Chapter Fourteen: The Age of Nasser, 1949-1967

By the late 1940s, the core of the Arab Middle East, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, had secured formal independence from the European imperial powers that had controlled the region during the interwar period. Now free to chart their own course, the people of those states expected rapid economic growth, political populism, unity, the defeat of Israel, and an assertive, independent foreign policy.

Despite persistent instability in the region, they appeared to be well on their way toward realizing those aspirations under the dominant political figure of the age: Egypt’s charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954-1970). Indeed, to the delight of the Arab people, he defied the imperial powers, imposed sweeping economic and political reforms, threatened Israel, and even, for a brief period, seemed poised to erase the frontiers that Europe had imposed on the region following the First World War. It was an exhilarating period for nationalists, a time of hope and anticipation for a brighter future for the Arab people.

Framing the Postwar Middle East

The Middle East that Nasser dominated was, even by the standards of the times, a complex and volatile place. Between 1949 and 1967, the region experienced a dizzying array of coups, assassinations, purges, covert operations, conspiracies, terrorist incidents, interstate conflicts, Great Power interventions, and diplomatic crises. What explains the Middle East’s volatility during this period? Why did it experience such a high degree of instability? Many local, regional, and international forces played a role in spurring the volatility that characterized the 1950s and 1960s in the Middle East.

Ultimately however, it was a combination of four overlapping currents—decolonization, the ideology of Arab nationalism, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli conflict—that, collectively, constituted the wellsprings of regional instability during this period.

Decolonization

The first of these, decolonization, began in the interwar period. Decolonization was the often-contested process by which subject peoples used diplomacy, force, and collective popular actions to challenge and then dissolve their subordinate relationships with the imperial powers. It played a central role in framing the development of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, decolonization shaped nearly all of the conflicts and political disturbances that the region experienced during those years. That it did so is perhaps surprising in light of the fact that the Arab countries at the core of the region had all achieved political independence by 1946. As such, they exercised the prerogatives of sovereign members of the international community such as maintaining diplomatic relations with other states and holding seats in the United Nations (UN).

However, appearances very much obscured the fact that Britain continued to dominate the Arab Middle East well into the postwar era. Through treaties, ties with political clients, economic concessions, and the maintenance of military bases, London continued to informally dominate a number of Arab states coming out of World War II. In Jordan, a $35 million annual subsidy coupled with continued control of the country’s powerful Arab Legion afforded London enormous leverage. In neighboring Iraq, Britain’s possession of two airbases, its dominant position in the consortium that held the concession to exploit oil, and its close relations with King Faisal II (r. 1939-1958) and the country’s leading politician, Nuri al-Said (1888-1958), assured it of substantial influence. In Egypt, finally, Britain’s ownership of the strategic Suez Canal, its control of Sudan, (which Cairo hoped to retain as an Egyptian colony) and its maintenance by way of treaty of a huge military complex ensured that it continued to hold a commanding position.

Britain and the Arab states’ divergent goals in the region ensured that the decolonization endgame in the Middle East would be fractious, bitterly contested, and destabilizing. London, for its part, was disinclined to withdraw from the region or even to moderate its involvement. Weakened by World War II and by the loss of its valuable colony in India in 1947, Britain believed that its position in the Middle East was essential to its continued status as a Great Power. As a result, it vigorously resisted demands that it loosen its grip on the region. The Arabs were no more inclined to compromise than was London. Nationalist army officers, Islamic organizations, and popular Arab political movements alike found Britain’s ongoing indirect control of the Middle East to be utterly intolerable and loudly insisted on an immediate end to its influence in the region. As a result, the British government and anti-imperialist forces in the Arab world would find themselves locked in a bitter struggle over decolonization in the immediate postwar era, a contest that would come to color nearly all aspects of the Middle East’s development.

Arab Nationalism

The ideology of Arab nationalism also played a critical role in shaping the postwar Middle East. Maturing during the interwar period and especially in the 1940s, Arab nationalism held that the Arabs constituted a single people linked by a common history, culture, and language, and that their present subordinate situation stemmed largely from the fact that the Europeans had deliberately partitioned the Middle East following the First World War in order to weaken them. Their prescription for the ills of the Arab world flowed from this view. By overthrowing collaborationist governments such as Jordan’s and Iraq’s and by replacing the European-imposed fragmentation of the Arab world with political unity and shared purpose, the Arabs could once again stand up and restore themselves to the glory of their ancestors.

Two schools of Arab-nationalist thought, moderate and Ba’athist, vied for dominance in the two decades after World War II. Moderates who espoused the idea of wataniya, or single-state nationalism, acknowledged the reality of local nationalist sentiments and thus accepted the political division of the Arab world into separate states. As such, rather than pushing for the unification of existing governments into a single state, they called for the Arab countries to work collectively to coordinate their economic programs, defense policies, and, especially, diplomatic strategies. It was this line of thinking that led to the development of the Arab League in 1945.

Sharply critical of the moderates, the Ba’athists instead championed a more radical and far-reaching construction of Arab nationalism, or qawmiya. Two Syrians, the Christian Michel Aflaq (1910-1989) and the Muslim Salah al-Din al-Bitar (1912-1980), developed the basic tenets of the ideology in the 1940s and founded the transnational Ba’ath or “Renaissance” Party in 1947. With branches in a number of Arab countries, the movement focused on the achievement of two overarching goals: the establishment of an equitable society and, more importantly, the replacement of the existing, Western- created Arab countries with a single, unified state. Achieving those goals would not be easy. The leaders of the existing Arab monarchies and republics not only had a vested interest in the continued division of the Middle East, but deeply embedded as they were in the imperialist powers’ exploitive economic system, they could be relied upon to also oppose the call for equity and social justice. Thus, the Ba’athists concluded, the Arab people could only achieve a true rebirth rooted in equity and social justice by first overthrowing the collaborationist governments.

The Cold War

The third current that shaped the region in the postwar era was the diplomatic, economic, and military competition between the US and the USSR known as the Cold War. The global contest between the superpowers would have a peticular focus on the Middle East for two reasons. First, though both produced enormous quantities of oil, the Soviet Union and the US alike correctly perceived the strategic and economic significance that petroleum would play as the world continued to industrialize. Accordingly, each sought to control the Middle East’s oil reserves to meet its future needs and, in America’s case, to ensure that its allies in Europe and Japan could access the cheap energy on which the postwar reconstruction of their shattered economies depended. Second, both understood the geostrategic significance of the Middle East in a future superpower conflict. Situated just to the south of the Soviet border, it was, immediately after World War II, the only territory from which long-range American B-29 bombers could strike Soviet industrial targets in the Ural region. Later, it would provide the Soviets with bases from which their naval and air forces could menace American strategic, ballistic-missile submarines operating in the Mediterranean Sea.

Given its strategic and economic importance, it is unsurprising that the Middle East emerged as one of the first theaters in the Cold War. As we saw in Chapter Eleven, the Soviet Union had sought to secure an oil concession in northern Iran and had attempted to strongarm Türkiye into giving it control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits immediately following the end of World War II. Two of the most important opening salvos in the Cold War, these events powerfully influenced Washington’s evolving views of Soviet behavior. In particular, they played an important part in shaping the containment policy that the American diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) first articulated in 1947. Predicated on the assumption that the USSR would collapse if it could no longer expand, containment called for the US to counter Moscow’s efforts to increase its influence outside the Eastern Bloc. The crises in Iran and Türkiye not only shaped Kennan’s thinking but also proved critical in leading President Harry Truman (r. 1945-1953) to put containment into practice through the issuance of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. One of the most critical initiatives of the Cold War, it justified a request for $400 million in economic and military aid in support of Greek and Turkish efforts to resist Soviet interest in the region.

The region’s importance as a theater in the Cold War grew substantially over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. In the process, the superpower contest adversely affected the region. Both the USSR and the US frequently interpreted events in the Middle East through a Cold War lens, and both sought to use their power and patronage to shape the region to their advantage in the global struggle. Proxies and allies within the Middle East did not always share their patrons’ Cold War perspective. However, they were more than happy to exploit the superpower conflict to achieve their own ends. In the process this approach often resulted in the global struggle intensifying existing regional conflicts. Thus, in sharp contrast to Europe where the superpower contest would come to inhibit intraregional conflicts, the Cold War would interact with other forces in the Middle East, such as decolonization and Arab nationalism, to deepen fault lines and intensify regional conflicts.

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The final current that shaped the postwar Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, was not only the most intense but also likely the most important in shaping the region’s development between 1949 and 1967. The battle lines here were hard and fast. With many of its citizens having recently experienced the horrors of the Holocaust or been expelled from their homes in the Arab world, there existed in Israel an overwhelming preference for an aggressive, Iron Wall-informed approach to national security over one that sought peace through compromise or negotiation. For their part, the Arabs, saw what they termed the “Zionist entity” as an affront to their nationalist aspirations and as a European settler-colonial venture. As a result, Arab governments refused to recognize Israel and loudly and publicly called for its destruction.

Exacerbated by the ongoing plight of the Palestinian refugees, the standoff between Israel and its Arab neighbors dramatically shaped both the internal political evolution of the Middle Eastern states and their foreign policies. Domestically, it inflamed popular sentiments, generated friction between leaders committed to a hardline approach and those willing to consider a negotiated settlement, and, in the Arab states, justified violence and extraconstitutional actions that would destabilize countries for decades to come. In the realm of international relations, meanwhile, the Arab-Israeli conflict led both Israel and the Arab states to become enmeshed in the Cold War because affiliation with one camp or the other provided the only reliable way to get the diplomatic support and sophisticated weapons needed to keep pace with the other side. In sum, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Arab-Israeli conflict would, in conjunction with decolonization, Arab nationalism, and the Cold War, militarize the Middle East, distort its political, social, and economic development, and ensure that the region failed to establish a stable international order.

The Legacy of the 1948 War, 1949-1955

The interplay between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the forces of decolonization, Arab nationalism, and the Cold War was especially strong in the years immediately after Israel’s founding. As we saw in Chapter Thirteen, the 1948 War that had accompanied the Jewish state’s birth was a watershed moment that dramatically reshaped the political and ideological contours of the Middle East. However, it affected Israel and its Arab enemies very differently. For the Arab states, defeat at the hands of Israel, particularly after their governments had promised an easy victory, had delegitimized the ruling elites and set the stage for a period of instability and sweeping political change that lent strength to both the decolonization process and Arab nationalism. For Israel, in contrast, success in 1948 buoyed public spirits, legitimized its government, and solidified support for the hardline, Iron Wall approach that Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880- 1940) had first articulated and that David Ben Gurion (r. 1948-1954, 1955-1963) and other Labor Zionists had come to adopt as their own.

