CHAPTER 11
In the course of the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had led Egypt and the Arab world through a string of improbable triumphs. “Nasserism” had become the dominant expression of Arab nationalism. Men and women across the Arab world believed the Egyptian president had a master plan for unifying the Arab people and leading them to a new age of independence and power. They saw their hopes realized in the union of Syria and Egypt.
Nasser’s remarkable run of successes came to an end in the 1960s. The union with Syria unraveled in 1961. The Egyptian army got mired in Yemen’s civil war. And Nasser led his nation and its Arab allies into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The long-promised liberation of Palestine was yet further set back by Israel’s occupation of the remaining Palestinian territories, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. The hopes of the Arab world in 1960 had been worn down to disillusion and cynicism by the time of Nasser’s death in 1970.
The events of the 1960s had a radicalizing impact on the Arab world. With British and French imperialism increasingly a thing of the past, the Arabs found themselves drawn into the politics of the Cold War. By the 1960s the Arab states had divided into pro-Western and pro-Soviet blocs. The influence of the Cold War was most pronounced in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which developed into a proxy war between Soviet and American arms. The Arab experience, it seemed, would continue to be one of divide and rule.
The United Arab Republic would prove more of a challenge than Nasser had ever anticipated. Shukri al-Quwatli, the twice-deposed president of Syria, reportedly warned Nasser that he would find Syria “a difficult country to govern.” He explained: “Fifty per cent of the Syrians consider themselves national leaders, twenty-five per cent think they are prophets, and ten per cent imagine they are gods.”1
The Syrians chafed under Egyptian rule. The Syrian army, which had initially shown such enthusiasm for the union, hated taking orders from Egyptian officers. The Syrian landowning elites were outraged when Egypt’s land reform program was applied to Syria. By January 1959 over one million acres of farmland had been confiscated from large landholders for redistribution to Syrian peasants. Syrian businessmen saw their position undermined by socialist decrees that transferred their companies from private to state ownership, as the government expanded its role in economic planning. The average Syrian was crushed under the weight of the notorious paperwork of Egyptian bureaucracy.
The Egyptians alienated the Syrian political elites by excluding them from government. Syrian society was intensely political, and the Syrian politicians resented the dissolution of their parties and their subordination to Egypt’s single state party. Nasser named his own right-hand man, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, to be his viceroy over the Syrian regional government, relegating his supporters in the Ba‘th party to posts of second importance. By the end of 1959, leading Ba’thists had resigned from the UAR cabinet in protest—including some of the architects of the union, such as Salah al-Din Bitar. In August 1961, Nasser decided to dispense with the Syrian regional government altogether and to rule Syria through an expanded cabinet based in Cairo.
Having led its country into union with Egypt in February 1958, the Syrian army now organized a coup to sever ties and take Syria back again. On the morning of September 28, 1961, Syrian army units moved into Damascus before dawn, arrested Field Marshal Amer, and secured the radio station. The Syrian interim government, an entirely civilian cabinet, expelled Amer and ordered the deportation of all Egyptians from Syrian soil on September 30—some 6,000 troops, 5,000 civil servants, and an estimated 10,000–20,000 Egyptian guest workers.
Nasser was perplexed by Syria’s bid for secession. His first reaction was to dispatch the Egyptian army to repress the coup with force. He relented hours later and recalled his forces, accepting Syrian secession “so that no Arab blood would be shed.” “Nasser was tormented by the breakup of the UAR,” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “It had been the first international expression of his dream of Arab Unity and it was not revived in his lifetime.”2
In the aftermath of the Syrian coup, Nasser initially pinned the blame for the breakup of the UAR on its opponents—the Jordanians, the Saudis, even the Americans. Yet the Syrian secession forced Nasser to ask hard questions about his own political orientations and the direction the Egyptian revolution had taken. He never recognized the obvious problem with the UAR—that Egypt had ruled in a quasi-imperial fashion over the proud Syrians. Instead, Nasser came to the conclusion that Egypt and Syria had failed to achieve the degree of social reform necessary for such an ambitious Arab unity scheme to work. His response to the breakup of the UAR was to introduce a radical reform agenda to strip the “reactionary” elements from Arab society and pave the way for a future “progressive” union of the Arab people.
Starting in 1962, Nasser took the Egyptian revolution down the road of Arab socialism—an ambitious if quixotic reform agenda fusing Arab nationalism and Soviet-inspired socialism. The Egyptian government accelerated the nationalization of private enterprise, which had begun in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, to create an entirely state-led economy. Already in 1960 the UAR government had introduced its first Soviet-style five year plan (1960–1965) with overly ambitious targets for economic expansion in industry and agricultural output. In the countryside, the land reform measures begun in 1952 were intensified as new laws lowered the maximum land holding from 200 to 100 acres, with expropriated lands redistributed to landless and smallholder peasants. Egyptian industrial workers and peasants were given new prominence in state institutions.
Egypt’s new political orientation was enshrined in the 1962 National Charter, which sought to weave Islam, Arab nationalism, and socialism into a coherent political project. Not only did the National Charter envision a new political culture for Egypt, but it set out ideals for reshaping Arab society at large. And the ideological orientation of the country was entrusted to the official state party, the National Union, which was renamed the Arab Socialist Union.
With his turn to Arab socialism, Nasser gave up trying to subvert the rules of the Cold War and threw in his lot with the Soviet Union, following its model of a state-led economy. Leaving the door open to future unity schemes, Nasser retained the name “United Arab Republic” for his country. It was only in 1971 that the UAR was laid to rest and Nasser’s successor renamed the country the Arab Republic of Egypt.
Arab socialism would exercise great influence in Egypt and divide the Arab world. The language of politics in Egypt grew much more doctrinaire. The ultimate target of Nasser’s critique after the breakup of the UAR was the “reactionaries,” the men of property who put narrow national self-interest before the interests of the Arab nation. By extension, those Arab states that were supported by the West—conservative monarchies like Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and liberal republics like Tunisia and Lebanon—were dismissed as “reactionary” states (in the West they were known as “moderate” states). The revolutionary Arab states all aligned themselves with Moscow and followed its social and economic model. They were known in the Arab world as “progressive” states (dismissed as “radical” Arab states in the West). The list of progressive states was initially quite small—Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—though their ranks would expand with the conclusion of successful revolutions in Algeria, Yemen, and Libya.
Egypt was fairly isolated in this new division of the region, as it had poor relations with the other emerging “progressive” Arab states—Iraq in particular. However, in 1962 Nasser had just gained an important ally. After the bloodiest anticolonial war in the region’s history, Algeria had finally secured its independence from France.
The Algerian war of independence raged for nearly eight years, from the first uprising of November 1, 1954, until the establishment of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria in September 1962. The conflict spared no part of Algeria, spreading from the cities to the countryside. By war’s end, over one million Algerians and Frenchmen had lost their lives.
When the Algerians launched their bid for independence, they had every reason to expect high casualties. In 1945 French repression of moderate nationalists in the eastern market town of Sétif (the nationalists wished to carry Algerian flags alongside French flags in their local Victory in Europe parade) resulted in riots that left forty Algerians and Europeans dead. The French overreaction to the Sétif demonstrations set off nationwide protests across Algeria through the month of May 1945. The French deployed warships, aircraft, and some 10,000 soldiers to quell the uprising. Whereas about one hundred European men, women, and children had been killed by Algerian insurgents, many more Algerians had been killed by French retaliatory measures. The French government acknowledged some 1,500 Algerian dead, though the army put the figure at 6,000–8,000. Algerians claims ran as high as 45,000 dead. The French intended Sétif as a warning against further nationalist activity. Predictably, their murderous overreaction had the opposite effect intended, driving many Algerians to embrace the nationalist cause. As Algerian nationalists rose up against the French in 1954, they were still haunted by the memory of Sétif.
The heavy casualties of the 1954–1962 Algerian War reflected an implacable logic of violent retribution. The Algerian nationalists of the National Liberation Front (FLN) believed they had to inflict terror on the French that would provoke a terrible retaliation from them, which would force the colonial power from the country. The French, for their part, had no intention of withdrawing from their oldest and most entrenched North African possession. “Algeria is France,” the French insisted—and they meant it. They believed the nationalists to be a marginal force that could be crushed, leaving the silent majority of complacent Algerians to continue under French rule. The resulting savage war of unspeakable horrors shattered Algeria and France alike.
Atrocities against civilians began with FLN attacks on the French settlers in Philippeville in August 1955, when Algerian fighters killed 123 men, women, and children. After the experience of Sétif, the FLN knew the French would retaliate with a vengeance that would generate broad-based Algerian hatred for the French. They were right. The French acknowledged killing over 1,200 Algerian civilians in retaliation for the Philippeville massacre. The FLN claimed the French had killed 12,000. Thousands of Algerians volunteered for the FLN as a result. In such a way, the small FLN insurgency of 1954 erupted into total war by the end of 1955.
As thousands of Algerians volunteered to join the national liberation struggle, the FLN managed to consolidate its hold over Algerian politics through a combination of conviction and intimidation. The aggressive tactics of the French military encouraged a number of Algerian political parties and movements to make common cause with the FLN. Early nationalists such as Ferhat Abbas, as well as the parties of the left, like the Communists, folded their own organizations into the National Liberation Front. The FLN was ruthless with its internal opponents. In the first three years of the war of independence it is estimated that the FLN killed six times more Algerians than Frenchmen in their operations. By July 1956, the FLN had secured unrivaled command of the national liberation struggle, which it declared both a war of independence and a social revolution.
The leadership of the FLN was divided between six internal commanders, who organized resistance within five insurrectionary provinces, or wilayas, and three external leaders based in Cairo. With the outbreak of the nationalist uprising in November 1954, the French used their extensive intelligence network to clamp down on the internal leadership. During the first six months of operations, the French had killed the commander of Wilaya II and arrested the leaders of Wilayas I and IV. With the internal leadership in disarray, the initiative passed to the external leadership.
Of the three external leaders of the FLN—Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Ait Ahmed, and Mohamed Khider—Ben Bella gained the most prominence (he would later become the first president of independent Algeria). Born in a village in western Algeria in 1918, Ben Bella was in every sense a child of French Algeria. French was his first language, he volunteered for the French army in 1936, and he even played for a French soccer team in the late 1930s. His conversion to nationalist politics was provoked by French repression of the 1945 Sétif uprising. He was arrested by the French in 1951 but escaped from prison in Algeria and made his way to Tunisia and Cairo, where he established an FLN office. Following the outbreak of the war, Ben Bella moved between Arab capitals raising funds and political support for Algeria’s bid for independence from France.
