This was life in Israel until 1956.
In 1956, there was the war,
the Sinai Campaign.
The Sinai Campaign didn't just suddenly happen.
During the first part of the 1950s,
you might say already from 1949,
there was a phenomenon which was called 'infiltration'.
There were around 750,000 refugees
around the State of Israel,
across the Green Line, across the border.
At night Arabs would infiltrate
and perhaps take something that they would then hide in their house
or hide in a field or gather. Something.
Anything. Fruit, vegetables.
And [Jews] would kill them, all those who were caught.
And as time went by, this became more violent in nature.
That means people came with weapons
and occasionally murdered people.
Then it escalated and the military authorities
in the West Bank, especially in Gaza,
the Egyptians in Gaza sent armed infiltrators.
There were battles, and here and there Jews were killed.
Then the reprisals began.
Fairly soon it was no longer clear who was retaliating against whom,
because it had become a chain, one incident led to another.
Here a Jewish woman with two children was murdered,
there they attacked a police station at a border crossing,
killing 20 people.
And it escalated from one year to the next,
and Israel had an ally: France.
Why France?
Because a war of independence broke out in Algeria in 1954.
Algeria been neither Moroccan nor Tunisian;
Algeria was part of France, and had been annexed.
And the French, who somehow suppressed
the uprising in Morocco and Tunisia,
suppressed the uprising in a much stronger way in Algeria.
There was really a massacre on both sides.
In 1954 a real war of independence erupted,
with the support of Egypt and Abdel Nasser.
And the French could not tolerate the idea,
that there could be a population in 'their' Algeria
which was rebelling against France. Intolerable.
There must be someone instigating it.
Who? Nasser, Abdel Nasser.
So they had to bring down Abdel Nasser in Egypt.
Who could do it? Israel.
So an alliance was established between Israel and France,
and it was obvious that Israel should
help France to overthrow Abdel Nasser.
And in preparation for war
they started to increase the retaliations.