The great disaster
On May 23, 1973, the Israeli Minister in Paris, Yosef Hadas, submitted a report on a conversation with one of his local contacts. It was a routine filing and contained no new and earth-shattering revelations, but its heading attracted the attention of the officials in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem: âA Young Egyptian Defines Nasser.â The French official had told Hadas about his recent meeting with the Egyptian ambassador in Paris, at which he heard his concise and on-target description of the late Egyptian president Nasser. The fellow had said that âNasser wanted to change the history of the region, but he only changed its geography.â2 No one at the Israel Embassy in Paris could have offered a better summary of Nasserâs years in power (1954â70), so Hadas recommended exploiting the phraseâfor Israeli propaganda purposes, of course.
Three years after the idolized leaderâs death, some Egyptian citizens recognized that he had deceived them. Yes, Nasser had expelled the British and nationalized the Suez Canal. Yes, he had chalked up important political and industrial achievements, such as the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Yes, Egypt had made itself the leader of the Arab world and of the Non-aligned Bloc.3 But the bottom line, when all was said and done, was that he had not been able to unite the Arabs under his baton. The Egyptian economy had not taken off, despite his socialist projects. In slightly more than a decade, the country had gone down to military defeat twice, trounced by Israel in 1956 and again in 1967. So the Egyptian quoted by Hadas was right: Nasser had sought to change the history of the Middle East, as was evident from his book The Philosophy of the Revolution, but had only redrawn its map in the wake of the defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967.
After that debacle, the Arab world began beating its breast: searching within itself for the roots of the failure and proposing diverse solutions of the problem that had led to it. As time passed the public debate turned into an obsession. The trauma of defeat was burned into the masses and they could not stop thinking about it. But no Arab country had been wounded as deeply as Egypt by the lightning war. In both its own eyes and those of its allies (Syria and Jordan), Egypt bore the main responsibility for the defeat. Having dragged the confrontation-line states into the war, it now had to bear the guilt of the disastrous outcome.4 That guilt rested heavily both on the Egyptian people and on its political and military leaders, because the scale of its losses on the battlefield was unbearable.
The fighting, which lasted no more than four days, cost the Egyptians 15,000 dead, 50,000 wounded, and 4,230 prisoners. On top of that, the armed forces had lost nearly 70% of their heavy artillery, 361 aircraft, and 590 tanks. The Egyptian army had been shattered, and the country itself crashed into a reality that dwarfed its leadersâ worst nightmares. Not surprisingly, they reacted as if their world had come to an end. On June 8, four days after the start of the fighting on the Egyptian front, there were signs of a general disintegration of the senior military echelons. At 11 oâclock that night, War Minister Shams al-Din Badran asked Nasser to come urgently to the Egyptian General Headquarters. When he arrived, the president found the deputy supreme commander of the armed forces, Field Marshal Muhammad Abdel Hakim Amer, in a state of total collapse and contemplating suicide. Nasser tried to soothe him, accepted full responsibility for the outcome of the war, and promised to resign.5
Another leader of the 1952 Free Officersâ coup, Anwar Sadat, fell into a deep depression and closeted himself at home for four days. When the war was over, he was tormented by his pangs of remorse and sense of utter impotence (âI ⊠was completely overwhelmed by our defeatâ).6 Nasser himself, âthe man who had been deified by his own countrymen, worshipped by the Arab masses ⊠[was] thrown upon the mercies of a disdainful Russia, with no army or air force to defend his country.â7 On June 11, after he withdrew his resignation, he confessed that he had been in such a severe emotional state that he had sent his family out of Cairo and âkept a gun beside [himself] to use at the last minute.â8 That same day he was informed that there were only seven tanks left to defend the capital. Later, Sadat wrote that
those who knew Nasser realized that he did not die on September 28, 1970, but on June 5, 1967, exactly one hour after the war broke out. That was how he looked at the time, and for a long time afterwardsâa living corpse. The pallor of death was evident on his face and hands, although he still moved and walked, listened and talked.9
In addition to the initial trauma right after the defeat, Egypt was rocked by repeated aftershocks, some of which threatened the pillars of the Nasserist regime and were not much weaker than the rout on the battlefield. The first tremor that struck the Egyptian people was Nasserâs resignation, announced in a speech on June 9. The French journalist Eric Rouleau, who was then in Cairo, described a haggard and troubled man whose voice was choked by tears as he read his speech:
I tell you truthfully and despite any factors on which I might have based my attitude during the crisis that I am ready to bear the whole responsibility. I have taken a decision in which I want you all to help me. I have decided to give up completely and finally every official role, to return to the ranks of the masses and to my duty with them like every other citizen.10
Shocks in the leadership
The president had resigned. The father of the July 1952 revolution, the man who had placed himself at the head of the Arab world and endeavored to unite it, the figure to whom Egyptians had lifted their eyes in the hope that he would lead them to a promising future, had handed in his keys and turned to leave. That was not what was supposed to happen. Egypt refused to accept the defeat; even more so, it refused to believe that Nasser had resigned in its wake. Pursuant to Article 110 of the provisional constitution of March 1964, Nasser named Vice-President Zakaria Mohieddin to succeed him. Mohieddin declined the position.11 No sooner had Nasser finished his speech than shocked crowds poured into the streets. Whether these demonstrations were spontaneous or carefully orchestrated by the authorities, Nasser clearly had regained the peopleâs trust.