Israel: Infiltration and the Iron Wall

Israelis emerged from the 1948 War with a newfound sense of confidence and a reaffirmation of the belief that they could best ensure the survival of their country through military force. Celebrating the “New Zionist Man” who refused to let any slight pass unpunished, they looked favorably on their army’s aggressive and successful defense of their infant country and contrasted it with the seeming helplessness with which Europe’s Jews had responded to the Holocaust. The country’s leadership shared this view. Despite overtures from some Arab leaders, they refused to negotiate after the victory in 1948. Instead, aware that a Western arms embargo called the Tripartite Agreement had frozen Israel’s dominant military position in place, David Ben Gurion’s Labor Zionist coalition government opted to rely on an Iron Wall strategy of military intimidation to maintain Israel’s security.

Palestinian infiltration into Israel following the 1948 War soon presented a test of that commitment. Even before the fighting had ceased in early 1949, refugees had begun crossing the frontier into Israel. The vast majority of them did so for benign reasons. Most merely sought to harvest crops on their former land, to recover property, to visit relatives, or to smuggle goods. However, a small proportion entered Israel to engage in sabotage or to launch terrorist attacks. Though disorganized and infrequent, those incursions imposed a tangible and painful cost on the Jewish state. They resulted in the deaths of nineteen Israelis in 1950, forty-eight in 1952, and a further forty-two in 1953. They were especially demoralizing to the North African, or Maghribian, and Middle Eastern, or Mizrahim, immigrants whom the government had settled in moshavim: communal agricultural settlements established along the frontier for the purpose of asserting control over the border. Indeed, infiltration attacks had led so many Mizrahim and Maghribian Jews to flee the moshavim by the early 1950s, that officials in the Jewish Agency were coming to fear that the effort to use the settlements to control the border was teetering on the edge of failure.

With its experience in the 1948 War having affirmed the belief that the Arabs could be best deterred through force, David Ben Gurion’s Labor Zionist government opted to respond to rising infiltration with an aggressive, Iron Wall approach. Initially, Tel Aviv moved to discourage incursions through actions on the Israeli side of the border. Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers set booby traps, laid mines, organized ambushes, and adopted a deadly “free fire policy” in which they shot at suspected infiltrators without warning. All told, this approach resulted in the deaths of between 2,700 and 5,600 Palestinians between 1949 and 1956.

Somewhat later, the IDF began to supplement that strategy with an even more aggressive policy centered on launching disproportionate retaliatory attacks against the villages from which the infiltrators had originated. This new approach had three interrelated goals: it sought to deter future infiltration, to spur the Arab states to prevent further incursions, and, in keeping with the Iron Wall’s emphasis on military intimidation, to demonstrate the futility of contesting Israel’s overwhelming military superiority. Collective punishment of Arab villages suspected of aiding infiltration began in 1951 and crested in October 1953 when Unit 101, an elite special-operations force commanded by future prime minister Ariel Sharon (1928-2014), attacked the Jordanian- ruled West Bank Village of Qibya. Resulting in the demolition of forty-five homes and the deaths of sixty-nine Palestinians, two thirds of whom were women and children, the operation proved popular in the Jewish state but inflamed public opinion in the Arab world and sparked international condemnation of Israeli militarism.

The Arab States: Assassination, Instability and Leadership Changes

Israel’s victory in 1948 also profoundly affected the Arab monarchies and republics. However, the war’s impact on those states was very different than it had been on Israel. While success had solidified support for Ben Gurion’s government, defeat had instead dramatically weakened approval of the Arab states. The abject failure of the Arab governments to prevent the establishment of Israel and, especially, their inability to provision their armies with adequate food and ammunition, thoroughly delegitimized their governments and ruling elites and left them vulnerable, isolated, and weak. The result was a series of rapid and often bloody coups and assassination attempts immediately after 1948 that ended with a new group, the officer corps, assuming a dominant position in the Arab states.

This process began in Syria. Frustrated by the civilian government’s poor support of the war effort, Colonel Husni al-Za’im (r. 1949) seized control of the government in March 1949 in a coup so well executed that CIA officers subsequently studied it as a model of effective regime change. However, Za’im proved considerably less successful in maintaining his grip on power than on assuming it. Opposed to his willingness to pursue peace with Israel, a hardline faction of officers overthrew and executed him in August 1949. They in turn fell from power in a third coup that December. Moreover, Za’im was not the only Arab leader to perish at that time as a result of a willingness to negotiate with Israel. In what amounted to a declaration of popular opposition to peace with the Jewish state, a Palestinian tailor’s apprentice assassinated Jordan’s Abdallah (r. 1921-1951) in 1951 at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque shortly after news leaked that the king had engaged in negotiations with Israeli leaders. Following the brief and unhappy rule of Abdallah’s mentally unstable son, Talal (r. 1951-1952), his sixteen-year- old grandson, Hussein (r. 1952-1999), succeeded to the throne.

The Egyptian Revolution, 1952

The next change in government in the region was far-more consequential. Launched in 1952, the Egyptian Revolution not only put the officer corps in charge of the largest Arab state but also set the stage for the military’s dominance of the entire Arab world for the following two decades. Dissatisfaction with civilian rule among the Egyptian officers had grown rapidly in the years before 1948. Many had long been frustrated with King Faruq’s (r. 1936-1952) venality and with the Wafd Party’s corruption and inability to end Western dominance; some had even toyed with the idea of a coup in the past. It was Egypt’s defeat at the hands of Israel, however, that turned them irrevocably against the old order. Blaming their failure in 1948 on the government’s inability to provide adequate supplies to the units deployed to Palestine, a group of junior officers hailing largely from the lower-middle-class resolved that Egypt could only achieve real independence and national greatness under a new, reform-minded, military-dominated, Arab-nationalist government. Led by a thirty-four-year-old son of a postal worker, Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, they organized a secret, revolutionary society immediately after the war called the Free Officers and began plotting not merely the overthrow of Faruq but the end of the entire liberal order. It was a bold objective for a group of young men of comparatively low rank. Accordingly, the Free Officers recruited a sympathetic senior figure, the fifty-one-year-old General Muhammad Naguib (1901-1984) to serve as a figurehead who could, once they assumed power, lend them the gravitas that they lacked.

Government missteps soon gave them the chance to act. Seeking to restore the Wafd Party’s popular standing after the war by negotiating a revision of the Anglo- Egyptian Treaty of 1936, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879-1965) initiated talks with London in early 1950. Begun with great fanfare, the negotiations soon deadlocked just as they had in the 1920s and 1930s. This time, the discussions foundered over London’s insistence on retaining control of the massive base complex it possessed in the Canal Zone. Frustrated, al-Nahhas adopted a more forceful approach in October 1951. Seeking to pressure the British, he unilaterally abrogated the treaty and encouraged popular guerrilla attacks and acts of sabotage against imperial troops and installations. It was an ill-considered move. Paramilitary attacks on imperial positions along the canal spurred British soldiers to respond with a series of escalating military actions that culminated in January 1952 in a massive assault on a police barracks in Ismailia that killed forty-six Egyptian police officers. Infuriated, mainstream nationalists scheduled a general strike in Cairo for the following day to protest the incident. Unfortunately for them, the demonstration rapidly degenerated into an orgy of violence and looting. By the time the smoke cleared on what came to be known as Black Saturday, fifty Egyptians and seventeen foreigners lay dead, and dozens of businesses associated with the West and the Egyptian upper class, department stores, automobile dealerships, night clubs, and high-end hotels, had been reduced to ashes in a series of well-planned arson attacks.

Those buildings were not all that lay in ruins that day. The fighting in Ismailia and the destruction and looting on Black Saturday also marked the end of the line for Egypt’s old regime. Unable either to negotiate an end to Britain’s presence in the canal zone or to maintain order in the capital, Faruq, the Wafd Party, and the entire parliamentary system had lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the Egyptian people and were, from that point forward, living on borrowed time.

The Free Officers’ revolution finally came on July 23, 1952. Thanks to the old order’s unpopularity, Nasser and his allies were able to seize control of the government with little difficulty in a nearly bloodless coup. They followed by establishing a new executive organ, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), nominally headed by Naguib, to oversee the political changes that they intended to implement.

Despite the Free Officers’ later reputation as militant revolutionaries, they did not immediately implement a radical agenda. Instead, having no firm ideological positions at that time beyond adherence to moderate Arab nationalism and an ambiguous commitment to social progress, they focused initially on securing three objectives that would strengthen their position: the elimination of rival sources of political power, the passage of a series of populist reforms, and the signing of an agreement with London that would at last secure the removal of British troops from Egypt.

Consolidation of Power

Nasser and the officers first moved to eliminate any potential threats to their control of Egypt. They dissolved the legislature, suspended the constitution, arrested key political leaders on corruption charges, and deposed and replaced King Faruq with his infant son, Fuad II (r. 1952-1953). They also outlawed all political parties including the Egyptian Communist Party and replaced them with a new mass movement called the Liberation Rally. Renamed the National Union in 1956 when the Free Officers reorganized it along more explicitly pan-Arabist lines, the Liberation Rally was not a political party in the conventional sense. Instead, it was a device that the officers created to connect with, control, and mobilize the masses in support of the RCC and its initiatives. Finally, seeking to blunt leftist criticisms, they formally abolished the monarchy in June 1953 and declared Egypt a republic. For lack of a better candidate, Nasser and the RCC decided to elevate Naguib to the newly created office of president.

However, Nasser and his supporters’ efforts to assume a monopoly over political power were not yet entirely complete. Two challenges remained to be addressed: the Muslim Brotherhood and President Naguib. While initially cordial, relations between the officers and the Brotherhood had grown strained over the course of 1953 owing to the fact that neither wished to share power. Nasser and his allies consequently began to consider taking steps to curb the organization in early 1954. They realized in short order, however, that doing so lay beyond their capabilities at that time. The Brotherhood possessed a large following, a robust apparatus of schools and social welfare organizations, and a potent paramilitary wing. Accordingly, the officers decided to wait until they were in a stronger position before moving against the Brotherhood. Meanwhile, to the surprise of many, Naguib had emerged as a genuine threat to Nasser and his allies. A supporter of the pluralistic, democratic system that the RCC had been systematically dismantling, the general had become popular with the masses and, more dangerously, had secured a substantial following among the officers. This threat was one that Nasser and his allies could not put off. Accordingly, they engineered a bureaucratic showdown in the spring of 1954 that ended with Naguib being purged from the government. Thereafter, Nasser, who formally took the title of president in 1956, enjoyed unquestioned control of the RCC and, by extension, the country of Egypt.

