The failed offensive was aimed at seizing the Suez canal back from then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser after he privatized the strategic waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean beyond.

Following Nasser’s move, Britain, France and Israel colluded in an elaborate plan under which the Jewish state attacked Egypt, and France and Britain sent paratroopers to “separate the belligerents” but in practice to secure the canal.

The move incensed the Soviet Union, which threatened to intervene with nuclear weapons. When US president Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to back Britain, fighting was abruptly halted after 10 days, troops withdrawn by the end of the year and UN peacekeepers sent in.

Widely seen as a fiasco, the crisis led to the resignation of British prime minister Anthony Eden, severely strained trans-Atlantic relations and undermined both France’s and Britain’s standing in the Arab world.

In Israel, the war is largely forgotten, ranking well below the campaigns of 1948, 1967, 1973 and the two Lebanon conflicts in public consciousness.

Ahead of the 50^th anniversary of the crisis, newspapers have hardly mentioned the topic and no public ceremonies are planned.

“It wasn’t a turning point in the balance of power,” says Joseph Heller, professor emeritus of international relations at Hebrew University.

“It was neither won nor lost. There was no respite in the Arab-Israeli conflict... nothing was solved.”

“The fact that we don’t count it as among major wars says much,” says Yael Dayan, the daughter of the famed Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, who was chief of staff during the conflict, and a young army conscript herself at the time.

“Today, when we tend to make a difference between choice wars and wars of necessity... you could say that “56 was a choice war,” she says.

Different versions have been given as to why Israel decided to join the venture — to stop border incursions from the then Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, gain access for Israeli vessels to the Suez canal, an attempt to increase territory and an opportunity to get rid of Nasser, hostile to the then eight-year-old Jewish state.

“When France and Britain decided to invade, Israel saw an opportunity to get rid of Nasser, so we joined the war,” Heller says.

“Ben-Gurion was frightened to death that Egypt, with Soviet support, would annihilate the Jewish state,” he says. “America was not supporting Israel at the time.”

The campaign led Israeli leaders to focus on building up the Jewish state’s military capacity in preparation for the next conflict that they felt was just around the corner.

“It was a war that made us fit, that made certain that we had to be taken into account in the area as an army, that we were here to stay,” Dayan says.

It also sparked a change in relations between Israel and the United States, which today is the Jewish state’s most powerful and important ally, with Washington giving Israel oral guarantees on security and starting to provide financial aid in the year following the conflict.

“America came nearer to Israel afterward, though it took some time,” Heller says. “It was a trigger for improving relations, there is no doubt about that.”