CHAPTER 10
The Arab world entered the new era of the Cold War in a state of revolutionary ferment. The anti-imperialism of the interwar years gained renewed vigor at the end of the Second World War. Hostility toward Britain and France was rife in the aftermath of the Palestine War. This complicated Britain’s position in Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, where it still enjoyed preferential alliances with the monarchies it had created.
The old nationalist politicians, and the kings they served, were discredited for their failure to make a clean break from British imperial rule. A host of radical new parties, ranging from the Islamist Muslim Brothers to the Communists, vied for the allegiance of a new generation of nationalists. The young officers in the military were not immune to the political ferment of the age. The younger generation questioned the legitimacy of Arab monarchies and the multiparty parliaments installed by the British, instead showing more enthusiasm for revolutionary republicanism.
The transcendental ideology of the age was Arab nationalism. Liberation from colonial rule was the common wish of all Arab peoples by the 1940s, but they had yet higher political aspirations. Most people in the Arab world believed they were united by a common language, history, and culture grounded in the Islamic past, a culture shared by Muslims and non-Muslims. They wanted to dissolve the frontiers drafted by the imperial powers to divide the Arabs and build a new commonwealth based on the deep historic and cultural ties that bound the Arabs. They believed that Arab greatness in world affairs could only be restored through unity. And they took to the streets, in their thousands, to protest against imperialism, to criticize their governments’ failings, and to demand Arab unity.
Egypt was in many ways at the forefront of these developments. Medical doctor and feminist intellectual Nawal El Saadawi entered medical school in Cairo in 1948.
THE ARAB WORLD TODAY
The atmosphere was charged with political tension. “In those days,” she recalled in her autobiography, “the university was the scene of almost continuous demonstrations.” Saadawi was no stranger to nationalist politics. Her father read the newspaper with her and condemned the corruption of the king, the military class, and the British occupation of Egypt. “It’s a chronic triple misery and there’s no solution to it without a change in the regime,” he would tell his daughter. “People must wake up, must rebel.”1 The younger Saadawi took her father’s words to heart and by the time she was a high school student had already begun taking part in the mass demonstrations that brought Cairo to a standstill in the late 1940s.
The demonstrations reflected the Egyptian people’s impatience for change. In the aftermath of the Palestine disaster Egyptians were disenchanted with political parties, disillusioned by King Farouq, and increasingly intolerant of the British position in their country. The postwar era was an age of decolonization, and the British had long outstayed their welcome in Egypt.
Egypt went to the polls in 1950 to elect a new government after the turmoil of defeat in Palestine and the assassination of Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi in December 1948. The Wafd secured victory and formed a government that resumed negotiations with the British to achieve the full independence that had eluded Egyptian nationalists since 1919. Between March 1950 and October 1951, the Wafd conducted talks with the British government. After nineteen months of talks failed to produce results, the Wafd government unilaterally abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. The British refused to recognize the abrogation, which would have turned their forces in the Suez Canal Zone into an illegal army of occupation. And though the British Empire was on the retreat—the British had withdrawn from India in 1947—the strategic importance of the Suez Canal remained a cornerstone of British foreign policy.
Having failed to achieve its goals through negotiation, the Wafd stepped up pressure on the British by other means. With the tacit approval of the Wafd government, young men—mostly Muslim Brothers, students, peasants, and workers—volunteered for guerrilla units, known as fida’iyin(literally, “fighters ready to sacrifice themselves”). In October 1951 the guerrilla bands began to attack British troops and facilities in the Canal Zone. The British responded to these attacks with force. One of Nawal El Saadawi’s classmates left his medical studies to join the fida’iyin and was killed in action against the British, a martyr for the cause.
The armed struggle in the Canal Zone provoked intense political debates in Cairo. Saadawi remembered a student rally she attended at the university in November 1951. She listened with growing impatience to the student politicians—Wafdists, Communists, Muslim Brothers—as they struck heroic poses and waxed rhetorically. Then one of the fida’iyin, a man named Ahmed Helmi, was called to the podium. He was one of the freedom fighters who had taken part in the attacks on British troops occupying the Canal Zone. He appealed to his squabbling classmates in a quiet voice. “Colleagues,” he explained, “the freedom fighters in the Canal Zone need ammunition and rations, their rear lines have to be stable to protect them, there is no time, no room for partisan struggles. We need unity of the people.”2 Saadawi was riveted by the intense young man and later married him.
By January 1952 the British had decided to use military force to assert their control over the Suez Canal Zone. British forces began to occupy Egyptian police stations in the Canal Zone in order to prevent the policemen from lending their support to the fida’iyin. On January 24 the British secured the surrender of 160 policemen in their station in one of the canal towns without a fight. The Egyptian government was embarrassed by the ease with which the British had taken over the station, and in response it called on Egyptian policemen in the Canal Zone to resist the British “to the last bullet.” The opportunity came the very next day, when 1,500 British troops surrounded the governorate in Ismailiyya and demanded its surrender. The 250 policemen guarding the government offices refused. The British pummeled Egyptian positions with tank and artillery fire for nine hours, as the Egyptians fought until their ammunition was depleted. By the time they finally surrendered, the Egyptians had suffered forty-six dead and seventy-two wounded.
News of the British assault provoked outrage across Egypt. A general strike was declared for the next day, Saturday, January 26, 1952. Workers and students converged on Cairo in the tens of thousands. The city braced itself for a day of mass demonstrations protesting the British action. Yet nothing had prepared the people or government of Egypt for Black Saturday.
Dark forces were at work in Cairo on Black Saturday. What began as a series of angry demonstrations quickly degenerated into violence in which over fifty Egyptians and seventeen foreigners (including nine Britons) were killed by the crowd. Provocateurs and arsonists worked under the cover of the demonstrations to generate maximum disorder. Anouar Abdel Malek, a Communist intellectual who witnessed the events of Black Saturday, described how the demonstrators stood aside to watch in fascination as the arsonists put the richest quarters of central Cairo to the torch. “They watched as they did because the splendid capital belonged not to them but to the rich whose businesses were burning. So they let it go.”3 In the course of the day, crowds torched a British club, a Jewish school, an office of the Muslim Brothers, four hotels (including the famous Shepheard’s Hotel), four night clubs, seven department stores, seventeen cafés and restaurants, eighteen cinemas, and seventy other commercial establishments, including banks, automobile display rooms, and airline ticket offices.4
The terrible events of January 25–26, 1952, spelled the end of the political order in Egypt. It was clear to all that the arson attacks, unprecedented in Egypt’s history, had been planned. Rumors and conspiracy theories swept the capital. The Communists blamed the Socialists and the Muslim Brothers. Some argued it was a plot to undermine the position of King Farouq (who hosted a banquet celebrating the birth of his son on the night Cairo burned). Others maintained the fire was planned by the king and the British to bring down the Wafd and to appoint a caretaker government that would be more responsive to the king’s wishes.
Whatever his role in Black Saturday, King Farouq did dismiss the Wafd government of Mustafa Nahhas on January 27 and appointed a series of cabinets headed by independent politicians loyal to the throne. Parliament was dissolved on March 24, and elections for a new assembly were postponed indefinitely. It looked as though Farouq was following in his father’s footsteps and repeating the 1930 experiment of palace rule. Public confidence in the government of Egypt plummeted.
Ultimately, it matters little who ordered the burning of Cairo (there never has been a conclusive answer to the question). The rumors and conspiracy theories revealed a crisis of confidence in both the monarchy and the government that presaged the coming revolution in Egypt.
Though many were talking about revolution in Egypt in 1952, only a small group of army officers was actively plotting the overthrow of the government at the time. They called themselves the Free Officers, and their leader was a young colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Free Officers were united by their patriotism and the firm belief that Egypt’s monarchy and parliamentary government had failed the country. Nasser and his colleagues had been appalled by their experiences in the Palestine War, when they were sent to battle without adequate weapons and found themselves besieged by the Israelis for months and ultimately defeated. The Free Officers came together initially to oppose British imperialism in Egypt. In time, they came to see the political system of Egypt as the main obstacle to realizing their aspirations for total independence from Britain.
In the aftermath of the Palestine War, Nasser recruited some of his most trusted colleagues to join a secret political cell of military men. He drew Palestine War veterans like Abd al-Hakim Amer and Salah Salem; men with connections to the Muslim Brothers, like Anwar Sadat; and Communists, like Khaled Mohi El Din, in an effort to secure the broadest support for their actions. They held their first meeting in Nasser’s living room in the autumn of 1949. As the Free Officers organization grew, new cells were created independent of each other to evade detection. Members of each cell recruited like-minded officers from across the different branches of the Egyptian armed forces.5 They issued their first leaflet in fall 1950 to generate support in the officer corps for their anti-imperialist cause.6
The events of Black Saturday transformed the Free Officers movement. Until January 1952 their focus had been on combating imperialism, and they had restricted their criticism of the government to issues of corruption and collaboration with the British. After January 1952 the Free Officers began to discuss openly the overthrow of King Farouq and the royalist governments he appointed. They set a target date for their coup in November 1952 and began to escalate their recruitment and mobilization of opposition officers.
The confrontation between the palace and the Free Officers came to a head over the seemingly innocuous elections to the Egyptian Officers’ Club executive in December 1951. For Farouq, the Officers’ Club served as a barometer of the military’s loyalty to the monarchy. The Free Officers decided to use the elections as a means to confront the king and his supporters. Nasser and his colleagues convinced the popular general Muhammad Naguib to run for president of the club at the head of an opposition slate for the board of directors. When Naguib and the opposition slate swept the elections, King Farouq tried by all means to have the results overturned. Finally, in July 1952, Farouq intervened personally to dismiss Naguib and to dissolve the board of the Officers’ Club. The Free Officers recognized that they would lose all credibility if they did not respond to the king’s challenge immediately. As Abd al-Hakim Amer, one of Nasser’s closest colleagues, warned the other Free Officers, “The King has dealt us a strong blow, and unless we reply in the same manner, our organization will lose its credibility with the officers and no one will agree to join us.”7
The Free Officers were in total agreement that failure to act quickly and decisively would land them all in jail. Nasser met with the senior statesman of the Free Officers, General Naguib, to plan an immediate coup against the monarchy. “We unanimously agreed that Egypt was now fully ripe for a revolution,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs. The king and his cabinet were in their summer residences in Alexandria, leaving Cairo to the military men. “It was so hot and sultry that no one besides ourselves would be thinking in terms of an immediate revolution,” Naguib reasoned. “It was therefore the ideal time for us to strike.” They resolved to act before the king had time to appoint a new cabinet “and before his spies had time to discover who we were and what we had in mind.”8
The Free Officers had reached the point of no return. The risks of plotting against the regime were high. The Free Officers knew they would face charges of treason if they failed. They went over their plans very carefully: the simultaneous occupation of the radio station and the military headquarters. The mobilization of loyal military units behind the coup plotters. Measures to ensure public security and to prevent foreign intervention. There were many details to get right in advance of the coup date of July 23, 1952.