Populism

In the meantime, Nasser and his RCC allies were also moving to secure the revolution by implementing a series of populist economic and social reforms. On the surface, these changes appeared to be far reaching. They included a ban on the use of traditional titles such as pasha and bey, caps on rents, the establishment of wage minimums, and the legalization of unions. Most importantly, they included a package of land-reform laws. Designed to improve the lot of the poorest peasants, the program placed limits on the amount of property any single individual could own and redistributed the excess land to poor peasants.

However, a closer look reveals, that the RCC’s early reform package was in fact quite tepid. Reflecting the fact that the officers remained as yet uncommitted to a particular ideological position, the changes they implemented tended to be modest in terms of both method and impact. The officers’ conservatism was most evident in their signature initiative: land reform. That program did not simply take land from absentee owners and directly redistribute it the fellahin. Instead, it reimbursed property owners for their losses and required the destitute peasants who had obtained land through the program to shoulder part of the cost. As a result, it did little to alter the distribution of wealth and power in Egypt.

Still, the broader reform program did pay two important dividends for the officers. First, by improving the lot of the impoverished masses, however modestly, it turned the fellahin and urban poor into vociferous supporters of Nasser and the officers. Second, the land redistribution component of the officers’ reform program weakened the economic and political power of a critical component of the Wafd Party: the landed elite. In so doing, it left the Wafd too weak to mount a serious challenge during the RCC’s vulnerable early years.

The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1954

Meanwhile, Nasser entered negotiations with London in 1953 that finally secured the evacuation of British troops from the canal zone. Two changes made an agreement possible. First, the development of the hydrogen bomb rendered large base complexes such as the one Britain maintained along the Suez Canal obsolete. As a result, London was more inclined to make concessions than it had been in the past. Second, unlike earlier Egyptian leaders, Nasser was willing to drop Egypt’s claims to Sudan. With these stumbling blocks out of the way, the two sides were able to quickly reach an agreement. Signed in July 1954, the resulting Anglo-Egyptian Treaty called for Britain to remove its remaining troops from Egypt no later than June 1956. To the consternation of Egyptian nationalists, however, the deal also permitted the British to reoccupy the base complex in the event of a war in the Middle East.

The agreement set the stage for Nasser’s final consolidation of power. It was the weakness of the treaty, ironically, that made his success possible. Sensing an opportunity to challenge the Egyptian leader on nationalist grounds, the Muslim Brotherhood launched a coordinated campaign against Nasser’s government that culminated in an assassination attempt on the Egyptian leader while he was giving a speech in Alexandria in October 1954. Nasser’s cool response to the attack, he remained unflustered and finished his speech as if nothing had happened, created a surge of support that gave him the political capital to mount an aggressive move against the Muslim Brotherhood. The ensuing campaign was a success. The regime arrested thousands of Brotherhood members, imprisoned its leadership, and dismantled its institutional structure. Severely weakened, it would not recover until the 1970s. Thus, by the end of 1954, Nasser had eliminated the last serious threat to his power. Thereafter, he ruled Egypt without challenge.

Nasserism

Nasser had risen to power without fixed views or a formal ideology. By the time he consolidated his position in 1954, however, he had come to develop a guiding philosophy, Nasserism, that would shape his subsequent approach to governance, regional relations, and global affairs. Nasserism was very much a product of its times. Calling for social justice, Arab unity, an end to imperialism, neutrality in the Cold War, and the defeat of Israel, it reflected the main ideological currents that shaped the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s. For a time, it was enormously popular both inside and outside Egypt, constituting, from the mid 1950s through 1967, the dominant ideology in the Arab world.

Domestically, Nasserism made rapid economic modernization and the improvement of living standards for the neglected lower classes its central objectives. Like many other rulers in the developing world, Nasser did not attempt to achieve these goals through a conventional, market-oriented approach. Leery of the capitalist system of development that the imperialist powers championed, he instead sought to attain his objectives through a state directed, Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model of development based loosely on the program that Ataturk (r. 1923-1938) had implemented in Türkiye. Nasser’s new modernization drive focused on agricultural expansion and, especially, the creation of state-owned industrial concerns. Central to both efforts was a planned hydroelectric project, the Aswan High Dam, in upper Egypt. Though fabulously expensive, its estimated cost was a then-staggering $1 billion, it promised to revolutionize life in Egypt. Once completed, it was expected to expand the amount of cultivable land in the country by more than one-million feddan, equivalent to about one-million acres, and to supply sufficient electricity not merely for Egypt’s planned industrial expansion but for all of the country’s needs.

Internationally, Nasserism focused on securing complete Arab independence from the imperial powers. A moderate Arab nationalist, the Egyptian president did not insist as the Ba’athists did that the Arab world needed to come together into a single political union in order to end colonial dominance. Instead, he believed that the independent Arab states could free themselves of Western control by following a shared foreign policy and by working collectively.

His commitment to Arab nationalism led him to pursue a stridently independent, anti-imperialist foreign policy in the 1950s. Global in tone but regional in focus, it included four broad components. First, arguing that they were tools of continued imperial control, he vociferously criticized the continuation of Britain’s defensive treaties with Jordan and Iraq. Second, he steadfastly resisted American-sponsored efforts to draw Egypt and the Arabs into the Cold War on the Western side through collective- security alliances such as the Baghdad Pact that Iraq, Britain, Türkiye, Iran, and Pakistan established in early 1955. As he noted acidly, Israel and Britain were far-more immediate threats to the Arab people than were the distant Soviets. Third, he called for the Arabs to use the Cold War to their advantage through a policy he called Positive Neutrality, in which they would exploit their independence in the global struggle to cut favorable deals with both superpowers. Finally, to the consternation of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), who viewed the Cold War in starkly black-and-white terms, Nasser became a major leader in the emerging Non-Aligned Movement (refered to colloquially in the Cold War context as the Third World).

Nasserism rapidly gained influence in the Arab world in the mid-1950s. Its success stemmed from a combination of humble technological developments and the Egyptian leader’s high-profile achievements in foreign relations. Diplomatically, Nasser’s ability to finally secure the evacuation of British troops from Egypt and his willingness to stand up to the dominant Western powers dramatically raised his stature both within the Arab Middle East and globally. Technologically, the widespread adoption of new, low- cost transistor radios permitted the Egyptian leader to bypass other Arab governments and to speak directly to their peoples via Radio Cairo’s powerful transmitters. The new medium made for a potent propaganda tool, one that Nasser used with consummate skill to influence politics in other Arab states. In February 1955, for example, he used Radio Cairo to spark a coup in Syria that resulted in a neutralist, pro-Nasserist government seizing power from one that had close ties with Iraq’s conservative, Hashemite monarchy. A concerted radio campaign later that year against the Baghdad Pact not only compelled King Hussein of Jordan to abandon plans to join the alliance, but also spurred Palestinians, who constituted a majority of the population, to hold violent demonstrations against his government. Desperate to mollify the protestors so he could hang onto his throne, Hussein responded by dismissing the British officers who led the Jordanian army and by agreeing to hold free elections in 1956, a vote that a strongly pro-Nasserist party handily won.

The Suez Crisis, 1956

Nasserism reached dizzying heights of popularity as a result of one of the defining international crises of the 1950s: the brief war between Egypt on the one hand and an alliance of Israel, Britain, and France on the other that occurred in late 1956. Known as the Suez Crisis in the West and as the Tripartite Aggression in Egypt, the conflict was the culmination of the interplay between the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Cold War, Arab nationalism, and decolonization. The last, desperate gasp of classical, nineteenth-century style imperialism in the region, the crisis would remake the geostrategic outlines of the Middle East and would vault Nasser to a new level of influence that would solidify his status as the region’s dominant figure for the next decade.

The Gaza Raid, February 1955

The war had its origins in the ongoing dispute over infiltration into Israel. As we have seen, Tel Aviv’s commitment to the Iron Wall had led it to launch retaliatory raids aimed both at deterring Palestinians from crossing the border and at encouraging the Arab states, including Egypt, to curb infiltration. Unsurprisingly, those punitive actions did not sit well with the nationalistic Free Officers. Furious about Tel Aviv’s repeated violations of Egyptian territory, they began sending small groups of soldiers into Israel in early 1954 with orders to mount guerrilla attacks and to collect intelligence.

Adhering to Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall policy, Tel Aviv was deeply committed to responding swiftly and overwhelmingly to any incursion. Accordingly, after one such operation ended in the death of a cyclist in February 1955, the Israeli government decided to retaliate by attacking an Egyptian military installation in the Gaza Strip. Designed to embarrass Nasser by revealing Egypt’s military weakness, the assault was a stunning success. Commanded by Ariel Sharon, the force of 150 elite paratroopers that executed the Gaza Raid killed thirty-seven Egyptian soldiers during the operation and left their base a smoldering ruin.

The Czech Arms Deal, September 1955

The Gaza Raid infuriated Nasser. As Tel Aviv had intended, the attack demonstrated that he lacked the ability to defend Egypt and thus threatened to undermine his grip on power. Feeling that he had no choice but to respond, Nasser followed the Gaza Raid with two actions, one designed to harm Israel and the other to redress the military balance. First, to strike back at the Jewish state, he tightened Egypt’s four-year-old blockade of the Strait of Tiran that controls access to the Israeli port of Eilat that sits at the head of the Red Sea. In conjunction with the earlier closure of the Suez Canal to vessels bound for Israel, this action ensured that ships travelling from the Far East could only access the Jewish state by making a costly circumnavigation of Africa. Second, he moved to modernize the Egyptian army by seeking to purchase advanced weapons abroad.

This latter task appeared to be a daunting one. The Tripartite Agreement had made arms purchases all-but impossible, and Washington, Nasser’s first choice for weapons, had indicated that it would only consider making an exception for Egypt if it joined an anti-Soviet security treaty like the Baghdad Pact. Determined to pursue an independent foreign policy, Nasser found that condition unacceptable and pressed on with his search. He finally met with success behind the Iron Curtain. In September 1955, he worked out an agreement with the Kremlin to purchase arms from the Soviet client state of Czechoslovakia. It was a good deal for Nasser. Egypt would receive a massive package of weapons over the following year including submarines, 230 T-34 tanks, 200 armored personnel carriers, 50 Il-28 medium bombers, more than 100 advanced MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighter jets, and 600 artillery pieces. In exchange, Nasser agreed to provide Czechoslovakia with 100,000 tons of cotton valued at $86 million.

