From Black Arrow to Gaza: How Israel Keeps Burning Its Bridges with the West

The narrative of an unshakeable Israeli-Western alliance built on shared values and unified strategic interests has fractured in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Since October 7, 2023, Spain, Canada, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands have suspended or ceased arms sales to Israel, joined by UN human rights experts who formally called on all states to halt weapons transfers. Germany, Israel’s second-largest arms supplier, announced in August 2025 that it would not authorize any exports usable in Gaza — before reversing the suspension in November 2025 following a Gaza ceasefire.

On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity — the first such warrants ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed democratic country. All 125 ICC member states, including France and the United Kingdom, are now legally obligated to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory.

Many treat the recent wave of emerging tensions between the West and Israel as something new. They are not. 70 years ago, a single Israeli military operation demonstrated with brutal clarity that Israeli strategic interests and Western diplomatic priorities could diverge sharply, and that Israeli leaders were prepared to deceive their Western partners when it served their purposes. That operation was Operation Black Arrow (Mivtza Ḥetz Shaḥor), carried out on the night of February 28, 1955.

On that fateful night, approximately 150 Israeli paratroopers crossed more than three kilometers into Egyptian-controlled Gaza and launched a coordinated assault on an Egyptian army camp near the Gaza railway station. The Egyptian-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission determined in UN document S/3373 that the attack was “a prearranged and planned attack ordered by Israeli authorities” carried out by regular army forces. The Israeli forces struck the military camp, a water-pump facility vital to local infrastructure, and the railway station master’s house using mortars, anti-tank weapons, hand grenades, bangalore torpedoes, and explosives. A separate unit ambushed an Egyptian military truck rushing reinforcements. The MAC’s own findings recorded 36 Egyptian military personnel and two civilians killed, 29 soldiers and two civilians wounded, and eight Israeli soldiers dead — the most serious clash between the two parties since the 1949 Armistice Agreement.

The operation was authorized by David Ben-Gurion, who had returned as Defense Minister exactly one week earlier on February 21. Moshe Dayan, appointed IDF Chief of Staff in December 1953, had been the chief architect of Israel’s aggressive retaliation doctrine since taking that post — a record that included the October 1953 Qibya massacre, in which forces under his command killed 69 Palestinian civilians in a West Bank village, an operation documented in the Sharett diaries and analyzed by the Institute for Palestine Studies. Ariel Sharon commanded the Paratroop Brigade that carried out the Gaza Raid. Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, a moderate who opposed the scale of the operation, was effectively sidelined. As Avi Shlaim highlighted in the London Review of Books, “Ben-Gurion had handed him a stacked deck before taking to his desert retreat.”

Israel’s initial account to the international community was a fabrication. At the Mixed Armistice Commission, the Israeli delegation claimed that “an Israeli patrol was ambushed inside Israeli-controlled territory by an Egyptian armed force” and that a “running fight, starting in Israel and carried on into Egyptian-controlled territory” had followed — framing the entire operation as a defensive pursuit of Egyptian aggressors. In fact, 150 Israeli paratroopers had crossed more than three kilometers into Egyptian-controlled territory and launched the assault themselves.

Israel later shifted to a retaliation justification: on February 23, Arab infiltrators linked to Egyptian military intelligence had stolen documents from an Israeli government building near Rishon LeZion, and the same group murdered an Israeli civilian in Rehovot on February 25. But the response obliterated any proportionality argument. Egypt reported to the UN Security Council that the operation left 39 dead and 32 wounded. British diplomat Pierson Dixon dismissed Israel’s counter-complaint at the Security Council outright. As the UK Parliament’s Hansard record of the debate demonstrated, the UK delegate stated at the outset that the prima facie evidence pointed to a “premeditated attack on Egyptian-controlled territory.” Dixon later told the Council he had expected “some expression of regret for this armed attack” from Israel. “Nothing of the sort was offered us,” Dixon continued. “Instead we are faced, without denial, by a complete disregard of the Security Council’s call to Israel to take steps to prevent all retaliatory action in the future.”

The United States, together with France and the United Kingdom, jointly brought UN Security Council Resolution 106 to a vote on March 29, 1955. It passed unanimously, condemning the attack “as a violation of the cease-fire provisions” and calling on Israel to “take all necessary measures to prevent such actions.” The State Department’s own declassified record of the Security Council proceedings corroborated that he United State, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union all voted together to condemn Israel — a vanishingly rare instance of Cold War unanimity. The contrast with subsequent decades, when the United States routinely vetoed Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, could not be sharper.

