. The Arab defeat aroused further nationalism, which forced the withdrawal of British forces from the Suez Canal, the overthrow of the Egyptian regime of King Farouk in 1952 and his eventual replacement by a military junta, led after 1954 by Gamal Nasser, who symbolized and energized anti-Israeli sentiment throughout the Arab world. Tensions remained high as the Arab embargo on Israel and Egyptian-supported fedayeen attacks from the Gaza strip led to Israeli reprisals. Finally, the Israelis joined the French and British attempt to overthrow Nasser by force in 1956 after he nationalized the Suez Canal, but they were forced to withdraw their forces nearing Suez under international pressure led by the United States.
Between 1956 and 1967, an arms race developed in which the Israelis, with support largely from the French, modernized their armed forces and the Egyptians and Syrians became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for the supply of weapons. According to Lacquer (1968, p. 66), about $2 billion in Soviet arms flowed to them in the decade prior to the outbreak of war in 1967, including more than 2,500-3,000 modern tanks and more than a thousand jet aircraft, mostly Mig-17s and Mig-21s.
The balance of power in the Middle East was destabilized by the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq by radical nationalists and even more so by the arrival in power of the left-wing Ba'th party in Syria in February, 1966, which, according to Brecher (1980), "decided to seek legitimacy in the radicalization of the Arab-Israeli conflict" (p. 42). The Syrians armed and supported Fatah, the Palestinian guerrilla movement led by Yasir Arafat, which began to launch raids into and explode bombs in Israel, in early 1965. Israel retaliated, most forcefully in its raid of November 1966 on a Fatah base in the village of Samua in Jordan, where it destroyed a full Jordanian division. In the air over Syria on April 7, 1967, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) d...