In three ways, the Czech arms agreement completely disarranged the strategic balance in the Middle East. First, it effectively nullified the Tripartite Agreement that had banned arms sales to the region. Indeed, France, which sought to curb Nasser’s power in response to his support for Arab rebels in its Algerian colony, promptly followed the deal by selling AMX-13 light tanks, artillery, and advanced Mystère IV fighter jets to Israel. Second, the agreement threatened the preponderant military position that Israel had enjoyed since 1950. Once Egypt had integrated the arms into its military, it would, to Tel Aviv’s chagrin, possess a military that was at least as powerful as the IDF. Finally, the deal dramatically altered the Cold War balance in the Middle East. With the conclusion of the agreement, the USSR had not merely leapfrogged over America’s efforts to contain its influence in the region but had established close ties with the largest and most important Arab state.

Financing the Aswan High Dam

Unsurprisingly, the Eisenhower administration found the Czech arms deal deeply troubling. It feared that the agreement would be the pivotal first step in a longer Soviet campaign of subversion that would end with Egypt and perhaps other Arab states absorbed into the Eastern Bloc, an outcome that would shift the Cold War balance substantially in the USSR’s favor. Determined to prevent Moscow from consolidating its influence in Egypt before it was too late, the administration let Nasser know in December 1955 that it was prepared to help finance the centerpiece of Egypt’s economic development scheme: the Aswan High Dam. The American proposal included a $200 million World Bank loan, as well as grants of $56 million from the US and $14 million from Britain to help fund the first phase of the project. Washington and London also pledged to provide loans for later phases of the dam’s construction. In exchange, they insisted that Egypt forgo future arms purchases from the Eastern Bloc and that it open its economy to the West.

Despite what seemed like a promising offer, the deal gradually fell apart over the spring and early summer of 1956. Nasser had been eager to secure foreign aid to kickstart the dam’s construction and was pleased when he first learned of the Eisenhower administration’s proposal. His enthusiasm cooled, however, when he became aware of the conditions that the Americans had attached to their offer. To Nasser, they smacked of the colonialist limits that Britain had imposed on Egypt in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Accordingly, Nasser refrained from immediately accepting the US offer; instead, in keeping with his policy of Positive Neutrality, he moved in the spring of 1956 to see if he could shop it to get a better deal from Moscow. That initiative appeared promising for a time. In the end, however, the USSR was unable to provide a financing package as attractive as Washington’s. As a result, in July, Nasser instructed the Egyptian ambassador to the US to let Secretary of State Dulles know that Egypt had agreed to Washington’s terms.

By that point, however, the administration had decided to pull its funding offer. It made this about face for three reasons. First, Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower (r. 1953-1961) believed that the Egyptian government would need to impose crippling austerity measures to service the loans and worried that its people would come to hate the countries from which Egypt had borrowed the funds. Better that they vent their anger at the Soviet Union, which Dulles and Eisenhower presumed would step in as the project’s primary foreign backer, than at the US. Second, Washington had grown weary of Nasser’s efforts to play both sides of the street. Dulles’s belief that humanity was locked in an epochal struggle between the Free World and the totalitarian Soviet Bloc accorded no legitimacy to fence sitters. Given this outlook, Nasser’s continued efforts to play Washington off Moscow through Positive Neutrality and his propaganda broadcasts against pro-Western states rankled the Secretary of State and soured him on the Egyptian leader. Finally, in May 1956, Nasser extended formal diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a state that the US had been working aggressively to keep isolated. That move was the final straw for Dulles and Eisenhower. Furious with Nasser for breaking with the US on such an important issue, they decided to pull the plug on the aid package. Thus, on July 19, the Secretary of State informed the disappointed Egyptian ambassador that the US was withdrawing its offer to finance the dam.

Nationalization of the Suez Canal, July 1956

Just as Cold War considerations had shaped Washington’s decision to withdraw its funding offer, so did Nasser’s commitment to decolonization guide Egypt’s response. The Egyptian president was livid about the Eisenhower administration’s decision to pull its funding offer. In his eyes, Washington’s action was not merely a threat to the foundation of Egypt’s economic development program but an effort to embarrass and weaken his government. Nasser could not let the slight go without a reply. In short order, he came up with a response that was as bold as it was ingenious: he would nationalize the Western-owned and controlled Suez Canal and use the toll revenues it generated to finance the dam.

With a dramatic flair, he announced his new plan in a live radio address just eight days after Dulles had withdrawn the American financing offer. Upon hearing Nasser utter a codeword in his speech, de Lesseps, the name of the French engineer who had overseen the construction of the waterway, Egyptian forces took possession of the canal and assumed control of its operations. The announcement thrilled people in Egypt and throughout the developing world. To their delight, Nasser had not merely found a means of offsetting the loss of American funding for the Aswan High Dam but had done so in a way that directly challenged lingering Western imperialist influence in Egypt.

His action had the added benefit of being perfectly legal. In taking control of the waterway, Egypt promised to reimburse the Suez Canal Company’s shareholders based on the closing value of its stock the day Nasser had ordered the waterway nationalized. The seizure of the canal was thus consistent with international law. Indeed, as Egyptians delightedly pointed out in response to London’s howls of protest, it was no different than the Labor government’s nationalization of Britain’s railroads and steel industry immediately following World War II.

The Tripartite Aggression, October-November 1956

Legal or not, Nasser’s move elicited angry protests in Britain and France. On the surface, Paris and London’s concerns were narrowly economic in nature. With the British government owning 44 percent of the canal and French investors holding the balance, both London and Paris were insistent that Egypt restore their property, promises of reimbursement be damned. More fundamentally, however, French and British rage was a function of the symbolism of Egypt’s seizure of the canal. Nasser, an upstart from the developing world, was challenging what they saw as the natural order of things in which Western Great Powers dictated to the weak and not the reverse. Accordingly, determined to reassert their primacy, London and Paris committed themselves to overturning his action, peacefully or otherwise.

Washington took a more temperate approach to the crisis. Well aware of the serious damage that an attack on Egypt would do to the West’s reputation among the world’s many recently decolonized people, the Eisenhower administration was determined to see the impasse resolved through diplomacy rather than force. Accordingly, the president and his advisors floated a succession of plans to settle it that revolved around the idea of placing the canal under international control. In every case, their efforts proved to be stillborn. Committed to keeping the canal in Egyptian hands, Nasser repeatedly rebuffed Washington’s proposals and made emphatically clear that his government would reject any solution that did not involve his country retaining untrammeled sovereignty over the canal. Egypt’s success in operating the waterway following nationalization strengthened his hand and even raised questions about whether Nasser’s action constituted a problem. Indeed, as several American congresspeople pointed out during a briefing on the situation, if the Egyptians could run the canal and if they were willing to compensate the Suez Canal Company’s shareholders, then there was no crisis to resolve.

Egypt’s ability to operate the waterway may have satisfied American congressional leaders, but it failed to meet French Prime Minister Guy Mollet’s (r. 1956- 1957) and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s (r. 1955-1957) insistence that France and Britain regain control of the canal. Accordingly, ignoring Washington’s clear desire to see the situation resolved peacefully, they began hatching a plot in conjunction with Israel to regain control of the canal through force. Designed to disguise what was, at heart, an act of naked imperialist aggression, the scheme was as preposterous as it was out of step with the times. It called for Israel, which joined the conspiracy on October 21, to set the plan in motion by first invading Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula. Next, pretending that they were impartial parties acting only to ensure that trade could continue to flow through the canal, France and Britain would use the fighting as a pretext to issue an ultimatum demanding that both Israeli and Egyptian forces withdraw immediately from the canal zone. When Nasser refused to comply, as the conspirators knew he would, French and British troops would then seize control of the waterway.

London, Paris, and Tel Aviv were confident in this plan. They not only believed that it would result in a quick victory, but that it would allow them to achieve all of their goals vis-à-vis Egypt. Britain would regain control of the canal, France would end Nasser’s support for the Algerian rebels and recover its shareholders’ property, and Israel would destroy the military equipment that Nasser had acquired from Czechoslovakia before the Egyptian army could integrate it into its forces, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the IDF’s regional military dominance. Finally, though they were less certain of this outcome, they were also hopeful that a quick military victory over Egypt might prove so embarrassing for Nasser that the Egyptian people would overthrow him.

The conspirators wasted no time in putting their scheme into action. As per the plan that they had drawn up, the war began with Israeli forces launching a surprise invasion of the Sinai Peninsula. Well led and equipped, three columns of IDF troops quickly steamrolled their way through Egypt’s ill-prepared defenses on October 29 and began to advance rapidly westward toward the canal. A fourth column swung south to take control of Sharm al-Shaykh, the town that commanded the Strait of Tiran. London and Paris issued their ultimatum the next day. When Egypt refused to comply by the deadline they had set, they joined the war, first by bombing Egyptian airbases and then, on November 5, by dropping paratroopers in the canal zone. The next day, Royal Marines stormed ashore near the northern entrance of the waterway. Brushing aside Egyptian forces, they quickly seized control of the city of Port Said.

Despite this military success, however, it had already become quite clear that the political side of the operation was not unfolding in accordance with the conspirator’s plan. From the very start, the entire world had seen right through London and Paris’s ludicrous pretense that they were acting for the good of the international community and quickly intuited the broad outlines of the conspiracy. As a result, the parties to the collusion found themselves squeezed from all quarters. Wildly inconsistent with decolonizing spirit of the times, their imperialistic actions faced near-universal condemnation in the UN General Assembly and in the world press. Worse, they confronted economically devastating fuel shortages thanks to concerted Arab actions. Not only did Egypt block the flow of oil through the canal by scuttling cement-filled ships in it, but the Syrian government responded to the war by cutting the pipeline that connected the oil fields of Iraq to the terminals on the Mediterranean. As a result, the flow of oil to Europe slowed to a trickle. Making matters all the grimmer, the Kremlin piled on by issuing a statement on November 5 threatening to launch rockets on Paris and London if France and Britain did not cease their aggression.

Far more important, however, was the economic and diplomatic pressure that they faced from across the Atlantic. Eisenhower was apoplectic with Eden, Mollet, and Ben Gurion for organizing the attack on Egypt. He resented that they had acted without Washington’s approval, expressed concern that their invasion might fatally damage the West’s reputation in the Arab world, and fumed that they had undertaken such a shabby and transparent act of imperialism so close to the American presidential election. Above all, Eisenhower was furious that the attack had permitted Moscow to crush the Hungarian Revolution, a concurrent uprising aimed at ending Soviet control of Hungary, without suffering significant damage to its international reputation.

Eisenhower moved quickly to ratchet up the pressure on Tel Aviv, Paris, and London. On the diplomatic front, he secured passage of a UN resolution regarding the Suez Crisis on November 2. It called for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of French, British, and Israeli troops from Egypt, and the Installation of United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) peacekeepers in the Sinai. Concurrently, he took two economic actions that grievously imperiled France and, especially, Britain. First, he accelerated a devastating war-induced run on Britain’s currency by instructing the Federal Reserve Board to dump America’s holding of pounds and by blocking London’s attempt to secure an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Second, the president barred efforts to redirect oil from the Western Hemisphere to France and Britain as part of an effort to offset the loss of Middle Eastern petroleum. As he told an aide, he was leaving Paris and London to “boil in their own oil” until they came to their senses.