The coup plotters were under close government scrutiny, adding to the intense pressures of the last days before the coup. General Naguib was warned by one of his officers on the eve of the coup that he was about to be arrested on suspicion of leading a conspiracy against the government. “I did my best to conceal my alarm,” Naguib confessed in his memoirs. He decided to stay at home that night, while the coup unfolded, claiming he was under surveillance and feared he might compromise the Free Officers’ plans.9 Anwar Sadat took his wife to the cinema that night, where he got into a very noisy fight with another moviegoer and went to the police station to file a complaint—as good an alibi as a coup plotter could hope for in case of failure. 10 Even Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abd al-Hakim Amer surprised their supporters when they showed up for the coup dressed in civilian clothes (they later changed into uniform).11
In spite of their doubts and fears, the Free Officers succeeded in orchestrating a near-bloodless coup. Rebel military units surrounded Egyptian army headquarters and overcame light resistance to occupy the facility by 2:00 A.M. on the morning of July 23. Once the headquarters had been secured, the military units supporting the coup were given the go-ahead to occupy strategic points in Cairo while the city slumbered. When the army had taken its positions, Anwar Sadat went to the national radio station and announced the coup in the name of General Muhammad Naguib, as commander in chief of the armed forces, completing what had been a classic coup d’état.
Nawal El Saadawi was working in the Kasr al-Aini Hospital in central Cairo on July 23, and she described the exultation that followed on from the announcement. “In the wards the patients had been listening to the radio. Suddenly the music broke off for an important announcement which said that the army had taken over control of the country and that Farouk was no longer king.” She was astonished by the patients’ spontaneous reaction. “Suddenly as we stood there the patients rushed out of the wards shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ I could see their mouths wide open, their arms waving in the air, their tattered shirts fluttering around their bodies. It was as though the corpses from the dissecting hall had suddenly risen from the dead and were shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’” Indeed, even the dead were stopped in their tracks, as she saw a funeral cortege leaving the hospital brought to a halt by the news. “The men carrying the coffin put it down on the pavement and mixed with the crowd shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ and the women who a moment ago had been mourning the defunct started to shrill out [in celebration] instead of shrieks.”12
King Farouq and his government crumpled on July 23. Yet the Free Officers had little idea of how to proceed now that their movement had succeeded. “It was obvious that we hadn’t prepared ourselves, when we carried out our revolution, for taking over government posts,” Sadat reflected in his memoirs. “We had no ambition to be government ministers. We had not envisaged that and had not even drawn up a specific government program.”13 They decided to ask veteran politician Ali Maher to form a new government. The Free Officers had no idea what to do with Farouq himself: Arrest him? Execute him? Nasser made the wise decision to secure Farouq’s abdication and allow him to go into exile rather than risk tying up the new government with potentially divisive judicial proceedings or turning an unpopular monarch into a martyr through a messy execution. Farouq abdicated in favor of his infant son Ahmed Fuad II, under a regent, and was seen off by General Naguib on July 26 with a twenty-one-gun salute from Alexandria in the royal yacht Mahroussa.
“I saluted him and he returned my salute,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs:
A long and embarrassing pause ensued. Neither of us knew what to say.
“It was you, effendim [My Lord], who forced us to do what we have done.”
Faruk’s reply will puzzle me for the rest of my life.
“I know,” he said. “You’ve done what I always intended to do myself.”
I was so surprised that I could think of nothing more to say. I saluted and the others did likewise. Faruk returned our salutes and we all shook hands.
“I hope you’ll take good care of the Army,” he said. “My grandfather, you know, created it.”
“The Egyptian Army,” I said, “is in good hands.”
“Your task will be difficult. It isn’t easy, you know, to govern Egypt.”14
General Naguib in fact would be given little chance to govern Egypt. The real leader in Egypt was Nasser, as would soon become apparent.
The Free Officers revolution represented the advent of a newer, younger generation in Egyptian politics. Naguib, at age fifty-one, was the old man in a movement whose average age was thirty-four. All were native-born Egyptians of rural origins who had risen through the military to positions of responsibility—much like the men around Colonel Ahmad Urabi in the 1880s.
Like Urabi, the Free Officers chafed at the privileges and pretensions of the Turco-Circassian elites that had surrounded the royal family. One of their first decrees after taking power was to abolish all Turkish titles such as bey and pasha, which they believed had been conferred by “an abnormal King . . . on people who did not deserve them.”15
Stripped of its titles, the Egyptian aristocracy was next deprived of its land. The Free Officers initiated a major land reform, passing laws that limited individual land holdings to 200 acres. The vast plantations of the royal family were confiscated by the state, and some 1,700 large landholders saw their estates expropriated by the government, which reimbursed them in thirty-year bonds. In all, some 365,000 acres were seized from Egypt’s landed elite. These lands were then redistributed to small holders with no more than five acres of property. The program passed over the strenuous objections of Prime Minister Ali Maher, who represented a civilian elite whose wealth lay in landed property. The Free Officers valued mass support over the wishes of the propertied elite and secured Maher’s resignation in September 1952.
The land reform measure secured tangible political benefits for the Free Officers. Although only a fraction of Egypt’s farming population actually benefited from the land reform measures of 1952—about 146,000 families in all, out of a total Egyptian population of 21.5 million—it engendered tremendous goodwill among the citizens of Egypt.16 With the backing of the Egyptian masses, the military men were emboldened to take the reins of power and play a more direct role in politics.
Once the Free Officers entered politics, they proved very decisive. General Naguib agreed to form a new, largely civilian, government in September 1952. Nasser created a committee of military men to oversee the work of the revolution, ostensibly in collaboration with the government, but increasingly in rivalry with Naguib, called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The military men were quick to purge Egyptian politics of party pluralism. In January 1953, in response to pressures from the Wafd and the Muslim Brothers, the RCC banned all parties and expropriated their funds for the state. Working behind the scenes, Colonel Nasser introduced a new state-sponsored party known as the Liberation Rally. Nasser argued that party factionalism was largely responsible for the divisive politics of the interwar years. He hoped the Liberation Rally would serve to mobilize popular support behind the new regime. Nasser made the final break with the old order when the RCC abolished the monarchy, on June 18, 1953. Egypt was declared a republic and Muhammad Naguib named its first president. For the first time since the Pharaonic era, Egypt was ruled by native-born Egyptians. As Nawal El Saadawi put it, Naguib was “the first Egyptian to rule since King Mena in ancient Egypt.”17
The Egyptian republic was now a government of the people, and it enjoyed the full support of the great mass of the Egyptian people. “The atmosphere in the country changed,” Saadawi recalled. “People used to walk along with grim, silent faces. Now the streets had changed. People . . . chatted, smiled, said good morning, shook hands with complete strangers, asked about one another’s health, about recent events, congratulated one another for the change of regime, discussed, tried to foretell future events, [and] kept expecting changes to happen every day.”
The challenge for the new government would be to meet the high expectations of a people eager for change. It would not be easy. The new Egyptian government inherited an intimidating array of economic problems. The country was over-reliant on agriculture, and agricultural output was constrained by Egypt’s desert environment. There was no way to expand the land under cultivation without the water resources for desert reclamation. Egyptian industry remained largely underdeveloped. Whereas agriculture contributed 35 percent of the Egyptian gross domestic product in 1953, industry contributed only 13 percent (with services accounting for the remaining 52 percent of GDP).18 The slow pace of industrialization was in large part due to low levels of public and private investment. Overall population growth well outstripped the rate of job creation, which meant that fewer Egyptians would get the steady jobs necessary for a significant improvement in their standard of living.
The officers of the Revolutionary Command Council had a radical solution to all their problems: a hydroelectric dam on the Nile. Engineers had identified the ideal place for the dam in Upper Egypt near the town of Aswan. The new Aswan High Dam would store enough water to allow an expansion of land under cultivation from 6 million acres to between 8 and 9.5 million acres, and would generate enough electricity to permit Egypt’s industrialization and provide affordable electricity to the country as a whole.19 Such a project would cost hundreds of millions of dollars—far more than Egypt could raise from its own resources.
To finance the Aswan Dam, and to secure Egypt’s economic independence, the ruling officers would have to engage with the international community. Yet Egypt was intensely jealous of its independence, and sought at all costs to secure its aims without compromises to its sovereignty. The Free Officers were soon to discover how hard it was to engage with the rest of the world without making compromises.
In the international arena, the top priority of the new Egyptian government was to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal. It was the unfinished business of Egyptian nationalism since half a century before.
In April 1953 Nasser and his men entered into negotiations with the British, brokered by the United States, to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal from Egypt. The stakes were very high for both sides. Nasser believed that failure would prove the downfall of the Free Officers, and Britain was very sensitive about its international position in an increasingly postcolonial world. The process dragged out over sixteen months, as negotiations broke down and resumed with some frequency. In the end, the British and Egyptians struck a compromise in which the British would withdraw all military personnel from Egyptian soil within twenty-four months, leaving some 1,200 civilian experts in the Canal Zone for a seven-year transition period. It was not a complete and unconditional British withdrawal: the two-year delay for military withdrawal and the concessions for a seven-year British civilian presence were grounds for criticism from some Egyptian nationalist circles. However, it was independence enough for Nasser to secure the RCC’s approval in July 1954. The settlement was concluded between the two governments on October 19, 1954, and the last British soldier left Egypt on June 19, 1956.
The new agreement with Great Britain faced criticism within Egypt. President Muhammad Naguib seized on the shortcomings of the agreement to batter his young rival Gamal Abdel Nasser. No longer satisfied with his role as figurehead, Naguib sought the full powers that he believed were his due as president. Nasser, through his control of the Revolutionary Command Council, was encroaching on the powers of the president. Relations between Nasser and Naguib had deteriorated by early 1954 to what some contemporaries described as hatred, and after Naguib criticized the British withdrawal, Nasser deployed his loyal followers to discredit Naguib and turn public opinion against a man they still revered.
The Muslim Brotherhood also seized upon the incomplete British withdrawal to criticize the Free Officer regime. The Islamist organization, banned along with all the other political parties in 1953, already had its grievances with the new military regime. Early in 1954, Nasser’s clampdown on the Brotherhood made him the target of an Islamist splinter group bent on his assassination. They even considered deploying a suicide bomber wearing a dynamite belt who might get close enough to kill Nasser with the blast—one of the earliest suicide bomb plots in Middle Eastern history. However, the tactic did not appeal to the Islamists of 1954, and there were no volunteers.20
On October 26, 1954, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood named Mahmoud Abd al-Latif tried to assassinate Nasser using a more traditional method. He fired eight bullets at Nasser during a speech celebrating the evacuation agreement with the British. Abd al-Latif was a very bad shot—none of the bullets so much as grazed their target. But with bullets whizzing around him, Nasser performed heroically. He did not flinch under fire and only briefly paused in his speech. When he resumed with great emotion, he electrified an audience that extended via radio broadcast across Egypt and the Arab world: “My countrymen,” Nasser shouted into the microphone, “my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake, die for the sake of your freedom and honor.” The crowd roared their approval. “Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser.”21
The moment could not have been more dramatic, and the Egyptian public declared Nasser their champion. With his newfound popularity, Nasser established his primacy over the revolution and now had a free hand to dispose of both President Muhammad Naguib and the Muslim Brotherhood—his two main rivals for the public’s allegiance. Thousands of Muslim Brothers were arrested, and in December six of their members were hanged for their role in the assassination attempt. Naguib was implicated in the trials and, though he was never charged of wrong-doing, was dismissed as president on November 15 and confined to house arrest for the next twenty years.
