A History of the Middle East (45 page)

Kennedy’s death came as a shock to Nasser and to all the Arabs, who felt they had lost the first American statesman with some sympathy for their point of view. Nasser was not reassured when President Johnson, who had much less interest in foreign affairs than Kennedy, gave evidence of being much more sensitive to the concerns of US Zionists. Nasser’s relations with Washington deteriorated sharply over the question of the Congo (Zaïre), where Egypt was giving increasing support to the rebels against the government of Moise Tshombe which the US wanted to sustain in power. Nasser reacted angrily and defiantly when he concluded that the US was trying to use its supplies of cheap food to Egypt as a means of pressuring him to change his policies. However, when the US House of Representatives passed a resolution to stop all further aid to Egypt, President Johnson and his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, refused to accept that the hands of the United States should be tied in the Middle East in this way. The president exerted all his influence to have the vote reversed in the Senate.

For reasons of language, racial and religious affinity and strategic interest, Nasser had not given the same priority to his African Circle as to his Arab Circle, but Egypt had acquired important influence throughout black Africa, where most of the states had only just acquired independence. In July 1964 Nasser was host to the second conference of the Organization of African Unity. His position as a leader of the non-aligned movement was taken for granted, and in
October 1964 fifty-six heads or representatives of heads of non-aligned countries held their summit meeting in Cairo. The concept of non-alignment might have been incapable of precise definition but it had real meaning to most countries in the Third World, which to some extent identified it with Nasser and his policies.

Nasser’s function as a world statesman could not solve his domestic difficulties or avert the looming threat of a new war with Israel. Egypt’s commitments were dangerously over-extended. Although his policies of industrialization and rapid economic expansion had achieved a commendable growth rate over the past decade, some of the projects had been ill-conceived and the burden of debt had risen to alarming levels. He had successfully exploited Egypt’s strategic role to secure aid from East and West, but Western aid was tailing off, the country’s credit was being destroyed and foreign exchange was desperately short. Although the Egyptians’ acceptance of his leadership still appeared overwhelming, to an extent which could not be explained solely by the police methods which the regime undoubtedly used, in the summer of 1965 Nasser, in uncharacteristically depressed mood, announced the discovery of a nation-wide conspiracy by a revived Muslim Brotherhood, revealing ideological and political dissatisfaction at many levels of society.

The responsibilities of Egypt’s assumed role of Arab leadership were more immediately dangerous. The continuing civil war in Yemen not only added to Egypt’s economic burdens but also tied down some 40,000 of its best-trained troops. At the same time, events were moving rapidly towards the tragic denouement of a third Arab–Israeli war.

In February 1966 the Syrian regime, which had begun a rapprochement with Egypt, was overthrown by the radical wing of the Baath. The new Syrian rulers had no love of Nasser, but they were more strongly hostile towards the Arab kings and, if possible, even more bellicose than their predecessors towards Israel. While King Hussein was trying to prevent Palestinian
fedayeen
from operating from his territory, Syria gave them encouragement and support and accordingly Israel’s threats of heavy retaliation were principally directed
against Syria. Nasser could not reject a Syrian appeal for help, and in November 1966 he signed a comprehensive Syrian–Egyptian defence pact. He had a commitment to Syria without the power to control it.

A few days later, three Israeli soldiers were killed by a mine explosion near the Jordanian frontier. Although Syria was clearly the main source of Palestinian sabotage attacks, Israel launched its customary heavy retaliation raid against a West Bank village. Protesting against their inadequate protection by the Jordanian army, the West Bankers rose in a revolt which was quelled only with difficulty. King Hussein angrily attacked Nasser for his criticism of Jordan’s handling of the affair and taunted him with hiding behind the protection of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), which had kept the Egyptian–Israeli front quiet since 1956.

