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"We are a small nation," said Ben-Gurion, his stained, grey suit rumpling on his powerful, squat body, "and ours is a poor country. Everything we tried to do was doubly difficult, but we built it up. We took in more than 1,000,000 immigrants, including 300,000 survivors of Hitler's slaughter and 400,000 refugees from Arab countries. Here in the Middle East we are the only people who still believe in the same faith and talk the same language that we did 3,000 years ago. Hebrew was a dead language, but now it is the language of our people again. Nasser cannot even speak a word of Egyptian, the language of the Pharaohs.
"We survived before under worse conditions, and we will survive now. Eight years ago we were invaded by the armies of six Arab nations. We had no organized army and very few arms, but because of the sacrifice of our sons—and of our daughters, too—we defeated them. We won because we were filled with idealism and a great vision of the future. Faith is much more important than arms or riches or numbers. It is our real weapon."
It was not Israel's only weapon. "Once blest is he whose cause is just," goes the old American saying. "Twice blest is he who gets his blows in fust." A civilian army called to its posts almost overnight last autumn, Israel's motorized forces under one-eyed General Moshe Dayan had swept across 120 miles of Sinai desert in four days in an operation that is being studied with admiration by U.S. Army observers. The military skill with which they advanced was matched by the diplomatic skill with which they retreated—and then stopped. Ben-Gurion chose two strong points of resistance, and then began his argument against what the U.N. Assembly had called Israel's single injustice. His points of resistance: Gaza and Aqaba.
The Gaza Strip is the tiny corner of the old British Palestine mandate now crowded with 219,000 Arab refugees from Palestine (practically all of them on relief). In the 1949 armistice, Egypt won the right to administer it as unannexed territory. To the Israelis it was a dangerous center of the over-the-border commando raiding against their desert settlements, raids which Israel under Ben-Gurion avenged with ever-increasing ferocity. The Gulf of Aqaba is the north-reaching arm of the Red Sea whose use was denied to Israeli shipping more than six years ago by Egyptian guns emplaced at Sharm el Sheikh. In violation of the 1949 armistice, the guns commanded the narrow passage into the gulf.
Spelling out his justification for hanging on at Sharm el Sheikh, Ben-Gurion said:
"The straits and the Red Sea are important to us—perhaps more than the Mediterranean. We have closer cultural affinity with the West, but economically we are perhaps closer to the East. To us trade with Asia and Africa is vital. Elath [at the head of the gulf] is our doorway to the East, and nobody has the right to blockade it. We cannot rely on the good will of Nasser—forget Nasser—we cannot rely on the good will of any Egyptian government to keep it open after forcibly blocking it for so many years. Under international law we have the right to use the Suez Canal, but Egypt denied us our rights."