Egypt now had one undisputed master. From the end of 1954 until his death in 1970, Nasser was president of Egypt and the commander in chief of the Arab world. No Arab leader has exercised such influence on the Arab stage before or since, and few would match Nasser’s impact on world affairs. Egypt was on the brink of a remarkable adventure, years of pure adrenaline when anything seemed possible.
Once the evacuation agreement had been concluded with the British, the next item on Egypt’s agenda was the unfinished business with the new state of Israel. Tensions ran high along the fragile border between Egypt and the Jewish state. Premier David Ben-Gurion made a number of attempts to sound out the intentions of the Free Officers, but Nasser and his men avoided direct contact with the Israelis (secret exchanges did take place between Israeli and Egyptian diplomats in Paris in 1953, with no result). Ben-Gurion came to the conclusion that Egypt under its new military rulers could turn into the Prussia of the Arab world and as such posed a clear and present danger to Israel. Yet Nasser knew his country was far from the necessary military strength to contain, let alone confront its hostile new neighbor. In order to pose a credible threat to Israel, Egypt needed to acquire materiel from abroad. Nasser quickly discovered, however, that in exchange for arms, foreign governments would inevitably set conditions that would compromise Egypt’s newfound independence.
Nasser turned first to the United States, approaching the Americans for assistance in November 1952. In response the Free Officers were invited to send a delegation to the United States to state their needs: aircraft, tanks, artillery, and ships. The Americans were willing to assist in principal but wanted Egypt to commit to a regional defense pact before processing any orders for military hardware.
In May 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles visited Cairo with the dual mission of promoting a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states, and isolating America’s super-power rival, the Soviet Union, in the Middle East. Discussions with the Egyptian government quickly turned to the subject of weapons. Dulles made clear that the United States remained willing to assist Egypt, on condition that it join a new regional defense pact called the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) that would bring Egypt into a formal alliance with the United States and Great Britain against the Soviet Union.
Nasser rejected Dulles’s suggestion out of hand. MEDO provided a basis for extending the British military presence in Egypt—something no Egyptian leader could permit. What Nasser could not get Dulles to appreciate was that the Egyptians saw no grounds to fear a Soviet menace. The real threat for Egypt was Israel. Mohamed Heikal (b. 1923) was editor of the influential Egyptian daily Al-Ahram and a close confidant of Nasser’s. He remembered Nasser asking Dulles: “How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal [i.e., Israel] to worry about somebody who is holding a knife 5,000 miles away?”22
Relations between Egypt and Israel deteriorated following the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Evacuation Agreement in 1954. Ben-Gurion saw the British presence in the Suez Canal Zone as a buffer between the Egyptians and Israel, and the imminent withdrawal of British troops thus spelled disaster. In July 1954, Israeli military intelligence started covert operations in Egypt, planting incendiary devices in British and American institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. They apparently hoped to provoke a crisis in relations between Egypt, Britain, and the United States that might drive Britain to reconsider its withdrawal from the Suez Canal.23 Much to Israel’s embarrassment, however, one of the Israeli spies was caught before planting his device, and the whole ring was exposed. Two of the men in the notorious Lavon Affair (named after the then defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was blamed for the fiasco) were later executed, one committed suicide in prison, and the others were sentenced to long prison terms.
Tensions between Egypt and Israel reached a new height in the wake of the Lavon Affair and the subsequent execution of the Israeli agents. Ben-Gurion, who had stood down as prime minister for just over a year while the dovish Moshe Sharett headed the government, returned to the premiership in February 1955. He marked his return to office with a devastating attack on Egyptian forces in Gaza on February 28, 1955.
The Gaza Strip was the only part of the Palestine mandate to remain in Egyptian hands at the end of the 1948 war, and it teemed with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The border between Gaza and Israel was frequently infiltrated by dispossessed Palestinians, some to recover property from lost homes inside what was now Israel, others to inflict damage on the Jewish state that had displaced them. Two such infiltrations in February 1955 served as the Israeli government’s pretext for massive retaliation. Two companies of Israeli paratroopers crossed into Gaza and destroyed the Egyptian army’s local headquarters, killing thirty-seven Egyptian soldiers and wounding thirty-one. Israel had displayed its military superiority, and Nasser knew his days would be numbered if he did not provide his army with better weaponry with which to stand up to the Israelis.
Egyptian losses in Gaza placed Nasser in a terrible bind. He needed foreign military assistance more than ever yet could not afford to make concessions to secure such aid. The British and the Americans continued to press Nasser to join a regional alliance before they would consider providing modern weapons to Egypt. The English-speaking powers were now urging Nasser to sign on to a NATO-sponsored alliance called the Baghdad Pact. Turkey and Iraq had concluded a treaty in February 1955 against Soviet expansion, to which Britain, Pakistan, and Iran all acceded in the course of the year. Nasser was bitterly opposed to the Baghdad Pact, which he saw as a British plot to perpetuate its influence over the Middle East and to promote its Hashemite allies in Iraq over the Free Officers in Egypt. Nasser condemned the Baghdad Pact in no uncertain terms and succeeded in preventing any other Arab state from acceding to the pact, despite British and American enticements.
British Prime Minister Anthony Eden began to see Nasser’s influence behind every setback to British policy in the Middle East and hardened his line against the Egyptian leadership. In light of the growing antagonism between Nasser and Eden, there was no question of Britain supplying Egypt’s military with advanced weapons.
Nasser next sounded out the French as an alternate source of military hardware. But the French, too, had grave misgivings about Nasser due to his support for nationalist movements in North Africa. Nationalists in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria were mobilizing to secure their full independence from France, and they looked to Egypt as both a role model and an ally. Nasser in turn sympathized with the North African nationalists and saw their struggle against imperialism as part of the broader Arab world’s resistance to foreign domination. Although he had little in the way of financial or military resources to offer, he was only too happy to provide refuge to exiled nationalists and to leave them the freedom to mobilize their independence struggle within Egypt’s frontiers.
So long as Nasser provided a free haven to North African nationalists, the French refused to provide him with military assistance. When faced with a choice between the Arabs and the French, Nasser chose the Arabs. The fact that the French were fighting a losing battle with Arab nationalism made them resent Nasser’s position all the more.
French authority in North Africa had been dealt a fatal blow by France’s defeat by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II. The demoralized colonial officials of the collaborationist Vichy Regime were poor representatives of a once great empire. Nationalist movements in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were encouraged by the perception of French weakness.
In November 1942, American troops easily defeated Vichy forces in Morocco. Two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca to plot the North African campaign. They invited the sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V, to join them for a dinner in which Roosevelt was outspoken in his criticism of French imperialism. The sultan’s son Hassan, who would later succeed to the Moroccan throne as King Hassan II, also attended the dinner. He quoted Roosevelt saying “the colonial system was out of date and doomed.” Churchill, himself prime minister of an imperial power, disagreed, but Roosevelt warmed to his theme. According to Hassan, Roosevelt “foresaw the time after the war—which he hoped was not far off—when Morocco would freely gain her independence, according to the principles of the Atlantic Charter.” Roosevelt promised U.S. economic aid once Morocco achieved its independence.24
Roosevelt’s words reached far beyond the dinner table. Two weeks after his visit, a group of nationalists drafted a manifesto and wrote to the U.S. president to request his support for Moroccan independence. The sultan even offered to declare war on Germany and Italy and to enter the war on the Allies’ side. However, both the British and the Americans were committed to supporting General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces and so, rather than accede to Moroccan demands for independence, the Americans handed Morocco over to de Gaulle’s Free French in June 1943. The Moroccans would have to achieve their own independence without foreign intervention. And so they did.
The strength of the Moroccan independence movement derived from the partnership between the monarchy and the nationalists. In January 1944 a new nationalist movement calling itself the Istiqlal, or Independence Party, published a manifesto calling for Moroccan independence. The Istiqlal was openly monarchist, and its manifesto proposed that the sultan negotiate with the French on behalf of the Moroccan nation. The party’s one condition was that the sultan establish the instruments of a democratic government.
Mohammed V gave his full support to the Istiqlal, which placed him on a collision course with the French colonial authorities. As the nationalist movement spread from the narrow circle of political elites to the labor unions and urban masses in the late 1940s, the sultan increasingly was viewed by the colonial authorities as the head of the nationalist snake that threatened the French empire in North Africa.
The broader Arab world offered moral support to the Moroccan nationalists. Exiled Moroccan militants established the Office of the Arab Maghrib in Cairo in 1947 where they could plan political action and spread propaganda without French intervention. The Maghrib Office made headlines when it freed the leader of the 1920s Rif War against Spain and France, Muhammad Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi, a.k.a. Abd el-Krim, from the French ship that was bringing him back from his exile in the island of Réunion to Paris. Abd el-Krim was given a hero’s reception in Cairo and named the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa.
The French were growing increasingly concerned that the tide of Arab nationalism might sweep away their North African possessions. Mohammed V began to place great emphasis on Morocco’s ties to the Arab world. In April 1947 he delivered a speech in Tangier in which he spoke of Morocco’s Arab ties without making any mention of France. In 1951 a hard-line French resident-general presented Mohammed V with an ultimatum: either disavow the Istiqlal or abdicate. Though the sultan conceded to French pressure, he still retained the full support of the nationalists and the Moroccan masses, who began to mobilize in mass demonstrations. Public order in Morocco broke down as the labor unions called for strikes and as nationalist demonstrations turned into riots.
Nationalist demonstrations raged in Tunisia at the same time. In December 1952, the French assassinated a Tunisian labor leader named Farhat Hached. His murder provoked mass demonstrations in both Tunisia and Morocco. The French authorities suppressed the riots that broke out in the main cities of Morocco with such violence that they inadvertently encouraged the nationalist movement. Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid captured the intense shock provoked by the violence in her autobiographical novel, The Year of the Elephant. For Zahra, the book’s narrator, the violence of December 1952 marked the moment when she decided to join the underground nationalist movement.
I did take a position years before actually joining the resistance. I remember the day and the occasion quite clearly. The slaughter that black day in Casablanca can never be forgotten. Whenever I think of it, my body goes numb. I see them, [French] soldiers from the Foreign Legion, emerging from a barracks close to our neighbourhood, their machine guns blasting down passersby.
How long I lived with those shots reverberating in my ears and the sight of women and children falling constantly in my mind. Later I would see many corpses lying like garbage bags on the sidewalk, but they never affected me like the events of that horrible day.... That day I lost all affection for life.... The situation had to be changed or it was not worth living.25
In the aftermath of the December 1952 riots, both the Istiqlal and the Communist Party were banned by the French authorities, and hundreds of political activists were exiled. However, the sultan remained the key rallying point of Moroccan nationalist aspirations, and the French were determined to secure his abdication. Working through a coterie of Moroccan notables loyal to France and opposed to Mohammed V, the French orchestrated an indigenous coup against the sultan. A group of religious leaders and heads of the Muslim mystical brotherhoods, convinced that Mohammed V’s nationalist politics were somehow contrary to their religion, declared their allegiance to a member of the royal family named Ben Arafa. The French authorities demanded that the sultan abdicate, and when he refused he was arrested by French police, on August 20, 1953, and flown from the country at gunpoint. For the next two years Mohammed V was held in exile on the East African island of Madagascar.
