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Next morning, surprisingly brisk and bright-eyed, he turned up at his office for the first time in a fortnight. Ben-Gurion drafted replies to Eisenhower and Bulganin. Asked how he felt, he grunted: "I have no time to feel ill." He called in leaders of all political parties except the Communists to tell them that the U.N. and the great powers were "not content with a mere cease-fire."
Then he sat down to write a speech taking back all his victorious vaunts of two nights before. At 12:30 a.m., delayed until his reply to Eisenhower was in Washington and thus free to be broadcast, Ben-Gurion's speech of abnegation went on the air. Hoarse and halting, the patriarch spoke his surrender: "The government is prepared to withdraw its forces from the territory of Egypt immediately after the entry of the international emergency force into the canal zone."
Again the Guerrillas. At this stunning reversal, requiring surrender of conquests almost three times the country's size, the flush of victory vanished from Israel. "It took us only one week to conquer the Sinai desert," said a Jerusalem schoolteacher, "and only one day to lose it." Perhaps Ben-Gurion never intended to keep Sinai ("We want no more desert"), but he had obviously hoped to bargain with it for his minimum demands: 1) peace on the border; 2) possession of the Gaza Strip and of islands in the Gulf of Aqaba; 3) the right to move Israeli cargoes through the Suez Canal.
All celebrations ended abruptly in Israel, and released reservists were called back. Army units worked full speed to get battle-worn tanks, guns and other equipment back into shape. At week's end Foreign Minister Golda Meir told a party meeting that the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian-held corner of the old Palestine mandate overrun in the Sinai blitz, "is an integral part of Israel."
On the very night that the tough old leader made his submission, Israeli newspapers carried reports that fedayeen guerrillas had struck across the border in a half-dozen raids from Jordan. Whatever the Israelis had won by their preventive war, they did not appear to have won a peace. "Go-it-alone" Israel, in its fear of the Soviet Union, turned once again toward cooperation with the U.N., and above all toward the U.S.