Tension rose to a new height the following spring, as Israeli leaders issued increasingly severe warnings to Syria. Soviet, Syrian and Egyptian intelligence combined to warn Nasser that an Israeli attack on Syria was imminent. Nasser’s response on 18 May was to ask the UN secretary-general U Thant to withdraw the UNEF from Sinai (where, on Israel’s insistence, it was stationed only on Egypt’s side of the border). When U Thant complied, the road to war was wide open. Nasser ordered troops into Sinai and, with the eyes of the Arab world upon him, announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. King Hussein, realizing that he would be unable to stand aside from the inevitable war that was coming, flew to Cairo on 30 May to sign a defence pact with Egypt. Egypt now had defence agreements with both Syria and Jordan, but there was no real co-operation between them and no semblance of an Arab joint command.

The Arab countries were now in a state of emotional self-intoxication as the belief became widespread that final victory over Israel was imminent. Even Nasser abandoned his usual doubts about Arab military capabilities, although he had exaggerated faith in his own military commander, Field Marshal Amer. He also believed that it was possible that the United States would restrain Israel from
attacking and that he could score a tactical victory without fighting. He himself promised the Soviet Union that Egypt would not strike first. However, experience should have told him of the high probability that Israel would act if international pressure was not going to reopen the Straits of Tiran to its shipping. Any last doubts should have been removed when the activist General Moshe Dayan joined the Israeli cabinet on 1 June.

On 5 June 1967 Israel attacked all seventeen of Egypt’s military airfields, destroying most of its airforce on the ground, and on 6 June Israeli forces advanced rapidly into Sinai. The seven Egyptian divisions in Sinai were defeated, and an estimated 10,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed or died of thirst in the struggle to return across the Suez Canal, which Israeli forces reached on 9 June. After destroying the Egyptian airforce, Israel could turn against Jordan, which had entered the war as Egypt’s ally. By the evening of 7 June, with the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank occupied, Jordan accepted the UN Security Council’s demand for a cease-fire. Egypt accepted on the following day. Israel was now free to turn against Syria, which had confined itself to probing attacks. Israeli troops stormed up the Golan Heights and occupied the key town of Quneitra on the Syrian plateau. Syria accepted the cease-fire on 10 June.

The swift and shattering course of the Six-Day War had many immediate and long-term consequences. The Zionist state of Israel had gained military control over all Jerusalem and the remaining 21 per cent of Palestine. Some 200,000 more Arab refugees crossed the River Jordan to the East Bank. Israel had occupied the whole of Sinai and its forces were on the banks of the Suez Canal, where this time they intended to stay. In seizing the Golan Heights, Israel had removed Syria’s strategic advantage.

While Israel’s victory had been too swift for the Soviet Union to help its Egyptian and Syrian friends, Western governments and public opinion were almost unanimously hostile towards the Arabs and favourable towards Israel. The only notable exception was France’s President de Gaulle, who during both the war and its aftermath showed some sympathy with the Arab position and warned
against Israel’s domineering tendencies. Egypt’s break with Britain and the United States was complete. At the outset of the war, on the basis of information from King Hussein that Jordanian radar stations had detected approaching from the sea a large flight of aircraft which could come only from British and US carriers, Egypt broke off relations with the US and Britain and expelled all US and British citizens.

Nasser’s heavy share of responsibility in the disaster was clear, and his position, both in Egypt and among the Arabs, was irrepar-ably damaged. In dark tones on the third evening of the war he announced on Cairo Radio his acceptance of full personal responsibility and his intention to resign and hand over power to his vice-president, Zakariya Mohieddin. He also dismissed his right-hand man Field Marshal Amer. Whether or not Nasser had expected it, the reaction was an overwhelming public demand that he should remain in office. The extraordinary dominance which he had achieved in Egypt, and his position as the generally well-loved father figure of a nation accustomed to paternalistic rule, meant that he was not allowed to abandon the presidency at a time of such desperate crisis. His health was deteriorating – he suffered from ‘black diabetes’, which caused defective blood circulation – and there is little doubt that the 1967 disaster shortened his life. But in one sense Egypt’s situation made his position easier, since those who might have challenged his power were restrained by their lack of any practical alternative to his policies. In August 1967 he was faced with a conspiracy to restore Field Marshal Amer as head of the armed forces, and in 1968 and 1969 there were serious outbreaks of student and industrial unrest, but he overcame these with a mixture of firmness and mild concessions. While there was considerable dissatisfaction, especially among the professional classes and intelligentsia, because the old power structure had not been radically changed, the continuing state of emergency with Israel provided a powerful argument for postponing fundamental reforms.