The most consequential American casualty of the raid was a secret peace initiative. Beginning in November 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had launched a joint US-British effort to broker a comprehensive Egyptian-Israeli settlement under the classified codename Operation Alpha. As the State Department’s own Foreign Relations records document, Dulles assigned State Department official Francis Russell and his British Foreign Office counterpart Charles Evelyn Shuckburgh to develop detailed proposals for a Palestinian settlement. As the Economic Cooperation Foundation confirmed, the plan called for Israel to cede parts of the Negev to Egypt and Jordan, the resettlement of 75,000 Palestinian refugees in Israel, and a state of non-belligerence between Israel and Arab countries.

The plan had already been damaged by the Lavon Affair — a covert Israeli operation in which Egyptian Jewish agents recruited by Israeli military intelligence planted bombs in American, British, and Egyptian civilian targets in Cairo and Alexandria, with the aim of creating instability and discouraging British withdrawal from the Suez Canal Zone. Ben-Gurion’s authorization of the Gaza Raid one week after returning as Defense Minister delivered the killing blow. As the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question documents, “Israeli expansionists were not ready to proceed toward a peace agreement with Egypt.”

The operation exposed a deliberate institutional deception of Israel’s Western allies. Avi Shlaim noted that Ben-Gurion’s 1953 “temporary” retirement to the desert settlement of Sdeh Boqer was a calculated maneuver: Dayan and Lavon were appointed Chief of Staff and Defense Minister respectively just before Ben-Gurion stepped back, meaning the hawks controlled the defense apparatus while a moderate held the position of prime minister. Ben-Gurion could present a peaceful face to Washington and London while the military pursued escalation entirely outside Sharett’s authority. Shlaim writes plainly that after taking the Chief of Staff post in December 1953, Dayan “actively, deliberately and deviously pushed for war” — and that the activists’ overarching aim “was to make it psychologically impossible for Nasser or any other Arab leader to come to terms with Israel, and to prepare the way for the armed confrontation” that arrived at Suez. According to the Institute for Palestine Studies’ analysis of the Sharett diaries, that objective emerged clearly from a Mapai party ministers’ meeting on January 31, 1954, when Sharett documented that Dayan “brought out one plan after another, all for ‘direct action'” against Egypt.

The Institute for Palestine Studies’ analysis of the Sharett diaries documents that these private journals, compiled without thought of publication, recorded how “the violent stratagems by which Ben-Gurion and his associates sought at once to destabilize the Arab countries on Israel’s borders” were concealed from Western eyes. Ben-Gurion returned as Defense Minister on February 21, 1955, authorized the Gaza Raid one week later, ousted Sharett as Prime Minister in November 1955, and fired him as Foreign Minister in June 1956, clearing the path for the Suez invasion. Sharett himself wrote the morning after the operation that it had “at one and the same time scuttled US efforts at mediation between Egypt and Israel and opened the way to developments leading to the Suez war.”

Revisionist historians who examined newly declassified archives in the late 1980s overturned the Israeli justification at its foundation. As Avi Shlaim called attention to in the London Review of Books in his review of Benny Morris’s archival research, the evidence drawn from Israeli, British, American, and UN archives showed that infiltration into Israel “was a direct consequence of the displacement and dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians” — and that “90 per cent or more of all infiltrations, in Morris’s estimate, were motivated by economic and social concerns,” with Palestinians crossing to look for relatives, return to their homes, recover possessions, or tend their fields. Most critically, Egyptian military documents captured during the 1956 and 1967 wars established that “the Egyptian authorities had a clear and consistent policy of curbing private incursions into Israel until February 1955” — the month Ben-Gurion authorized the Gaza Raid.

The Gaza Raid did not respond to Egyptian-organized aggression. It created it. Nasser, humiliated by what the UN Truce Supervision Organization’s own report S/3373 called “the most serious clash between the two Parties since the signing of the Armistice Agreement,” reversed course and organized fedayeen units within the regular Egyptian army for the first time. He then secretly negotiated an arms deal with Czechoslovakia for Soviet-manufactured weapons, publicly announcing it on September 27, 1955, as the Center for Israel Education records. The deal, described by academic historians at the Wilson Center as among the pivotal events cementing Soviet influence in the Middle East, introduced tanks, jet fighters, and bombers into the Arab-Israeli theater at a scale that shocked the West. The State Department’s own records document that Secretary Dulles told the Egyptian ambassador the deal “enormously complicated” American efforts to stabilize the region. Escalating Israeli raids followed, and the Suez War arrived in October 1956.

Operation Black Arrow established a cycle that has persisted for seven decades. It begins with Israeli military aggression that exceeds what Western allies can publicly defend. It follows with a fabricated Israeli justification. It concludes with a diplomatic crisis that leaves lasting damage. The modern fraying of relations between Western nations and Israel is simply the latest chapter in this long history of manipulation. Despite the warm rhetoric regarding shared values and unshakeable bonds, the reality is that the relationship between Israel and the United States remains incredibly thin. Israel has a recurring habit of deceiving and exploiting its so-called allies to serve its own narrow agenda. It is time to recognize the truth that Israel is no friend to the United States or the West.