Nasser's Peace

Egypt's Response to the 1967 War with Israel

Michael Sharnoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367182540
• eBook ISBN: 9781351617628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gamal Abdel Nasser was arguably one of the most influential Arab leaders in history. As President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970, he could have achieved a peace agreement with Israel, yet he preferred to maintain his unique leadership role by affirming pan-Arab nationalism and championing the liberation of Palestine, a common euphemism for the destruction of Israel.

In that era of Cold War politics, Nasser brilliantly played Moscow, Washington, and the United Nations to maximize his bargaining position and sustain his rule without compromising his core beliefs of Arab unity and solidarity. Surprisingly, little analysis is found regarding Nasser's public and private perspectives on peace in the weeks and months immediately after the 1967 War. Nasser's Peace is a close examination of how a developing country can rival world powers and how fluid the definition of "peace" can be.

Drawing on recently declassified primary sources, Michael Sharnoff thoroughly inspects Nasser's post-war strategy, which he claims was a four-tiered diplomatic and media effort consisting of his public declarations, his private diplomatic consultations, the Egyptian media's propaganda machine, and Egyptian diplomatic efforts. Sharnoff reveals that Nasser manipulated each tier masterfully, providing the answers they desired to hear, rather than stating the truth: that he wished to maintain control of his dictatorship and of his foothold in the Arab world.

1

Nasser’s Pre-1967 Peace Perception

On July 23, 1952, a clandestine military group known as the Free Officers led by General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser launched a bloodless coup against Egyptian King Farouk and his royal family. This event was known as the July Revolution, and the Free Officers radically altered Egypt by ousting the Turco-Circassian elite that had ruled for centuries during Ottoman rule. They were young, revolutionary, and transformed Egypt from a British-backed monarchy into an independent republic. Naguib, the older and more experienced, served as president and prime minister until Nasser, who served as deputy prime minister and interior minister, ousted him from power. Nasser became prime minister in 1954 and ruled Egypt largely behind the scenes until being sworn in as president on June 23, 1956.¹

The Jewish state of Israel, bordered by four Arab nations including Egypt, was not initially perceived by Nasser as a threat. On the contrary, prior to 1955, the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) viewed him as a moderate capable of reaching a peace agreement with Israel.² In a December 1953 interview with a British labor minister, Nasser announced that he had no desire to destroy Israel and that “the idea of throwing the Jews into the sea is propaganda.”³ On August 20, 1954, he told the New York Times that “the Arabs do not plan to attack Israel,”⁴ and on December 20, 1954, he told Foreign Affairs magazine that Egypt did not seek to be “the initiators of the conflict.”⁵ Nasser’s aversion to combat with Israel and war in general was expressed in his 1955 memoir in which he described serving as a major during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: “I felt from the depths of my heart that I hated war. Not only this particular war in which we were engaged, but the idea of war itself. I felt that humanity does not deserve the honor of life if it does not strive with all its heart in the cause of peace.”⁶

The Paradox of Nasser’s Pan-Arab Ideology and Actions

Though Nasser did not initially perceive Israel as an “artificial entity” or “colonial implant,” his emerging ambition to become the leader of the Arab world meant maintaining a state of belligerency with the Jewish state. In his 1954 memoir, The Philosophy of the Revolution, Nasser claimed that Egypt’s unique geography and historical legacy enhanced its ability to influence Africa, the Muslim world, and the Arab world. Of these three significant regions, it was the Arab world which captivated Nasser’s attention the most: “I always imagine that in this region in which we live there is a role wandering aimlessly about in search of an actor to play it.”⁷

Nasser’s ambition to unite the Arab world under his leadership and reluctance to fight Israel underscored a paradox. Attaining pan-Arab leadership required promoting Arab unity and championing the Palestinian cause – pan-Arabism’s most cherished goal. How conceivably could this goal be achieved without fighting Israel? The Arab League, formed in 1945, comprised Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Transjordan (later Jordan), none of which recognized the United Nations (UN) Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, or Israel’s independence. No Arab nation recognized Israel’s right to exist, and the Jewish state was unanimously perceived as an unlawful entity backed by the West, which had usurped Arab land at the Palestinians expense.⁸

The Arab League viewed Zionism, defined as the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland, as an injustice. While most Jews considered Israel’s independence as the rebirth of their nation after nearly 2,000 years in exile, the Arab world perceived Israel’s independence as al-Nakba (the catastrophe), which caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee. Leading the Arab world required adopting their official narrative, and Nasser began articulating that Israel’s existence represented a physical barrier to Arab unity by separating North Africa from the Middle East. Nasser described Israel’s creation as a crime against the Arab nation and claimed that Palestinian rights could only be restored by reversing the events of 1948, a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state.⁹

Although Nasser sought to avoid direct confrontation with Israel, from May 1954 onward, he allowed Palestinian fedayeen (self-sacrificers) to launch border raids from the Gaza Strip, which Egypt conquered during the 1948 War. He tolerated attacks against Israeli targets in the hope to exhaust the Jewish state to the point where it would either be forced to cede territory to Egypt or its citizens would no longer feel safe in their own country and emigrate.¹⁰