The exile of Mohammed V did nothing to calm the situation in Morocco. The nationalists went underground and turned to violent tactics now that their right to political self-expression was denied. They attempted to assassinate several French colonial officials, notables collaborating with the French, and even the usurper sultan Ben Arafa. In response, the French settlers established their own terrorist organization, called Présence Française (“the French Presence”), to assassinate nationalist figures and intimidate their supporters. The French police instigated a reign of terror, arresting suspected nationalists and torturing political prisoners.
It was against this background that Zahra, the protagonist in Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographical novel, entered the resistance. Her first mission was to help one of the men in her husband’s secret cell to flee the French police and escape from Casablanca to the international zone in Tangier. The mission was all the more ironic because the fugitive was a veteran of the French war in Vietnam who had lost his leg in Dien Bien Phu. Yet Zahra managed to see her fellow-resistance fighter safely to the international zone in Tangier.
After her first success, the leaders of the resistance gave Zahra more challenging tasks. She led an arson attack on the shop of a collaborator in the center of Casablanca and ran for her life from the crowded market, with police and tracker dogs in hot pursuit. Zahra took refuge in a courtyard where she found the women of the house cooking. “I’m a guerrilla fighter,” she told them, and they gave their protection without asking any questions. Finding herself under the protection of Moroccan women, Zahra mused on how politics had changed her life and the position of women in her country. “If my grandmother had returned from the dead and seen me setting shops ablaze, delivering guns, and smuggling men across borders, she would have died a second death,” Zahra reflected.26
The turning point for the French Empire in North Africa came in 1954. Protests had been mounting against French rule in Morocco and Tunisia since the late 1940s, prompting the French authorities to reconsider their position in both protectorates. The two states were nominally ruled by indigenous dynasties—the Alaoui sultans in Morocco and the Husaynid Beys in Tunisia. The French believed they could better secure their interests in both countries by coming to an accommodation with the nationalists and conceding independence under friendly governments. Yet French imperial policy was thrown into disarray by two events that spelled the end of the French Empire: the loss of Indochina following the decisive French defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (March–May 1954), and the outbreak of the Algerian war for independence on November 2, 1954.
The French did not consider Algeria a colony. Unlike Tunisia and Morocco, which were ruled as protectorates, the territory of Algeria had been annexed to the French state and divided into départments just like the rest of metropolitan France. One million French citizens lived in Algeria, with their interests actively protected by elected representatives in the French parliament. As far as the French—government and people alike—were concerned, Algeria was French. So when Algerian nationalists declared war, the French responded rapidly and with full force. They sent their troops, already embittered by the defeat in Vietnam and determined never to face surrender again, to “defend” Algeria from the threat of nationalism.
Faced with a war in Algeria, the government of Pierre Mendès-France took decisive action to cut its losses and resolve relations with Tunisia and Morocco. The French premier went to Tunis in person to ask the ruling bey, Muhammad VIII al-Amin (r. 1943–1956) to appoint a new government to negotiate Tunisian independence. The bey, who sought to preserve his own power over the nationalists, tried to exclude the most popular nationalist party, Habib Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour. However, by March 1955 he was forced by popular demand to invite Bourguiba to participate in the negotiations.
The charismatic Bourguiba quickly assumed the leadership position of the Tunisian negotiating team and secured agreement for autonomy in April 1955 before concluding the March 20, 1956, protocol in which France recognized Tunisia’s independence. Affirming the republican principle that sovereignty lay in the people, Bourguiba moved in July 1957 to abolish the monarchy in Tunisia, which had been compromised by its collaboration with French colonial rule. The Tunisian Republic elected Bourguiba its first president, which post he held for the next thirty years.
In Morocco the French sought to calm the situation by allowing Sultan Mohammed V to return from Madagascar to resume the throne. On November 16, 1955, the sultan landed in Morocco to a rapturous reception. Two days later, Mohammed V addressed the nation from the Royal Palace in Rabat, on the occasion of the Fête du Trône, the Moroccan national day. “What to say that could describe that day?” reflected Zahra, the nationalist freedom fighter of Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographical novel. “The whole of Casablanca became one huge celebration connected by stages and loudspeakers. Songs and performances mingled with speeches, and the aroma of tea being prepared on sidewalks filled the air.” Zahra, her family, and friends boarded a bus from Casablanca to Rabat to hear the sultan’s address. She remembered the “incredible roar” that greeted Mohammed V and his two sons when they appeared on the balcony of the palace. “How many times have I listened to his throne speech delivered that November 18! What a speech! I learned it by heart and can still recite it to this day.”
Zahra repeated the sultan’s words from memory: “On this joyous day God has blessed us twice over. The blessing of return to our most beloved homeland after a long and sorrowful absence, and the blessing of gathering again with the people we have so missed and to whom we have been unerringly faithful and who have been faithful to us in turn.” The sultan’s message was clear: Morocco had achieved its independence only because the monarch and the people had supported each other. To Zahra, the events of November 18 revealed nothing so much as the failure of French efforts to split the monarch from his people through exile. “Fantastic what an effect [the sultan] had on our hearts! His exile had wrapped him in a sacred cloak, and for his sake the people had joined the resistance, as if he had become an ideal or a principle. Had the French not exiled him, their presence in Morocco would have continued much longer; I’m certain of that.”27
On March 2, 1956, Morocco achieved its independence from France.
By the time Morocco and Tunisia had achieved their independence, Algeria had descended to all-out war. What had started as a poorly organized insurgency by a small band (estimates range from 900 to 3,000 fighters on November 1, 1954) of underarmed men had developed into a mass popular uprising in which unarmed civilians—both settlers and native Algerians—were often the target of indiscriminate and murderous violence.
In August 1955, the Algerian National Liberation Front, known by the French acronym, FLN attacked the settler village of Philippeville, killing 123 men, women, and children. The French retaliated with extraordinary brutality, killing thousands of Algerians (official French figures acknowledge 1,273 deaths whereas the FLN claimed 12,000 Algerians killed).28
The Philippeville massacres intensified FLN resolve and also strengthened the organization by attracting large numbers of volunteers from those outraged by unmeasured French reprisals against Algerian citizens. The massacres also served as a stark reminder of the FLN’s strategic weakness in the face of the French army of occupation, with all of the resources of an industrial power.
The Cairo office of the FLN was an important base for the movement’s international operations, and the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser had given full public support for the cause of Algerian independence. It was in order to isolate Algerian nationalists and to force Egypt to abandon its support for the FLN that France placed conditions on the sale of any military hardware to Nasser’s Egypt—conditions that, true to form, Nasser was unwilling to accept.
By 1955 Nasser had made some influential friends. He was respected by the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement—men like Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and China’s Zhou Enlai. Nonalignment was a natural line for Egypt to adopt, given its aversion to foreign domination. Like the other members of the movement, the Egyptian government wanted to preserve the freedom to enjoy cordial relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union without having to take sides in the Cold War. The organization also provided a forum for the countries of Asia and Africa to advance their goal of decolonization. Nasser, for example, proposed a resolution to the movement’s inaugural conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in support of Algerian independence that passed unanimously—much to France’s chagrin.
The Egyptian people were delighted as their charismatic young president was recognized as a leader on the world’s stage. The Americans, however, were far less pleased. President Dwight Eisenhower rejected the politics of nonalignment out of hand. His administration believed there was no middle position between the United States and the USSR—ultimately, a country could only be with the Americans or against them. Nasser’s refusal to join a regional alliance against the Soviet Union had raised American ire, though many in the American administration still hoped to bring Nasser around. They were to be disappointed.
Nasser’s pursuit of the arms denied him by the West ultimately led to the Communist bloc. He discussed the problem of securing modern weapons for his army with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, who offered to raise the matter with the Soviet Union on Egypt’s behalf. In May 1955, the Soviet ambassador in Cairo sought an audience with Nasser, initiating negotiations that ran through the summer months of 1955.
Even as he turned to the Soviets for military assistance, Nasser tried to keep the Americans on his side. The Egyptian president informed the Americans about his communications with the Soviets and told the U.S. Ambassador to Cairo that he had a firm offer of arms from the Soviet Union, but that he would still prefer U.S. military assistance. In Mohamed Heikal’s view, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles first thought Nasser was bluffing. It was only after he had incontrovertible evidence that Nasser was about to conclude an agreement with the Soviets that Dulles sent envoys to prevent the deal from going through.
In September 1955 Nasser presented the Americans with a fait accompli when he announced that Egypt would obtain arms from the Soviet satellite state of Czechoslovakia. 29 The magnitude of the arms deal dramatically changed the balance of power in the Middle East as Egypt acquired 275 modern T-34 tanks and a fleet of 200 warplanes, including MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters and Ilyushin-28 bombers.30
Following this first demarche toward the Communist bloc, the Egyptian government further alienated the Eisenhower administration in May 1956 when it extended diplomatic relations to the People’s Republic of China. Egypt had gravely undermined U.S. attempts to contain the spread of Communist influence in the Middle East, and the United States was determined to get Egypt to change its policies.
The British, French, and Israelis were more ambitious still: they wanted to change Egypt’s government altogether. They saw Nasser as the champion of a dangerous new force known as Arab nationalism, which they believed he could mobilize against their vital interests in the Middle East. Ben-Gurion feared Nasser might rally the Arab states to mount a fatal attack on Israel. Prime Minister Anthony Eden believed Nasser deployed Arab nationalism to strip Britain of its influence in the Middle East. The French saw Nasser as encouraging the Algerians to intensify their war against France. Each of these states had a real reason to seek Nasser’s overthrow to advance their national interests.
In the course of the year of 1956 these three states conspired to make war on Egypt in a fiasco dubbed both the Suez Crisis (in the West) and the Tripartite Aggression (by the Arabs).
The road to Suez began in Aswan. Along with the land reform program, the Aswan High Dam remained a central part of the Free Officers’ domestic development agenda, as it was expected to provide both the country’s energy needs for industrialization and a significant expansion of agricultural area through irrigation.
The Egyptian government could not, however, fund the dam on its own. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects in the world, and the price was astronomical—an estimated $1 billion, of which $400 million would have to be paid in foreign currency. The Egyptian government negotiated a finance package with the World Bank in late 1955 to provide a loan of $200 million, backed by a commitment from the United States and Great Britain to provide the remaining $200 million.
The British and U.S. governments hoped to use the Aswan Dam project as a means to exercise some control over the politics of Nasser’s Egypt. According to Heikal, the United States and Britain never intended to give the full amount Egypt needed, pledging only one-third the sum requested—not enough to guarantee the dam but rather just enough to exercise influence over Egypt during the years it would take to build it. Dulles allegedly told the Saudi king Sa’ud in January 1957 that “he had decided to help [Egypt] with the Dam because the project was a long term one,” according to Heikal. “It would have tied Egypt to America for ten years, and in that time Nasser would either have learned the danger of co-operating with the Soviet Union or he would have fallen from power.”31
The U.S. government also tried to make the loan contingent on a commitment from the Egyptian government not to buy more arms from the Soviet Union. The military expenditure would, it argued insincerely, undermine Egypt’s ability to pay its part of the dam’s construction costs. Nasser had no intention of breaking with the Soviet Union, which was the only power willing to assist his military with no preconditions.
