When Nasser forced Britain to withdraw from Egypt in 1954, many puppet Arab leaders depen- dent on foreign assistance became alarmed by his growing popularity. Nasser had begun buying Soviet arms from Czechoslovakia in defiance of a I960 West-imposed arms control deal. He also intensified the guerilla campaign against Israel from bases in the Gaza Strip. In 1956, the United States clumsily attempted to curtail Nasser's power by withdrawing its offer to finance the Aswan High Dam. Rather than yield to the snub, Nasser nationalized the previously international Suez Canal to use its revenues for the dam. Israel, Britain, and France devised a scheme to take the canal. Israel took the Sinai, opened its port of Eilat to international shipping, and dealt Nasser's military a major blow. The Anglo-French force entered Egypt and began to seize the canal under the pretext of separating Egyptian and Israeli combatants. The military vic- tors, however, had not considered world reaction to their adventure. The United States and the Soviet Union, both furious, applied intense diplomatic pressure. When Israel, Britain, and France withdrew their troops to placate the US, Nasser was heralded as the savior of the Arab world without having won a battle. THE 1967 SIX-DAY WAR. During the mid 1960s there was an increase in raids on Israel backed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization . In return, Israel hit Palestinian refugee camps. Meanwhile, Nasser successfully demanded the with- drawal of the UN buffer-zone troops stationed in the Sinai since 1956. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol warned that a blockade of the Straits of Tiran would be taken as an act of aggression. Nasser, under pressure from Syria and Saudi Arabia, initi- ated a blockade on May 22, 1967. Jordan, Iraq, and Syria also deployed troops along Israel's borders. On June 5, Israel launched a preemptive strike against air fields in the Sinai, obliterating the Egyptian air force before it ever got off the ground. Eshkol issued a warning to Jordan's King Hussein via the UN supervision force, but Hussein refused to heed it; he opened fire on the UN headquarters in Jerusalem and began bombarding Jewish Jerusalem. In response, Israeli forces broke through the Jordanian Unes, surrounded the Old City, and advanced toward Ramallah and the Dead Sea; simultaneously, they attacked Jenin in the North. East Jerusalem and the Old City fell to Israel on June 7, and by June 9 all parties had accepted a cease-fire. Shortly afterwards, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, much to the chagrin of the United States. From Egypt, Israel had won the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, from Syria the Golan Heights, and from Jordan the West Bank. With the United States behind Israel and the Soviet Union behind Nasser, any local conflict raised the threat of superpower confrontation. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967 and accepted by all parties, stipulated "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territo- ries occupied in the recent conflict.