The Gaza Dilemma

Paradoxically, Egypt’s control of Gaza questioned Nasser’s pan-Arab pretenses, which emphasized Arab rights, dignity, and unity.¹¹ This small, coastal territory bordering the Mediterranean Sea and located between Egypt and Israel was home to more than one-quarter of a million Palestinians; many of them were refugees of the 1948 War. All were denied Egyptian citizenship and were harshly ruled by a string of Egyptian governors, who severely restricted their freedom of movement and expression. Although Nasser had inherited the situation from the defunct monarchy, he did little to change the situation on the ground. He justified Palestinian statelessness on the premise that one day the Arab armies would liberate Palestine and facilitate their “return.” Speaking to a “Palestine Club” in Alexandria on December 13, 1953, Nasser expressed “a deep sense of tragedy” regarding what had happened to Palestine during the 1948 War and blamed Egypt’s leaders for their defeat. He also held the UK responsible for financing and encouraging the Jews to “occupy Palestine” and for providing them with weapons to fight against the Arabs.¹²

This emphatic rhetoric notwithstanding, Nasser commonly deemphasized a distinct Palestinian identity by addressing them as “Arabs of Palestine” or even more broadly as “the people of Palestine.” On March 29, 1955, Nasser stressed to a crowd in Gaza the broader concept of Arab nationalism at the expense of parochial Palestinian nationalism: “We will never forget the conspiracies hatched to eliminate Arab nationalism in Palestine.”¹³ On November 28, he told the media that the Palestinians, to whom he did not specifically refer to as a distinct nation but in general terms as the “Arab people of Palestine,” were victims of British colonial policies and aggression, which had “left the Arab people of Palestine at the mercy of the Zionist armed gangs.” While Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip remained stateless and faced harsh conditions under his rule, Nasser portrayed a benevolent facade to the world by asserting that Egypt defended “the rights of the Arab people of Palestine.”¹⁴

The Bandung Conference

Nasser’s chance to elevate his standing as the foremost leader of the Arabs came during an international peace conference for developing nations in Bandung, Indonesia, on April 14, 1955. According to Nasser, the UN Charter had been violated by the partition resolution, which constituted an “unprecedented” act. Refraining yet again from addressing the Palestinians as a distinct nation entitled to self-determination, he referred to them as a refugee community called “the people of Palestine.”¹⁵ Yet Nasser’s portrayal of the Palestinians as victims of a unique injustice was transformed in the general Afro-Asian struggle for independence and against imperialism and colonialism.¹⁶ On July 20,1956, Nasser joined the Yugoslav President and Indian Prime Minister in a statement declaring that the principles addressed at Bandung should serve as the cornerstone for international relations. If applied correctly, these principles had the potential both to diffuse East–West tension and provide security and territorial integrity to all nations.¹⁷

Nasser’s performance at Bandung helped catapult him from a novice revolutionary leader into a world statesman. Having shared the podium and befriended established anti-imperialist and anticolonialist leaders, Nasser became known to a worldwide audience. The policies and goals espoused at Bandung inspired the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement six years later, and this influential bloc advocated a strategic policy of “positive neutrality” in which developing nations should receive aid from the US, Europe, and the Soviet Union without becoming subservient to either East or West.

Nasser’s adoption of the policy of positive neutrality was not a new one. In 1951 – the year before Nasser’s Free Officers orchestrated their coup against King Farouk – they had drafted an edict demanding “arms for the army from all countries which will sell us weapons either from the East or West.”¹⁸ Moreover, in his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev recalled that shortly after the July 1952 coup, the Free Officers solicited military aid from Moscow.¹⁹

The 1956 Suez War

Despite his newfound alliance with nonaligned nations and his seemingly promising future, Nasser engaged in a series of actions which violated several principles espoused at Bandung and ultimately brought Egypt into armed conflict with Israel and the West.²⁰ On February 24, 1955, in retaliation for the killing of civilians by Gaza-originated fedayeen, Israel bombed Gaza, killing thirty-eight Egyptians. Several days later, Nasser attempted to alleviate concerns among Egyptian military officers that these reprisals could lead to war with Israel. He assured them that Egypt would reign victorious in a future battle against Israel because “the Egyptian army had not fought at all in 1948” and that the Egyptian military suffered as a “victim of treachery and treason” under the negligence of King Farouk.²¹

By 1955, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had succeeded in creating the Baghdad Pact, a pro-Western, anti-Soviet alliance of Arab and Muslim nations, including Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. Unlike the UK, however, the US was not an official member since it wanted to keep its regional options open. Fearful of Western domination, Nasser announced that Egypt would receive arms shipments from Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s Central European satellite, and a member of the Warsaw Pact. This arms deal characterized Egypt’s first major transaction with the communist bloc and the Soviet Union’s first official transaction with a noncommunist nation.²² Ironically, while receiving weapons from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Nasser’s Pre-1967 Peace Perception
• 2. Nasser’s 1967 War Defeat
• 3. Nasser’s Responses to United Nations’ Proposals
• 4. Clandestine Meetings at the United Nations
• 5. Arab Summits and Clandestine Meetings
• 6. Nasser’s Palestine Policy, Khartoum, and Tito’s Proposal
• 7. Nasser’s British Strategy
• 8. United Nations Deliberations and Private Party Negotiations
• 9. Nasser’s Meeting with Robert Anderson
• 10. Nasser and UN Resolution 242
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index