Nasser had come to recognize that the rules of the Cold War precluded cooperation with both the Soviets and the Americans. By April 1956 he suspected that the United States would withdraw its support for the Aswan High Dam. Three months later, on July 19, 1956, Eisenhower announced that he was withdrawing all American financial aid for the project.
Nasser learned of the U.S. announcement in mid-air on his way back to Cairo from a meeting in Yugoslavia. He was irate; Eisenhower had announced the decision to withdraw financial support for the dam before giving the Egyptian government the courtesy of an advance warning, let alone an explanation. “This is not a withdrawal,” Nasser said to Heikal, “it is an attack on the regime and an invitation to the people of Egypt to bring it down.”32
Nasser believed he had to strike a bold response and quickly. Within twenty-four hours he had a plan, and only six days to pull off his most ambitious coup yet.
Nasser was scheduled to give a major speech in Alexandria on July 26 marking the fourth anniversary of the revolution. His theme would be the Aswan Dam. If the Western powers refused to help the Egyptians, he planned to argue, then Egypt would pay for the dam itself by nationalizing the Suez Canal and diverting the canal’s revenues to meet the cost of the dam.
Legally, the Egyptian government had every right to nationalize the Suez Canal, so long as it paid shareholders in the Suez Canal Company fair compensation for their stock. However, as a public company listed in France, with the British government as the largest shareholder, Nasser knew that nationalization of the canal would provoke an international crisis. Britain in particular was determined to preserve its influence in the Middle East and would interpret the nationalization as another hostile measure by the Egyptian government. Nasser estimated the likelihood of foreign intervention to run as high as 80 percent.
In the event they opted for war, Nasser calculated that it would take the British and the French at least two months to raise the necessary military force to intervene. The two-month delay would give him crucial time to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. It was quite a gamble, but one Nasser believed he had to take to uphold Egypt’s independence from foreign domination.
Nasser tasked a young engineer named Colonel Mahmoud Younes with the actual takeover of the Suez Canal Company’s offices. On the evening of July 26, Younes was to tune into Nasser’s speech on the radio and launch the operation if and when he heard Nasser say the code words, “Ferdinand de Lesseps”—the architect of the Suez Canal. If Nasser did not mention the name during the speech, Younes was to do nothing and wait for further orders.
As was his habit, Nasser gave his speech from notes and launched into the background of the Aswan Dam crisis. He recounted the history of Egypt’s exploitation by the imperial powers, he cited the case of the Suez Canal, and he mentioned Ferdinand de Lesseps—many times over. “The President was so worried [Mahmoud Younes] would miss it that he kept on repeating the Frenchman’s name,” Heikal recalled. “It was de Lesseps this and de Lesseps that until he had repeated it about ten times and people began to wonder why he was making such a fuss about de Lesseps, for the Egyptians had no real love for him.”
Nasser needn’t have worried, as the attentive Colonel Younes had heard the name on the first mention, turned off his radio, and went to work. “I’m sorry,” he later confessed to Nasser, “I missed the rest of your speech.”
His teams secured the Suez Canal Company branch offices in Cairo, Port Said, and Suez. Younes personally commanded the takeover of the company’s headquarters in Ismailiyya. As one of the men who accompanied Younes recalled, “We entered the offices in Ismailia at around 7pm and there was no staff in the offices, except the nightshift. We called the senior staff, foreigners of course because there was no Egyptian in the decision-making level . . . and they were taken by surprise.”33 The occupation of all three offices of the company was accomplished by a team of thirty officers and civil engineers.
By the time Nasser reached the climax of his speech, the canal was securely in Egyptian hands. “We will not allow the Suez Canal to be a state within a state,” Nasser told his enchanted audience. “Today the Suez Canal is an Egyptian company.” After declaring the nationalization of the canal, Nasser went on to pledge that the £35 million revenues from the canal would henceforth be applied to build the Aswan High Dam project. “The people went wild with excitement,” Heikal remembered.34
News of the nationalization of the Suez Canal sent shock waves through the international community. Ben-Gurion’s first thought was that it would provide the opportunity to topple Nasser. He made overtures to the United States but found the Eisenhower administration noncommittal. He confided to his diary: “The Western powers are furious . . . but I am afraid that they will not do anything. France will not dare to act alone; [British Prime Minister] Eden is not a man of action; Washington will avoid any reaction.”35Yet Ben-Gurion underestimated the depth of British and French anger over Nasser’s move.
The French were the first to react. The day after the nationalization, Maurice Bourès-Maunoury, the French minister of defense, called Shimon Peres, then serving as director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, to ask him how long it would take the Israel Defense Force to conquer the Sinai Peninsula to the Suez Canal. Peres made a rough guess: two weeks. The French minister came straight to the point: Would Israel agree to take part in a tripartite attack on Egypt, in which Israel’s role would be to seize the Sinai, and a joint Anglo-French force would occupy the Suez Canal Zone? Peres was in no position to commit the Israeli government to a war alliance, but he gave the French an encouraging reply and initiated a collusion that would result in the Second Arab-Israeli War.
The French next approached Sir Anthony Eden with the plan, in which an Israeli attack on Egypt in the Sinai would provide the pretext for a joint Anglo-French military intervention to “restore peace” in the Canal Zone. The assumptions were that Nasser’s government could not survive such an attack, that Israel would secure its frontiers with Egypt, and that Britain and France could reassert their control over the canal by such improbable means. The whole mad plan reveals nothing so much as a collective lapse in judgment.
To conclude the unlikely tripartite alliance, a meeting was convened in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, attended by Christian Pineau and Selwyn Lloyd—the French and British foreign ministers—and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was an uncomfortable conversation marked by deep mistrust between the Israelis and the British, reflecting the bitterness of the end of the Palestine mandate. But the conspirators were held together by their shared hatred of Nasser and their determination to see him destroyed.
After forty-eight hours of intense negotiations, the three parties struck a secret agreement on October 24, 1956. First Israel would invade Egypt, provoking an Arab-Israeli conflict that placed maritime communications through the Suez Canal in jeopardy. Britain and France would insist on a cessation of hostilities, which would of course be ignored. The Anglo-French alliance would then intervene with their own troops to occupy the Canal Zone. So little did the Israeli diplomats trust their French and English counterparts that they insisted that all parties sign a written agreement, lest the Europeans try to back out after Israel’s initial invasion.
Britain and France both had good reason to reconsider their collusion with Israel. France had gained widespread hostility for providing arms to the Israelis after 1948, and for denying Algerian demands for independence. Britain’s imperial past continued to bedevil its relations with Arab nationalists. For the former imperial powers to side with Israel was a plan destined to poison the European powers’ relations to the Arab world. And there was little chance of such a conspiracy long remaining a secret.
Yet the improbable plan went into effect when Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, initiating a war in the Sinai and a rush to the Suez Canal. The next day, Britain and France delivered the agreed ultimatum to both the Egyptians and the Israelis to cease hostilities and withdraw their forces 10 miles from their respective banks of the Suez Canal. The French and British revealed their hand in the crisis by mistiming their announcement. They demanded the withdrawal of all belligerents from the Canal Zone while Israel was still miles from the canal. As Nasser’s confidant Mohamed Heikal reasoned, “What justification was there in the demand for a mutual withdrawal ten miles from the Canal when the Israelis at that stage had only one battalion of lightly armed paratroopers still forty miles from the Canal?” The only reason why Britain and France might expect the Israelis to be at the canal was if they had played a role in planning the attack.
As evidence of British collusion in Israel’s attack mounted—British surveillance aircraft were spotted flying over the Sinai—the Egyptians were forced to accept the unthinkable. As Heikal recalled, “Nasser just could not bring himself to believe that Eden, with all the knowledge he claimed of the Middle East, would jeopardise the security of all Britain’s friends and Britain’s own standing in the Arab world by making war alongside Israel on an Arab nation.”36
The United States was also incredulous as it watched the Suez Crisis unfold. Certainly, the Americans were not above such tactics—the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.37The Syrians had accepted Soviet economic assistance, and the United States wanted to contain the threat of Soviet expansion into the Middle East. Such an operation was entirely consistent with the U.S. worldview in 1956.
The Eisenhower administration found the Suez conflict incomprehensible. Britain and France were still acting like imperial powers at the height of the Cold War. For the Americans, the containment of Soviet expansion was the only geostrategic game that mattered, in the Middle East as in other critical parts of the world. They could not conceive of their NATO allies Britain and France going to war over a once-strategic waterway that led to their now-defunct empires in South and South-east Asia. Eisenhower was also furious with his European allies for undertaking such a major military operation without consulting the United States. Had they been consulted, the Americans certainly would have opposed the Suez war. The British and French governments knew perfectly well how the Americans would respond and chose to leave Washington in the dark.
From the American perspective, the Suez Crisis was an unmitigated disaster. The disruption to an American covert operation in Syria was completely overshadowed by events in Hungary. On October 23, just six days before the Israeli attack on Egypt, a revolution had erupted in Hungary. Student demonstrations against the Stalinist regime in Budapest had led to nationwide protests. Within days, the Soviet-supported government fell, and a new cabinet was formed under the leadership of reformer Imre Nagy, who quickly moved to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, effectively ending military cooperation with the Soviets and their allies. It was the first crack in the Iron Curtain separating Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the West, and the most important development since the start of the Cold War.
Working the halls of the United Nations to protect the movement in Hungary from Soviet retaliation, the Eisenhower administration watched in fury as the British and French began hostilities in Egypt. The Anglo-French intervention provided a better distraction than the Soviets could have dreamed of. After their bombers blitzed Egyptian air bases on October 31, the British and French dropped paratroops into the Canal Zone in early November. Soviet diplomats were able to seize the moral high ground in defending Nasser’s Egypt against Western aggression, all the while deploying their own forces in Hungary to restore their authority over Eastern Europe. NATO solidarity was undermined just when the West most needed to provide a solid front to contain the USSR. Eisenhower placed full responsibility for the loss of Hungary on Britain and France.
In Egypt, Nasser found himself fighting a war he could not win against three better-armed enemies. In the opening days of the war he ordered his forces to retreat from Gaza and the Sinai, which fell rapidly to the Israelis, and to concentrate on defending the Canal Zone. Nawal El Saadawi was serving as a doctor in a village clinic in the Delta and remembered hearing Nasser’s speech echoing “from thousands of radios in the houses and on the streets: ‘We shall go on fighting until the invaders leave. We will never surrender.’” His defiance in the face of an unprovoked attack by superior forces once again electrified the Egyptian people, who volunteered en masse to assist the national effort. “I took off my doctor’s coat,” Saadawi recalled, “and put on fatigues.”
Saadawi, like many other Egyptians, was prepared to go to the war zone to assist the effort, but in the disorder that followed she never got the call; she thus followed events from her village in the Delta. When, on November 6, British and French paratroops laid siege to Port Said, she—like all Egyptians—was horrified. “Rockets and bombs were dropped by thousands from planes, naval ships bombarded it from the sea, tanks roared through the streets, and sharpshooters were parachuted on to the roofs of houses,” Saadawi wrote. The Egyptians mounted civilian resistance that fought alongside their army. “Groups of guerrilla fighters, most of them very young, were formed and began to fight with guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails.”38 In all, some 1,100 civilians were killed in the fighting in the Canal Zone.