The French succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the FLN in October 1956. Following reliable intelligence, the French air force intercepted a Moroccan DC-3 carrying Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed, and Khider, as well as the supreme commander of the internal leadership, Mohamed Boudiaf, and forced the plane to land in the western Algerian city of Oran. The FLN leaders were arrested and dispatched to prison in France, where they served out the remaining years of the Algerian War.
The French public celebrated the arrests of the FLN leadership as if this development marked the end of the Algerian War. Mouloud Feraoun, a celebrated author and member of Algeria’s Berber community, reflected bitterly that the capture of the leaders of the movement would do nothing to restore peace between Algerians and the French. “They present the seizure [of the FLN leaders] as a great victory, prelude to the final victory,” he wrote in his diary. “What final victory? Snuffing the revolt, the death of the rebellion, the renaissance of Franco-Algerian friendship, of confidence, of peace?”3 Written in a tone of bitter irony, Feraoun recognized that whatever the French might hope, the arrest of Ben Bella and his colleagues was the prelude to more, not less, violence.
By the time of Ben Bella’s arrest, the violence had already moved from the countryside to the cities. On a Sunday evening in September 1956, the relative peace of the capital, Algiers, was shattered by three bombs set off in the European quarters of the city. It was the start of a violent campaign known as the Battle of Algiers. The FLN took the war to the capital in a calculated bid to provoke a French reaction that would bolster support for the National Liberation Front inside Algeria and generate international condemnation that would isolate France. Through the autumn of 1956 and the winter of 1957, the FLN organized a number of murderous terror attacks. The French retaliated with mass arrests and extensive torture to expose the FLN’s network in Algiers. The Battle of Algiers did attract widespread international attention, and France did face condemnation. But the Algerians paid a terrible price for these gains.
Mouloud Faraoun observed the violence in Algiers with horror and condemned both the French and the FLN for the murder of innocents. “The attacks in the cities are multiplying,” he wrote in his diary in October 1956, “stupid, atrocious. Innocents are torn to shreds. But which innocents? Who is innocent? The dozens of peaceful Europeans drinking in a bar? The dozens of Arabs who littered the road near a mangled bus? Terrorism, counter-terrorism,” he reflected with ironic bitterness, “desperate cries, atrocious screams of pain, agony. Nothing more. Peace.”4
The FLN mobilized all segments of the society in the Battle of Algiers. Women in particular played a central role, carrying bombs, running guns, serving as couriers between leaders in hiding, and providing a safe refuge for activists wanted by the French. The role of Djamila Bouhired and other women in the movement was captured with a gritty realism in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film, The Battle of Algiers.
Fatiha Bouhired and her twenty-two-year-old niece Djamila played central roles in the Battle of Algiers. Fatiha Bouhired’s husband was one of the first men in her quarter of the Casbah, or old city of Algiers, to join the independence movement. He was arrested by the French early in 1957 and killed while trying to escape. Her husband’s death redoubled Bouhired’s commitment to the liberation struggle, and she allowed the FLN to operate a clandestine bomb factory in her attic. Her niece Djamila served as one of the bomb carriers and delivered correspondence between FLN activists hiding in the Casbah. Both women showed remarkable presence of mind under pressure. Once, Fatiha and Djamila were alerted that soldiers were about to search their house. They made coffee, put classical music on the gramophone, and got dressed up. When the soldiers arrived they were greeted like welcome guests by attractive women with fresh coffee.
“I would be most curious to know what lies behind those beautiful eyes,” the captain of the patrol murmured suggestively to Djamila Bouhired.
“Behind my eyes,” she replied, rolling her head flirtatiously, “is my hair.”5
The officers searched the house no further.
The police would soon discover another side of Djamila Bouhired. On April 9, 1957, Djamila was shot in the shoulder while fleeing a French patrol in the Casbah. She was found carrying correspondence addressed to Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe, high-level FLN leaders who were at that time the two most wanted men in Algiers. She was taken to a hospital to be treated for the bullet wound, then transferred directly from the operating table to the interrogation chamber.
Over the next seventeen days she was subjected to horrific torture, clinically described in her deposition to the kangaroo court that ultimately condemned her to death. She never cracked. Her only comment in court was that “those who tortured me had no right to inflict such humiliation on a human being, physically upon my person, and morally upon themselves.”6 Her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Fatiha Bouhired continued to serve the FLN after her niece was arrested. She bought a house in the Casbah to provide a new refuge for Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe. They could trust no one else. “They were at home in my home, not hiding among other people,” Bouhired explained. The Casbah was riven with mistrust as the French infiltrated the FLN through collaborators and intelligence obtained by torturing detainees. “I was afraid of those who had sold out,” Fatiha Bouhired confided to an interviewer, “and preferred to do everything myself: I did the shopping, I was their intermediary, I helped them move about. I did everything, but that way I felt more at ease.”
The French were relentless in their pursuit of the surviving FLN leadership in Algiers. In July 1957, Yacef’s sister was arrested. Under torture, she revealed Fatiha Bouhired’s role in the movement and her connections to Saadi Yacef and a female bomber named Hassiba. The French authorities immediately arrested Bouhired. “They took me away and tortured me all night,” Fatiha Bouhired recalled. “Where is Yacef? Where is Yacef?” they demanded. Fatiha disclaimed any knowledge of Saadi Yacef and said Hassiba only came to her house to give her financial assistance on behalf of the FLN for the loss of her husband. She stuck to her story through repeated torture and ultimately persuaded the French, who agreed to place agents in her house to catch Hassiba when she next called on Fatiha.
Even with French agents in Fatiha Bouhired’s house, Ali la Pointe and Saadi Yacef remained in place. This led to the ironic situation of the French providing security to the FLN’s covert command center, with Ali la Pointe safely in the attic and French soldiers on the ground floor. Fatiha would prepare couscous, the Algerian traditional dish, for the French agents downstairs, always allowing Saadi Yacef to spit in the food before serving it to her unwelcome guests. “This time take them their couscous, and next time we’ll send them a well-seasoned bomb,” growled Yacef.7
Fatiha chafed in her new role as make-believe informant to the French, but her play-acting came to a sudden end when the French discovered Yacef’s hiding place and arrested him along with Fatiha in September 1957. She spent months in prison—refusing afterward to discuss her tortures—before being placed under house arrest.
With all of the senior leadership of the FLN in the capital dead or imprisoned, the Battle of Algiers came to an end in autumn 1957. But the larger Algerian War raged on.
Buoyed by its hard-fought success in defeating the insurgency in Algiers, the French army renewed its effort to break the National Liberation Front in the countryside. In late 1956 the French initiated a policy of forcing Algerian peasants from their homes and farms into internment camps. The forced resettlement of rural Algerians gained pace after the Battle of Algiers. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were rounded up and forced to live under French surveillance in camps with no access to their farmlands or work. Rather than suffer these French measures, many rural workers fled to the cities, where they congregated in slums. Others sought refuge in Tunisia or Morocco. By war’s end in 1962, some three million rural Algerians had been displaced from their homes, many never to return.
The French further isolated the FLN by closing the frontiers between Algeria and its neighbors with electrified fences and mine fields, thus preventing the migration of arms, fighters, and supplies from Morocco and Tunisia.
In military terms, the French had contained and defeated the insurgency in Algeria by 1958. However, the FLN opened new fronts in its war of independence, bringing its cause to the attention of the international community. With support from Egypt and other countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, they succeeded in getting the Algerian question on the agenda of the United Nations General Assembly in 1957. The following year, the FLN declared a provisional government in exile based in its Cairo office, with veteran nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas as president. And in December 1958 the provisional government of Algeria was invited to send a delegation to the People’s Republic of China. Algerian nationalists were gaining international attention and support that served to isolate France politically even as it seemed to have won the war militarily.
France itself was increasingly divided over the Algeria question by 1958. French taxpayers were beginning to feel the enormous cost of war. The French force in Algeria, only 60,000 men in 1954, had expanded ninefold to over 500,000 by 1956.8 This massive occupation force could only be sustained through conscription and extended national service—always unpopular measures. The young conscripts found themselves caught up in a war of unspeakable horror. Many returned home appalled by what they had witnessed and traumatized by what they had done: violations of human rights, forced resettlement, house demolitions, but worst of all, the systematic use of torture against men and women.9 French public opinion was shocked by reports of French soldiers resorting to methods associated with the brutal Nazi repression of the French Resistance in the Second World War. Leading French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre grew increasingly outspoken against the war at home, while France suffered isolation in the international arena for the violence of an imperial war during an age of decolonization.
The army and the settler community in Algeria were alarmed by the wavering French support for the Algerian colony. In May 1958 a group of French settlers rose in rebellion against the anemic government of French Premier Pierre Pflimlin, whom they suspected of seeking accommodation with the FLN enemy. Their slogan was “the Army to Power!” On May 13 the settlers overran the governor-general’s offices in Algiers to declare effective self-rule under a revolutionary “committee of public safety” with General Jacques Massu, commander of the elite paratrooper units, as its president.
The French military in Algeria was in full sympathy with the settlers’ movement. General Raoul Salan, commander in chief of French forces in Algeria, had dispatched a long telegram to his superiors in Paris on May 9. Salan conveyed his officers’ concerns that “diplomatic processes” might lead to “the abandonment of Algeria.” He continued: “The army in Algeria is troubled by the recognition of its responsibility towards the men who are fighting and risking a useless sacrifice if the representatives of the nation are not determined to maintain Algérie française.”10 Salan warned that only determined government action to preserve French Algeria would prevent a military putsch—not just in Algeria, but in metropolitan France as well. The crisis in Algeria risked toppling the French republic itself.
The settler insurrection sent shock waves through Algiers. Mouloud Feraoun captured the fear and uncertainty in his diary on May 14: “Atmosphere of revolution. People barricaded in their homes. Demonstrators march up and down the major arteries of the city, shops closed. The radio speaks of a Committee of Public Health that has taken all in hand and occupies the Governor General’s office and controls broadcasts.” The Muslims of Algiers recognized that this was a fight between the French that did not involve them. Feraoun questioned the Fourth Republic’s ability to withstand the pressure. “At base, the Algeria War will prove a very hard blow for France, perhaps a mortal blow to the Republic. After which, no doubt, this blow will bring the remedy to Algeria and Algerians.”11
Soon after, Pfimlin’s government fell, and the hero of the French resistance in World War II, General Charles de Gaulle, was returned to power by public acclaim in June 1958. Within three months, de Gaulle submitted a new constitution to plebiscite and in September 1958 launched the Fifth Republic.