Faced with this pressure, France and Britain quickly buckled. On November 6, they brought the war to a speedy conclusion by agreeing to the terms of the UN ceasefire. Thanks to continuing American pressure, they followed by quickly withdrawing their troops from Egypt. Israel was more reluctant to pull out but finally agreed to remove the last of its soldiers from the Sinai in March 1957. Immediately after their withdrawal, UNEF peacekeepers took up positions at Sharm al-Shaykh and along the Egyptian side of the frontier with Israel to ensure against the outbreak of a new conflict.

Consequences

Momentous in significance, the Suez Crisis fundamentally restructured the power dynamics of the Middle East. The biggest winner by far was Nasser. Though Egypt had suffered a clear military defeat, his diplomatic triumph over the despised imperial powers and the hated Israelis massively raised his stature in the Arab world and instantly turned him into the leader of the anti-Zionist cause. Israel also strengthened its position as a result of the war. It is true that Washington had compelled Tel Aviv to yield the territory its army had conquered in the Sinai. However, the stationing of UNEF troops at Sharm al-Shaykh opened the Gulf of Aqaba to Israel-bound shipping while the success of its soldiers further enhanced the IDF’s military reputation. Washington, too, emerged in a stronger position. Thanks to its support of Egypt, the US gained prestige in the Arab world, at least for a time. However, the Kremlin saw its reputation rise much further. Its promise in October 1958 to provide critical funding for the Aswan High Dam and, more importantly, the widespread belief in the Middle East that Moscow’s ultimatum to France and Britain had been decisive in bringing the war to a swift conclusion had substantially raised its standing with people throughout the Arab world.

In contrast, Paris and, especially, London emerged from the crisis the clear losers. The conflict demolished their reputations in the region, hastened Britain’s departure from the Middle East, and grievously undermined the position of Arab states like Iraq that continued to maintain close ties with London. More broadly, Suez marked the swan song of London’s pretensions as a global imperial power. As the Sunday Times later wrote, Anthony Eden had been “the last prime minister to believe Britain was a great power and the first to confront a crisis which proved beyond doubt that she was not.”

The Eisenhower Doctrine

The US responded aggressively to the new power dynamic that existed in the Middle East following the Suez Crisis. Fearing that the sudden decline of British influence would create a vacuum that the USSR could fill, the president announced a new policy toward the region, the Eisenhower Doctrine, in an address to congress in January 1957. Echoing the language of the Truman Doctrine, it declared that the United States would provide military and economic aid to Middle Eastern countries that faced “overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism” and would, if necessary, even commit its forces to their defense.

Despite the rhetorical emphasis on Marxism, Moscow was not the main focus of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Instead, Eisenhower and Dulles designed the new policy primarily to contain the radical Arab nationalism that Nasser championed. In their estimation, the Egyptian president’s promotion of Positive Neutrality made him an unwitting pawn whose actions threatened to give the USSR a backdoor way into the Middle East. The administration was confident that the conservative Arab states were capable of checking Nasser’s ambitions in the region. However, it also believed that those states would not act directly against such a powerful and popular figure unless they enjoyed clear American backing. Accordingly, the administration devised the Eisenhower Doctrine as a way of assuring the conservative Arab regimes that they would have the support of the United States in any conflict with Nasser.

Approved by Congress in March 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine appeared to pay immediate dividends. Strengthened by the prospect of American assistance, Jordan’s King Hussein purged his government of Nasserists in April and successfully stared down a challenge by insubordinate pan-Arabist army officers. Buttressed by American aid money and the deployment of the Sixth Fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean, he then solidified his grip on power by cracking down on the Nasserist opposition and by imposing martial law. Events in Lebanon reinforced the perception that the doctrine was a success. With clandestinely provided American funds, pro-Western Maronite President Camille Chamoun (r. 1952-1958) orchestrated a decisive electoral victory over the Nasserist United National Front (UNF) opposition, which had itself received covert aid from Egypt—, n parliamentary elections held in June. Thus, by the early summer of 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine seemed to be well on its way to achieving its purpose of containing Nasserism.

Howeever, the Lebanese elections marked the policy’s high point. For the next twelve months, Washington’s effort to limit or rollback Nasserism failed completely, most notably in Syria. That country had become more and more concerning for the Eisenhower administration over the course of 1957. Two issues stood out. First, Moscow’s influence in Damascus had grown dramatically thanks to its agreement early that year to provide Soviet military hardware and development loans in exchange for Syrian wheat. Second, exploiting the post-Suez rise in anti-Western sentiment, the Ba’ath Party and Syrian Communist Party (SCP) had succeeded in compelling the government to agree to increase the number of leftists in the cabinet in December 1957, a change in the political balance that suggested that the Soviet Union was poised to assume a dominant position in Damascus.

Determined to prevent Syrian pan-Arabists from delivering their country to Moscow, American officials responded by sponsoring a pro-Western coup and by prodding the conservative Arab regimes to put diplomatic pressure on Damascus. Begun with high hopes, these efforts went nowhere. The coup plot quickly fizzled thanks to the swift actions of the very capable head of the Syrian security service, Abd al- Hamid Sarraj (1925-2013). Meanwhile, the conservative Arab states’ willingness to support the administration’s hardline approach collapsed after Nasser launched a blistering, radio-based propaganda campaign against them that resonated with their people and thus threatened their grip on power. Seeking to end the Egyptian leader’s attacks, they soon began to urge Washington to moderate its position toward Damascus. Lacking either supportive regional allies or proxies inside Syria, the administration had no choice but to comply. Thus, by the end of 1957, the once promising Eisenhower Doctrine lay in tatters.

Nasserism at High Tide, 1958-1961

By 1958, Nasser’s popularity had reached dizzying heights. As we have seen, his success in the Suez Crisis had dramatically raised his stature and had rendered him the unquestioned leader of the anti-Zionist cause. His subsequent ability to intimidate the conservative Arab states during the Syria crisis further enhanced his standing and made clear that he enjoyed enormous political influence in the Arab world. By 1958, as a result Nasser bestrode the Arab Middle East like a colossus, a figure of enormous power who appeared, for a time at least, ready to bring all the Arabs together under his rule in a unified state.

The United Arab Republic

That expectation stemmed from a stunning turn of events in early 1958: the political merger of Egypt and Syria. While Cairo would ultimately dominate the union, unification had its genesis in the aspirations of the Syrian Ba’ath Party. During the mid-1950s, it had entered into a mutually beneficial marriage of convenience with the rival SCP that had allowed the two comparatively small parties to assume dominant positions in the government. To the Ba’athists’ alarm, however, the country’s increasingly close relationship with Moscow had boosted the SCP’s standing to such a degree that it appeared likely that the communists would soon eclipse the Ba’ath and assume sole control of the state. Desperate, party leaders concluded that the only way that they could forestall that outcome was by securing the political merger of Syria and Egypt. Talk turned into action in early 1958 thanks to a precipitate move by a cabal of Ba’athist army officers. Acting without prior approval, a group of them, later joined by Ba’ath Party cofounder Salah al-Din al-Bitar, travelled to Egypt and pitched Nasser on the idea of unifying their states under his rule.

The Egyptian leader initially expressed skepticism. A moderate Arab nationalist, he had long interpreted pan-Arabism to mean that the Arab states would closely coordinate their foreign policies rather than formally join together in a political union. He was also leery of taking on the challenges intrinsic in running a country that was not territorially contiguous, and he blanched at the idea of becoming involved in Syria’s byzantine political arena. At the same time, however, he grasped that union would substantially strengthen his position in the Arab world and afford him greater clout on the global stage. He consequently set aside his doubts and agreed to the proposal subject to three conditions: Syria’s political parties had to immediately dissolve, its military officers needed to abandon any involvement in politics, and its state institutions had to be absorbed into, and thus subordinated to, Egypt’s existing government. The expansiveness of Nasser’s terms surprised the Ba’athists but did not faze them. Confident that their organizational and ideological sophistication would allow them to dominate the unified government, they accepted Nasser’s conditions with little debate. As a result, on February 1, 1958, Nasser proclaimed that Egypt and Syria had joined together to form a new state: the United Arab Republic (UAR).

The union of Egypt and Syria seemed to mark a watershed moment in the region every bit as significant as the Suez Crisis or the establishment of Israel. To Arab nationalists, the erasure of the borders that the European powers had imposed at the conclusion of World War I heralded nothing less than the end of imperial dominance and the beginning of an Arab revival. It was a heady moment, one that emboldened pan-Arabists throughout the region and raised expectations even in the conservative Gulf monarchies that the entire Arab world would imminently enter the union.

The pressure to join fell most heavily on Lebanon and, especially, Jordan. Excited by the merger of Syria and Egypt, many Jordanians joined opposition groups to demand that King Hussein abdicate as the first step in a process that would end with their country joining the UAR. This pressure was substantial and, for a time, seemed likely to sweep the Jordanian king from power. However, Hussein was not prepared to go quietly. Instead, taking advantage of the fact that he had solidified his control of the military the prior year, he responded with a proposal that used the language of unity and nationalism to fortify the Hashemite position. It called for Jordan and Iraq to come together in a federal union wherein each would continue to enjoy domestic autonomy but would fully integrate their militaries and would pursue a joint foreign policy. Equally concerned about the danger of Nasserism, Faisal II’s government was receptive. Accordingly, just thirteen days after Syria and Egypt had merged, the two Hashemite kingdoms announced the birth of a rival superstate, the short-lived Arab Federation.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, the establishment of the UAR appeared not only to have reinvigorated the opposition to Camille Chamoun, but to have created the expectation that the country would soon join Nasser’s superstate. For a time, in fact, the question of whether Lebanon should merge with the UAR seemed to have left the country teetering on the edge of civil war between the president’s mostly Christian, pro-Western supporters and the largely Sunni Nasserists. Ultimately, however, while many people in Lebanon were enthusiastic about the idea of union, the question of whether the country would join the UAR was of only secondary importance in spurring the political crisis that gripped Lebanon in 1958. Far more critical in dividing the country was President Camille Chamoun’s effort to remain in power beyond his constitutionally limited six-year term. Indeed, the country remained tense but peaceful in the months following the creation of the UAR and only descended into crisis when Chamoun made clear in May 1958 that he intended to have the constitution amended to permit him to serve a second term.

