Israel, meanwhile, was keen on war: McHugo says its military and much of its government were ‘itching for war’; they wanted the ‘destruction of the Egyptian army’.33 Rogan explains that, while the Arabs were anxious to correct the humiliation of 1948, Israel too ‘needed one good war to secure defensible boundaries and inflict a decisive defeat on the Arabs’.34 Israel knew it was militarily superior to its Arab neighbours. While Nasser may have thought that US intervention would lead to a settlement, Israel was ‘not prepared to give Egypt a political victory which did not correspond to the
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