Suez Canal Quotes

The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.

At the Suez Canal, the British became alarmed at the Egyptian debacle and the possibility of Israeli penetration near the canal. They demanded that the Jews stop or face the British Army. In warning, the British sent Spitfire fighters into the sky to gun the Israelis. It seemed only fitting somehow that the last shots of the War of Liberation were against the British. The Israeli Air Force brought down six British fighter planes. Then Israel yielded to international pressure by letting the Egyptians escape. The

the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the distance from Europe to India, undermining the importance of Muscat and other Omani harbors as Indian Ocean transshipment points.

The experience at Suez was little help. Probably they would have been better off in the long run had there been no Suez Canal in their past.

The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.

Since 1849 I have studied incessantly, under all its aspects, a question which was already in my mind since 1832. I confess that my scheme is still a mere dream, and I do not shut my eyes to the fact that so long as I alone believe it to be possible, it is virtually impossible. ... The scheme in question is the cutting of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. This has been thought of from the earliest historical times, and for that very reason is looked upon as impracticable. Geographical dictionaries inform us indeed that the project would have been executed long ago but for insurmountable obstacles. [On his inspiration for the Suez Canal.]

Today we are apt to think of the Middle East, however defined, as something of a geographical unit. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, and in fact until the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, the Mediterranean and the Levant were physically and psychologically very remote from the Red Sea, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf.

One had only to look at the map to see that Panama was the proper place for the canal. The route was already well established, there was a railroad, there were thriving cities at each end. Only at Panama could a sea-level canal be built. It was really no great issue at all. Naturally there were problems. There were always problems. There had been large, formidable problems at Suez, and to many respected authorities they too had seemed insurmountable. But as time passed, as the work moved ahead at Suez, indeed as difficulties increased, men of genius had come forth to meet and conquer those difficulties. The same would happen again. For every challenge there would be a man of genius capable of meeting and conquering it. One must trust to inspiration. As for the money, there was money aplenty in France just waiting for the opening of the subscription books.

Egypt, too, learned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the nineteenth century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled, and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after World War Two.

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

There are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.

Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the irrigation canals. I shall know the climate, the seed time, and the harvest. Kurrachee and the Suez Canal will shine out from my mental map. I shall be able to calculate at what time of the year the cargoes will be delivered in England. Moreover, the Punjab will be to me the equal in size and population of a great European country, a Spain or an Italy, and I shall appreciate the market it offers for English exports.7

There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord’s word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly “king’s portion” of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God’s great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body. If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with “king’s meat and wine,” even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can “run and not be weary and walk and not faint.” If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God.

Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy – it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense – but it has never been a Blue Water navy. Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 97 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs. Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile. Two of the continent’s oldest countries, with the largest armies, have at times edged towards conflict over the region’s major source of water.

Gallipoli was one of a series of military ‘Easterner’ adventures launched without proper analysis of the global strategic situation, without consideration of the local tactical situation, ignoring logistical realities, underestimating the strength of the opposition and predicated on a hugely optimistic assessment of the military capabilities of their own troops. Not for nothing is hubris regarded as the ‘English disease’. But the Gallipoli Campaign was a serious matter: vital resources had been drawn away from where it really mattered. The Turks were all but helpless if left on their own. They had tried to launch an ambitious attack across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal but had been easily thwarted. Gallipoli achieved nothing but to provide the Turks with the opportunity to slaughter British and French troops in copious numbers in a situation in which everything was in the defenders’ favour. Meanwhile, back on the Western Front, was the real enemy: the German Empire. Men, guns and munitions were in the process of being deployed to Gallipoli during the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle; they were still there when the Germans launched their deadly gas attack at Ypres in April, during the debacles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, and during the first ‘great push’ at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At sea Jellicoe was facing the High Seas Fleet which could pick its moment to contest the ultimate control of the seas. This was the real war – Gallipoli was nothing but a foolish sideshow.

