It was in the Middle East, in November 1956, that the United Nations (UN) first equipped its peacekeeping forces with blue helmets. This was to distinguish the 6,000 or so military personnel tasked with monitoring the ceasefire following Israel's offensive against Egypt, with the backing of France and Great Britain.

Israel categorically refused the deployment on its territory of this United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), which, in March 1957, had to make do with taking position on the Egyptian side of the Israeli-Egyptian border, as well as inside the Gaza Strip, where its headquarters were located.

In May 1967, Cairo demanded the UNEF's withdrawal, which led to an escalation with Israel that culminated in the Six-Day War the following month, with Israeli reoccupation of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights were also occupied in the wake of this conflict).

The failure of this first experience of a UN peacekeeping force in the Middle East was made all the more bitter by the fact that 14 Indian peacekeepers were killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in June 1967. It would be seven years before the UN sent its peacekeepers again to the region, this time following the October 1973 war between Israel, on the one hand, and Egypt and Syria, on the other.

UNEF II was set up to oversee the Israeli-Egyptian ceasefire before a United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) was established in May 1974 with a comparable mission on the Syrian front. Unlike the original UNEF, these two peacekeeping forces were not deployed on the international border but on territory still occupied by Israel, which had agreed to a limited disengagement rather than an actual withdrawal. UNEF II's mandate came to an end in March 1979 with the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt under the United States's aegis. Over the next three years, Egypt gradually reclaimed the entire Sinai Peninsula.

UNDOF, on the other hand, is still deployed half a century later, with a thousand blue helmets under Nepalese command. Hafez al-Assad, ruler of Syria from 1970 to 2000, and then his son and successor Bashar al-Assad were determined to maintain calm on the Golan front, despite the annexation of this Syrian territory by Israel in December 1981.

As for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), it was established in March 1978 in the wake of Israel's first invasion of Lebanon, itself provoked by the bloodiest attack ever perpetrated in Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). UNIFIL's mandate was both to "confirm the withdrawal of Israeli troops" and assist "the Lebanese government in restoring its effective authority." After a few bloody incidents with Palestinian fighters, UNIFIL managed to deploy in southern Lebanon. But Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon only to establish a "security belt" on its northern border, patrolled by a pro-Israeli militia recruited from the local population.

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