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Catastrophe: History’s Most Disastrous Defeats

Khalid Elhassan January 15, 2025 17 min

Catastrophe - Napoleon retreats from Moscow — Napoleon retreats from Moscow. ABC

4. Pressure on a Regional Champion to Act

Catastrophe - UN peacekeepers in the Sinai were expelled by Nasser — UN peacekeepers in the Sinai were expelled by Nasser. K-Pics

In the months before the Six Day War (June 5^th to 10^th, 1967), tensions between Israel and her Arab neighbors climbed steadily. Raids from Palestinian guerrillas based in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, increased, eliciting massive Israeli reprisals. That put Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a bind. The Arab world’s most popular politician and a hero of the masses for his defiance of Britain, France, and Israel during the 1956 Suez Crisis, he was now being criticized for failing to aid those Arab states against Israel. He was also accused of hiding behind a UN peacekeeping force stationed along the Israeli-Egyptian border.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.