The Americans placed great pressure on Britain and France to stop fighting and withdraw their troops. American efforts in the Security Council were stymied by Britain and France exercising their vetoes to prevent the passage of any resolutions constraining their actions in Suez. With the Soviets and their allies threatening to intervene in the conflict on Egypt’s side, the Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency, which would have had a catastrophic impact on the British economy. The threats were effective, and Britain and France conceded to a United Nations cease-fire on November 7. All British and French troops were withdrawn from Egypt by December 22, 1956, and the last Israeli forces withdrew from Egypt in March 1957, to be replaced by a United Nations peacekeeping force.
For Egypt, the Suez Crisis was the classic example of a military defeat turned to a political victory. Nasser’s bold rhetoric and defiance were not matched by any military accomplishments. The very act of survival was deemed a major political victory, and the Egyptians—and Nasser’s mass following across the Arab world—celebrated as though Nasser had in fact defeated Egypt’s enemies. Nasser knew that his nationalization of the Suez Canal would face no further challenge and that Egypt had achieved full sovereignty over all of its territory and resources.
For the Israelis, the Suez war represented a stunning military victory and a political setback. Although Ben-Gurion was embarrassed to have to retreat from territory the IDF had occupied by force of arms, he had demonstrated Israeli military prowess to his Arab neighbors once again. Yet Israeli participation in the Tripartite Aggression reinforced the widespread view in the Arab world that Israel was an extension of imperial policy in the region.
Israel’s association with imperialism made it all the more difficult for the Arab world to accept the Jewish state, let alone to extend recognition or to make peace. Rather, the defeat of Israel came to be associated with ridding the Middle East of imperialism, as well as the liberation of Palestine—powerful ideological impediments to any peace process in the 1950s.
France lost a great deal in the Suez Crisis. Its position in Algeria was undermined and its influence in the Arab world more generally decreased. For the remainder of the 1950s, the French gave up on the Arab world and threw their support behind Israel. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis the French armed the Israelis and helped them to establish their nuclear program, providing a reactor in 1957 twice the original capacity promised.
Britain, which had hoped to preserve a major influence in the Arab world, was undoubtedly the greatest loser of the Suez Crisis. The decision to go to war had engendered tremendous domestic opposition in Britain and provoked a number of high-level resignations from both government and Foreign Office officials. Anthony Eden suffered a major breakdown in the aftermath of Suez and resigned his premiership in January 1957. The impact of Suez on Britain’s position in the Middle East was even more devastating. As Heikal concluded, “No Arab leader could be Britain’s friend and Nasser’s enemy after Suez. Suez cost Britain Arabia.”39
Nasser’s remarkable string of successes propelled him to a position of dominance in the Arab world. His anti-imperial credentials and calls for Arab solidarity made him the champion of Arab nationalists across the region. Nasser took his message to the Arab masses across the airwaves, as the power of long-distance radio broadcasting combined with the spread of affordable and portable transistor radios in the course of the 1950s. In an age of widespread adult illiteracy, Nasser was able to reach a vastly broader audience via radio than he ever could have through newspapers.
At the time, the most powerful and widely followed radio station in the Arab world was the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs (Sawt al-’Arab). Launched in 1953 to promote the ideas of the Egyptian revolution, the Voice of the Arabs combined news, politics, and entertainment. It connected Arabic speakers across national boundaries through a common language and promoted the ideas of pan-Arab action and Arab nationalism. Listeners from across the Arab world were electrified: “People used to have their ears glued to the radio,” one contemporary recalled, “particularly when Arab nationalist songs were broadcast calling Arabs to raise their heads and defend their dignity and land from occupation.”40
Nasser conquered the Arab world by radio. Through the Voice of the Arabs, he was able to pressure other Arab rulers to toe his line, bypassing the heads of Arab governments to address their citizens directly. In a political report on the situation in Lebanon in 1957, the director of intelligence in Lebanon, Amir Farid Chehab, wrote: “Political propaganda in Nasser’s favour is what mostly occupies the spirit of the Muslim masses who consider him the only leader of the Arabs. They care for no other leader but him thanks to the influence of Egyptian and Syrian radio stations and his achievements in Egypt.”41
Some Arab nationalists began to take Nasser’s calls for Arab unity more literally than the Egyptian president intended—nowhere more so than in Syria.
Politics in Syria had been relentlessly volatile since Husni al-Zaim overthrew President Shukri al-Quwatli in 1949. Between al-Quwatli’s fall in 1949 and his return to power in 1955, Syria had witnessed five changes of leadership, and by the late summer of 1957 the country was on the verge of complete political disintegration. Caught between the Soviet Union and the United States (which were plotting the overthrow of the Quwatli government in 1956), and between inter-Arab rivalries in an age of revolutionary ferment, the country was also being torn from within by deep political divides.42
The two most influential parties in Syria in the late 1950s were the Communists and the Arab Renaissance Party, better known as the Ba‘th (literally, “Renaissance”). The Ba’th was founded by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar in the early 1940s as a secular pan-Arab nationalist party. Their motto was “One Arab nation with an eternal message.” The Ba’th eschewed smaller nation-state nationalism in individual countries in favor of a greater Arab nationalism uniting all Arab people. The ideologues of the Ba’th held that the Arabs could only achieve full independence from outside rule and social justice at home through full Arab unity—a utopian vision of a single Arab state freed from the imperial boundaries imposed by the 1919 Versailles settlement. Branches of the party had cropped up in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq in the late 1940s.
Although Ba‘athism would become a major political force from the 1960s through the present day, the party was still quite weak in Syria in the 1950s. A middle-class intellectual’s party, the Ba’th had no mass support base. In the 1955 elections the party secured fewer than 15 percent of the seats in the Syrian parliament. The party was very much in need of a powerful ally, and its members found it in Egypt’s Nasser. They gave their wholehearted backing to Nasser both out of conviction—his anti-imperialism and pan-Arab rhetoric so closely matched their own—and to harness Nasser’s massive popularity in Syria to their own cause.
The Communist Party in Syria had less need of Nasser, as its position was growing with the expansion of Soviet influence in the country. The Syrian Communists also were wary of Nasser because he had suppressed the Egyptian Communist Party. Yet they too sought to profit from Nasser’s mass appeal in Syria.
By 1957 both the Ba‘th and the Communists approached Nasser with proposals to unite Syria and Egypt, with the rival Syrian parties outbidding each other in their efforts to court Nasser’s favor. Whereas the Ba’th proposed a federal union, the Communists raised the stakes with the suggestion of a full merger of the two countries into a single state—confident that Nasser would reject the offer. It was all a bit of a game, as neither the Ba’th nor the Communists had the power to conclude a union with Egypt.
The game became serious, however, when the Syrian army got involved in the merger. The army had already staged three coups against the Syrian government, and many of its officers were avowed Ba’thists. They were drawn to the military-led government of Nasser’s Egypt and believed that union would favor them as the dominant power in Syrian politics. On January 12, 1958, without prior warning to their own government, the Syrian chief of staff and thirteen of his top officers flew to Cairo to discuss a union with Nasser. A high-ranking Syrian officer called on cabinet ministers—including Khalid al-Azm, then minister of finance—to inform them of the army’s actions only after the chief of staff had left for Cairo. “Wouldn’t it have been better for you to inform the government of your decision and discuss the matter with them before going to Cairo?” al-Azm asked the officer.
“What’s done is done,” the officer replied, and withdrew.
Al-Azm was one of the patrician nationalist politicians who had fought for Syria’s independence from the French mandate and had withstood the terrible bombardment of Damascus in 1945. He was convinced that the military would bring disaster to Syria. “If Abdel Nasser agrees to this proposal,” he reflected in his diary, “Syria will disappear altogether, and if he refuses the Army will occupy the offices of state and bring down both the government and the parliament.”43
The Syrian government decided to send the foreign minister, Salah al-Din Bitar, who was also one of the cofounders of the Ba’th, to Cairo to sound out Nasser’s views and report back to the cabinet. Once in Cairo, Bitar got caught up in the excitement of the moment and traded observer status for that of self-declared negotiator. Bitar entered into direct discussions with Nasser as an official representative of the Syrian government.
Nasser was bemused by the steady stream of Syrian politicians and military men who flocked to Cairo to fling their country at his feet. Although he had always promoted Arab unity, he understood the expression to mean Arab solidarity, a unity of purpose and of goals. He had never aspired to formal union with other Arab states. Egypt, he recognized, had a very distinct history from the rest of the Arab world. Prior to the revolution, most Egyptians would not have identified themselves as Arabs, reserving the term either for the residents of the Arabian Peninsula or for the desert Bedouin. The proposal was all the more unlikely given that Egypt and Syria shared no borders but were separated by the iron wall raised by Israel.
Yet Nasser saw how a union with Syria could advance his interests. As head of a union of two major Arab states, Nasser could secure his position as the unrivaled leader of the Arab world. The union would be hugely popular with the Arab masses beyond Egypt and Syria, reinforcing their greater loyalty to Nasser than to their own national rulers. It would also demonstrate to the great powers—the Americans and Soviets, the British and French—that the new political order in the Middle East was being shaped by Egypt. Having overcome imperialism, Nasser was now circumventing the Cold War.
Nasser received his Syrian visitors and imposed his terms: full union, with Syria ruled from Cairo by the same institutions that governed Egypt. The Syrian army would come under Egyptian command and would have to stay out of politics and return to the barracks. All political parties were to be disbanded and replaced with a single state party to be known as the National Union, party pluralism being equated with divisive factionalism.
Nasser’s terms came as something of a shock to his Syrian guests. The Ba‘th representatives were appalled by the prospect of dissolving their party, but Nasser reassured them that they would dominate the National Union, which would prove their vehicle to shape the political culture of the United Arab Republic (UAR), as the new state was to be called. The name was deliberately open ended, as the union of Syria and Egypt was to be but the first step toward a broader Arab union and toward the Arab renaissance to which the Ba’th aspired. Though Nasser set terms that disenfranchised both the Ba’th and the military in politics, both groups came away from the Cairo discussions under the illusion that they would exercise predominant influence in Syria through the union with Egypt.
After ten days’ discussion, Bitar and the officers returned from Cairo to brief the Syrian cabinet on the union scheme they had agreed with Nasser. Khalid al-Azm made no effort to hide his opposition to their proposals, but he found himself in the minority. Al-Azm watched in dismay as the elected leadership of Syria blithely surrendered their country’s hard-gained independence on what he saw as an Arab nationalist whim. He mocked President al-Quwatli’s opening remarks, using “words like ‘Arabness’ and ‘the Arabs’ and ‘glory’” to “fill an otherwise empty speech.” Al-Quwatli then gave the floor to the foreign minister. Bitar told his colleagues that he and Nasser had agreed to a full union of Syria and Egypt into a single state, and that they proposed to put the matter to a public referendum in both countries—knowing full well that the union would enjoy massive public support in both Syria and Egypt.