The Iraqi Coup, July 1958

Ultimately, the state most dramatically affected by the merger of Syria and Egypt was Iraq. The announcement of the establishment of the UAR had electrified Iraqis opposed to the old order and led many to conclude that their country’s future lay in joining Nasser’s superstate. Such sentiments were particularly prominent among a group of pro-Nasserist army officers who had earlier formed a secret organization called the Free Officers. Excited about the pan-Arabist implications of the UAR, they began plotting a coup in 1958 under the leadership of General Abd al-Karim Qasim (r. 1958- 1963) and Colonel Abd al-Salam Arif (r. 1963-1966) aimed at ending the monarchy and finally freeing Iraq of Western dominance.

Their chance came in July 1958. Taking advantage of the movement of an infantry brigade through the capital, ordered, ironically, for the purpose of deterring a rumored coup against Hussein, the Free Officers made their move. In a well-planned operation, they seized government buildings, the palace, and, critically, the radio station, from which Arif declared the establishment of a republic and urged people to take to the streets to forestall any counterrevolutionary actions. The subsequent, rapid destruction of the old order proved to be anarchic and bloody. The soldiers sent to detain the king instead massacred the royal family and hastily buried them in shallow graves on the palace grounds. The savvy Nuri Said managed to avoid capture for a time but he, too, was executed after he was discovered trying to slip out of Baghdad disguised as a woman. Meanwhile, the street protests that Arif had called for to protect the new government rapidly got out of hand. Unleashing three decades of pent-up fury, the mob sought vengeance in an orgy of violence against anything and anyone associated with the previous regime. They tore down a statue of Faisal I (r. 1921-1933), torched the British Chancery, dug up and mutilated the body of the former regent, Abd al-Ilah (1913-1958), and killed a number of officials by dragging them to death behind cars.

It was a grim day for Washington. Qasim and the other coup plotters followed the revolution by immediately withdrawing Iraq from the Baghdad Pact. Worse, not long after, they established close relations with the USSR. In other words, the coup had not only thoroughly gutted the alliance system that Eisenhower and Dulles had so carefully constructed for the purpose of preventing Moscow from extending its power into the Middle East but had also given the Soviets immediate influence over an important Arab state.

The Inclusion of Yemen, 1958

The Kingdom of Yemen, which had already signed a defense pact with Egypt, entered into a loose confederation with the United Arab Republic known as the United Arab States on March 8. A central motivation behind this decision was North Yemen’s sense of vulnerability towards its considerably larger and more powerful northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia. For North Yemen, the confederation was viewed as a crucial source of external security and political backing. Unlike Syria, North Yemen retained full sovereignty throughout its time in the confederation, preserving its independent status at the United Nations and maintaining separate diplomatic missions abroad for the duration of the arrangement which ended in 1961.

1958 Lebanese and Jordanian Crises

Panic gripped the leaders of the conservative Arab regimes following the Iraq coup. Blaming the tumultuous events on Nasser, they frantically called on the Western states to protect their governments lest they be the next to fall. Jordan was the most vulnerable of the conservative states. Keenly aware of his country’s exposure, King Hussein immediately requested the deployment of Western troops to his capital to protect his government. London was receptive. Eager to prevent Nasserism from sweeping through the entire Middle East, it quickly acceded to his request. As a result, the first of 3,700 British paratroopers began arriving on July 17.

Chamoun also demanded Western intervention. Claiming that Nasser would follow the Iraq coup by seeking to subvert his government, he invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine just hours after he learned of the events in Baghdad and requested the immediate deployment of US troops to his country. Chamoun’s appeal put the administration in a difficult position. By that point, the American president and his advisors had long since determined that the 1957 Lebanese political crisis had been the product of confessional divisions and Chamoun’s overweening ambitions rather than Nasser’s interference and were leery of once more becoming involved in the country’s internal affairs. As important, having concluded from the Syria debacle that the Eisenhower Doctrine had failed to achieve its goals, the administration had quietly begun to pursue a policy of rapprochement toward the Egyptian leader. Nonetheless, the day after the Iraq coup, it acceded to Chamoun’s request and began landing a force in Lebanon that eventually numbered more than 15,000 soldiers.

What explains Eisenhower’s apparent change of heart? Why did he agree to Chamoun’s request? According to the historian Douglas Little, the driving force behind the president’s decision to deploy troops was his desire to uphold American credibility. In this view, Eisenhower believed that the US had no choice but to act if it wished to maintain its standing in the region. As the president reasoned, if Washington failed to answer Chamoun’s request for help, friendly governments in the Middle East would first begin to doubt Washington’s commitment and then come to terms with Nasser to the detriment of Western interests. Thus, regardless of Chamoun’s intent, the president felt he had to act.

In the end, the intervention had at best equivocal results for the US. On the positive side, Washington managed to secure a promise from Nasser to respect Jordanian and Lebanese independence in exchange for the withdrawal of British and American troops from those states. It also brokered a deal in Lebanon that resulted in the election of the popular head of the army, the Maronite General Fuad Shihab (r. 1958-1964), to the presidency at the end of Chamoun’s term. Respected by all the factions, he pursued a policy of reconciliation and moderation that soon restored order, thus permitting Eisenhower to honor his deal with Nasser and withdraw American troops. At the same time, however, the intervention also imposed significant costs on Washington. Most notably, having more-than-a whiff of neo-colonialism to it, the deployment had stripped away any residual goodwill that the United States had earned in the Arab world as a result of its support for Nasser during the Suez Crisis.

Karim Qasim

The events in Jordan and Lebanon aside, Nasserism seemed unstoppable in the summer of 1958. Far more important, the coup in Iraq seemed to suggest not only that Nasserism was the wave of the future, but that Iraq’s territory, its substantial population and, most critically, its enormous oil wealth would soon be under the Egyptian leader’s control. Few doubted this outcome. The US, the Soviet Union, the European states, and Arab nationalists alike agreed that it was only a matter of time before the Iraqi Free Officers petitioned Cairo to add Iraq to the UAR. The future appeared bright indeed for Nasser.

That assessment soon proved to be off the mark. Despite the widespread belief that union was inevitable, the new government in Baghdad ultimately chose not to join the UAR. That decision reflected Qasim’s victory in an internal dispute with Arif in the weeks immediately following the coup. On one level, the conflict between them was a simple power struggle over which man would rule. On another, however, it reflected a larger debate over Iraq’s national identity, one that revolved around the question of whether it should remain an independent, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional country, or whether it should instead be a component of a larger, progressive, secular-but- predominantly Sunni Arab state. Arif favored the latter position, and, with the support of Iraq’s Ba’athists, Arab nationalists, and many Sunni Arabs, pressed for the country to immediately join the UAR. Qasim disagreed. Uninterested in ceding national sovereignty or Iraq’s ample oil revenue to Egypt, he countered by promoting an “Iraq first” policy that enjoyed the support of heretofore marginalized groups such as the Shiʿa and Kurdish communities as well as the Iraq Communist Party (ICP), which was leery that Nasser would compel them to disband. With their backing, Qasim was able to force Arif out of the government in late 1958 after which he consolidated his position by purging Ba’athists and pan-Arabists. Furious, Nasser responded by launching a vigorous propaganda campaign against Qasim and by seeking to isolate Iraq in the Arab world. Aware that the ICP was a key pillar of Qasim’s rule, he also vented his frustration by clamping down on the communist party in Egypt.

Nasser did manage to find a silver lining in the defeat of the expansion of the UAR. A savvy political strategist, he believed that he could use the crackdown on the communists to improve relations with the US and to secure much-needed American food aid. He was correct on both counts. Having already decided to seek a rapprochement with Nasser following the failure of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the administration found the Egyptian leader’s move against the communists encouraging. It consequently agreed to permit Cairo to purchase $110 million worth of wheat through the PL-480 “Food for Peace” program. It was a good deal for Nasser. Payable in UAR pounds rather than in scarce hard currency, the agreement provided Egypt with much-needed aid at a heavily discounted price.

Nasser was nevertheless right to be upset about Qasim’s decision to stay out of the UAR. Iraq’s refusal to join the union was a major diplomatic defeat for him and the larger Nasserist movement he led. It demoralized nationalists throughout the region, undermined the Egyptian leader’s claim to speak for all Arabs, and strongly suggested that pan-Arabism was not, in fact, the wave of the future. In sum, though Nasserism remained a powerful force in the Arab world after 1958, the wind had come out of its sails and few continued to view Arab unification as inevitable.

Demise of the UAR

Despite these diminished expectations, most observers were still shocked when Syria, in a sudden move, seceded from the UAR in September 1961. Its departure was the result of growing disenchantment in Damascus with the union. As we saw, despite Nasser’s insistence that Egyptians would control the upper echelon of the government, the Ba’athists had wagered in 1958 that they would be able to outmaneuver their less- ideologically sophisticated partners and would thus assume a dominant voice in the UAR. That bet proved to be a bad one. Instead of manipulating officials in Cairo, they found themselves unhappily shunted to the side and thoroughly dominated by the imperious Egyptians. Syrian landlords and businesspeople similarly chafed under Nasserist rule. They railed against the imposition of a land-reform program that Cairo had initiated in 1958 and fumed at the Egyptian government’s heavy-handed intervention in the economy.

The UAR collapsed under the weight of these differences in the summer of 1961. Two events led to the final break. First, the promulgation of the July Laws, a sweeping new package of economic regulations that called for the nationalization of most businesses, destroyed what little enthusiasm for union remained among Syria’s influential landowner and business classes. Second, Cairo’s decision to force Sarraj from his post as chief of intelligence in Syria infuriated many Syrian military leaders. In fact, this move was the final straw for Syria’s Ba’athist army officers. Just a week after Sarraj stepped down, they responded with a coup that resulted in Syria immediately seceding from the UAR. Caught off guard, an initially furious Nasser vowed to compel Syria to return to the union. However, cooler heads soon prevailed. Realizing that he could not regain control of Syria if its military opposed him, he abandoned the effort and agreed to a peaceful separation. Egypt formally retained the UAR name until 1971 and the two states periodically entered into perfunctory reunification talks, but, from that point forward, the united Arab state, the cherished dream of Arab nationalists, was dead.

Political, Social, and Economic Development, 1958-1967

While the officers who dominated Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in the late 1950s and 1960s gave a great deal of attention to foreign relations, they by no means neglected domestic concerns. On the contrary, seeking both to improve the lot of the impoverished masses and to consolidate their grip on political power, they promoted a populist, state-centered economic vision in all three states. Though the specifics differed from country to country, the broad outline of their efforts were remarkably similar. In each state, the officers sought to foster rapid economic growth, to distribute income more equitably, and to establish political institutions designed to mobilize popular support behind the government. For a time, their efforts seemed to be quite successful.