On the morning of June 10, Nasser planned to address the National Assembly, but could not reach its building. Thousands of demonstrators blocked the roads between downtown Cairo and Nasserâs home in Heliopolis. Thousands more took up stations outside the National Assembly and proclaimed they would not allow him to enter until he withdrew his resignation. Many demonstrators carried placards declaring that the Egyptian people were behind Nasser and there was no one to take his place. Around noon, after many delays, the National Assembly was finally gaveled to order. Nasser, as mentioned, could not attend, so Sadat, the Assembly president, delivered a statement on his behalf, whose essence was retraction of the resignation:
I have decided to remain in my post and to stay where the people want me to stay, until the period is over when we can all eliminate the traces of the aggression.⊠Now, my brother citizens, link your arms together and let us begin to [realize] our urgent task.12
The second shock struck along with the first. On June 9, at a meeting attended by Nasser, Amer, and War Minister Badran, Mohieddin said that they all shared responsibility for the defeat and its ramifications, and not just Nasser (even though, while the war raged, the latter had accepted full responsibility for the fiasco); hence all of them should resign. Badran objected and said that only Nasser should resign. He did so, as we have seen, but with an unexpected twist. Although Amer, as first vice-president, should have stepped into his shoes, Badran was astonished to hear that instead the choice had fallen on Mohieddin, the second vice-president.
This slight deepened the rift between Nasser and the military High Command, especially Amer and Badran. On June 11, after Nasser withdrew his resignation, he began a purge of his opponents in the senior echelons of the armed forces. The first to be forced out, not surprisingly, were Amer and Badran, followed by army commander Gen. Abd al-Mohsen Kamal Murtagui, Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Mohamed Sedky Mahmoud, Admiral Suleiman Ezzat, and other top officers, mainly those who had been Amerâs protĂ©gĂ©s. Nasser published a list of new appointments, including Gen. Mahmoud Fawzi as Commander of the Armed Forces, Gen. Abd al-Munim Riad as Chief of Staff, and Gen. Madhkur Abu al-Ezz as Commander of the Air Force. This amounted to a clean sweep of the veteran command echelon, identified with Amer, and its replacement by Nasser loyalists.
This was not the end of the affair. Amer, Badran, and many of their colleagues resolved to take steps against the regime, in order to put a halt to the arrests of senior figures in the officer corps and force Nasser to return them to their commands. Badran began organizing his supporters in secret and stockpiling weapons in one of Amerâs residences, in the Cairo suburb of Giza. The house soon became a veritable fortress; as Badran later testified at his trial, there was enough weaponry to defend an entire city. Initially, the conspirators planned to abduct Nasser, but when they realized this was impossible they decided on a military coup. On August 25, 1967, two days before the plot was to be launched, Amer, Badran, and 50 other senior officers and government figures were arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government. After protracted interrogation in the presence of Nasser, Mohieddin, and Sadat, as well as a long stretch of house arrest, Amer committed suicide on September 14. The precise circumstances of his death remain unclear today.13
The third shock was produced by the ensuing show trials of the commanders of the 1967 war. Even though the people had suppressed the trauma of defeat during the turbulence that immediately followed it and Nasser had regained their confidence, the masses could not forget the âJune defeatâ (naksa áž„uzaran). Nasser needed to provide a swift response to the publicâs demands. As a result, 50 senior officers and members of the ruling elite went on trial on January 22, 1968. The indictments cited crimes related to national security and included charges of plotting to overthrow the regime. The accused denied these charges and exploited the trial to attack the regime and its head. They claimed that Nasser led a corrupt government that systematically suppressed the Egyptian people and their freedom. Rage and frustration spread among the citizens, on top of the feelings of inferiority and helplessness that followed the Six Day War. In late February, the masses took to the streets for the first protests of their kind in the history of the Nasser regime, demonstrating against their venerated leader.14
On February 20, the Cairo court-martial found four senior officers of the Air Force responsible for its collapse in the initial hours of the war and sentenced them to prison terms of ten to 15 years. Two others were acquitted of all charges. The next day, many workers, incited by activists of the Arab Socialist Union, poured out of the military industries in Helwan to protest the light sentences. However, these workers had an ulterior motive: they were afraid that the regime might try to restore the mili...