One of de Gaulle’s first acts was to fly to Algeria to face the rebellious settler community. In a famous speech delivered in Algiers, de Gaulle calmed the restive army and settlers by promising that Algeria would remain French. “I have understood you!” de Gaulle reassured the rapturous crowds. He put forward an ambitious reform platform to develop Algeria and integrate its Arab citizens into the commonwealth of France through industrial development, land distribution, and the creation of 400,000 new jobs.
De Gaulle’s proposals were clearly intended to reassure the army and settlers in Algeria and bring an end to General Salan’s Committee of Public Safety. However, his comments demonstrated how little he understood the nationalist movement behind the FLN’s war. Reflecting on de Gaulle’s pronouncements, Mouloud Feraoun wrote bitterly: “Algerian nationalism? It doesn’t exist. Integration? You’ve got it.” It was as though de Gaulle were going back to the idea of assimilation as first set out in the Blum-Violette proposals of 1930. Assimilation might have held some appeal even as late as 1945. By 1958 it was an irrelevance. To Feraoun, it was as if de Gaulle were saying: “You are French, old man. Nothing else. Don’t give us any more headaches.”
In the face of stubborn FLN resistance, de Gaulle was forced to come to terms with Algerian demands for total independence. In spite of his early promises, de Gaulle reversed his position and began to prepare his countrymen for Algeria’s secession from France. In September 1959 he spoke for the first time of Algerian self-determination, provoking a round of violent demonstrations by settlers in Algeria in January 1960. De Gaulle persisted and in June 1960 convened the first direct negotiations with the provisional government of the Algerian Republic in Evian.
Hard-liners in the settler movement and their allies in the army began to see de Gaulle as a traitor. They formed terrorist organizations, like the Front of French Algeria and the notorious Secret Armed Organization, better known by its French acronym, the OAS, and actively plotted de Gaulle’s assassination. The OAS also unleashed a violent terror campaign within Algeria that inflicted random violence on Arab civilians.
The Evian negotiations, combined with the breakdown in public security, provoked a political crisis among the settlers and military in Algeria. In January 1961 the French government held a referendum on self-determination in Algeria, which carried with a resounding 75 percent vote in favor. In April 1961 the Foreign Legion parachute regiment in Algiers mutinied in protest against the French government’s moves to concede Algerian independence. However, the mutiny did not gain wider support among the French military, which remained faithful to de Gaulle, and the coup leaders were forced to surrender after only four days.
As the settlers’ position in Algeria grew more tenuous in 1961 and early 1962, the OAS stepped up its terrorist violence inside Algeria. “Now it seems that the OAS doesn’t warn anyone,” Mouloud Feraoun noted in one of his last journal entries, in February 1962. “They murder in cars, on motorcycle, with grenades, with machine-gun fire, with knives. They attack cashiers in banks, post offices, companies . . . with the complicity of some and the cowardice of all.”12 Feraoun’s brave voice of reason was silenced by OAS guns on March 15, just three days before the signing of the Evian Accords.
While violence continued to rage in Algeria, the FLN and de Gaulle’s government made steady progress in their negotiations in Evian. On March 18, 1962, the two sides signed the Evian Accords, conferring full independence on Algeria. The terms of the accords were put to public vote in a plebiscite held in Algeria on July 1. Algerians voted in near unanimity for independence (the vote was 5.9 million in favor, 16,000 opposed). On July 3, de Gaulle proclaimed the independence of Algeria. Celebrations in Algiers were delayed for two days to coincide with the anniversary of the French occupation of the city on July 5, 1830. After 132 years, the Algerians had finally driven the French from their lands.
Ongoing terror and an uncertain future drove the French community from Algeria in massive waves—300,000 left in the month of June 1962 alone. Many settler families had lived for generations in North Africa. By the end of the year, only some 30,000 European settlers remained in Algeria.
But most destructive was the bitter fighting that swiftly broke out between the internal and external leadership of the National Liberation Front in a desperate bid to seize power in the country they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to win. For the battle-weary Algerian people it was too much. The women of Algiers took to the streets to protest the fighting between their own freedom fighters, chanting “Seven years, enough is enough!”
It was not until Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne secured Algiers in September 1962 that the fighting came to an end. Ben Bella took his place at the head of government; a year later, after the ratification of the constitution in September 1963, he was elected president. Three years later, Boumedienne displaced him in a bloodless coup, reflecting the continued factionalism within the FLN leadership.
For many, independence proved a hollow victory—particularly for Algerian women. After their courage and sacrifice, they were appalled to hear FLN leader Mohamed Khider insist that women should “return to their couscous.” Baya Hocine, one of the veterans of the Battle of Algiers who suffered torture and years in prison, reflected on the mixed emotions that came with independence:
1962 was a black hole. Before then it was a great adventure and then . . . you found yourself all alone. I don’t know how the other sisters felt, but I had no immediate political objectives in mind. 1962 was the greatest comfort, the end of the war, but at the same time it was the great fear. In prison, we so believed we would . . . get out, that we would make a socialist Algeria.... And then we saw an Algeria made practically without us . . . without anyone thinking about us. For us, it was worse than before, because we had broken all of the barriers and it was very difficult for us to go back to that. In 1962, all of the barriers were restored, but in a terrible way for us. They were put back in place to exclude us.13
Algeria had achieved independence—but at a high price. Its population had suffered death and dislocation on a scale unprecedented in Arab history. Its economy was shattered by war and willful destruction by the departing settlers. Its political leadership was divided by factionalism. And its society was divided by the different expectations of what roles men and women should play in the building of independent Algeria. Yet Algeria quickly set about forming a government and took its place among the progressive Arab states as a republic born of revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
With the success of the Algerian revolution, Nasser had a new ally in his battle against Arab “reaction.” Egypt, still known as the United Arab Republic after the Syrian secession, had set its sites on wholescale reform of the Arab world as the prelude to achieving Arab unity. Revolutionary Algeria, with its emphasis on anti-imperialism, Arab identity politics, and socialist reform, was a natural partner. Nasser’s new state party, the Arab Socialist Union, drafted a joint communiqué with the FLN in June 1964 to assert their unity of purpose to promote Arab socialism.14
Nasser took some credit for having supported the Algerian revolution from inception to independence. He was moving away from an earlier role as standard bearer of Arab nationalism and now sought to present himself as the champion of progressive revolutionary values. Carried away by his rhetoric, Nasser found himself providing unquestioning support to Arab revolutionary movements wherever they occurred. When a group of officers toppled the monarchy in Yemen, Nasser gave immediate support—in his own words: “We had to back the Yemeni revolution, even without knowing who was behind it.”15
Y emen, long autonomous within the Ottoman Empire, had secured its independence as a kingdom in 1918. The first ruler of independent Yemen was the Imam Yahya (1869–1948), who as head of the Zaydi sect, a small Shiite community found only in Yemen, provided both religious and political leadership to his country. In the 1920s and 1930s,Yahya extended his rule by dint of conquest over tribal lands across the territory of northern Yemen, much of it inhabited by Sunni Muslims.
Throughout his reign, Yahya faced pressures from Saudi Arabia to the north, which seized ’Asir and Najran from what Yahya considered “historic Yemen,” and from the British in the south, who had held the port city of Aden and its hinterlands as a colony since the 1830s. Nevertheless, Yahya’s ongoing military conquests gave the illusion of unity to a society deeply divided along regional, tribal, and sectarian lines. Under his rule, Yemen had very little exchange with the outside world, remaining focused on pursuing policies that preserved the country’s isolation.
Yemen’s isolation came to an end with Imam Yahya’s rule. Yahya was assassinated by a tribal shaykh in 1948 and was succeeded by his son, the Imam Ahmad (r. 1948–1962). Ahmad had a reputation for ruthlessness that was reinforced when he ascended to power and had his rivals imprisoned and executed. He departed from Yahya’s xenophobia and established diplomatic relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in his search for development assistance and military aid.
Yet Ahmad was not secure on his throne. An attempted coup in 1955 made him increasingly suspicious of domestic rivals and threats from abroad—particularly Nasser and his relentless calls for overturning “feudal” regimes. The Egypt-based Voice of the Arabs reached as far as Yemen, carrying its electrifying message of Arab Nationalism and anti-imperialism.16 In Yemen as elsewhere in the Arab world, Nasser’s direct radio appeal to the people placed Imam Ahmad under pressure and was a source of tension between Yemen and Egypt.
Yet Nasser was not consistently hostile to the Yemenis. In 1956 Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia concluded an anti-British pact in Jiddah, and in 1958 Imam Ahmad gave his full support to the union of Egypt and Syria, joining a federation scheme with the UAR known as the United Arab States. However, Ahmad opposed Nasser’s vision of Arab socialism, with its state-led economy and nationalization of private companies, which he condemned in verse as “taking property by forbidden means” that was “a crime against Islamic law.”17
Coming right after Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961, Ahmad’s lecture on Islamic law infuriated Nasser. Egypt severed ties to Yemen, and the Voice of the Arabs stepped up its rhetoric, putting pressure on the Yemenis to topple their “reactionary” monarchy.
The opportunity arose the following year. Imam Ahmad died in his sleep in September 1962, putting the kingdom in the hands of his son and successor Imam Badr. One week later, Badr was overthrown in an officer’s coup, and the Yemen Arab Republic was declared.
Supporters of the Yemeni royal family challenged the coup, with support from the neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Egypt threw its full weight behind the new republic and its military rulers as part of what Nasser saw as the larger battle between progressives and reactionaries in the Arab world.
The Yemeni revolution quickly devolved into a civil war within Yemen itself, and an inter-Arab war between the Egyptians and the Saudis, between the “progressive” republican order and the “conservative” monarchies in a battle for the future of the Arab world. There were no Egyptian interests at stake, only a confusion between rhetoric and realpolitik. This was Nasser’s first war of choice, and it proved to be his Viet Nam.
Egyptian troops began to flood into Yemen after the September 1962 coup. Over the next three years the total deployment swelled from 30,000 at the end of 1963 to a peak of 70,000 in 1965—nearly half the Egyptian army.
From the start, the war in Yemen was unwinnable. The Egyptians faced tribal guerrillas fighting on their own terrain, and more than 10,000 soldiers and officers were killed over the course of five years of war. High casualties and few successes took their toll on troop morale, as the Egyptians failed to advance their lines much beyond the capital city, Sanaa. Whereas the Saudis bankrolled the royalists, and the British gave them covert assistance, the Egyptians had no surplus wealth to underwrite the huge expense of a foreign war. Yet such practical concerns had no impact on Nasser, who was blinded by his mission to promote revolutionary reform in the Arab world. “Withdrawal is impossible,” Nasser told his commander in Yemen. “It would mean the disintegration of the revolution in Yemen.”18
Nasser readily acknowledged that he saw the Yemen War as “more a political operation than a military one.” What he failed to appreciate was the Yemen War’s impact on Egypt’s military preparedness to confront the more immediate threat of Israel.