Egypt: Arab Socialism

Egypt had already taken tentative steps toward a more state-centered economy in the years following the Free Officers’ coup. As we have seen, its government had adopted an economic development model based loosely on Mustafa Kemal’s ISI system and had implemented a series of socio-economic changes such as land reform aimed at improving life for the poorest Egyptians. Egypt’s shift to a state-led economic model accelerated dramatically in the early 1960s when it adopted a new program dubbed Arab Socialism. Unsurprisingly, Nasser was the driving force behind this change. Increasingly influenced by Soviet economic ideas, he believed that a system of central planning was the only way that Egypt could industrialize rapidly and equitably.

The transition to Arab Socialism took place with great speed in the early 1960s. Nasser initiated the process at the start of the decade when he ordered the nationalization of the largest banks and decreed the start of Egypt’s first Five Year Plan (1960-1964). He went substantially further the following year when he promulgated the July Laws. Sweeping in extent, they nationalized many industries including insurance, textiles, steel production, and shipping, and resulted in the government taking a 10-50 percent stake in nearly all other firms. The July Laws also instituted a minimum wage, capped the salaries of highly compensated individuals, adopted a highly progressive tax regime that set the top marginal rate at a confiscatory 90 percent, and effected a far-reaching land-reform program that limited individuals to own no more than 100 feddans, a little more than 100 acres, and redistributed the excess property to landless peasants.

Nasser completed the move to Arab Socialism in 1964. That year, the state also dramatically expanded the public educational system in order to ensure that the country had the trained workers needed to manage its ongoing industrial development. As a result, the share of the population that held a college degree began to increase substantially. More importantly, the Egyptian president also issued a new decree in 1964 that resulted in the nationalization of nearly all of the firms over which the government had assumed partial ownership three years earlier.

Concurrently, Nasser orchestrated a series of changes designed both to radically restructure Egyptian society and to solidify his control of the country’s people. He first reorganized the National Union into the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) and used it to mobilize the people in support of the regime and its economic program. To ensure against the emergence of organized criticism of the government and its economic policies, he followed by having the state assume control over previously autonomous groups such as labor unions, student organizations, and universities. Finally, he oversaw the issuance of a new National Charter in 1962 that formalized Egypt’s commitment to Arab Socialism and radical change. It was a truly revolutionary document. Most notably, it called for women to enjoy equal rights and acknowledged for the first time the need for contraception to help control the country’s rapidly growing population.

For some time, Nasser’s economic program appeared to be quite successful. Workers enjoyed enhanced benefits, many peasants acquired land, and the distribution of income became increasingly equitable. Even the middle class benefited from the shift to Arab Socialism. While some blanched at the adoption of a state-centered development scheme, most were delighted when Nasser had guaranteed work for the middle class by decreeing in 1962 that all university graduates who could not find jobs on their own would be given government employment.

Economic and demographic data sustained the belief that Arab Socialism was a success. Gross domestic product rose at an impressive clip during the early and mid-1960s. Egypt’s average life expectancy increased by more than three years between 1954 and 1969. However, per capita income only rose by 2 percent a year during the decade thanks largely to Egypt’s robust population growth. It was also the case that many landlords and members of the middle class had left Egypt in response to the imposition of Arab Socialism, an emigration that deprived it of capital and entrepreneurs. Still, on balance, the country appeared to be much better off. Nasser, it seemed, could justifiably take pride in having quickly improved Egypt’s economy.

Iraq—Political Instability and Autocracy

In the broadest sense, Iraq’s social, political, and economic development between 1958 and 1967 paralleled the course that Nasser had charted. Like Egypt, Iraq had a populist, if undemocratic, military-dominated regime. Its government also promoted an Egyptian-style, state-centered development model and took steps to break the power of the established elite in order to quickly achieve a more equitable distribution of income. In several critical ways, however, Iraq’s experience in the late 1950s and 1960s differed substantially from Egypt’s, most notably in terms of its political instability and in its failure to develop meaningful connections between the people and the state.

Iraq’s difficult history after 1958 reflected the country’s awkward early years. Stitched together to serve British interests, it emerged from the mandatory period with a weak civic-political culture, a powerful, coercive state, and a political elite that ruled on the basis of patronage and personal ties rather than popular support. The subsequent brief dominance in the 1930s of Sunni officers who had absorbed the late Ottoman Empire’s authoritarian, militarized conception of the state only served to reinforce and institutionalize that political system. The result would be the hardening of ethnoreligious fault lines and the institutionalization of a state that conferred near-unchecked powers of coercion and patronage upon those who controlled it, a legacy that ensured that the country’s post-coup governments would focus far-more on buttressing the state that granted them such overwhelming authority than on reforming society.

Qasim’s government certainly reflected and perpetuated the pattern that had been established during the mandate and the monarchy. That it did so marked a significant move away from the public declarations that the Free Officers had made immediately following the coup. At that time, the country’s new leaders had declared their intention to liberalize Iraq. They promised to end the former government’s corruption and exploitation, to democratize the country both politically and economically, and to grant rights to minority groups, particularly the Kurds. Unsurprisingly, as a result, many of the Free Officers’ civilian allies and supporters anticipated that the coup would mark a fundamental turning point for Iraq that would result in both state and society being restructured along genuinely liberal lines.

They were to be bitterly disappointed. Intoxicated by the enormous power that he had inherited from the Hashemite government, Qasim instead focused on quickly consolidating power in his hands. He did so with great skill. He first used his personal ties to other figures in the military and the enormous patronage powers that the state afforded him to cement his control of the officer corps. Next, he took advantage of fighting between communist party irregulars and government troops in Mosul in March 1959 to institute a sweeping purge of army officers and civilian administration who might oppose him. Shortly after, he used ICP demonstrations in Kirkuk that had devolved into violence between the communists and the city’s more conservative, middle- and upper- class Turkoman people as a pretext to rein in the now-emboldened party. Finally, in October 1959, he used a failed assassination attempt against him to justify crushing Iraq’s small Ba’athist party.

Qasim’s focus may have been on exploiting the patronage powers of the state to solidify his position, but that is not to suggest that he completely abandoned the idea of advancing social progress. To the contrary, one of the new regime’s first acts was the Agrarian Reform Law, a land-reform program that divided large estates into small plots and redistributed them to landless peasants. While limited, the fellahin had to pay for the land that they acquired, it nonetheless improved the position of many peasants. Qasim also instituted several reforms aimed at placating the Kurds. Shortly after taking power, he issued a new constitution that accorded them equal status in Iraq, and he welcomed the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani (1903-1979) back from exile in the Soviet Union. For a time, he also acknowledged the far-left Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) as one of the country’s few legitimate parties.

Other reforms were more-far reaching. For example, the revised Personal Status Law extended to women far greater rights than they had previously enjoyed. Among other provisions, it ended child marriage, limited polygamy, and gave women equal inheritance rights. Focused on the oil industry, meanwhile, Public Law 80 substantially redressed the imbalance in power between the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) and Baghdad. Issued in October 1961, it returned over 99.5 percent of the IPC concession to the state including the valuable Rumaila field and thus gave the country much greater control over its oil reserves.

While people were universally enthusiastic about Public Law 80, Qasim’s reform package as a whole engendered substantial criticism. It was especially unpopular among the Shiʿa clerics. They condemned the revisions he had made to the Personal Status Law, attacked his regime’s embrace of leftist ideas and tolerance of communists, and condemned his land-reform program, the latter because it reduced the tithes that Shiʿa estate owners had paid. The Shiʿa clergy were so put off by Qasim’s reforms, in fact, that some, most notably the young cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935- 1980), abandoned their traditional quietism and became active in political groups such as the Islamic Daʿwa Party.

For Barzani and the Kurds, in contrast, it was the absence of meaningful reforms that fueled dissatisfaction with Qasim’s government. The primary issue for them was autonomy. Barzani demanded that the central government permit the use of Kurdish in education, that it devolve substantial power to local authorities, and, above all, that it grant the Kurds immediate political autonomy. Qasim resisted those conditions. Concerned that Barzani would try to transform autonomy into full independence, he sought to walk a fine line wherein he appeared to move toward granting autonomy even as he dragged his feet on ceding any real power to the Kurds. No stranger to Iraq’s hardball political tactics, Barzani was quick to deduce that Qasim did not intend to meet Kurdish demands, Accordingly, after quietly building up his military power in the rural north, he issued an ultimatum in August 1961 demanding immediate autonomy. When Qasim refused to meet it, he ordered his forces, known as the peshmerga, to revolt.

By that point, Qasim’s grip on power was beginning to slip. Three issues contributed to his increasingly vulnerable position. The first was his mishandling of the Kurdish situation. To the frustration of his fellow officers, the Kurdish revolt that Qasim had failed to prevent had resulted in the Iraqi army becoming mired in an expensive and seemingly unwinnable war. The second was his rejection of pan-Arabism in favor of an “Iraq first” foreign policy. That decision left Iraq isolated in the Arab world and alienated many pan-Arab Free Officers who favored union with the UAR. The third was Qasim’s ill-thought-out attempt to annex Kuwait shortly after that country won its independence from Britain in June 1961. This effort revived a 1938 claim to the emirate and furthered the idea that Kuwait fell within Iraq’s “natural’ boundaries” which the British had maliciously hived the emirate off to weaken it. Bold but amateurish, Qasim’s effort to annex Kuwait went nowhere. The quick deployment of British troops to the emirate and Nasser’s equally rapid extension of a security guarantee to it compelled the Iraqi leader to hurriedly back down. The diplomatic equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot, the failed attempt cost him a great deal of prestige and, critically, further undermined his standing among his fellow officers.

As dissatisfaction with Qasim surged, a coalition consisting of the reconstituted Ba’ath Party and a group of pan-Arabist officers led by Qasim’s former partner, Abd al- Salam Arif, organized a conspiracy to overthrow the Iraqi dictator. They moved against Qasim in February 1963. Taking advantage of his failure to establish the connections between state and society that could be used to mobilize the masses to support him, the plotters overwhelmed regime loyalists after two days of bitter fighting in Baghdad and then arrested and summarily executed Qasim. They followed by establishing a Ba’athist state ruled by the National Council of the Revolutionary Command (NCRC), which included a mix of party members and pan-Arab officers. Abd al-Salam Arif, who was not himself a Ba’athist, served as president.

Sharply divided along ideological lines between the radical Ba’athists and the more conservative pan-Arabist military officers, the regime was not destined to last. The two factions clashed over a number of points including the broader question of the country’s future direction and the more immediate issue of which group would dominate their increasingly shaky coalition. A particular sticking point for the officers was the Ba’ath Party’s development of a militia, the Ba’athist National Guard, that it used to bloodily suppress the rival ICP. The more-moderate pan-Arabist officers were delighted that their governing partners had destroyed the communists as a political force. However, they also viewed the Ba’ath Party’s growing radicalism and, especially, the rapid expansion of its militia with mounting trepidation. Fearing that the Ba’athists would become unassailable if their paramilitary force were permitted to grow unchecked, Abd al-Salam Arif decided to mount a pre-emptive move against the party. Launched in November 1963, the operation succeeded both in destroying the National Guard and in purging the Ba’athists from the NCRC.

