THE capture of Rafa concluded the first phase of that part of the Great War which was centred on Egypt. For the British the country was valuable above all because the Suez Canal ran through it, for this formed a vital part of the main route linking Britain and its eastern empire – India, Malaya, East Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. In enemy hands it would provide just as easy an access to those lands. It was because the Turks had reached the east bank of the Canal, so closing it for a time, that the British forces had been fighting in the Sinai desert for the previous two years. During that time a series of other conflicts in the region had also developed, so that what had been a single area of fighting along the Canal had spread all over the Near East and nearby Africa. The fight at Rafa had marked the end of the two-year process of driving the Turks from the Canal, but the whole Near Eastern situation had changed in that time, and it now marked not just an end, but a point at which new decisions had to be made.

Egypt had been technically Turkish territory until 1914, though by then it had had for a century its own autonomous ruler, the Khedive. He in turn had gone into debt to greedy European money-lenders, and had been subjected to supervision by a Financial Commission whose purpose was to service those debts by managing the khedivial finances, and through them the whole Egyptian economy. Hardly surprisingly, this had not been to the liking of the Egyptians, for their welfare was low in the Commission's priorities, and in order to ensure that the Commission could operate, the British had occupied the country in 1882. The Khedive was retained in nominal authority, but a British High Commissioner was in charge of civil matters and a British Sirdar was in command of the Egyptian army; theoretical suzerainty still lay with the Ottoman Sultan. The Ottoman layer of this curious situation was removed in 1914, when Egypt became a British protectorate, in the process of which the reigning Khedive, who was in exile, was replaced. This had been one of the justifications for the invasion by a Turkish army out of Palestine. The Turks had been stopped at the Suez Canal.