Summary
The IDF raid of 11 December 1955 on Syrian positions on the northeastern shore of Lake Kinneret, in which 56 Syrians were killed and 30 captured, presented officially as securing Israeli fishermen; Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace treats its timing — amid Turkish, Iraqi, British and American pressure on Syria over the Baghdad Pact — as the point of the action, and quotes Moshe Dayan that France gave Israel arms “because we fought” in reprisals of this kind (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.218-223).
Details
- The raid killed 56 Syrians, wounded 9 as first reported in the book (PDF p.218; a later passage gives 6 wounded, PDF p.223 — recorded under Open questions on the source page), captured 30, and cost 6 Israeli soldiers (PDF p.218, p.223).
- Haaretz (13/12/55) protested not reprisals in principle but that this one was unprepared: reports of Syrian harassment of the fishery had appeared “under small headings” and caused no public anger, and the disturbance “did not justify a retaliatory action on the scale that was carried out” — from which the authors infer the role of the “guided” press in preparing the ground on other occasions (PDF p.219-220).
- Dayan, three years later: “We received arms from France for the very purpose of reprisal actions of the severest kind – after Operation Kinneret. The French sought partners in their struggle and did not want Abd al-Nasser’s expansionist tendency to succeed. They gave us arms because we fought” (Davar, 16/11/58; PDF p.220). France nevertheless voted in the Security Council (19/12/55) to condemn Israel for the raid.
- Ben-Gurion decided the operation alone, without consulting government members, who learned of it in the newspapers; Haaretz (16/12/55) warned this had brought Israel “dangerously close to a Prime Ministerial dictatorship” (PDF p.220).
- A. Ginai (Yedioth Aharonoth, 14/12/55) spelled out the diplomatic reverberations: testing the Syria-Egypt treaty signed three weeks before, strengthening Lebanese opponents of a treaty with Syria, and influencing the Baghdad Pact struggle then at its height in Jordan (PDF p.221).
- The underlying fishing conflict, in the book’s account, is structural: the ceasefire line runs on the lake’s northeastern shore, so the whole lake belongs to Israel while the shore’s Arab residents, who have fished it for generations, watch foreign fishermen take their fish (PDF p.223).
Related pages
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, Baghdad Pact, Moshe Dayan, France, Watchdog state