The Soviet Union at once showed its readiness to repair Egypt’s enormous military losses, and Soviet arms and equipment poured
into the country. But although Nasser’s public speeches were defiant and even bellicose in tone, in reality he accepted that Egypt’s military options were extremely limited. In November 1967 he accepted the UN Security Council Resolution 242 calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for Arab
de facto
recognition of Israel, and he publicly agreed with the Soviet leaders on the need for a political settlement in the Middle East.

As Egypt’s armed forces recovered, in 1969–70 Nasser allowed them to conduct a ‘war of attrition’ against Israel along the Suez Canal. The Egyptians scored several successes, which raised public morale, but Israel exacted a heavy cost by bombarding Egypt’s Canal cities and conducting commando raids deep into Egyptian territory. Nasser asked the Soviet Union to step up its aid, and the number of Soviet military advisers in Egypt was increased from about 3,000 to 10,000. But Nasser still had not abandoned hope that a political solution to the Arab– Israeli conflict could be achieved through US pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories. On 1 May 1970 he made what he called a ‘final appeal’ to President Nixon to withhold support for Israel so long as it continued to occupy Arab lands, and on 23 July he announced Egypt’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan, sponsored by the US secretary of state William Rogers and based on UN Resolution 242, which led to a cease-fire in the Suez Canal area on 7 August.

The burden of Arab leadership had finally proved too heavy for Egypt. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Nasser era in the Middle East came to an end during the six fateful days in June 1967, although it began an irreversible decline then. In fact Arab shame and humiliation caused by the catastrophe intensified the anti-Western trend in parts of the Arab world. In South Arabia (the former British Aden Colony and Protectorate) left-wing extremists took power when Britain withdrew in 1967 and created the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In 1969 the conservative parliamentary regime in Sudan was overthrown by radical socialist army officers led by Colonel Jaafar Nimeiry, who moved the country leftwards towards closer relations with Egypt and the Soviet Union. A few months later
the aged King Idris of Libya was ousted in a coup led by a passionately Nasserist young beduin colonel named Muammar Qaddafy. The events in Sudan and Libya were a boost for Nasser in his decline; they offered the prospect of strategic depth for Egypt’s armed forces and of economic help through Libya’s oil wealth. On Qaddafy’s insistence, Libya, Sudan and Egypt began to discuss plans for a federation. But Nasser’s experience could not make him enthusiastic about such a prospect, and in 1969 neither Sudan nor Libya could be of much help in Egypt’s immediate difficulties.

The support of Sudan and Libya could not outbalance two greater realities which tended to diminish Egypt’s role in the Arab world. One was the fact that Egypt’s defeat greatly enhanced the position of King Feisal, the leader of the conservative and fundamentally pro-Western oil states of Arabia. At the Khartoum summit meeting which followed the 1967 war, Feisal secured Nasser’s agreement to withdraw all his troops from Yemen. Although the Arab leaders at the summit reached the apparently intransigent conclusion that there should be no peace, no direct negotiations and no recognition of Israel, the reality was that, in return for substantial economic aid which would continue ‘until the traces of aggression are removed’, Nasser agreed that the Arab oil states could lift the half-hearted boycott they had imposed on Britain and the United States during the Six-Day War.

King Feisal was now in a stronger position to press his view that Islamic unity was at least as important as Arab unity. In 1969 he secured the holding of the first conference of Islamic heads of state at Rabat, before the Arab summit for which Nasser was pressing. The Islamic summit was a triumph for Feisal as it agreed to the founding of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) with its permanent headquarters in Jedda. When the Arab summit did take place a few months later, Nasser failed to secure Feisal’s agreement that the Arabs should devote all their resources to supporting Egypt in its struggle with Israel. It was a tired and disillusioned Nasser who accepted the US-sponsored cease-fire on the Suez Canal a few months later.