Me había convertido en el orgulloso poseedor de un Morris Oxford cerrado, modelo 1932, de nueve años de antigüedad, un vehículo cuya carrocería había sido rociada con una pestilente pintura marrón, del color de las heces de un perro, y cuya máxima velocidad en una carretera recta y lisa era treinta y cinco millas por hora. El Mando de Cazas accedió a regañadientes a mi solicitud. Había un ferry que cruzaba el Canal de Suez por Ismailía. Era una balsa de madera, que se arrastraba de una orilla a otra por medio de unos cables, y conduje el coche hasta allí, de donde lo pasaron a la orilla del Sinaí. Pero, antes de que me autorizaran a iniciar el largo y solitario viaje a través del desierto de Sinaí, tuve que mostrarle a las autoridades que llevaba conmigo cinco galones de más de petróleo y un depósito de cinco galones de agua para beber. Luego emprendí el camino. Me encantó el viaje. Creo que me encantó porque era la primera vez en mi vida que había estado un día entero y una noche sin ver ningún ser humano. Poca gente lo ha hecho. Había una carretera estrecha de suelo duro que se extendía sobre las blandas arenas del desierto, desde el Canal hasta Beersheba, en la frontera de Palestina. La distancia total a través del desierto era de doscientas millas y no había ningún pueblo, ninguna cabaña, ningún puesto, ni ningún signo de vida humana en todo el trayecto. Mientras recorría aquella tierra estéril y despoblada, me pregunté cuántas horas o días tendría que aguardar para que pasara otro viajero que pudiera ayudarme en el caso de que se estropeara mi viejo coche. Pronto lo iba a descubrir. Llevaba viajando unas cinco horas cuando el radiador se puso a hervir por el terrible calor de las primeras horas de la tarde. Me detuve, abrí el capó y esperé a que se enfriara el radiador. Al cabo de una hora o así pude quitar el tapón del radiador y echarle un poco de agua, pero comprendí que sería inútil volver a conducir con el calor que hacía a pleno sol, porque el agua empezaría a hervir de nuevo. «Tengo que esperar», me dije, «hasta que se oculte el sol». Pero también sabía que no debía conducir de noche, porque las luces no funcionaban y, ciertamente, no quería correr el riesgo de salirme de la estrecha y dura carretera de noche y quedar atascado en la arena. Era un problema y la única forma de salir de él que se me ocurría consistía en esperar hasta el amanecer y hacer un esfuerzo para llegar a Beersheba antes de que el sol empezara a asar de nuevo el motor. Había llevado conmigo una gran sandía, para casos de emergencia, y corté una raja; separé de ella las pepitas negras con la punta de un cuchillo y me comí la rosada y fresca fruta, de pie junto al coche, al sol.

Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants.

committed a small oversight, and yet one that almost destroyed their venture. They had assumed that they would deliver the kerosene in bulk to various localities, and that the eager customers would line up with their own receptacles to be filled. The customers were expected to use old Standard Oil tin cans. But they did not. Throughout the Far East, Standard’s blue oil tins had become a prized mainstay of the local economies, used to construct everything from roofing to birdcages to opium cups, hibachis, tea strainers, and egg beaters. They were not about to give up such a valuable product. The whole scheme was now threatened—not by the machinations of 26 Broadway or by the politics of the Suez Canal, but by the habits and predilections of the peoples of Asia. A local crisis was created in each port, as the kerosene went unsold, and despairing telegrams began to flow into Houndsditch. In the quickness and ingenuity of his response to the crisis, Marcus proved his entrepreneurial genius. He sent out a chartered ship, filled with tinplate, to the Far East, and simply instructed his partners in Asia to begin manufacturing tin receptacles for the kerosene. No matter that no one knew how to do so; no matter that no one had the facilities. Marcus persuaded them they could do it. “How do you stick on the wire handles?” the agent in Singapore wrote to Samuel’s representative in Japan. Instructions were sent. “What color do you suggest?” cabled the agent in Shanghai. Mark gave the answer—“Red!

