed until April 1957. Although the nationalization of the canal did continued, coming under the management of the Suez Canal Authority, the U.N. Emergency Force oversaw the security of the canal for another decade before Nasser expelled them in the run up to the Six-Day War.

Publication History and Census

This manuscript cartoon satire was prepared by cartoonist George White in December 1956. A published version appeared on the editorial page of The Tampa Tribune on Sunday, December 23, 1956. Though it was later published, the present work - a draft drawn by the artist's own hand - is an entirely unique manuscript work.

Cartographer

George White (1901 - March 7, 1964) was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and relocated to Tampa with this family in 1915. White studied art under Tampa artist Walter Collins and began work as a commercial artist at the Tampa Morning Tribune in 1928 and by 1934 was a regular cartoonist at the Tribune. Rather unconventionally, the paper featured his cartoons on the front page. His work displays the evolving course of America's domestic and geopolitics from the interwar period, through World War II, and into the Cold War.   Further Details...

Condition

Very good.. Manuscript.

References

Tunzelmann, A., Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace, (New York: HarperCollins) 2024.