In the decade since the Suez Crisis, Israel and its Arab neighbors had been engaged in an arms race in preparation for the inevitable next round of war. The United States began to overtake France as the primary source of military hardware for Israel, Britain supplied the Jordanians, and the Soviets armed Syria and Egypt. The Soviets were not above using their position in Egypt and Syria to pressure their rival, the United States, in an area of strategic interest to both superpowers.
War was inevitable because Israel and the surrounding Arab states were dissatisfied with the status quo and unwilling to consider peace on the basis of the status quo. The Arabs were so unreconciled to Israel that they refused to refer to the country by name, preferring to speak of “the Zionist entity.” Having lost wars to the Israeli army in 1948 and 1956, the Arabs were determined to settle the score. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip served as a daily reminder of the Arabs’ failure to live up to their promises to liberate Palestine.
The Israelis were also intent on war. They feared that the country’s narrow waist between the coastline and the West Bank—at points only 7.5 miles, or 12 kilometers, wide—left Israel vulnerable to a hostile thrust dividing the north from the south of the country. In addition, the Israelis had no access to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem, which remained in Jordanian hands. And Syria held the strategic Golan Heights overlooking the Galilee. Moreover, the Israelis believed that their strategic advantage—holding more and better quality weapons than their Arab neighbors—would diminish over time as the Soviets provided weapons systems of the latest technology to the Egyptians and Syrians. The Israelis needed one good war to secure defensible boundaries and inflict a decisive defeat on the Arabs to impose peace on terms with which Israel could live.
In the spring of 1967 the Israelis began to complain of Palestinian infiltrators crossing from Syria to attack Israel, and tensions between the two countries escalated rapidly. The Israelis and Syrians put their armed forces on alert. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol threatened offensive action against Damascus if the Syrian provocations did not stop. Threats gave way to hostilities in April, when Israeli jets engaged the Syrian air force in dogfights over Syrian airspace. The Israeli air force downed six Syrian MiG fighters. Two of the planes crashed in the suburbs of Damascus. As Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled, “The situation between Syria and Israel became very dangerous.” 19 The sudden escalation of hostilities placed the whole region on a war footing.
At this moment of heightened tension, the Soviet Union chose to leak a false intelligence report to the Egyptian authorities alleging a massing of Israeli troops on the Syrian frontier. The Soviets no doubt were smarting from the ease with which the Israelis with their French Mirage fighters had downed the state-of-the-art MiG 21s the USSR had provided the Syrian air force. Egypt had a mutual defense pact with the Syrians, which meant that if the Israelis initiated hostilities with Syria, Egypt would have to go to war. Perhaps the Soviets hoped to mobilize the Egyptians with false intelligence and contain the Israelis with the prospect of a two-front conflict.
Although Nasser was in possession of good intelligence, including aerial photographs, suggesting that the Israelis were not in fact mobilizing on the Syrian frontier, he continued to act publicly as though there were an imminent threat of war. Perhaps Nasser hoped to claim a victory over Israel without having to fire a shot: first, by circulating the Soviet intelligence of an Israeli threat to Syria, then by deploying his troops to the Israeli frontiers as a deterrent, subsequently claiming the absence of Israeli troops on the Syrian frontier as proof the Israelis had withdrawn in the face of Egyptian pressure. Whatever his reasoning, Nasser continued to act on the basis of the false Soviet intelligence and ordered his army across the Suez Canal on May 16 to mass in the Sinai near the Israeli frontier. This miscalculation would prove the initial step to war.
The first challenge Nasser faced was to mount a credible threat to the Israelis. With 50,000 of his best troops still tied down in the Yemen War, Nasser was forced to call up all his reservists to muster the necessary manpower. He needed to make his soldiers appear more formidable than they actually were, both to generate enthusiasm among the Egyptian people and to pose a credible threat to the Israelis. Nasser gave his troop deployment a dramatic twist by parading soldiers and tanks through central Cairo for the benefit of the cheering crowds and the international press. “Our troops were deliberately marched through the streets of Cairo on their way to Sinai,” General Abd al-Ghani al-Gamasy complained, “in full view and for all to see—citizens and foreigners alike. The mass media covered these movements, contrary to all principles and measures of security.”20
The constant stream of soldiers to the front raised public expectations of an imminent war that might redeem Arab honor and liberate Palestine. None of Nasser’s millions of supporters doubted for a moment that the Egyptian army would lead its Arab allies to victory over Israel. However, the Egyptian forces were sent into the Sinai with no clear military objective, as though their sheer mass would intimidate the Israelis. Meanwhile, al-Gamasy reflected, “Israel quietly prepared for war under optimal circumstances.” Its strategists had full knowledge of the numbers and equipment of the Egyptian deployment. Not only had they spent the previous months gathering detailed intelligence, but they had seen it all on TV.
When the Egyptian units reached the Sinai, they came face-to-face with the United Nations Emergency Force. The UNEF had been posted to the Sinai in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel. It was comprised of 4,500 international soldiers posted to forty-one observation points in the Gaza Strip, along the Israeli-Egyptian frontier, and at Sharm al-Shaykh at the southern tip of the Sinai.
The UN forces were now an inconvenience, coming between the Egyptian troops and the Israeli frontiers. How could the Egyptian army pose a credible threat to the Israelis so long as there was a buffer force between them? The Egyptian chief of staff wrote to the commander of the UNEF to request the withdrawal of UN troops from the eastern frontiers between Egypt and Israel. The UN commander relayed the request to the secretary-general, U Thant, who responded that it was within Egypt’s sovereign rights to request the withdrawal of UN troops from its territory, but that he would only approve a total withdrawal of UN forces. The UNEF, U Thant argued, was an integral unit, and it made no sense to withdraw part of the force from the eastern frontier while preserving peacekeepers in the Gaza Strip and the Strait of Tiran. Egypt reflected on the secretary-general’s response and, on May 18, requested a total pullout of all UN troops from the Sinai. The last UNEF unit withdrew on May 31. Suddenly there was no buffer between the Egyptians and Israelis at all, heightening tensions between the two countries to fever pitch. This was Nasser’s second miscalculation, which took him much closer to war.
The withdrawal of UN forces created an unforeseen diplomatic problem for Nasser. Since 1957 the UN had kept the Strait of Tiran open to all shipping, regardless of the flag or destination of vessels. This had given Israel a decade of free access to the Red Sea from its port of Eilat. Once the UN had been withdrawn, the strait returned to Egyptian sovereignty. Egypt came under tremendous pressure from its Arab neighbors to close the strait to all Israeli shipping, as well as to vessels destined for Eilat. As Anwar Sadat recalled, “Many Arab brothers criticized Egypt for leaving the Tiran Strait . . . open to international, particularly Israeli, navigation.”
In the heated climate of May 1967, Nasser succumbed to the pressure. He convened a meeting of the Supreme Executive Committee that brought together the commander in chief of the armed forces, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer; Prime Minister Sidqi Sulayman; Speaker of the National Assembly Anwar Sadat; and other leading Free Officers. “Now with our concentrations in Sinai,” Nasser reflected, “the chances of war are fifty-fifty. But if we close the Strait [of Tiran], war will be a one hundred percent certainty.” Nasser turned to the commander of his armed forces and asked, “Are the armed forces ready, Abdel Hakim [Amer]?” Amer was positive: “On my own head be it, boss! Everything’s in tiptop shape.”21
On May 22 Egypt declared the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping and to all oil tankers destined for Eilat. Nasser was correct in his assessment of the probability of conflict. For Israel, this threat to its maritime routes was grounds for war.
By late May, the Arab world had abandoned any effort to avoid war. Arab public opinion, still smarting from the lost wars of 1948 and 1956 and a string of lesser attacks, was impatient to see Israel dealt a decisive defeat. The well-televised mobilization of Egyptian troops had raised expectations that the moment of reckoning was at hand. And inter-Arab cooperation meant that Israel would face attacks on three fronts. Syria and Egypt were already bound by a mutual defense pact, and on May 30, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo to throw in his lot with Nasser. Modern weapons, unity of purpose, strong leadership: surely the Arabs had all they needed to deal the Israelis a comprehensive defeat. Yet behind all the bluster, the Arabs were less prepared for war than ever.
Egypt and the other Arab states had not learned the lessons of 1948. They had undertaken no meaningful war planning, and despite their mutual defense pacts, there was no military coordination between Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, let alone a strategy for defeating so determined a foe as Israel. To make matters worse, Egypt had squandered its wealth and military resources on an unwinnable war in Yemen, where one-third of its armed forces remained pinned down in May 1967. It was as though Egypt were going to war with one arm tied behind its back.
War with Israel must have been the last thing Nasser wanted in 1967, yet he was hostage to his own success. The people of Egypt and the Arab world at large had responded to his propaganda and believed in him. They had every confidence in his stewardship and felt confident that he would deliver. Nasser’s credibility and his claim to leadership in the Arab world were at stake. As each of his miscalculations took him closer to war, he had ever less room for maneuver to avoid conflict.
The military mobilization in Egypt provoked a deep crisis in Israel. The Israeli public, increasingly fearful of encirclement by Arab enemies, looked to their government for reassurance—and grew yet more anxious. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol wanted to exhaust all diplomatic means before risking all-out war. His generals, headed by chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, disagreed. They were confident they could prevail over each of the Arab armies if they acted quickly, before their adversaries could establish secure positions and coordinate a plan of attack. Cabinet meetings grew increasingly divided. Eshkol feared entering a three-front war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Even the hawkish former premier, David Ben-Gurion, now retired, expressed reservations to Rabin over his mobilization for war. “You have led the state into a grave situation,” he admonished Rabin. “We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility.”22
The two weeks between the closure of the Strait of Tiran and the outbreak of war were a period of great tension, known as the “waiting period” in Israel. The Israeli public feared for the very existence of their state and had no confidence in their prime minister, whom they saw as indecisive.
The turning point came at the end of May. Isolated within his own coalition government, Eshkol was forced to bring the belligerent retired general Moshe Dayan into his cabinet as defense minister. Dayan’s entry into the government tipped the scales in favor of the war party. With reassurances from the United States that it would stand by Israel in the event of war, the Israeli cabinet met on June 4 and made the decision to go to war. The generals swung into immediate action.
