for Ben-Gurion to show that the Old Man was back again; others believe that Dayan was reasserting his independence and exceeding his orders as usual.
But the Gaza attack was much more significant than that. It was, in fact, a declaration of war against Abd-elNasser and his whole brand of nationalism, and so it was understood by Abd-el-Nasser himself. It seems the Egyptian dictator, an old hand at conspiracy and a great fan of undercover operations, was not too upset by the sabotage activities of the spy ring in Cairo, but the attack on Gaza was something else.
Just before it, two new trends had emerged that completely changed the situation of Israel. Egypt had decided not to join the Western military alliance, perhaps because it thought it did not need American assistance after the British evacuation had been assured; perhaps because it was influenced by the Afro-Asian overtures of Nehru; perhaps because the proposed pact favored Iraq, the traditional competitor of Egypt. Dulles was upset and reacted violently. All the nice speeches of Henry Byroade were forgotten, as were the anxieties about the Suez Canal bases. Washington forged ahead and created the Baghdad Pact, arming Egypt's enemies in the Arab world. Abd-elNasser became a Neutralist, then a dirty word in Washingtonese. The danger of an American-Egyptian entente disappeared, and Ben-Gurion may have thought it propitious to teach the Egyptians a lesson.
Even more important was an event which opened completely new vistas. On October i, 1954, the Algerian War of Liberation had begun. After losing Indo-China, Morocco and Tunisia, the French diehards were determined to fight for Algeria, "an integral part of France." Unable to understand the mechanism of modern nationalism or to reconcile themselves to facts that spelled their doom in Africa, the French naively believed the Algerian Revolution was nothing but a manoeuvre engineered by that sinister man in Cairo. They became obsessed with the idea