The Arab Countries • 305especially history books and biographies of such leaders as Julius Caesar,
Napoleon, and (closer to home) Mustafa Kamil. He embraced Egyptian na¬
tionalism, but not the parties of the 1930s. Unable to afford law school and
yet eager to lead his country's fight for independence, he managed to enter
the Egyptian military academy in 1937, the first year that young men with¬
out palace or aristocratic ties could be admitted into the officer corps.
After being commissioned, Nasir served in various army posts and
slowly gathered a group of young officers from equally modest back¬
grounds. Intensely patriotic, these men chafed at Britain's power and their
own army's weakness, shown by the British ultimatum to King Faruq in
1942 and Egypt's defeat by Israel in 1948. The bonding of these officers (re¬
inforced by the social divisions within the army) led to a conspiratorial
cabal, as they saw that only by ousting the rotten regime could Egypt be
liberated and redeemed. Even after they had ousted Faruq in 1952, Nasir
remained a conspirator. Once in power, he kept spies to report on friends
as well as foes.
Nasir started out leading from behind the scenes, but he engineered
Nagib's overthrow in 1954 because the latter seemed to have become too
popular. A ponderous speaker at first, Nasir did not win public support
until he openly defied the West. An Israeli raid on the Gaza Strip early in
1955, allegedly in retaliation for Palestinian raids into Israel, made Nasir
acutely aware that Egypt needed more arms. His officers wanted to get
them from Britain or the US, but neither country would sell any to Egypt
unless it promised to join an anticommunist alliance and refrain from at¬
tacking Israel. Nasir rejected these strings on Western aid. He attacked Iraq
for joining the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in the spring of 1955. Egypt op¬
posed any Arab alliance with the West.
Instead, as Nasir emerged as the leader of Arab nationalism, he adopted
a policy that he called "positive neutralism" after his exposure to national¬
ist and communist leaders at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and
Middle Eastern states opposed to Western domination. Defying the West,
he agreed to buy $200 million (then a huge sum) in arms from the com¬
munist countries. Arab nationalists outside Egypt, especially the Palestini¬
ans, hailed Nasir as their savior. He would lead the refugees back to their
usurped homeland, just as Salah al-Din in 1187 had driven the Crusaders
from Jerusalem. Egypt started arming bands oifidaiyin (Arabic for "those
who sacrifice themselves"), made up mainly of Gaza Strip Palestinians, to
provoke border incidents with Israel.
The US government tried to deflect Nasir from his anti-Western drift by
adopting a policy that now seems confused. On the one hand, Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles wanted Nasir to leave the other Arab states and