At 8:00 A.M. on June 5, 1967, an early-warning radar station in ’Ajlun, Jordan, detected waves of aircraft setting off from Israeli air bases and heading to the south-west. The Jordanian operator immediately broadcast a warning to the Egyptian air defense operations center in Cairo and to the Egyptian Ministry of War. His warning fell on deaf ears. The corporal on duty in the main receiving station had set his radio to the wrong station, and the duty officer in the ministry failed to inform the minister. Israel went to war with the advantage of total surprise.
While waves of Israeli bombers were heading toward Egyptian airspace, the commander in chief of Egyptian forces, Field Marshal Amer, was in a transport plane with several senior officers, flying to the Sinai to review air force and infantry positions. The head of the advanced command center in Sinai, General Abd al-Muhsin Murtagi, was waiting on the ground at Tamada Air Base to receive the Egyptian military’s top brass. “At forty-five minutes past eight,” he recalled, “Israeli planes attacked the airport, destroying all aircraft and bombing runways to render them inoperational.” Incapable of landing, Amer’s plane was forced to return to Cairo, as all of the Sinai air bases were under simultaneous attack.23
At exactly the same time, Vice President Husayn al-Shaf ‘i of Egypt was taking the Iraqi prime minister, Tahir Yahya, on a tour of the Suez Canal Zone. They touched down in the Fayed airport at 8:45, just as the first wave of Israeli planes attacked. “Our plane was able to land,” Shaf ’i wrote,
and two bombs exploded nearby. We came down, scattered, taking shelter on the ground, and watched events unfold minute by minute. Enemy planes came at ten- to fifteen-minute intervals in groups of three to four planes, targeting specifically the planes which stood motionless on the ground, their wings touching each other as though carefully arranged to be destroyed in the shortest time possible, with no effort or trouble. Every sortie ended with one or two planes going up in flames.24
As the delegation made its way back to Cairo by car, columns of smoke were seen rising above each of the air bases it passed.
In less than three hours the Israeli air force had achieved air supremacy over Egypt, eliminating all of its bombers and 85 percent of its fighter aircraft, and inflicting such damage on radar systems and runways as to prevent other aircraft from using Egyptian airspace. Indeed, Nasser requested that the Algerian government lend its MiGs to his air force before he realized that the extent of the damage to Egypt’s air bases prevented their deployment.
With the Egyptian air force out of commission, the Israelis went to work next on Jordan and Syria. King Hussein had put his armed forces under Egyptian command in keeping with the defense agreement he had concluded with Nasser six days earlier. The Egyptian commander now ordered Jordanian artillery and the Jordanian air force to attack Israeli air bases. The small Jordanian air force had made its first sorties and returned to base to refuel when it was struck by Israeli jets shortly after noon. In two waves, the Israelis eliminated the entire Jordanian air force—planes, runways, and bases. They turned next to attack the Syrians, eliminating two-thirds of Syria’s air force in the course of the afternoon.
Once they had achieved control of the skies, the Israelis dispatched their ground forces in a bid to eliminate their Arab adversaries—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—in quick succession so as to avoid fighting on more than one front at a time. They began in the Sinai, deploying some 70,000 infantry and 700 tanks against a total Egyptian force of 100,000 in the Sinai. After intensive fighting on June 5, the Israelis had captured large parts of the Gaza Strip, broken through Egyptian lines on the Mediterranean coast, and seized the strategic crossroads of Abu ’Uwigla in eastern Sinai by nightfall.
The Egyptians fought back. The next morning the Egyptian commanders ordered one of their armored divisions to retake Abu ’Uwigla. General El-Gamasy was a witness. “I saw one of our armoured brigades under attack. It was heartbreaking. The Israeli planes had complete freedom of the skies. The tanks were moving across open desert in daylight, which made them easy targets with no effective means of defense.” 25 By afternoon, the Egyptian assault was abandoned. Field Marshal Amer, without consulting his officers on the ground, gave orders for a general retreat from the Sinai to regroup his forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. Disorganized and uncoordinated, this retreat turned Egypt’s defeat into a rout. El-Gamasy recalled watching the troops “withdraw in the most pathetic way . . . under continuous enemy air attacks, which had turned the Mitla Pass into an enormous graveyard of scattered corpses, burning equipment, and exploding ammunition.”26
Now that Egypt’s military had been neutralized, the Israelis turned to the Jordanian front. After the successful air strikes of June 5, the Israelis used their air supremacy to good effect, bombing the Jordanian armored units that had mounted a serious defense of the West Bank. Concerted Israeli attacks on Jordanian positions in Jerusalem and Jenin continued through the night before the air force could resume its strikes at dawn. By June 6 the Jordanian ground forces were besieged in the Old City of Jerusalem and on the retreat from Jenin. King Hussein went to the front to assess the situation for himself. “I will never forget the hallucinating sight of that defeat. Roads clogged with trucks, jeeps, and all kinds of vehicles twisted, disembowelled, dented, still smoking,” he recalled. “In the midst of this charnel house were men. In groups of thirty or two, wounded, exhausted, they were trying to clear a path under the monstrous coup de grace being dealt them by a horde of Israeli Mirages screaming in a cloudless blue sky seared with sun.”27
Hussein continued to hold out, both to avoid incrimination from his fellow Arabs for breaking ranks and in hopes of a UN cease-fire, which might save his position in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But the cease-fire came too late for Jordan. The Old City of Jerusalem fell on the morning of June 7, and Jordanian positions in the rest of the West Bank crumbled before the Israelis agreed to a cease-fire with the Jordanians. Syria and Egypt agreed to a cease-fire with Israel on June 8, but the Israelis pressed their advantage and attacked Syria, occupying the Golan Heights, before bringing the Six Day War to an end on June 10, 1967.
Stunned by their losses, the Egyptian commanders resorted to fantasy to buy time. On the first day of fighting, Cairo reported the downing of 161 Israeli planes.28 The Syrians followed suit, claiming to have shot down 61 Israeli aircraft in the opening hours of the war. It was the beginning of a concerted disinformation campaign broadcast over the radio waves and reproduced in the state-controlled newspapers that led the Arab world to believe that Israel was on the verge of total defeat. “We heard about the war from the radio,” one Egyptian intelligence officer recalled. “The whole world thought that our forces were at the outskirts of Tel Aviv.”29
To the extent the Arab leadership was willing to acknowledge setbacks, they blamed them on American collusion with the Israelis. On the first day of the war, the Voice of the Arabs broadcast the accusation that “the United States is the enemy. The United States is the hostile force behind Israel. The United States, oh Arabs, is the enemy of all peoples, the killer of life, the shedder of blood, that is preventing you from liquidating Israel.”30 Nasser actually contacted King Hussein of Jordan, notorious in progressive Arab circles for his close relations with both Britain and the United States, to coordinate statements pinning the blame for Israeli gains on an Anglo-American collusion. In an indiscrete telephone conversation intercepted by Israeli intelligence, Nasser was delighted by Hussein’s acquiescence. “I will make an announcement,” Nasser explained, “and you will make an announcement and we will see to it that the Syrians will make an announcement that American and British airplanes are taking part against us from aircraft carriers. We will stress the matter.”31 The fact that Britain and France had gone to war with Israel against Egypt in 1956 only gave credence to the rumors of conspiracy.
The disinformation campaign perpetrated by the Arab leadership did nothing but postpone the awful day of reckoning when they would have to present their citizens with the magnitude of their losses: the total defeat of the armies and air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and the occupation of vast Arab territory: the whole of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; the Palestinian Gaza Strip; the West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem; and the Syrian Golan Heights.
Yet during the first week of June, the deluded Arab masses were still celebrating. Jubilant crowds organized victory celebrations across the Arab world, never once suspecting that their leaders were lying to them. Anwar Sadat recalled his sense of despair as he watched the spontaneous parades “applauding the faked-up victory reports which our mass media put out hourly. The fact that they were rejoicing in an imaginary victory—rejoicing in what was in effect defeat—made me feel sorry for them, pity them, and deeply hate those who had deceived them and Egypt as a whole.” Sadat dreaded the inevitable moment of truth when the Egyptian people “realized that the victory they had been sold was in fact a terrible disaster.”32
That moment came on June 9, when Nasser took to the airwaves to assume full responsibility for the “reversal”—Nasser gave the war its Arabic name, al-Naksa—and to tender his resignation. He maintained the accusation of Anglo-American collusion with Israel. The war, he argued, was but the latest chapter in a long history of imperialist domination of Egypt and the Arab world, with the United States now taking the lead. As Sadat recalled, Nasser argued that the United States “wanted to be in sole control of the world and to ‘rule’ Egypt into the bargain. As Nasser could not grant this wish, he had no option but to step down and hand over power.”33
Immediately after this broadcast, the streets of Cairo filled with demonstrators, “men, women, and children from all classes and walks of life,” Sadat recalled in his memoirs, “united by their sense of crisis into one solid mass, moving in unison and speaking with the same tongue, calling on Nasser to stay on.” It was enough for the people of Egypt to come to terms with the shock of defeat. They did not want to do so without Nasser. For the Egyptians, keeping their leader was part of resisting defeat and foreign domination—“the United States this time, not Britain.” For seventeen hours, Sadat claimed, the people refused to leave the streets until Nasser agreed to rescind his resignation.34 Though he agreed to remain in office, Nasser never recovered from “the setback.”
The losses of 1967 ushered in a radical new age of Arab politics. The magnitude of the defeat, combined with the deliberate deception of the Arab public, set off a crisis of confidence in Arab political leaders. Even Nasser, back by popular acclaim, was not spared public scorn. Sadat, not always generous to his predecessor, recalled how after the defeat of 1967, “people everywhere sneered at [Nasser] and made him a laughing stock.” The other Arab leaders enjoyed a moment of respite as Nasser, the Arab colossus, was knocked off his plinth. They no longer had to fear the tirades of Nasser’s propaganda machine broadcast over the Voice of the Arabs when they failed to toe Egypt’s line. Nevertheless the moment did not last long. Internal threats swiftly mounted against Arab leaders in the aftermath of “the setback.”
Public disenchantment set off a wave of coups and revolutions against governments across the Arab world, just as had happened after the 1948 war. President Abd al-Rahman ‘Arif of Iraq was toppled by a coup led by the Ba’th in 1968. King Idris of Libya was overthrown by a Free Officers coup headed by Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi, and Ja’far al-Numayri wrested power from the Sudanese president in 1969. In 1970, Syrian president Nur al-Din Atassi fell to a military coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power. Each of these new governments adopted a radical Arab nationalist platform as the basis of their legitimacy, calling for the destruction of Israel, the liberation of Palestine, and triumph over imperialism—this time epitomized by the United States.