Las palabras no significan nada. Míreme a los ojos. Los ojos son la mejor forma de acercarse. Las palabras son aire. En cambio cada mirada es un ancho brazo de agua. Una corriente de agua de unos a otros. Como una vía fluvial abierta a la navegación entre los que se miran, como el canal de Suez, ¿no le parece, Andy? Mirándose a los ojos es lo más cerca que pueden estar dos personas, con la ropa puesta y sin tocarse, quiero decir. Mucho más que hablando. ¿No opina lo mismo?

I wish you to go to the inauguration of the Suez Canal first, and then proceed up the Nile.

MONK ATE DINNER IN the comfort of the kitchen, with Hester and Scuff. There was a checked cloth on the table, and the yellow china jug full of flowers on the dresser at the side was so big it hid half of the plates kept there. The back door was open to let in the warmth of the summer evening and the faint smell of earth and cut grass. “Why’s it matter so much?” Scuff asked. They had been speaking of the new canal at Suez. “Because it will take about five thousand miles off the journey from Britain to the Far East,” Hester replied, eager to sharpen his interest in anything connected with schoolwork.

it is impossible to use that if the relative clause is non-restrictive – that is, if it does not serve to identify the thing under discussion, but only serves to provide more information about that thing. So, you must write the Suez Canal, which was opened in 1869, and you cannot write *the Suez Canal, that was opened in 1869.

Desperate to stop an ‘open revival of the Jew v. Arab conflict in Palestine’, Casey and his colleagues came up with a new idea.6 This was to win the Arabs’ acceptance of the Jewish presence by compensating them with an Arab federation, for which the British government had promised its support in 1941. Seemingly oblivious to the growing opposition to Britain’s presence in the Middle East, they believed that such a federation might form the outer of two zones – the Jews would form the inner – that would protect Britain’s position astride the Suez Canal, after the war, like the concentric rings around the bull’s-eye on a target.

In postrevolutionary Alexandria, the country’s second city, located on the Mediterranean coast, the security situation was even more dire than in Cairo. So frequent had kidnappings become as a way of extorting money from wealthier families that locals were taking their children to school in convoys guarded by armed parents, and men openly carried guns to protect themselves from muggers.5 In Suez, the main city on the Suez Canal, armed robbery, rape, and murder had become so common that nipping round the corner to stock up on necessities was a risky undertaking, especially if it meant leaving a family of only females in the house alone.

To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt’s principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country’s economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt’s fate as Britain’s most valuable colony was sealed. To pay for these massive

SS Seawise Giant Seawise Giant Ordered in 1974 and delivered in 1979, the longest ship ever built was the supertanker Seawise Giant. Larger than the largest Cruise Ship afloat, the Oasis of the Seas, which is 1,186 feet long. She was over 1,504 feet long and weighed in at 260,941 gross tons. Having a beam of 220 feet and drawing 79 feet of water, she was so large that she couldn't navigate through the Panama Canal the Suez Canal or even the English Channel. After having been sunk during the 1980 -1988 Iran–Iraq War she was raised, renamed a few times and used for oil storage until she was ultimately scrapped in India, in 2010. Read “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by Captain Hank Bracker

Her official name was Liberty Enlightening the World, but she was most often referred to simply as “Bartholdi’s statue.” The Alsatian sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi had originally meant for her to stand at the entrance to the Suez Canal, where, in the veil and dress of an Egyptian peasant woman, she would have held up a lantern that symbolized the light of Egypt bringing progress to Asia. That plan, however, had been rejected by Egypt’s ruler Khedive Isma’il Pasha as too expensive, and so Bartholdi went back to the drawing board, where he converted progress into liberty.

only 10 million of the required 250 million cubic meters of earth had yet been removed. The undertaking is a vast one, far exceeding that of the Suez canal, and every one there believed it would not be finished for many years

In 1956 the Eisenhower administration used its creditor powers to pressure Britain to withdraw from the Suez Canal and hand it over to Egypt. The U.S. is in danger of giving similar power to China.8

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.

