the invasion in November 1956. That makes it
hard sometimes to distinguish the wood from the
trees and from the tangle of undergrowth.
For Nasser and the Egyptians the desire to end
a semi-colonial status and subservience to Britain
took first place. British troops stationed in the
Suez Canal Zone were an army of occupation on
Egyptian soil. The Canal Company, with its head-
quarters in Paris, was alien too. It managed and
organised the passage of ships through the Canal
thousands of miles distant. No wonder that in the
mid-twentieth century Egyptians saw the Com-
pany and its protectors as the successors of the
imperialists who had first occupied Egypt in the
1880s. The Egyptians were regarded as backward
by Westerners, incapable of running the Canal
effectively by themselves. All this was deeply
humiliating to nationalists in Egypt. Moreover,
Egypt was still smarting from its defeat by Israel.
As most Israelis had come from Europe in recent
times they too were regarded as Westerners and
Zionism as another facet of imperialism. They had
displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
Arabs during the war for Israeli independence.
Now these Arabs were refugees in their own part
of the world. Not that Colonel Nasser or any of
the Arab leaders were much bothered about
Palestinian Arabs. But Nasser’s credentials as a
pan-Arab leader depended on espousing the Arab
cause and proclaiming his enmity to the Zionist
intruders.
Nasser knew that Egypt was militarily weak but
he did have some cards to play. The Suez Canal
had been constructed by Ferdinand, Vicomte de
Lesseps in the typical imperialist manner of the
nineteenth century. Ruthless and brilliant, de
Lesseps had set up the Suez Canal Company and
had plundered the Egyptian treasury, while the
Egyptians had supplied 20,000 forced labourers.
Construction began in 1859 and was completed
in 1869. When the khedive went bankrupt he
sold the Egyptian shareholding in the Canal to
Britain for a mere £4 million in the famous finan-
cial coup masterminded by the Rothschilds for
Disraeli. The Canal Company, with its British and
French shareholders, did not actually own the
Canal; the territory through which the canal was
constructed remained under Ottoman sover-
eignty. The Company had merely acquired a con-
cession to operate the Canal for ninety-nine years
after its opening. Thus it would end in November- That gave Nasser a legal claim. Was he pre-
pared to wait? For France and Britain time was
running out.
The Zone through which the Canal ran was
effectively controlled by British troops. Under the
Constantinople Convention of 1888 the Canal
was to be ‘free and open in time of war as in
peace’. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was
supposed to give Egypt real independence and
was indeed a step towards it. But Britain extracted
as the price the right to continue to occupy the
Canal Zone for twenty years and even to reoc-
cupy the rest of Egypt if necessary in the event of
war. Britain made use of this right during the
Second World War.
The time for renegotiating the alliance, then,
was rapidly approaching in the 1950s. And here
was the quandary for the West: in the era of Cold
War antagonism, to concede completely equal
rights in the Suez Canal to all countries, as
required by the Convention of 1888, could allow
the Soviet Union to secure a foothold. That was
unthinkable as far as London and Washington
were concerned. There was a way out, the solution
the West had found for that other crucial inter-
national ‘canal’, the Straits of Constantinople.
There was one exception to the requirement for
free passage of international canals. The sovereign
power through which the canal ran could take any
measures it felt necessary for its defence. By tying
Turkey into the NATO alliance the Soviets could
be kept out. So, if Egypt could be induced to con-
tinue the Western alliance, the Soviet Union would
be denied any influence. The situation would of
course be catastrophically reversed if Egypt con-
cluded an alliance with the Soviet Union!
The Cold War and the fear of Soviet penetra-
tion of the Middle East provide the key to an
understanding of Washington’s and London’s
policies in the early negotiations with Nasser.
Anthony Eden, foreign secretary in Churchill’s
government, worked hard to secure a friendly
agreement with Nasser over the issues outstand-
ing between Britain and Egypt, and he was
backed by the US secretary of state John Foster