Quotes About Aqaba

President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.

Simultaneously a small commando force of Husayn's Arabs, commanded by a British officer, blew up the Damascus-to-Medina railway north of Aqaba, interrupting the flow of Turkish reinforcements to the Hijaz. In the Hijaz itself an Arab force commanded by Husayn's son Feisal, supported by three British warships, had captured the port of Wejd towards the northern end of the Red Sea.

After helping Husayn's son Feisal to re-organise the Hashemite troops into a series of small, fast-moving and effective guerrilla units, on July 6th T. E. Lawrence, leading a small force of these Arab fighters, seized the port of Aqaba, thus preparing the way for the British to fight their way out of Sinai and into Palestine and opening the road for an allied advance towards Jerusalem and Damascus. With

nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the

As one of the participants in the Aqaba summit, I can testify that Israel fully expected the Palestinian Authority's newly reorganized and trained security agencies to take harsh action against the rejectionists who sought to wreck the peace process.