The Egyptian Expeditionary Force had initially protected the Suez Canal from the Turks. Its first assault on Gaza in March 1917 marked the start of an Allied invasion of enemy territory. In April the entire civilian populations of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were ordered to leave ‘for their own safety’. Beersheba and then Gaza were captured after heavy fighting in late October and early November. Jaffa fell on 16 November. Australian troops who entered Tel Aviv shouted ‘Europe, Europe’. Those victories paved the way for the advance on Jerusalem.

There followed heavy British investment in railway construction in the 1850s connecting the Mediterranean port of Alexandria to Cairo and the Red Sea port of Suez. In1859, French engineers began work on a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea at Suez (Figure 21.4

Elliot snorted a laugh. “You seriously think your kisses are so good they’re a reward? Your ego is so fucking over-inflated, you can see it from space. It rivals the Great Wall of China! It could stop up the Suez Canal! There are fucking Tumblr memes about your ego. Your ego is so big that the very implication that I’m being sarcastic when I say your kiss was the best kiss ever is making you completely crazy.

In 1931, when Anwar was twelve, Mahatma Gandhi passed through the Suez Canal on his way to London to negotiate the fate of India. The ship stopped in Port Said, whereupon Egyptian journalists besieged the ascetic leader. The correspondent for Al-Ahram marveled that Gandhi was wearing “nothing but a scrap of cloth worth five piasters, wire rim glasses worth three piasters

I remember explaining explaining what I saw to one brother who couldn't see the sea. "I see an endless body of blue," I said, "with a soul that courses through the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal, all the way to the Red Sea and the western coast of Yemen, where in the seaside town of Hudaydah, my father is at the market buying fish for a special meal. And when the tide comes in and the air is heavy with salt, my mind takes me straight to the port city of Aden and weekends I spent there with friends after high school. We'd lie on the beach and imagine our lives and the wives and families we would one day have.

In the first hour of the new day, in the cold, strong wind that already reaches our native shores, yes, in this one moment of eternally returning regret I realise: what staggers us, over and over again, is the morning splendour of departure!

The ship was charging hard northward, having cut through the choke point of Bab el Mandeb, or the Gate of Tears, that separated Yemen from the African nation of Djibouti. They were in the Red Sea, and Cabrillo had already called in enough favors with Atlas Marine Services, the Egyptian company that ran the Suez Canal, to see that his ship would be part of the next morning’s only northbound convoy. It would take eleven hours to transit the one hundred and one miles from Suez to Port Said, but once they were clear their final destination was only a day away. With the number of vessels heading into and out of the Suez Canal, the shipping lanes in the Red Sea were heavily congested. So as not to arouse undue suspicion from passing ships, Juan had posted a watch on the bridge, even though the Oregon was being piloted from the Op Center belowdecks. He was on the bridge now, overseeing preparations for taking on a canal pilot in the morning. Sandstorms raged in the western sky over Africa. The sun setting through burnt sienna clouds cast the bridge in an otherworldly glow. The temperature remained near eighty degrees, and wouldn’t get much cooler when the sun did finally settle over the horizon. “What

Rufus! Bank left!” Schofield yelled, peering up through their canopy. Rufus did so—rolling them on their side just as two Czech L-59s went screaming past them on either side and buried themselves in the sea. And then all of a sudden they hit the confines of the Canal— —and lost the electronic protection of the Prowlers. Schofield’s X-15 blasted down the length of the Suez Canal, flying low, banking around anchored

I don’t even know what year this is, after all.’ ‘Anno Domini eighteen seventy-five,’ Merriman said. ‘Not a bad year. In London, Mr Disraeli is doing his best to buy the Suez Canal. More than half the British merchant ships that will pass through it are sailing ships. Queen Victoria has been on the British throne for thirty-eight years. In America, the President has the splendid name of Ulysses S. Grant and Nebraska is the newest of the thirty-four states of the Union.

presence in West Asia would make it a major naval power in the Mediterranean, give it control over the Suez Canal, and ensure that the sea route to India and the Far East would be under its command.

despise the idea that paintings are investments,” Auguste said. “Why not hang a Suez Canal stock certificate on the wall?

