Keith Kyle, the author of this long book (656 pages, index included), manages to turn an interesting topic into a boring review of details within details that, ultimately, tells us he has done his homework searching for the last document in the darkest corner of some British archive, but has failed at keeping the reader's inrterest or his objectivity as a writer intact. The Arab-Israeli conflict is one where objectivity is wished for, although never attained. Kyle pretends to attempt objectivity and then slides into partisanship without even noticing or, at least, not wanting the reader to notice. His stance is very much against the joint Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, and he can't be faulted for that. A colossal blunder on the part of two former important powers, it served Israel in its limited security concerns and, ironically, it also helped the Egyptians and Colonel Nasser. That strange war humiliated the British and caused the downfall of the English Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. However, Kyle strays from here on, and provides the reader with hundreds of pages of obscure documents and his own "insight" and opinions, which can be summarized thus: Israel, dominated by Zionists (this is supposed to be an insult) suckered the British Empire and the French Republic into a fight where they could not be winners, only to help its ailing economy and tell Nasser, in the starkest terms, that war with the Jewish State was extremely serious. Kyle wants me, and the rest of the reading public, to be as outraged as he is about this, and I can't help but smile. Whether Israel suckered the two Europeans, or whether it got on the bandwagon when the decision to wallop Egypt had been taken in London and Paris, the English and French got what they deserved. Most of Kyle's acid comments are directed toward the British government and a good portion of that country's press. However, there is a badly supressed anti-Israel feeling throughout the book, which is not surprising, given the author's connection with "The Economist," one of the most respected magazines in the world, one that can truly be called "international" due to the coverage the entire planet receives in its pages, but one that has a documented history of antagonism towards Israel and some other countries (most of Latin America, Turkey, South Korea, for example), while tending to see with very benevolent eyes the doings of other countries, like Ireland. By antagonism I refer to the insistence, article after article, in portraying only the bad, rarely the good, and when the good is discussed, it is peppered with enough negatives as to render the praise, faint as it was, null. Both the magazine and the writer suffer from a very British maladie: incredulity at how low England has fallen in the world rank. Kyle sees the Suez affair as the proverbial last push that sent the United Kingdom tumbling down the steps, and showed it as militarily incapable of credible dissuasion outside the British Isles. Britain was eventually told by Eisenhower to cease and desist in Suez and the British complied with their patron's wishes. There is the parallel that Kyle seems to hate the most: Israel also does -mostly- what the US says. But Israel appears to be quite comfortable with this situation and is, after all, a country that only 20 years ago became developed ("The Economist" doesn't recognize this and still lists Israel as a "developing" nation). Israel has been able to take care of its wars quite capably. By contrast, England is part of the G-7, one of the richest countries in the world, and, still, needed all the help it could get from the United States in 1982 to defeat a third world country such as Argentina, in a fourth-class war against a fifth-class army. It could have gone alone against Egypt in 1956, but it needed a ready excuse -separating the fighting sides, Egypt and Israel- and a willing partner in the deed, and that was France. Perhaps given what Jewish terrorists did to British soldiers -and sometimes civilians, as in the bombing of the King David Hotel- in the last years of the Palestinian Mandate, right before the Israeli War of Independence and the foundation of the State of Israel, it is understandable that the author has very cold feelings toward Israelis, especially the Israeli military, so efficient, so ruthless, so identified with the Israeli people. But he pretends to be objective. That is just not true. As I said, nobody is really objective in this particular conflict. I am biased toward Israel. Kyle's pretension of objectivity and the minutiae of documentation that nothing adds to the overall picture, although it does inflate his book, are the main reasons "Suez" gets, barely, one star with me. But, then again, I, at least, admit that I am biased.