The guarantee that failed Israel is back.

In 1957, Israel surrendered hard-won gains for promises that dissolved when tested. The emerging order with the Islamic Republic of Iran bears an unsettling resemblance.

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a writer in Toronto.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In recent days, an American president stood in a French palace, signed a memorandum ending a war that America undertook with Israeli support — a war Israel was then forbidden to finish — and called the Israeli prime minister his “very small partner.”

He said it almost fondly.

Benjamin Netanyahu “gets a little excited sometimes,” Trump explained. We are the big partner. He is the small one.

When trying to make sense of the present, I often go looking for it in the past. Not for comfort necessarily, but because the present is bad at telling you what it actually is, and the past is much better at it.

So when I read that phrase — “very small partner” — I went looking and found that I had read this script before. The setting changes, the waterway changes, the enemy changes. The structure, not so much. A great power decides that Israel’s war has gone far enough, ends it on terms Israel didn’t write, reopens a waterway, and offers, in place of victory, a dangerous guarantee.

Let me tell you about the last time.

In the summer of 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, who still imagined themselves empires, wanted him gone. They conspired in secret with Israel at a villa outside Paris, in the suburb of Sèvres, over three days in late October.

The plan was a piece of theatre: Israel would invade the Sinai. Britain and France would then sweep in to separate the Israeli and Egyptian combatants and seize the canal, as though they were peacemakers and not the actual authors of the war.

Israel had its own reason to play the part. For years, Egypt had blockaded the Straits of Tiran, narrow sea passages between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas that connect the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea — choking off Israeli shipping to the south and strangling the Port of Eilat (Israel’s sole Red Sea port).

Freedom of navigation was a real Israeli interest, not a pretext. So Israel invaded on October 29, 1956, and went deep into Sinai.

Then Washington, D.C. ended it.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had not been told. He learned of the invasion the way you learn of a betrayal — after the fact — from people other than the ones who owed you the truth. He was furious. He didn’t issue a stern statement. He waged financial war on his own allies.

The United States blocked Britain’s credit at the International Monetary Fund. It blocked a loan from the Export-Import Bank. It threatened to dump its holdings of British sterling, which would have collapsed the pound while Britain’s reserves were already bleeding out. Oil was withheld. Within days the British government folded, and with it the last pretension of European power in the Middle East.

UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned three months later.

Israel held on longer. It took until March of 1957, and relentless American pressure, before Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to give the Sinai back to Egypt.

He didn’t return it for nothing. He extracted assurances. The Straits of Tiran would stay open. Israeli ships would reach Eilat. A United Nations Emergency Force (the brainchild of Canada’s Lester B. Pearson) would stand in the Sinai as a buffer, and, he was told, it could not simply be waved away on Egypt’s say-so.

This was the consolation prize. Israel surrendered the territory it had conquered and received, in exchange, a guarantee; an international promise; a piece of paper about an open waterway. Hold onto that piece of paper.

It was worth nothing in just 10 years.

In May of 1967, Nasser unilaterally ordered the UN force out of the Sinai. The UN, to its lasting shame, complied at once. Then Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the exact act that Israel had warned, in 1957, it would treat as a cause of war. Ninety percent of Israel’s oil came through that strait.

So the Israelis went to the guarantors. They sent Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban to Paris, London, and Washington to call in the promise of 1957. And the guarantors discovered they had urgent business elsewhere.

France, under Charles de Gaulle, had made its peace with the Arab world after losing Algeria, and was no longer interested. Washington was drowning in the Vietnam War and in no mood to force open anyone’s strait. De Gaulle admitted, to Eban’s face, that yes, the commitment had been made. It simply would not be kept.

U.S. President Lyndon Johnson later called Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran the single act of folly most responsible for the war that followed. He was right about the folly. He was quiet about the other half of it, which is that the United States had promised, a decade earlier, that this exact folly would never be allowed to stand — and then allowed it to stand.

Israel opened the strait itself, in June, by force, alone — miraculously, in just six days. It has not leaned on a guarantee about Tiran since, because there was nothing left to lean on. The guarantee had been written in water.

Smoke rises from oil tanks beside the Suez Canal hit during the initial Anglo-French assault on Port Said in November 1956. (photo: Wikipedia)

Now look at last week. The United States went to war with Iran in February, with Israel alongside it. Never had two more formidable air forces fought together for a more just cause. Whatever you think of how it started, the ending is the part that should hold your attention. Because the ending is 1956 again, with the furniture rearranged.

The war is being closed on American terms. Israel was not in the room. It was not shown the text of the Memorandum of Understanding until after the fact. The centrepiece of the deal is a waterway: the Strait of Hormuz, reopened, the American blockade lifted, the oil flowing.

There is a guarantee architecture, of course. There always is. Toll-free passage, but only for 60 days. A future administration of the Strait, to be worked out later by Iran and the Gulf states. A $300 billion dollar fund to rebuild Iran, to be paid for by the same Gulf neighbours that Iran spent this spring bombing.

It’s the same sand: a temporary arrangement dressed as a permanent one, a promise about an open strait that depends entirely on the interests of powers who will have moved on by the time it is tested.

But here’s the cruelty in the 2026 version, the detail that makes it way worse than 1956: Back then, the open strait was at least Israel’s prize. Tiran was reopened for Israeli ships. This time the strait is opened for Iran. Israel does not even get the consolation. It gets the bill — the surviving enemy, and a patron who stood at a microphone and called it the “very small partner.”

And the patron is already turning away. Trump’s whole posture toward the region is transactional, Gulf-facing, allergic to long wars. He is scared of lengthy engagements, even the ones he undertook.

Trump has said, more or less, that he keeps no permanent enemies. He thinks that Hamas recently hasn’t been that bad, and he has essentially faulted Israel for the conflict with Hezbollah. The future he is building runs through Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and the reconstruction of Tehran, and Israel is a line item in it, not the point of it.

So here is what I take from the two straits, 70 years apart: A guarantee from a great power is not a gift. It’s a loan, and the great power decides when to call it in and when to let it lapse. The open waterway that someone else’s navy opens for you is a waterway that someone else’s navy can close against you, or simply decline to keep open, the moment its attention drifts. Tiran in 1957 was a solemn international commitment, and it dissolved the first time it was tested.

The deeper danger is not that the guarantee fails. It is what the guarantee does to you while you still believe in it. It teaches you to stop guaranteeing yourself. It persuades you that your security has been subcontracted to someone larger and kinder, so that you can lay down the heavy work of holding the strait open with your own hand.

And then the day comes, and the larger kinder power is in Vietnam, or in Versailles, or simply in love with a deal, and you discover that the only freedom of navigation you ever truly held was the kind you took and kept yourself.

The trajectory of the “very small partner” runs in one direction. In 1956, Israel was the junior member who at least got the strait. In 2026, it is the “very small partner” who gets nothing. If you let someone else define how small you are, they will keep refining the number downward, because it costs them nothing and it flatters them to do it.

We cannot take anything for granted.

The most expensive illusion in our history is the one that keeps coming back, the one that whispers someone bigger will keep the water open for us, so that we need not keep it open ourselves.

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