55 years ago/May 22, 1967

In his speech to the Knesset Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said that Israel took the necessary measures, but they didn’t have aggressive intentions. He called for mutual troop reductions. He blamed the crisis on the sabotage and terror actions backed by Syria. US President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a message to Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union and offered to calm down the situation together. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, in a speech to the United Arab Republic (Egypt) Air Force, pronounced the close of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Why was the Straits of Tiran important? At the end of the first Arab-Israeli War the last Israeli operation intended to secure the southern part of the Negev Desert and, at the same time, the Israeli troops reached the Gulf of Aqaba at Umm Rashrash, what got a new name: Eilat. The port became very important for Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran the Jewish state could reach the Red Sea. It was important, for example the vast majority of oil came to Israel through this way in 1967. The argument, briefly, was about the legal status of the Straits of Tiran. According to the Egyptian (officially United Arab Republic then) viewpoint, the Straits of Tiran were Egyptian territorial waters because of the distance from the Egyptian coast. According to the Israeli and US viewpoint it was an international waterway because it connected the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba which was shared by four countries – Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia – itself, and as an international waterway Israel had a right to pass through. This question had already an important role in the Suez Crisis (Second Arab-Israeli War), and Israel considered it crucial that the Straits of Tiran would stay open, and he had promises . By closing it, Nasser took one more big step towards the war.