Three developments were critical: British colonialism, as it set troops and trade in movement; religious pilgrimages and fairs, including the Haj, which took Indian Muslims to Mecca; and the transport revolution involving railroads, steamships, and the Suez Canal.

Some of the greatest minds in the history of science, including Kepler, Halley, and Euler, had speculated as to the existence of a so-called “hollow Earth.” One day, it was hoped, the technique of intra-planetary “short-cutting” about to be exercised by the boys would become routine, as useful in its way as the Suez or the Panama Canal had proved to surface shipping. At the time we speak of, however, there still remained to our little crew occasion for stunned amazement, as the Inconvenience left the South Indian Ocean’s realm of sunlight, crossed the edge of the Antarctic continent, and began to traverse an immense sweep of whiteness broken by towering black ranges, toward the vast and tenebrous interior which breathed hugely miles ahead of them. Something did seem odd, however. “The navigation’s not as easy this time,” Randolph mused, bent over the chart table in some perplexity. “Noseworth, you can remember the old days. We knew for hours ahead of time.” Skyfarers here had been used to seeing flocks of the regional birds spilling away in long helical curves, as if to escape being drawn into some vortex inside the planet sensible only to themselves, as well as the withdrawal, before the advent of the more temperate climate within, of the eternal snows, to be replaced first by tundra, then grassland, trees, plantation, even at last a settlement or two, just at the Rim, like border towns, which in former times had been the sites of yearly markets, as dwellers in the interior came out to trade luminous fish, giant crystals with geomantic properties, unrefined ores of various useful metals, and mushrooms unknown to the fungologists of the surface world, who had once journeyed regularly hither in high expectation of discovering new species with new properties of visionary enhancement.

He recalls sympathetically the words of The Observer after Britain’s disastrous military intervention over the Suez Canal in 1956: ‘We had not realized that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.

I received another shock when the ship passed through the Suez Canal. It proceeded slowly so that the waves would not wash down the loose sand on the banks. As we passed, a group of Arab workers on the shore started shouting obscenities and lifted their gallabiya - long garments like nightshirts - to flaunt their genitals at the British servicewomen, who were on the deck watching the world go by in the torrid heat.The women shrieked in surprise and disgust, much to the delight of the Arabs, who put their hands on their penises ands hook them. I had seen monkeys in the Botanic Gardens in Singapoer do this to visitors who refused them bananas. Later, I learnt they hated the British. Why, I did not know.

the building of the Ismailia mosque, which was to become the Brotherhood’s first headquarters, was even funded by the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company.

the NSR—the Northern Sea Route. This fulfills a major Russian objective, the opening up of a transit route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean. It has been facilitated by the retreat of the Arctic ice, although with more variability than sometimes recognized. For instance, in September 2014, the ice extent was 50 percent greater than it had been in September 2012. The route cuts the distance between Shanghai and Rotterdam by about 30 percent, and in the process avoids both the narrow Malacca Strait and the Suez Canal. This opening has been welcomed by Japan, South Korea, and especially by China, which, describing itself as a “Near Arctic State,” applies its own distinctive name to the route—the Polar Silk Road.

In the Far East, compulsory labor can work wonders, just like here... If only Belgium wanted to see that. This could create "inexhaustible resources and exploiting the soil and peoples of the Far East can only be brought to civilization and well-being in this way.