The 1967 war would utterly transform America’s position in the Middle East. It was then that the special relationship between the United States and Israel began, commensurate with Arab antagonism toward the United States. The split was bound to happen, given the differences in their respective geostrategic priorities. The Americans could not convince the Arabs to take their side against the Soviet menace, and the Arabs could not get the Americans to respect their views of the Zionist threat.
During the 1967 war, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson’s administration abandoned neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and tilted in favor of Israel. Believing that Nasser and his Arab socialism were taking the Arab world into the Soviet camp, they were pleased to see him discredited in defeat. Nasser, for his part, came to believe his own disinformation. What had started as a smokescreen to deflect domestic criticism—the claim of U.S. participation in the war on Israel’s side—grew into a conviction that America was using Israel to advance its own domination over the region in a new wave of imperialism. Throughout the Arab world, the alleged collusion between Israel and the United States served to explain a defeat that none could have imagined. All but four Arab countries (Tunisia, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) severed relations with the United States for its alleged role in the 1967 war.
With hindsight we know Nasser’s claims that the United States actually took part in the war on Israel’s side were unfounded. In fact, the very opposite was true. On the fourth day of the war, Israeli air and naval forces attacked a surveillance ship, the U.S.S.Liberty, killing thirty-four U.S. servicemen and wounding 171. The Israelis never provided a public explanation for their attack, though it is apparent that they wanted to disable the ship to keep the Americans from monitoring Israeli communications from the battlefield. The fact that such an unprovoked attack, incurring so many American casualties, could so easily be forgiven reflected the nature of the new special relationship between Israel and the United States.
Arab attitudes toward Israel also underwent significant hardening in the aftermath of the Six Day War. There had been some overtures by Arab states over the two decades since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, and some secret diplomacy between Arab and Israeli leaders. Nasser had engaged in secret exchanges with the Israelis in 1954, and King Hussein opened direct channels with the Jewish state in 1963.35 The Arab defeat in 1967 put an end to all covert negotiations with Israel. Nasser and Hussein, who had lost the most in the war, hoped to recover Arab territory through a postwar negotiated settlement with Israel. However, they were marginalized by the hard line adopted during the meeting of Arab heads of state in late August and early September 1967. Held in Khartoum, Sudan, the Khartoum Summit is best known for the adoption of the “three nos” of Arab diplomacy: no recognition of the Jewish state, no negotiation with Israeli officials, and no peace between Arab states and Israel. Henceforth the moral high ground in Arab politics would be defined in terms of adherence to the resolutions of the summit.
The international community still hoped to bring Israel and the Arabs together to conclude a just and enduring peace. When the United Nations debated the issue in November 1967, it found the Arab world divided over the possibility of a diplomatic solution. Resolution 242, unanimously approved by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, provided the legal framework for a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on an exchange of land for peace. The resolution called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” in return for “respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Resolution 242 has remained the basis of all subsequent “land for peace” initiatives in the Arab-Israel conflict.
The resolution gained the support of Egypt and Jordan, but not of Syria or the other Arab states. For them, the three nos of Khartoum ruled out the diplomatic solution implied by Resolution 242. It was an intransigent stance, but after losing three wars to Israel—in 1948, 1956, and 1967—most Arab leaders were only willing to negotiate with the Jewish state from a position of strength. After 1967, those leaders were convinced that the Arabs were in no position to negotiate.
The Palestinian people themselves had the most to lose from the postwar diplomacy. During the two decades since they had been driven from their homeland, the Palestinians had never gained international recognition as a distinct people with national rights. Since mandate times, they had been referred to as the Arabs of Palestine, rather than as Palestinians. In 1948 the Jews of Palestine took on a national identity as Israelis, whereas the Palestinian Arabs remained just “Arabs”—either “Israeli Arabs,” the minority who remained in their homes upon the creation of the state of Israel, or “Arab refugees,” those who took refuge from the fighting in neighboring Arab states. As far as Western public opinion was concerned, the displaced Arabs of Palestine were no different than Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, or Egypt and would be absorbed by their host countries in due course.
Between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinians disappeared as a political community. When Israeli premier Golda Meir claimed there were no Palestinians, few in the international community disputed her admittedly self-interested remark. This lack of awareness of Palestinian national aspirations was reflected in the UN debates of autumn 1967. Reasonable though Resolution 242 may sound to us now, at the time it represented the end of all Palestinian national aspirations. The principle of “land for peace” would confirm Israel’s permanence among the community of nations, returning what little territory remained of Arab Palestine to Egyptian or Jordanian trusteeship. The country formerly known as Palestine would disappear from the atlas forever, and there would be no state for all the Palestinians driven from their homes as refugees by the two wars of 1948 and 1967. It was not enough for Palestinians to reject Resolution 242. They also had to bring the justice of their cause to the attention of the international community by all possible means.
For twenty years the Palestinians had entrusted their cause to their Arab brethren in the hopes that combined Arab action would achieve the liberation of their lost homeland. The collective Arab defeat in 1967 convinced Palestinian nationalists to take matters in their own hands. Inspired by Third World revolutionaries, Palestinian national groups launched their own armed struggle not only against Israel but also against those Arab states that got in their way.
The founders of the Palestinian armed struggle first met in Cairo in the early 1950s. A Palestinian engineering student named Yasser Arafat (1929–2004), a veteran of the 1948 war, was elected president of the Palestinian Student Union in Cairo in 1952. He used the position to motivate a generation of young Palestinians to dedicate their lives to the liberation of their homeland.
One of Arafat’s closest collaborators was Salah Khalaf, who came to be known by his nom de guerre, Abu Iyad. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the fifteen-year-old Khalaf had been forced to leave his hometown of Jaffa for Gaza. He went on to study in Cairo at the teacher training college Dar al-’Ulum, where he met Arafat at a meeting of the Palestinian Student Union in the autumn of 1951. “He was four years older than myself,” Khalaf recalled, “and I was immediately taken by his energy, enthusiasm, and enterprising spirit.” Khalaf and Arafat were united by their mistrust of the Arab regimes in the aftermath of the 1948 disaster, though with the advent of Nasser and the Free Officers, Khalaf recalled, “Everything seemed possible, even the liberation of Palestine.”36
Revolutionary Egypt proved a difficult place for Palestinian politics. Though Nasser promised the restoration of Palestinian national rights, his government kept Palestinian nationalist activity under tight controls. Over the ensuing years, the Palestinian students fanned out across the Arab world, establishing footholds in various nations that would eventually become organized cells. Arafat moved to Kuwait in 1957, where Khalaf joined him two years later. Others, like Mahmud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority, found jobs in Qatar. The well-educated Palestinians were successful in their new jobs and channeled their resources toward their national cause—the liberation of Palestine.
The Palestinians only began to create distinct political organs in the late 1950s. In October 1959, Arafat and Khalaf convened a series of meetings with twenty other Palestinian activists in Kuwait to establish Fatah. The organization’s name was doubly significant. It is both the Arabic word for “conquest” and a reverse acronym for Harakat Tahrir Filastin—the Palestine Liberation Movement. The movement advocated armed struggle to transcend factionalism and achieve Palestinian national rights, and it would aggressively recruit and organize new members over the ensuing five years. Fatah began to publish a magazine—Filastinuna, or “Our Palestine”—to circulate its views. Its editor, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), would emerge as Fatah’s official spokesman.
The Arab states decided to create an official organ to represent Palestinian aspirations. In 1964 the first summit of Arab leaders met in Cairo and called for a new organization to enable the Palestinian people “to play their role in the liberation of their country and their self determination.” Arafat and his colleagues had grave misgivings about the new organ, dubbed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Palestinians had not been consulted in the establishment of their own liberation organization, and Nasser had imposed a lawyer named Ahmad Shuqayri to head the PLO. Shuqayri’s Palestinian credentials were slim at best. Born in Lebanon of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish descent, the eloquent Shuqayri had served until 1963 as the Saudi representative to the United Nations. Arafat and the Fatah activists were convinced that the PLO had been created by the Arab regimes to control the Palestinians rather than to involve them in the liberation of their homeland.
At first, Fatah tried to cooperate with the PLO. Arafat and Khalaf met with Shuqayri when he visited Kuwait, and they sent delegates to the first Palestinian National Congress, convened in Jerusalem in May 1964. The PLO was formally established at the Jerusalem Congress. The 422 invited delegates, drawn mostly from elite families, reconstituted themselves as the Palestinian National Council, a sort of parliament in exile, and ratified a set of objectives enshrined in the Palestinian National Charter. The new organization even called for the creation of a Palestinian national army, which would come to be called the Palestine Liberation Army. Fatah was marginalized at the congress and left Jerusalem determined to upstage the new official Palestinian organ. To seize the initiative, Fatah decided to launch an armed struggle against Israel.
Fatah’s first operation against Israel was a military failure but a propaganda success. Three commando teams were scheduled to attack Israel from Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon on December 31, 1964. However, the governments of Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan were keen to prevent the Palestinians from antagonizing the Israelis, knowing they would face severe reprisals against their own territory. The Egyptian authorities apprehended the Fatah squad in Gaza one week before the operation was due to take place. Lebanese security forces arrested the second group before they reached the Lebanese frontier with Israel. A third team crossed into Israel from the West Bank on January 3, 1965, and left dynamite charges in an irrigation pumping station, though the Israelis found the explosives and disarmed them before they could go off. As the Palestinian commandos returned to Jordanian territory, they were arrested by Jordanian authorities and one guerrilla was killed resisting arrest. Fatah had its first martyr, though tellingly he was killed by fellow Arabs.
The symbolism of the ultimately unsuccessful attacks was far more significant than Fatah’s military objectives. On New Year’s Day 1965, Fatah issued a military communiqué under an assumed name—al-Asifa, or “the Storm”—claiming “our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.”37
Palestinians around the world were electrified by the news. “On January 1, 1965, Fatah opened a new era in modern Palestinian history,” wrote Leila Khaled, a soldier of the armed struggle whose family had been driven from Haifa in 1948. To her, the attacks represented the beginning of the Palestinian revolution and the first step toward the liberation of her homeland. “The Palestinian people had spent seventeen years in exile living on hopes fostered by the Arab leadership. In 1965 they decided they must liberate themselves rather than wait for God’s help.”38
In its first eighteen months, the Palestinian armed struggle remained a marginal movement easily contained by Israel and its Arab neighbors. Salah Khalaf claimed Fatah carried out “about 200 raids” between January 1965 and June 1967, though he acknowledged such attacks were “limited in scope and not the sort that could endanger Israeli state security or stability.”
