On October 29, 1956, Israel’s army invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, opening the Suez Crisis. The invasion had its roots three months earlier, when Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal — seizing the vital waterway from its British and French owners and placing one of the world’s great arteries of trade under Egyptian control. London and Paris, unwilling to accept the loss, answered in secret: in a pact with Israel, they backed the assault on Sinai, and then bombed Egyptian cities themselves under the pretense of protecting the canal. What was presented as a mission to keep a waterway open was, in truth, an attempt by two fading empires to take back what Egypt had claimed as its own.

But the plan backfired, and swiftly. The United States and the Soviet Union — rivals who agreed on almost nothing — both demanded a ceasefire, and the combined pressure left the invaders with nowhere to go. All three withdrew. Britain and France, who had acted to defend their grip on the canal and their standing as imperial powers, left humiliated. Nasser, who had refused to bend, emerged a hero across the Arab world, his name carried on streets and in songs far beyond Egypt’s borders.

That is why October 29 still matters. It was the day the old empires learned they could no longer redraw the map on their own terms — the invasion that ended an era of empire.