When Bitar finished, many of his cabinet colleagues affirmed their support for the union. “When they all had had their say,” al-Azm related, “I asked for the session to be adjourned to give those present the opportunity to study the proposal. They all looked astonished by the suggestion. It was now my turn to be amazed. I could not believe that the Cabinet would be presented with so significant a proposal, which entailed nothing less than the dissolution of the Syrian entity, without allowing the ministers sufficient time to study the matter and to sound out the views of their parties, members of parliament, and policy makers in the country.”44 He succeeded only in securing a twenty-four hour adjournment.
Al-Azm prepared an extensive response and put forward a compromise union scheme based on a federation of the two states. His proposal gained enough support in the Syrian cabinet to be sent on to Cairo, but Nasser would have nothing to do with the compromise: it was total union or nothing at all. The Syrian army intervened again, preparing an airplane to take the cabinet to conclude the deal in Cairo. The chief of staff clarified the issue for the undecided politicians. “There are two roads open to you,” he is reported to have said. “One leads to Mezze [the notorious political prison outside Damascus]; the other to Cairo.”45 The Syrian government took the road to Cairo and concluded the union agreement with Egypt on February 1, 1958.
It was the beginning of a revolutionary year. The union of Egypt and Syria heralded a new age of Arab unity, generating tremendous public support across the Arab world. Nasser’s standing reached new heights, much to the consternation of the other Arab heads of state.
Perhaps the most vulnerable Arab leader in 1958 was the young King Hussein of Jordan, who would celebrate his twenty-third birthday in November of that year. Given Jordan’s history of relations with Britain, Hussein had been a particular target of the Nasserist propaganda machine. The Voice of the Arabs broadcast damning criticisms of Hussein and encouraged the Jordanian people to overthrow the monarchy and join the progressive ranks of modern Arab republics.
In response to these external pressures, King Hussein did all he could to distance himself from Britain. He stood up to British pressures and stayed out of the Baghdad Pact. In March 1956 he dismissed the British officers still running his army, including the influential commander Glubb Pasha. He even negotiated the termination of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty in March 1957—effectively ending British influence over the Hashemite Kingdom. These measures were followed by conciliatory efforts toward Egypt and Syria and by efforts to demonstrate Jordan’s commitment to Arab nationalism.
Hussein’s boldest concession was to open his government to pro-Nasserist forces. In November 1956 Hussein held free and open elections for the first time in Jordan’s history, which gave left-leaning Arab nationalists a clear majority in the Jordanian parliament. Hussein took the risk and invited the leader of the largest party, Sulayman al-Nabulsi, to form a government of loyal opposition. The experiment lasted less than six months.
The reform-minded Nabulsi government had a difficult time reconciling the contradictions between loyalty and opposition. Moreover, al-Nabulsi enjoyed greater public support and loyalty from the Nasserist “Free Officer” elements in the Jordanian military than did the king. Hussein came to believe that prolonging the Nabulsi government would shorten his monarchy, and he decided to act. In April 1957 Hussein took a real gamble in demanding al-Nabulsi’s resignation, on the pretext of the government’s sympathies for communism. Shortly after dismissing al-Nabulsi, Hussein took forceful measures to reassert his hold over the country and its armed forces. By mid-April, King Hussein had orchestrated the arrest or exile of the leading Jordanian Free Officers who threatened his rule and secured oaths of loyalty from his troops.
The pressures on Jordan intensified following the 1958 union of Syria and Egypt.46 Arab nationalists redoubled their calls for the Hashemite government to step aside and for Jordan to join the progressive Arab ranks through union with the United Arab Republic. Hussein’s own vision of Arab nationalism was more dynastic than ideological, and he turned to Iraq, led by his cousin King Faisal II, to shore up Jordan’s vulnerable position. Within two weeks, he concluded a unity scheme with Iraq called the Arab Union, launched in Amman on February 14, 1958.
The Arab Union was a federal arrangement that preserved each country’s separate national status but called for joint military command and foreign policy. The capital of the new state was to alternate between Amman and Baghdad every six months. The two Hashemite monarchies were connected by blood ties, a shared history under British tutelage, and even had a border in common.
The Arab Union was no match for the United Arab Republic, however. The union of Iraq and Jordan was seen as a rearguard action against the threat of Nasserism. By throwing in his lot with Iraq, host of the Baghdad Pact, whose prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id was reviled as the most anglophile Arab politician of his day, Hussein had exposed his kingdom to even greater pressure from the Nasserists.
Lebanon was another pro-Western state that came under intense pressure from the union of Syria and Egypt. The sectarian division of power agreed to in the 1943 National Pact had begun to unravel. Lebanese Muslims (which term grouped Sunnis, Shiites, and Druzes) were particularly aggrieved. They did not approve of the pro-Western policies pursued by the Maronite Christian president Camille Chamoun and wanted to align Lebanon with more overtly Arab nationalist policies. The Lebanese Muslims in 1958 had reason to believe that they outnumbered the Christians. The fact that the government had not authorized a new census since 1932 only confirmed Muslim suspicions that the Christians refused to recognize demographic reality. Lebanese Muslims began to question the political distribution of power that left them with less political voice than their numbers would warrant under a more proportional system. They knew that under true majority rule, Lebanon would pursue policies in line with the dominant Nasserist politics of the day.
The Lebanese Muslims saw Nasser as the solution to all their problems, a strong Arab and Muslim leader who would unite the Arab world and end the perceived subordination of Lebanon’s Muslims in the Christian-dominated Lebanese state. President Chamoun, however, believed Nasser posed a direct threat to Lebanon’s independence, and he sought foreign guarantees from outside subversion.
After the Suez Crisis, Chamoun knew he could not count on France or Britain for support. Instead, he turned to America. In March 1957 he agreed to the Eisenhower Doctrine. First presented to the U.S. Congress in January 1957, the doctrine was a major milestone in the Cold War in the Middle East. As a new policy initiative designed to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, it called for American development aid and military assistance to Middle Eastern states to help them defend their national independence. Most significant, the Eisenhower Doctrine authorized “the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence” of states in the region “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.”
Given the deepening of Soviet-Egyptian relations since the Czech arms deal and the Suez Crisis, the Eisenhower Doctrine seemed to many a policy designed to contain Egyptian as much as Soviet influence in the Arab world. Egypt rejected the new American policy as the Baghdad Pact all over again—another attempt by the Western powers to impose their anti-Soviet priorities on the Arab region, ignoring Arab concerns over Israel. Thus, when the president of Lebanon formally accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine, he entered on a collision course with both the Nasser government and Nasser’s many supporters in Lebanon.
Matters came to a head in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, held in the summer of 1957. In Lebanon, the parliament elects the president of the republic for a single six-year term. The parliament resulting from the 1957 elections would thus elect the next Lebanese president in 1958, so the stakes were high.
In the run-up to the elections, Chamoun’s opponents—Muslims, Druze, and Christians alike—formed an electoral bloc called the National Front. The front brought together a formidable group of politicians: the Sunni leader from Tripoli, Rashid Karami; the most powerful Druze politician, Kamal Jumblatt; and even Maronites hostile to Camille Chamoun’s rule, like Bishara al-Khoury’s Constitutional Bloc. The National Front represented a far larger share of the Lebanese public than those supporting the beleaguered President Chamoun.
Lebanon became a battlefield between the Americans, trying to promote regimes sympathetic to the West, and the Nasserists, who were trying to unite Arab ranks against foreign intervention. As parliamentary elections neared, the U.S. government feared Egypt and Syria would promote the National Front and undermine the position of the pro-Western Chamoun. So the Americans subverted the elections themselves. The C.I.A. provided massive funds to underwrite the election campaigns of candidates running in Chamoun’s bloc in an operation overseen personally by the American ambassador to Lebanon, who was determined to achieve “a 99.9 percent-pure pro-U.S. parliament.” Wilbur Crane Eveland, the C.I.A. agent who hand-delivered the funds to Chamoun in his distinctive gold Ford de Soto convertible, had grave misgivings about the operation. “So obvious was the use of foreign funds by the [Lebanese] president and prime minister that the two pro-government ministers appointed to observe the polling resigned halfway through the election period.”47 Electoral tensions gave rise to large-scale fighting in northern Lebanon, where many civilians were killed and wounded during the voting.
Chamoun won in a landslide. The victory was not so much an endorsement of the Eisenhower Doctrine as evidence of the corruption of the Chamoun government. The opposition press took the election results as proof that Chamoun sought to stack the parliament in his favor in order to amend the Lebanese constitution to allow himself an unlawful second term as president.
With the opposition shut out of the parliament, some of its leaders turned to violence to prevent Chamoun from gaining a second term of office. Bombings and assassinations wracked the capital city of Beirut and the countryside from February to May 1958. The breakdown in order accelerated after the union of Syria and Egypt, as pro-Nasser demonstrations gave way to violence.
On May 8, 1958, Nasib Matni, a pro-Nasser journalist, was assassinated. Opposition forces blamed the government for his death. The National Front held Chamoun’s government responsible for the murder and called for country-wide strikes in protest. The first armed disturbance broke out in Tripoli on May 10. By May 12, armed militias were fighting in Beirut as Lebanon dissolved into civil war.
The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, refused to deploy the army to prop up the discredited Chamoun government. The Americans prepared to intervene in Lebanon as the situation deteriorated and the pro-Western Chamoun government looked in danger of falling to the Nasserists.
At the height of the fighting in Lebanon, Iraqi journalist Yunis Bahri turned to his wife and suggested they leave the turmoil of Beirut for the relative calm of Baghdad. Bahri, a native of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, was an outspoken critic of British imperialism in the Middle East and had been one of many Arab nationalists drawn to Hitler’s Germany. He was renowned in the Arab world as the voice of Radio Berlin’s Arab service in the Second World War. “Hail, Arabs, this is Berlin,” was his famous call sign. After the war he moved between Beirut and Baghdad, writing for the leading Arab newspapers and working as a radio broadcaster. Fatefully, in 1958 he accepted a commission from the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id to broadcast a series of reports critical of Nasser. When war broke out in Lebanon, Bahri’s Beirut home was taken over by popular resistance forces. He told his wife they should go to Baghdad to take refuge from the shelling and shooting.
“But Baghdad is a burning hell at this time of the summer,” she replied.
“The flames of Iraq are more comfortable than the bullets of Beirut,” he insisted.48 Little did he know.
Bahri and his wife arrived in Baghdad on July 13, 1958, to a warm reception. The local press had covered their return, and their first night in town was spent in a string of engagements thrown in their honor. They awoke the next morning to a revolution.
A group of military conspirators led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and Colonel Abd al-Salam ‘Arif had been plotting since 1956 to overthrow the monarchy in Iraq and establish a military-led republic. They called themselves the Free Officers, inspired by the example of the Nasser and his colleagues in Egypt. Driven by Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism, the Iraqi Free Officers condemned the Hashemite monarchy and the government of Nuri al-Sa’id for being too pro-British—a particularly serious charge in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. The Free Officers sought to sweep away the old order installed by the British in the 1920s and install a new government created by the Iraqi people themselves. They believed the monarchy could only be overthrown by a singular act of revolutionary violence.
The Free Officers’ opportunity came when the Iraqi government ordered the deployment of army units to the Jordanian border to reinforce their Arab Union partner state against further threats from Syria and Egypt, on the night of July 13–14. The route from the army base to the Jordanian border took the rebel officers past the capital city. The conspirators decided to divert their troops to central Baghdad and seize power that very night.