The Arab defeat in 1967 was, ironically, a moment of liberation for the Palestinian armed struggle. With Gaza and the West Bank now under Israeli occupation rather than under Egyptian and Jordanian rule, as they had been between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinian movement could claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians in the occupied territories for the first time. Moreover, the Palestinian movement gained its freedom from the defeated Arab states. Nasser and the other Arab leaders had imposed stringent restrictions on Fatah and the other Palestinian factions. The chastened Nasser could no longer stand in the way of the Palestinian movement but used his diminished authority to pressure the other Arab states bordering Israel to allow the Palestinians to launch attacks from their territory.
Jordan became the primary center of Palestinian operations in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. Weakened by the destruction of his armed forces and the loss of the West Bank, King Hussein turned a blind eye to Fatah operations against Israel. The armed Palestinian factions set up their headquarters in the Jordan Valley, in the village of Karamah. The Israelis took note of Fatah’s preparations. In March 1968, Fatah was warned by Jordanian authorities of an imminent Israeli strike on its base in Karamah. The Palestinians decided to hold their ground and make a stand rather than retreat before superior Israeli forces. The Jordanians agreed to provide artillery support from the highlands overlooking the Jordan Valley.
On March 21 a major Israeli expedition force crossed the Jordan River in an attempt to destroy Fatah’s headquarters. Some 15,000 Israeli infantry and armor attacked both the village of Karamah and the Fatah training camps. Mahmoud Issa, a 1948 refugee from Acre, was there. “We were given orders not to intervene through the first part of the operation,” Issa recalled. “Abu Amar [Yasser Arafat’s nom de guerre] came in person to explain that we could only survive such a desperate situation by ruse. He had no difficulty in convincing us. We were materially incapable of defending Karamah.” Indeed, it is now estimated that there were only 250 Fatah guerrillas and administrative staff, and perhaps 80 members of the Palestine Liberation Army, based at Karamah at the time. “Our only option,” Issa continued, “was to ambush the Israelis, and to choose the right moment to do so.”39
Issa and his comrades took up positions outside the camp to strike their counterattack at sunset. “The day wore on,” Issa related in his memoirs. “There was nothing left of Karamah. Only ruins. Many women, men and children had been taken prisoner. There were also many dead.” After completing their mission under heavy Jordanian artillery fire, the Israelis began their withdrawal. It was the moment for which Issa and his comrades had been waiting.
The moment the tanks passed our positions, the signal was given for us to attack. It was a great relief for me and my comrades. It was as though we had held our breath for too long. We ran straight ahead and wanted to run faster yet. We could imagine the surprise of the Israelis, seeing commandos they believed buried under the rubble now racing towards them. The light failed. The bridges over the Jordan had been blown. The tanks were stopped in their tracks, and with the help of [Jordanian] artillery cover, a new battle took place.
The Palestinians disabled a number of Israeli vehicles with rifle-propelled grenades and inflicted a number of casualties with small arms before the Israelis completed their withdrawal across the Jordan.
For the Palestinians, Karamah was a victory of survival against superior forces and a moment of dignity (significantly, the word karama means “dignity” or “respect” in Arabic) when the Israelis were forced to withdraw under fire. Dignity came at a high price, however. Though inflated casualty figures were reported in the Arab press, at least 28 Israelis, 61 Jordanians, and 116 Palestinian fighters were killed in action.40 Yet the battle of Karamah was treated as an outright Palestinian victory across the Arab world. For the first time since 1948, an Arab army had stood up to the Israelis and shown that the enemy was not invincible.
Fatah was the prime beneficiary of the battle. As Leila Khaled recalled with some critical detachment, “Arab news media inflated the incident to make it appear as if the liberation of Palestine was just around the corner. Thousands of volunteers poured in; gold was collected in kilos, arms came by the ton. Fatah, a movement of a few hundred semi-trained guerrillas, suddenly appeared to the Arabs like the Chinese liberation army on the eve of October, 1949. Even King Hussein declared that he was a commando!”41 Salah Khalaf, one of Fatah’s founders, claimed that their offices were flooded with volunteers—some 5,000 in the first forty-eight hours following the battle. And Fatah operations expanded accordingly: 55 operations in 1968 grew to 199 operations in 1969 and peaked at 279 operations against Israel in the first eight months of 1970.42
Public support for the Palestinian armed struggle, and Fatah in particular, masked the factionalism and deep political rifts that fragmented the Palestinian national movement. Differences in ideology gave rise to a variety of tactics that would lead the Palestinian armed struggle from guerrilla warfare to terrorism.
The PLO underwent a major transformation in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Ahmad Shuqayri, who had never succeeded in establishing his leadership over the broader Palestinian movement, tendered his resignation as chairman of the PLO in December 1967. Though Arafat’s Fatah movement was in a strong position to take over the PLO, its followers chose instead to preserve the organization as a front for all Palestinian factions. Yet Fatah emerged as the dominant party under the PLO’s umbrella, and in February 1969 Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO, a title he would hold until his death in 2004.
Not all Palestinian groups accepted Fatah’s leadership. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by medical doctor George Habash (1926–2008), had deep ideological differences with Fatah. The PFLP believed that according to the Chinese and Vietnamese models, the armed struggle for national liberation could only occur after a social revolution; Fatah, in contrast, put the struggle for national liberation first. The PFLP leader was dismissive of Fatah, believing the rival organization ideologically bankrupt and tainted by association with Arab governments he deemed corrupt.
When Fatah took control of the PLO, the Popular Front leadership decided to follow their own path to the Palestinian revolution and to raise international awareness of the Palestinian cause. They left Fatah to pursue the armed struggle through guerrilla raids in Israeli territory—a strategy that looked increasingly quixotic given the high casualties the Palestinians suffered (1,350 guerrillas killed and 2,800 taken prisoner by the end of 1969, according to Israeli records).43 The Popular Front opted instead for high-profile operations against Israeli and U.S. targets abroad designed to raise international awareness of the Palestinian issue.
The Popular Front was the first Palestinian organization to engage in air piracy. In July 1968, three PFLP commandos hijacked a passenger jet of the Israeli national carrier, El Al, and ordered the pilot to land the plane in Algiers. The hijackers released all the passengers unharmed, preferring to hold a press conference rather than hostages. In December 1968, Mahmoud Issa, the veteran of Karamah, evacuated and sabotaged another El Al plane in Athens. He had been instructed by his superiors to surrender to the Greek authorities, in the expectation that his trial would generate wide press interest and serve as a platform to put the Palestinian cause to a global audience. Issa carried out his mission to the letter, seizing and evacuating the plane before detonating grenades in the empty aircraft and surrendering to the puzzled Greek authorities.
The Israelis responded to Palestinian attacks on their airliners by bombing the Beirut International Airport, where they destroyed thirteen Boeing aircraft of the Lebanese national carrier Middle East Airlines. “We thanked the Israelis for enlisting Lebanese support for the [Palestinian] revolution,” Leila Khaled remarked ironically, “and admired their audacity in blowing up planes that were seventy to eighty percent American owned!”44
The PFLP believed its strategy was producing results and that it had focused international attention on the Palestinian cause. “The world was at last forced to take notice of Palestinian actions. The Arab press couldn’t ignore them, nor could the Zionists conceal them,” Khaled concluded.45 In the international press, however, the Palestinians were gaining a reputation for terrorism that would undermine the legitimacy of their movement in Western public opinion.
As in the Algerian revolution, women played an important role in the Palestinian armed struggle. Amina Dhahbour became the first Palestinian woman to take part in a hijacking operation when she commandeered an El Al jet in Zurich in February 1969. Dhahbour’s involvement was an inspiration for women in the movement. Leila Khaled heard the news on the BBC World Service and immediately told her women comrades. “Within a few minutes we were all celebrating the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of women,” she recalled.46
Khaled, who had recently joined the Popular Front, volunteered for the Special Operations Squad and was sent to Amman for training. In August 1969, Khaled was given her first mission. “Leila,” her superiors told her, “you are going to hijack a TWA plane.” She was thrilled by the assignment, which she saw as a mission against American imperialism.47 She was firmly convinced that the strategy of hijacking Israeli and American aircraft advanced the strategic objectives of the movement to liberate Palestine. “Generally,” Khaled wrote, “we act not with a view to crippling the enemy—because we lack the power to do so—but with a view to disseminating revolutionary propaganda, sowing terror in the heart of the enemy, mobilising our masses, making our cause international, rallying the forces of progress on our side, and underscoring our grievances before an unresponsive Zionist-inspired and Zionist informed Western public opinion.”48 The hijacking of the TWA plane was timed to coincide with an address by President Richard Nixon to the annual meeting of the Zionist Organization of America in Los Angeles, California, on August 29, 1969.
Given the extensive security measures applied by airports today, it seems incredible how easily Leila Khaled and her associate smuggled pistols and hand grenades onto TWA Flight 840 in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. Shortly after takeoff, her accomplice forced his way onto the flight deck and announced the plane was under a “new captain.” Leila then assumed command of the aircraft. “To demonstrate my credibility, I immediately offered [the pilot] Captain Carter the safety pin from the grenade as a souvenir. He respectfully declined it. I dropped it at his feet and made my speech. ‘If you obey my orders, all will be well; if not, you will be responsible for the safety of passengers and aircraft.’”49
Once she had secured control over the plane, Khaled enjoyed her command enormously. She ordered the pilot to fly to Israel. She communicated directly with air traffic controllers en route, and particularly relished forcing the Israeli authorities to address the aircraft not as “TWA Flight 840” but as “Popular Front, Free Arab Palestine.” She had the pilot circle over her native city, Haifa, which she saw for the first time since 1948, shadowed by three Israeli fighters. Finally, she instructed the pilot to land in Damascus, where all of the passengers were ultimately released unharmed. Leila and her associate were held under house arrest by the Syrian authorities for forty-five days before they were allowed to return to Lebanon. They had enjoyed complete success in their mission and escaped with impunity.
The late 1960s were the heyday of the Palestinian commando movement. Fatah’s operations in Israel and the Popular Front’s hijackings brought the Palestinian cause to the world’s attention and gave hope to exiled Palestinians the world over. However, relations between the Arab host states and the Palestinian revolution soon began to deteriorate. The tensions were most pronounced in Lebanon and Jordan.
Palestinian guerrillas enjoyed significant public support in Lebanon, particularly among Leftist and Muslim groups disenchanted with the conservative Maronite-dominated political order. The Lebanese government, however, saw the Palestinian movement as a direct threat to its sovereignty and a risk to the country’s security. When Israeli commandos attacked Beirut Airport in 1968, the Lebanese authorities attempted to crack down on the Palestinians. Clashes erupted between the Lebanese security forces and Palestinian guerrillas in the course of 1969. Egyptian president Nasser intervened to broker a deal between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian factions. The Cairo Accord of November 1969 set the ground rules for the conduct of the Palestinian movement in Lebanese territory. It permitted Palestinian guerrillas to operate from Lebanese territory and gave the Palestinian factions full control over the 300,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon. The Cairo Accord provided a tenuous truce between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian movement that would be stretched to the breaking point over the next six years.
