304 • 17 ISRAEL'S REBIRTH AND THE RISE OF ARAB NATIONALISMEgypt's Nasir and His Policies
Our discussion of Egypt's early twentieth-century history in Chapter 15
ended with the British occupation in 1956. Most Egyptians longed to free
the Nile Valley from British rule. Egypt's involvement in the contest for
Palestine was really a struggle against the Hashimites for leadership of the
Arab world. Gaining control of the Sudan came to matter less, as Cairo's
attention shifted to keeping either the Jews or Abdallah from taking over
Palestine. The 1952 revolution that led to Nasir's rise to power can be
viewed as the result of mounting frustration over either ( 1 ) Britain's pro¬
longed occupation of the Nile Valley or (2) the Egyptian army's defeat by
Israel. Most researchers favor the latter interpretation because from 1948
to 1977 Egypt's energies were mobilized toward fighting against Israel and
competing for the leadership of the Arab world. On one hand, US and So¬
viet pressure persuaded the British to give up their Suez Canal base in
- On the other, Egypt agreed to Sudanese independence in 1956. Nile
Valley unity was giving way to Arab nationalism.
Let us put Egypt's role as an Arab country into historical perspective.
Even though the Arabs have not been politically united since the Abbasid
revolution in 750—if indeed they were ever really united—the idea arose
in the twentieth century that all people who speak Arabic do constitute
one nation. They should unite in a single state, as the Germans tried to do
under Bismarck and Hitler or the Italians under Mazzini and Mussolini. A
united Arab state must include Egypt, the largest Arab country and the
one linking North Africa's Arabs with those of Southwest Asia. The Egyp¬
tians believed that only a strong and united Arab world could withstand
the domination of the Western powers. They viewed Israel's creation as a
colonial imposition on the Arabs, an attempt to maintain British and US
influence in the Middle East. They did not want to become communists,
as some British and American observers thought in the 1950s, but because
Russia had not ruled the Arab world in the past, the Arabs did not resent
the USSR. Soviet diplomacy seized this chance to weaken the West's influ¬
ence; it turned away from Israel and began to back the Arabs.
The rise of pan-Arabism in Egypt coincided with the overthrow of Gen¬
eral Nagib, the titular leader of the 1952 revolution that ousted King Faruq,
by Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasir in 1954. For the next sixteen years, he
would, as Egypt's president, loom larger than life in the words and imagi¬
nations of both those who loved him and those who hated him. He could
be dictatorial or deferential, charismatic or suspicious, ingenuous or crafty.
He reacted more than he acted. The son of an Alexandrian postal clerk and
grandson of an Upper Egyptian peasant, Nasir had known poverty and hu¬
miliation in his youth. Moody and withdrawn, young Nasir read widely,