After the Free Officers gave instructions to loyal soldiers to divert their trucks from the highway toward the capital, the rebel soldiers took up positions in key points of the city. One detachment made its way to the Royal Palace to execute King Faysal II and all members of the ruling Hashemite family. Others went to the homes of high government officials. Orders were given for the summary execution of Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa‘id. Colonel Abd al-Salam ’Arif led a small detachment to take over the radio station to broadcast word of the revolution and to assert the Free Officers’ control over Iraq.
“This is Baghdad,” ‘Arif intoned over the airwaves in the early morning hours of July 14, 1958, “Radio Service of the Iraqi Republic.” To the Iraqi listening public, this was the first indication of the end of the monarchy. The edgy ’Arif paced the room between his broadcasts, anxious for word from his co-conspirators on the success of their revolution. Around 7:00 A.M. an officer in a blood-stained uniform burst into the room holding a submachine gun in his right hand and confirmed the death of the king and royal family. ’Arif began to shout “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! [God is great!]” at the top of his voice. He then sat at a desk, penned a few lines, and disappeared into the broadcast studio, repeating to himself, “Allahu Akbar, the Revolution was victorious!”49
Yunis Bahri followed the first reports of the revolution through ‘Arif’s broadcasts. “We did not know what was happening either inside or outside the capital,” Bahri recalled. “The people of Baghdad crouched in their homes, confused by the sudden shock of events.” Then ’Arif called the people into the streets to support the revolution and track down its enemies.
Though ‘Arif knew that the royal family had already been killed, he called on the Iraqis to attack the royal palace, as though he sought to implicate the Iraqi people in the crime of regicide. He also offered a reward of 10,000 Iraqi dinars for the capture of Nuri al-Sa’id, who had managed to escape his assailants at dawn—only to be caught disguised as a woman and lynched the following day. “When the people of Baghdad heard the incitement to attack the royal palace and Nuri al-Sa’id’s palace, they left their homes overcome with the desire to kill, murder, rob and plunder,” Bahri recalled. The urban poor leaped at the opportunity to plunder the fabled riches of Baghdad’s palaces and to kill anyone who got in their way.
Yunis Bahri took to the streets to witness the Iraqi Revolution firsthand. He was appalled by the carnage that greeted him. “Blood flowed in a violent stream down al-Rashid Street. The people applauded and cheered when they saw men dragged to death behind cars. I saw the mob drag the remains of the body of ’Abd al-Ilah after they had made an example of him, gratifying their thirst for revenge upon him. Then they hanged his body from the gate of the Ministry of Defence.” The crowd pulled down the statues of King Faysal I and General Maude, the British commander who first occupied Baghdad in 1917, and set fire to the British Chancellery in Baghdad. In the atmosphere of mass hysteria, anyone could be mistaken for a man of the ancient regime and lynched. “It was sufficient for anyone to point a finger, saying ‘That’s [cabinet minister] Fadhil al-Jamali!’ for the crowd to seize and bind the man’s legs and drag him to death without hesitation or mercy, while he screamed in vain and called upon God, the prophets and all the angels and devils protesting [the mistaken identity].” Baghdad was unrecognizable, “ablaze in fires and drenched in blood, the corpses of the victims scattered in the streets.”50
While the violence raged in the streets of Baghdad, Colonel ‘Arif continued to issue statements and orders throughout the day over the national radio station. He ordered the arrest of all former Iraqi cabinet ministers, as well as the ministers of the Arab Union, both Iraqi and Jordanian. As the day wore on, lower-level figures were singled out for arrest, from the mayor of Baghdad to the chief of police. By the afternoon they were calling for broadcasters and journalists who were considered sympathetic to the monarchy. Yunis Bahri, who had assisted Nuri al-Sa’id, was named as a sympathizer of the fallen government and was arrested the following day. He reached the Ministry of Defence just as al-Sa’id’s mangled corpse arrived in the back of a jeep.
The men of the old order were rounded up like sheep and led off to a new prison converted from an old hospital in a suburb of Baghdad known as Abu Ghurayb. The prison of Abu Ghurayb would gain notoriety as the torture chamber of Saddam Hussein and, later yet, of U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bahri was detained in Abu Ghurayb for seven months before being released without charge. He and his wife returned to Beirut early in 1959 to find a new government and the civil war at an end.
In Lebanon, the opposition forces celebrated the fall of the monarchy in Iraq. They believed the Hashemite monarchy was a British puppet state and that the Free Officers were Arab nationalists in Nasser’s mold. They took comfort in the fall of the pro-Western government in Iraq and redoubled their efforts against the Chamoun government in Lebanon. As Chamoun recorded in his memoirs, “In rebel neighbourhoods, men and women had gone into the streets, filled cafes and public places, joyful, dancing with a frenetic joy, threatening legal authority with the fate that had been that of Baghdad leaders. On the other hand, a great fear had spread to those Lebanese committed to a peaceful and independent Lebanon.”51
The Lebanese state, shaken by civil war, was now threatened with collapse. Chamoun invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine two hours after receiving news of the violent revolution in Iraq (Lebanon had the distinction to be the only country ever to invoke the doctrine). With the U.S. Sixth Fleet on hand in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marines landed in Beirut the very next day.
The United States intervened in Lebanon to prevent the fall of a pro-Western government to Nasserist forces. The American show of force on behalf of its Lebanese ally included 15,000 troops on the ground, dozens of naval vessels off the coast, and 11,000 sorties by naval aircraft that made frequent low-level flights over Beirut to intimidate the warring Lebanese. U.S. troops remained only three months in Beirut (the last American forces were withdrawn on October 25) and left without firing a shot.
Political stability returned to Lebanon under the brief American occupation. The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, was elected president on July 31, 1958, putting to rest the opposition’s concerns of an unconstitutional extension of Chamoun’s rule. President Chamoun’s term of office ended on schedule, on September 22. That October, President Shihab oversaw the creation of a coalition government combining loyalist and opposition members. Arab nationalist hopes that Lebanon would throw in its lot with Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic were dashed, as the new Lebanese government called for national reconciliation under the slogan “no vanquished and no victor.”
The Iraqi Revolution left Jordan totally isolated and threatened by the same Arab nationalist forces that had swept away the much stronger monarchy in Baghdad. King Hussein’s first reaction was to dispatch his army to put down the revolution and restore his family’s rule in Iraq. It was an emotive response rather than a rational calculation. Even if his overstretched, underarmed forces had managed to overpower the stronger Iraqi army, there were no surviving Hashemites in Iraq to restore to the throne (the only surviving member of the family, Prince Zeid, was then serving as Iraq’s ambassador to Great Britain and lived in London with his family).
Hussein soon recognized the vulnerability of his own position, and how easy it would be for his enemies in the UAR to overthrow him now that he no longer had Iraq to back him up. As he recalled his own army, which had reached 150 miles inside Iraq, Hussein turned to Britain and the United States on July 16 to request military assistance. As in Lebanon, foreign troops were seen as essential to prevent outside intervention in Jordan. It was a great risk for Hussein to turn to the former imperial power, so discredited by the Suez Crisis. Yet the risks of going it alone were even worse. On July 17, British paratroopers and aircraft began to arrive in Jordan to contain the damage of the Iraqi Revolution.
At the height of the Cold War, when political analysts conceived of whole regions of the world as dominoes at risk of falling, officials in Washington, London, and Moscow alike believed the Iraqi Revolution would set off an Arab nationalist sweep. They were convinced that the Iraqi coup had been masterminded by Nasser and that he was intent on bringing all the Fertile Crescent under his dominion in the United Arab Republic. This in part explains the speed with which the United States and Britain intervened to prop up the pro-Western states in Lebanon and Jordan.
All eyes now turned to Egypt—to sound out Nasser’s views on recent events—and to Iraq, to see what Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim intended to do. Would he bring Iraq into union with Syria and Egypt, creating the Arab superstate that would redress the balance of power in the region? Or would the traditional rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad be preserved in the republican era?
According to Nasser’s confidant, Mohamed Heikal, the Egyptian president had misgivings about the Iraqi Revolution from the outset. Given the extraordinary volatility of the Arab world in 1958, and the tensions between the Soviets and the Americans, further regional instability could only represent a liability for Egypt.
Nasser was meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia when he first learned of the coup in Baghdad, and he flew directly to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on July 17. The Soviets were convinced that Nasser had orchestrated the whole affair and were concerned about the U.S. reaction. Khrushchev admonished Nasser, saying, “Frankly we are not ready for a confrontation. We are not ready for World War Three.”52
Nasser tried to convince his Soviet ally that he had no part in the events in Baghdad, and he tried to secure Soviet guarantees against U.S. retaliation. The most that Khrushchev was willing to offer was to conduct Soviet-Bulgarian maneuvers on the Turkish border to discourage the United States from deploying Turkish troops in Syria or Iraq. “But I am telling you frankly, don’t depend on anything more than that,” Khrushchev warned the Egyptian president. Nasser reassured Khrushchev that he had no intention of seeking Iraq’s accession to the UAR.
The new Iraqi government was itself divided on whether to seek union with Nasser or preserve the independence of Iraq. The new leader of Iraq, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, was determined to rule an independent state and had no intention of delivering his country to Nasser’s rule. He worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party, seeking closer ties to the Soviet Union, and was cool toward the Cairo regime that had clamped down upon the Egyptian Communist Party. Qasim’s second-in-command, Colonel ‘Arif, played to the Arab nationalist gallery in calling for Iraq to join Egypt and Syria in the UAR. Qasim ultimately arrested his coconspirator and had ’Arif imprisoned, condemned to death, and reprieved (in 1963’Arif would head the coup that would overthrow and execute Qasim).
For the next five years, Qasim took Iraq down the road of rivalry, rather than unity, with Egypt, and relations between Iraq and the UAR deteriorated in mutual recrimination. Iraq’s failure to join the United Arab Republic was a great disappointment to Arab nationalists across the Middle East, who had seen in the bloody revolution the possibility of uniting the three great centers of Arabism—Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad.
The Arab world had been utterly transformed by the Egyptian Revolution. In the course of the 1950s Egypt had emerged as the most powerful state in the region and Nasser the undisputed leader of the Arab world.
Nasser rose to the peak of his power in 1958 with the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. The union sent shock waves across the Arab world that nearly toppled the fragile governments in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan. Arab nationalists welcomed the prospect of the collapse of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and of the pro-Western Christian state in Lebanon in the expectation that both would join the United Arab Republic. The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad seemed the harbinger of a new Arab order, uniting Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and fulfilling the hopes of Arab nationalists in a united, progressive Arab superstate. For one brief, heady moment, it looked as though the Arab world might break the cycle of foreign domination that had marked the Ottoman, imperial, and Cold War eras to enjoy an age of true independence.
Iraq’s decision to stay out of the United Arab Republic was a major turning point. Without the excitement and momentum that the accession of Iraq, or indeed of Jordan or Lebanon, might have brought to the UAR, Egypt and Syria were left to the mundane business of making their hybrid state work. They would not succeed. Arab nationalism turned a corner, and Nasser, having reached the pinnacle of success in the course of the 1950s, suffered a string of setbacks and defeats that turned the 1960s into a decade of defeats.