Relations with the Kingdom of Jordan were even more volatile. Some of the Palestinian factions openly called for the overthrow of the “reactionary” Hashemite monarchy to mobilize Palestinian and Arab masses through social revolution, which they saw as the necessary first step for the liberation of Palestine. Salah Khalaf acknowledged that the guerrillas were in part to blame for the breakdown in relations. “It’s true that our own behaviour wasn’t terribly consistent,” he wrote. “Proud of their force and exploits, the fedayeen [Palestinian commandos] often displayed a sense of superiority, sometimes even arrogance, without taking into consideration the sensibilities or interests of the native Jordanians. Still more serious was their attitude toward the Jordanian army, which they treated more as an enemy than as a potential ally.”50 But all the Palestinian factions believed King Hussein behaved duplicitously toward them and that he had thrown in his lot with the Americans and even the Israelis against the Palestinian cause.
By 1970 the Jordanians and the Palestinians were on a collision course. In June, the Popular Front took the first secretary of the American Embassy in Jordan hostage and seized the two largest hotels in Amman—the Intercontinental and the Philadelphia, taking more than eighty guests as hostages. King Hussein responded by sending his army to attack Palestinian positions in the refugee camps of Amman. The fighting raged for a week before a truce was struck and all the hostages were released. Leila Khaled regretted that the Popular Front had not continued fighting. “We missed the opportunity to depose Hussein when we had the confidence of the people and the power to defeat his fragmented forces,” she later reflected.51
The Popular Front struck again in September 1970 when it hijacked another plane to Athens and demanded the release of Mahmoud Issa. Since his own attack on an El Al passenger plane in Athens in December 1968, Issa had been held in a squalid Greek jail cell, forgotten by the outside world. The show trial he had hoped for in Greece, to focus international attention on the Palestinian cause, never materialized. As a result of its bold and successful hijacking, the PFLP was able to seize headlines and forced the Greek government to release Issa.
Mahmoud Issa returned to Jordan to a hero’s welcome, and within two months he had his next assignment. He was to prepare a landing strip for a spectacular PFLP operation—a synchronized three-plane hijacking that would bring Israeli and Western aircraft to the deserts of Jordan. The Popular Front hoped by these means to secure the front pages of the world’s press and to assert the authority of the Palestinian revolution over Jordan. It was a deliberate provocation, a challenge to both King Hussein and his army. Issa went to work on a disused airstrip to the east of the Jordanian capital Amman known as Dawson’s Field, renamed for the occasion “Revolution Airport.”
On September 6, 1970, commandos of the Popular Front boarded an American TWA airliner en route from Frankfurt to New York, and a Swissair flight from Zurich to New York, and forced both planes to land in Jordan.
The PFLP also assigned four commandos to seize an Israeli passenger plane that same day. The El Al ground staff refused boarding passes to two of the would-be hijackers, who chose to hijack an American Pan Am airliner instead. The Pan Am pilot refused to land his aircraft at Dawson’s Field, claiming the runway was not long enough to accommodate his massive Boeing 747 aircraft. He flew to Beirut, where Popular Front explosive teams wired the first-class cabin, and then directed the plane on to Cairo. The hijackers told the passengers and crew they would have only eight minutes to evacuate the aircraft once the plane landed. In fact, the explosives went off only three minutes after the plane touched down. Remarkably, all 175 passengers and crew managed to get off safely before the aircraft exploded.
The other two PFLP operatives succeeded in boarding the El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York. In command was Leila Khaled, the hijacker of TWA 840. Having suffered a string of attacks since 1968, El Al had intensified its security measures: cockpit doors had been reinforced, and air marshals were now posted on all flights. Shortly after takeoff, Leila and her comrade attempted to seize control of the aircraft. They met with determined resistance from the Israeli air marshals and crew. Some fourteen shots were fired, leaving an Israeli steward critically wounded and hijacker Patrick Arguello dead (Leila Khaled claimed he was summarily executed on the plane). Khaled was overpowered and disarmed. The pilot made an emergency landing in London to evacuate the wounded steward. The British authorities took the dying Arguello off the plane and arrested Leila Khaled. The Popular Front was quick to respond, hijacking a British BOAC airliner in Bahrain on September 9, where it joined the Swissair and TWA aircraft in Jordan’s “Revolution Airport.”
The multiple hijackings, combined with the destruction of the Pan Am aircraft in Cairo, captivated the international media. In terms of air piracy, the events of September 1970 would not be surpassed until September 2001. With three aircraft in Jordan still under its control, the PFLP began to make its demands: the release of Leila Khaled, three guerrillas held in West Germany, three other guerrillas held in Switzerland, and an unspecified number of Palestinians held by Israel. If its demands were not met within three days, all hijacked aircraft—which held a total 310 passengers and crew—would be destroyed. In fact, the Popular Front was still loath to alienate international public opinion by killing hostages, and it began to release women and children. Accounts of the hostages’ experiences dominated the front pages of the world’s press. On September 12, the remaining passengers were taken from the aircraft by armed PFLP guards and held hostage in a hotel commandeered by the Popular Front in central Amman. Charges were laid in the empty aircraft, which were destroyed in a series of spectacular explosions, captured by the television cameras of the world press.
A bigger explosion would follow five days later, when the Jordanian army declared war on the Palestinian revolution. For King Hussein and his army, the Palestinian factions had outstayed their welcome. The euphoria of Karamah had given way to Black September (as the war to drive the Palestinian revolution from Jordanian soil came to be called). The Popular Front had made no attempt to hide its wish to overthrow the monarchy and turn Jordan into the launching pad for the liberation of Palestine, and its decision to stage its hijacking outrage on Jordanian soil was the final straw. Fatah denounced the actions of the Popular Front, but the Jordanians no longer drew distinctions between Palestinian factions. There was not room for both the Palestinian revolution and the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.
Both King Hussein and his army were outraged by the PFLP’s audacity in seizing Jordanian territory for its terror operations. When segments of Jordan’s army attempted to intervene in the hijackings at Dawson’s Field, the Palestinian guerrillas countered with threats to the hostages. The Jordanian soldiers withdrew and held their fire, waiting for the hostage crisis to be resolved before taking action. This inaction in the face of Palestinian threats seemed to strip the Jordanian soldiers of their sense of manhood, taking them to the verge of mutiny against their monarch. One anecdote that gained wide circulation at the time was that when King Hussein reviewed his armored units, they flew women’s lingerie from their antennae in protest. “It’s we who are the women now,” a tank commander told his monarch.52
On September 17, Hussein ordered his army into action. Black September was all-out war. For ten days Palestinian guerrillas fought the Jordanian army in a conflict that threatened to broaden into a regional conflagration. As head of a conservative monarchy in a divided Middle East, Hussein came under threat by his “progressive” Arab neighbors who wished to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians. Hussein faced a serious threat from Iraqi troops that had been posted to Jordan since the Six Day War, and an actual invasion of his northern provinces by Syrian tanks flying the colors of the Palestine Liberation Army.
With his army overstretched by what was now a two-front war—against the Palestinians and the invading Syrians—Hussein invoked his friendship with the United States and Britain and even sought Israeli assistance to protect Jordanian airspace from outside attack. Western intervention, however, risked provoking a Soviet response in defense of its own regional allies. Nasser called on the other Arab states to broker a resolution to the conflict before it spiraled out of control.
It took Nasser’s authority to bring Arafat and Hussein together in Cairo on September 28 to resolve their differences. In a deal negotiated by the Arab heads of state, the Jordanians and Palestinians agreed to a total cease-fire. The remaining Western hostages from the hijack drama were released from the hotel and the different holding rooms to which they had been taken by the PFLP. The British authorities released Leila Khaled and a number of Palestinian guerrillas in a covert operation. But the damage done could not be repaired—even by Gamal Abdul Nasser. An estimated 3,000 Palestinian fighters and civilians had been killed in the Black September war; the Jordanians had also suffered hundreds of casualties. The city of Amman had been shattered by the ten days of fighting, and the Palestinian camps in the city had been reduced to ruins.
The days of intense negotiation had taken their toll on the Egyptian president. After seeing off Hussein and Arafat on September 28, 1970, Nasser returned home, where he suffered a massive heart attack and died at 5:00 P.M. that very evening.
Cairo Radio interrupted its regular programs to broadcast a solemn recital of verses from the Qur’an. After a suitable delay, Vice President Anwar Sadat announced the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The effect was both instantaneous and fantastic,” Mohamed Heikal recalled.
People poured out of their houses into the night and made their way to the broadcasting station on the banks of the Nile to find out if what they had heard was true.... First there were little groups to be seen in the streets, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands and then the streets were black with people and it was impossible for anybody to move. A group of women outside the broadcasting station were screaming. “The Lion is dead,” they cried, “The Lion is dead.” It was a cry that came to echo round Cairo and it spread through the villages until it filled Egypt. That night and in the days to come he was mourned with a wild and passionate grief. Soon people began to move into Cairo from all parts of Egypt until there were ten million in the city. The authorities stopped the trains running for there was nowhere for the people to stay and food supplies were running short. But still they came, by car, by donkey, and on foot.53
The grief over-spilled Egypt’s borders to spread across the Arab world. Mass demonstrations filled the major cities of the Arab world. Nasser, more than any other leader before or since, embodied the hopes and aspirations of Arab nationalists across the Middle East. Yet Arab nationalism had already died before Nasser. Syrian secession from the United Arab Republic, the inter-Arab war in the Yemen, and the massive defeat of 1967 and the loss of all of Palestine had dealt Pan-Arab aspirations successive blows from which it would not recover. The events of Black September cast the deep divisions between Arab states in sharp relief. Only Nasser seemed to transcend the fault lines growing between the Arab states, increasingly divided along Cold War lines into allies of the United States and partisans of the Soviet Union.
By 1970 the Arab world was firmly divided into distinct states with their own interests to uphold. There would be further high-profile unity schemes between Arab states after 1970, but none ever challenged the integrity of the states involved, and none endured. The unity schemes of the 1970s and 1980s were public relations exercises designed to confer legitimacy on Arab governments that knew that Arab nationalism still held a strong appeal to their citizens. Governments continued to pay lip service to common Arab themes of fighting the Zionist enemy and liberating the Palestinian homeland. But they were all looking out for their own interests. And a new force was taking hold of the Middle East, as the region’s oil resources began to generate tremendous wealth and give the Arabs influence over the world economy.