The dispute over Palestine placed Egypt in an uncomfortable
position. Technically, Egypt was not an Arab
state. King Farouk, who had acceded to power in 1936,
had frequently declared support for the Arab cause, but
the Egyptian people were not Bedouins and shared little
of the culture of the peoples across the Red Sea. Nevertheless,
Farouk committed Egyptian armies to the disastrous
war against Israel.
In 1952, King Farouk, whose corrupt habits had severely
eroded his early popularity, was overthrown by a
military coup engineered by young military officers ostensibly
under the leadership of Colonel Muhammad Nagib.
The real force behind the scenes was Colonel Gamal Abdul
Nasser (1918–1970), the son of a minor government
functionary who, like many of his fellow officers, had
been angered by the army’s inadequate preparation for
the war against Israel four years earlier. In 1953, the
monarchy was replaced by a republic.
In 1954, Nasser seized power in his own right and immediately
instituted a land reform program. He also
adopted a policy of neutrality in foreign affairs and expressed
sympathy for the Arab cause. The British presence
had rankled many Egyptians for years, for even after
granting Egypt independence, Britain had retained control
over the Suez Canal to protect its route to the Indian
Ocean. In 1956, Nasser suddenly nationalized the Suez
Canal Company, which had been under British and
French administration. Seeing a threat to their route to
the Indian Ocean, the British and the French launched a
joint attack on Egypt to protect their investment. They
were joined by Israel, whose leaders had grown exasperated
at sporadic Arab commando raids on Israeli territory
and now decided to strike back. But the Eisenhower administration
in the United States, concerned that the attack
smacked of a revival of colonialism, supported
Nasser and brought about the withdrawal of foreign forces
from Egypt and of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula.
Nasser now turned to pan-Arabism. In 1958, Egypt
united with Syria in the United Arab Republic (UAR).
The union had been proposed by the Ba’ath Party, which
advocated the unity of all Arab states in a new socialist
society. In 1957, the Ba’ath Party assumed power in Syria
and opened talks with Egypt on a union between the two
countries, which took place in March 1958 following a
plebiscite. Nasser, despite his reported ambivalence about
the union, was named president of the new state.
Egypt and Syria hoped that the union would eventually
include all Arab states, but other Arab leaders, including
young King Hussein of Jordan and the kings of
Iraq and Saudi Arabia, were suspicious. The latter two in
particular feared pan-Arabism on the assumption that
they would be asked to share their vast oil revenues with
the poorer states of the Middle East. Such fears were
understandable.
Nasser opposed the existing situation, in which much
of the wealth of the Middle East flowed into the treasuries
of a handful of wealthy feudal states or, even worse, the
pockets of foreign oil interests. In Nasser’s view, through
Arab unity, this wealth could be put to better use to improve
the standard of living in the area. To achieve a
more equitable division of the wealth of the region, natural
resources and major industries would be nationalized;
central planning would guarantee that resources were exploited
efficiently, but private enterprise would continue
at the local level.
In the end, however, Nasser’s determination to extend
state control over the economy brought an end to the
UAR. When the government announced the nationalization
of a large number of industries and utilities in
1961, a military coup overthrew the Ba’ath leaders in
Damascus, and the new authorities declared that Syria
would end its relationship with Egypt.
The breakup of the UAR did not end Nasser’s dream of
pan-Arabism. In 1962, Algeria finally received its inde-
pendence from France and, under its new president, Ahmad
Ben Bella, established close relations with Egypt,
as did a new republic in Yemen. During the mid-1960s,
Egypt took the lead in promoting Arab unity against Israel.
At a meeting of Arab leaders held in Jerusalem in
1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was
set up under Egyptian sponsorship to represent the interests
of the Palestinians. According to the charter of
the PLO, only the Palestinian people (and thus not Jewish
immigrants from abroad) had the right to form a state
in the old British mandate. A guerrilla movement called
al-Fatah, led by the dissident PLO figure Yasir Arafat
(b. 1929), began to launch terrorist attacks on Israeli territory,
prompting Israel to raid PLO bases in Jordan
in 1966.
World History