Somalia should have been one of the most economically successful African nations: it has the continent’s longest coastline, is strategically situated on the Suez Canal shipping lane, and has a long-standing history of trade and entrepreneurship. Sadly, events have taken the country along a different trajectory,

Egypt blocked the Straits of Tiran leading to Israel’s southern port of Eilat, and the Suez Canal was closed to Israeli shipping. The sum total of these provocations made Israeli leaders feel their state was in mortal danger from Egypt. But Israel’s tiny industries could not supply it with adequate weapons.

The Suez Canal was a vital British interest. Moreover, Nasser was supporting Algerian rebels in their fight against France. The two European powers decided that military action was the only solution. They needed a regional ally—one that was also threatened by Egypt. Israel fit the bill. France began supplying Israel with the arms, tanks, armored vehicles, and planes it needed to counter the growing Egyptian menace. Meanwhile, the situation along the Egyptian border worsened, as waves of fedayeen continued to kill civilians while Egyptian artillery struck into Israel.

Six months after Lucien traveled to Australia, Mum left her son, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her work, her friends and her country, sailed over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, into the Pacific and joined her husband in Sydney to start a new life. That's the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone was starting again after the war, after losing mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children, husbands and wives. It seems shocking now, but there wasn't such a sentimental attitude towards family or such a fear of death then as we have now. (People who live through wars often develop attachment disorders as protection from loss.)

By then tensions were rising in Palestine. Almost exactly twenty-five years earlier, in the hope of creating what it called ‘a buffer Jewish state’ to guard the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal and keep the French at bay, the British government of the day had issued the Balfour Declaration, named after the then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour. This pledged support for a Jewish national home in Palestine so long as it did not impinge on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities there. It helped Britain secure the mandate to rule Palestine in 1920.

How much have these wars cost Egypt and the Arab world since 1948? Until the October War, 99% of the economic burden was born by Egypt. Even after the October War—when the entire Arab world made a lot of money out of oil and added to their wealth—Egypt, by contrast, was drained of its resources. We did not even achieve much during the October War. We regained a very small portion of the Sinai, and we managed to reopen the Suez Canal. Against this the cost to Egypt was 14 billion pounds, plus all the losses in men and equipment. The October War also made it clear that we can gain less by war than by peace, since the United States sided with Israel during the war, and we cannot fight the United States. And the Soviet Union will never side with an Arab country as the United States did with Israel.

When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it allowed tropical species from the waters of the Indian Ocean to move into the Mediterranean. And they did. Yet while 250 species of all kinds established themselves, there has only been one recorded extinction. Similarly, when the Panama Canal joined the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in 1914, biodiversity increased on both sides. North America has morre birds and mammal species than when the Europeans first landed. And the addition of some four thousand plant species has added 20 percent to biodiversity and not, so far as is known, resulted in a single plant species being lost. Likewise, the UK’s twenty-three hundred additional species have not directly caused any known local extinctions.

Herbert Samuel, who was both Jewish and a Zionist, spotted the opportunity to promote his long-held ambition to see a Jewish state in Palestine. He began to argue that, by supporting the creation of a Jewish colony immediately east of Suez, Britain could deny that territory to rival foreign powers who might then threaten its control of the Suez Canal. ‘We cannot proceed on the supposition that our present happy relations with France will continue always,’ he warned his colleagues. ‘A common frontier with a European neighbour in the Lebanon is a far smaller risk to the vital interests of the British Empire than a common frontier at El Arish.

this must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy’s life-line and of protecting our own.” By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially “accessories to the crime,” that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line—the narrow front of southern Palestine—an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties.

Like the other giants in its class, the Marie Maersk was built for the profitable Asia-Europe route: from Busan and Kwangyang in South Korea, then along the eastern and southern Chinese coasts, down to Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal to Tangier and southern Spain, then up to Scandinavia by way of the Netherlands and Germany. Then back again; the round trip takes around six months. The kaleidoscopic cargo might include iPads, smartphones, cars, bulldozers, baseball caps and T-shirts from Chinese factories; then, on the return journey, fruits, chocolates, wine, watches and whisky.

