The Suez Crisis of 1956: The Day Egypt Took Back Its Canal

On the evening of 26 July 1956, a huge crowd filled Manshiyya Square in Alexandria to hear their president speak. Gamal Abdel Nasser talked for hours, mixing jokes, history and anger. Again and again he mentioned one name: Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who had built the Suez Canal. To the crowd, it sounded like a history lesson. To a group of Egyptian officers listening on the radio, it was a secret signal.

Each time Nasser said "de Lesseps", the plan moved forward. By the time he announced to the cheering crowd that the canal now belonged to Egypt, his officials had already taken over the canal company's offices in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez.

A canal built by Egyptians, owned by others

The Suez Canal opened in 1869, linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and cutting thousands of kilometres off the journey between Europe and Asia. It was dug largely by Egyptian peasants, many of them forced to work, and large numbers died from exhaustion and disease.

Yet Egypt saw little of the profit. The canal was run by a private company based in Paris. In 1875, a near-bankrupt Egyptian ruler sold the country's shares to Britain. By the 1950s, British and French shareholders were earning millions each year from a waterway that ran through Egyptian land, and the last British troops had only left their huge base in the Canal Zone in June 1956, under a 1954 agreement.

For many Egyptians, the canal was a daily reminder that their country was still not fully its own.

Why Nasser acted

Nasser had come to power after the officers' revolution of 1952, which ended the monarchy. His great project was the Aswan High Dam on the Nile, which promised electricity and controlled flooding for millions of farmers. (The same dam later forced the rescue of the temples of Abu Simbel.) The United States and Britain had offered to help pay for it.

But Nasser was also buying weapons from the Soviet bloc and refusing to join Western alliances. On 19 July 1956, Washington withdrew its offer of funding, and Britain followed. A week later, Nasser gave his answer in Alexandria: Egypt would nationalise the canal and use its income to build the dam. Shareholders, he said, would be compensated.

The secret plan

In London and Paris, the reaction was fury. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, compared Nasser to the dictators of the 1930s. France was angry too, partly because Egypt supported Algeria's fight for independence from French rule.

In October 1956, at a villa in Sèvres, near Paris, British, French and Israeli officials made a secret agreement. Israel would invade Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Britain and France would then pretend to act as peacemakers, ordering both sides to pull back from the canal, and send in their own troops to "protect" it.

The plan went ahead. Israel attacked on 29 October. British and French aircraft began bombing Egyptian targets two days later, and in early November paratroopers and marines landed at Port Said, at the northern end of the canal.

Egypt resists

The invasion did not go the way its planners hoped. In Port Said, soldiers and civilians fought back street by street, and many lives were lost. Egypt sank dozens of ships in the canal, blocking it completely, so that the very waterway the invaders claimed to protect became useless.

Around the world, Egypt won sympathy. Newly independent countries in Africa and Asia saw the attack as old-fashioned imperialism. The Soviet Union issued threats. Most importantly, the United States, furious that it had been kept in the dark, refused to support its allies. President Eisenhower's government used economic pressure, including on Britain's currency, to force a halt.

On 6 and 7 November, with their troops only partway down the canal, Britain and France accepted a ceasefire.

Peacekeepers and a changed world

To separate the armies, the United Nations created the UN Emergency Force, the first large-scale armed peacekeeping mission. The idea came largely from Canada's foreign minister, Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. British and French troops left Port Said in December 1956. Israeli forces withdrew from Sinai in early 1957. Salvage teams cleared the sunken ships, and the canal reopened in April 1957, now under Egyptian control.

The political damage in London was enormous. Eden resigned in January 1957, citing ill health, and later evidence showed he had misled Parliament about the secret deal with Israel.

In Port Said, 23 December, the day the last foreign troops left, is still remembered as the city's national day.

What Suez meant for Africa

Suez is often told as a story about Britain's decline. Seen from Africa, it is something else: proof that an African nation could take control of its own resources and survive the attempt to stop it.

Nasser became a hero far beyond Egypt. Over the following years, Cairo hosted and supported independence movements from across the continent, and Egypt became a founding member of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 (we told that story in Africa Day). For leaders such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah (see Ghana's independence), who led his country to independence just four months after the crisis, in March 1957, Suez showed that the colonial powers could be challenged, and that the world had changed. It gave new energy to the dream of Pan-Africanism.

Why it matters today

The Suez Canal remains one of the busiest trade routes on Earth and a major source of income for Egypt. When a single giant container ship, the Ever Given, got stuck there for six days in 2021, global trade felt the shock. More recently, attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have sent many vessels the long way around Africa, cutting the canal's earnings.

Every one of those headlines rests on a decision made in Alexandria in 1956: that a waterway running through Egypt should be run by Egyptians. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most important moments in modern African history.

Further reading

• History Hit — 10 Facts About the Suez Crisis
• Encyclopedia.com — Suez Crisis (1956–1957)
• Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2003)