De mister Churchill a mister Balfour 26 de mayo de 1915 Le dejo a usted una tarea de gran dificultad y que requiere una atención inmediata: la protección de la flota de los Dardanelos contra los ataques submarinos. No subestime la gravedad de este peligro. Hasta que pueda ser contrarrestado, las consecuencias pueden no tener límite. Durante estos quince días, no he tenido la autoridad necesaria para tomar decisiones importantes. Su espíritu claro y su juicio tranquilo darán el impulso necesario. Por mi parte, le dejo las notas que siguen por si quiere tenerlas en cuenta: 1. Conviene proseguir las operaciones militares al ritmo más acelerado posible, a fin de acortar el período peligroso. Todas las fuerzas necesarias que puedan estar disponibles y ser allí empleadas han de enviarse de una vez e inmediatamente. 2. Hasta que puedan reanudarse estas operaciones militares definitivas, la escuadra ha de permanecer segura en el puerto de Mudros o en el canal de Suez. Los buques indispensables para la protección de las tropas han de protegerse con barcos carboneros o transportes varios, amarrados a sus costados, hasta que hayan llegado las chalupas provistas de redes contra torpedos. 3. Tan pronto como sea posible, es preciso enviar buques protegidos contra los torpedos. Como indicaba en mi nota del día 13 del corriente al primer lord naval, los nueve monitores pesados han de ser enviados en cuanto vayan estando listos y también los cuatro Edgars provistos de bulges,112 que harán las veces de baterías de calibre mediano para fines de bombardeo. En los Edgars se han perdido quince días con este intermedio. Hasta que lleguen estos buques y mientras no se emprendan operaciones terrestres definitivas, hay que reducir la exposición de los barcos tanto como sea posible. 4. Hay que enviar al menos cien chalupas y remolcadores con 95 millas de redes indicadoras y ocho destructores más, que, de paso, escoltarán a los transportes; todo ello aparte de las otras medidas ya tomadas y que le serán expuestas. 5. La protección contra los submarinos ha de organizarse alrededor de la punta de la península de Gallípoli a partir de una gran zona rodeada de redes y ocupada por gran número de chalupas armadas y de hidros constantemente preparados. Insisto en que ha de actuarse enérgicamente y en gran escala. Por lo demás, se ha hecho ya mucho en este sentido. 6. Han de apresurarse las medidas para vigilar y proveer de redes la salida del Adriático, para buscar las probables bases de submarinos de la costa de Asia Menor, a fin de obstruirlas con minas, y organizar un vasto sistema de información sin reparar en gastos, cosas todas que han sido ya empezadas. 7. Hay que soportar con entereza todas las pérdidas. Le deseo de corazón que triunfe en este y en todos los demás asuntos angustiosos que le han sido confiados y que ha aceptado usted tan leal y valerosamente. Así terminó mi administración en el Almirantazgo. Durante treinta y dos meses de preparación y diez de guerra, había sostenido la primera responsabilidad y dispuesto del poder ejecutivo.

Prior to the building of the Suez Canal in the mid 1800’s, Israel was always considered as being a part of Africa, because it shared the same border as Egypt (the Land of Ham). But after the canal was built, they start calling Israel and the continents surrounding it – the Middle East. Consequently, when people think of the Middle East today, the thought of black people being the original inhabitants of Israel (Canaan) does not cross their mind. Instead, what crosses their mind is a picture of the European Jews wearing black top hats and long beards. This explains why our people think the bible is a “white man’s” book, because all of the people who claim to be the chosen people of God today are white.

The theory of Israel being a separate continent from Africa comes from the building of the Suez Canal, a sea level waterway that divides Israel (and the other Middle Eastern countries) from the border of Africa.