Abd al-Salam Arif had indicated to his supporters that he planned to liberalize Iraq once he had taken control of the government. As he came to understand fully the unchecked authority he commanded, however, he, like Qasim before him, became intoxicated with power and instead opted to establish an authoritarian regime that bore a striking resemblance to his predecessor’s government. Like Qasim, he made no effort to legitimize his rule by fostering a civic-political culture in Iraq or by securing the consent of the governed. Instead, he chose to rule through a combination of the state’s enormous powers of coercion, patronage, and the personal relationships that he had established with key members of the officer corps. The central role that ties of mutual obligation and patron-client relationships played in the functioning of his government was made clear in the immediate aftermath of his death in a helicopter crash in 1966. As it was well understood that continued stability in Iraq rested on the perpetuation of the network of personal connections, mutual obligations, and patronage that Arif had created, the officers decided to replace him with the only person who could be trusted to maintain that system: his brother, Abd al-Rahman Arif (r. 1966-1968).

Syria: the Ba’ath in Power

Though the Iraqi Ba’ath party had lost power in 1963, temporarily, as we shall see in the next chapter, its sister branch managed to assume control of Syria the same year. Its return to power was largely a function of the weak nature of the government in Damascus following the demise of the UAR. The conservative military officers who had orchestrated Syria’s secession from Egypt had opted to reestablish the parliamentary system that had existed prior to the 1958 union and had entrusted the government to the same class of urban notables that had earlier dominated the country. Out of step with the times, those men were unable to provide Syria with effective leadership or to control the cliques that had emerged within the officer corps. Taking advantage of the regime’s lack of popular support, Ba’athism’s founders, Aflaq and al-Bitar, set about reconstituting the Ba’ath Party and began scheming with dissatisfied army officers to overthrow the government. They did not have to wait long. Taking advantage of the regime’s lack of popular support, a coalition of Nasserist officers and the Ba’ath Party launched a successful coup that ended parliamentary government in Syria once and for all.

The new government proved every bit as wobbly as the one it had supplanted. Its instability stemmed from two significant problems. First, with ostensibly like-minded regimes in power in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, the new regime felt compelled to focus a great deal of its energy on unification talks aimed at bringing the three states into a re-formed UAR. On the surface, these discussions were amicable ones between like-minded leaders seeking a common end. In reality, however, Nasser, the Ba’athists in Syria, and those in Iraq were bitter rivals, and each would only accept union if their regime enjoyed complete dominance. As a result, the negotiations were little more than an exercise in which diplomats politely discussed the finer points of political unity while their governments and parties fired off propaganda broadsides at each other. Unsurprisingly, the unity talks soon collapsed in mutual recrimination.

Second, the new government found itself paralyzed by a split in the Ba’ath Party between a civilian faction and a group of officers called the Military Committee. Dominated by Aflaq, the civilians stressed pan-Arabism and downplayed Ba’athism’s calls for dramatic economic reforms. In contrast, their more radical opponents in the Military Committee deemphasized Arab unity and instead focused on imposing a quasi- Marxist-Leninist system on Syria. A theoretician rather than a political infighter, Aflaq was unable to slow either the radicals’ full-throated assault on Syria’s traditional market- based economy or their increasing dominance of the party and government. Finally, in 1966, the Military Committee launched a coup that formalized its growing power by forcing Aflaq out and by putting the radical General Salah Jadid (r. 1966-1970) in control of the government.

The 1966 coup had three important ramifications for Syria. First, the purge of Aflaq created an open rift with the Iraqi branch of the Ba’ath Party, which had remained supportive of the movement’s founder. As a result, following the Ba’athist seizure of power in Baghdad in 1968, Syria and Iraq found themselves locked in a bitter cold war as each vied for dominance of the broader Ba’athist movement. Second, the change in government resulted in Syria pursuing a radical economic restructuring plan aimed at replacing the country’s traditional capitalist economic system with a socialist one. Forced through on an aggressive timetable, it created significant economic problems and social dislocation for the country even as it succeeded in imposing state dominance of the economy. Finally, the coup resulted in Syria pursuing a radically aggressive foreign policy. Under Jadid, it developed close ties with the Soviet Union, expressed hostility toward the conservative Arab states, and, most importantly, adopted recklessly bellicose policies toward Israel that would help to spark a third Arab-Israeli war.

The Arab Cold War

Meanwhile, even as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq competed with each other for dominance of pan-Arabism, a broader, ideological conflict was emerging between them and the conservative, monarchical Arab states. Dubbed the Arab Cold War by the political scientist Malcolm Kerr, it took shape as a result of a coup in Yemen in the early 1960s. Inspired by Egyptian radio propaganda, Nasserist army officers led by General Abdallah al-Sallal (r. 1962-1967) deposed the Zaidi Shiʿa Imam Muhammad Badr (r. 1962) in September 1962 and declared the establishment of a Nasserist state: the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). For a brief time, it seemed like another victory for Nasserist pan-Arabism. To the chagrin of the officers, however, the imam had managed to slip out of the palace before al-Sallal’s troops could arrest him and had escaped to the mountainous north. There, he set to work organizing a pro-royalist tribal insurgency against the new government.

It did not remain a local struggle for long. Instead, almost immediately after the coup, the civil War in Yemen transformed into a broader regional contest between Nasserist Egypt and a Saudi-led coalition of conservative Arab monarchies. Riyadh took the first step. Fearing that radical republicanism would spread throughout the Arabian peninsula if the Yemeni Nasserists were able to consolidate their position, the Saudi regent, Faisal bin Abdulaziz al Saud (r. 1964-1975), began to supply the rebels with arms in the fall of 1962. Nasser was quick to respond. The Kingdom’s actions not only challenged his dominance of the Arab world but, as important, also presented him with a golden opportunity to restore his tarnished reputation following Syria’s embarrassing secession from the UAR. Accordingly, he agreed to provide aid to the republicans, first by supplying them with weapons and then by deploying 20,000 Egyptian troops to Yemen. As a result, what had begun as a local, internal dispute in Yemen had, by the end of 1962, become a full-fledged proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Begun with high hopes, the Egyptian intervention in Yemen quickly turned into a debacle. Despite eventually sending 70,000 of its best-equipped troops to the YAR, Egypt found itself incapable of defeating the imam’s increasingly sophisticated guerrilla fighters. Indeed, “Nasser’s Vietnam” quickly turned into a major drain on Egypt. The war sapped the country’s economy, weakened morale in its military, and damaged its leader’s reputation, particularly after his troops employed chemical weapons against the rebels. The fighting also produced enormous numbers of casualties. All told, an estimated 26,000 Egyptian soldiers died in Yemen between 1962 and the withdrawal of Nasser’s expeditionary force in 1968.

Nasser’s intervention in Yemen also brought his country into conflict with the US. Initially, President John F. Kennedy (r. 1961-1963) had hoped that the fighting in Yemen would not interfere with the recent improvement in ties between Washington and Cairo. Indeed, it was in part to forestall such an eventuality that he pressed both the royalists and the republicans to accept a UN-brokered end to the conflict. The failure of that initiative and, especially, Nasser’s decision to deploy Egyptian troops to Yemen eventually compelled Kennedy to rethink America’s approach to Egypt. The result was the abandonment of the effort to cultivate Nasser that Eisenhower had begun in 1958 in favor of a return to the earlier containment policy. The Kennedy administration made this shift emphatically clear in 1963 when it responded to an Egyptian attack on royalist guerrilla bases inside Saudi Arabia by deploying a squadron of F-100 fighter-bombers to the kingdom.

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson (r. 1963-1969), went even further. Seeing considerably less value in pursuing relations with Nasser than his predecessor, he accelerated the pivot back to a policy of containment, most notably by ending PL-480 wheat sales to Egypt in 1965. Nasser was furious about what he viewed as an attempt to blackmail his country. In response, he launched a fresh wave of propaganda attacks against the West, held a prominent meeting with the Argentine Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara (1928-1967), and, in an action especially nettlesome to Johnson, allowed the communist Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) to establish an office in Egypt.

The Middle Eastern Arms Race: The United States and Israel

Washington’s concurrent move to begin providing arms to Israel further angered Nasser. Kennedy set this new policy in motion in 1962. Believing that Egypt’s Soviet- supplied bombers gave Nasser a first-strike advantage that could destabilize the region, the president broke with America’s longstanding refusal to provide weapons to Israel and agreed to sell it powerful Hawk antiaircraft missiles. Johnson went considerably further. After reassessing the strategic balance in the Middle East in 1965, he moved to counter the Arab states’ growing arsenals of Eastern Bloc weapons by supplying offensive American arms to Israel for the first time. That year, he agreed to sell to the Jewish state 210 powerful M-48 tanks. He followed in 1966 by providing the IDF with forty-eight advanced A-4 Skyhawk jets.

Rising Soviet Influence

Moscow’s arms sales to the republican Arab states had indeed been substantial. Between 1961 and 1965, Egypt alone had acquired from the USSR 530 tanks, 170 MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighters, and 25 Tu-16 bombers. Syria and Iraq received similarly substantial deliveries of advanced Soviet weapons. Why did the USSR lavish these arms on its Arab allies? What did it hope to gain? Moscow had two primary reasons for supplying the weapons. First, it did so as part of a quid pro quo designed to achieve one of its key Cold War-related security goals. In exchange for advanced weapons, the USSR received the right to develop bases at Alexandria in Egypt and at Tartus in Syria from which its aircraft and ships could hunt American Polaris-missile-armed strategic submarines operating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Second, providing arms to the Arab republics left those states dependent on Moscow for spare parts, ammunition, and technical support and thus dramatically enhanced Soviet influence in the region.

The Six Day War

The flood of high-tech weapons into the region helped set the stage for another enormously consequential conflict: The Six Day War. Ending in an overwhelming Israeli victory, the confrontation reshaped the Middle East’s political and diplomatic structure and fundamentally altered the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this brief war. Indeed, in a century replete with turning points, the Six Day War stands alongside the post-World War I division of the region, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the events of 1979 as one of the defining moments in the creation of the modern Middle East.

Rising Tensions

Rising tensions in the mid 1960s set the stage for the conflict. After a period of relative quiet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arab-Israeli relations took a turn for the worse as a result of a conflict over a resource that is peculiarly scarce in the region: water. In late 1963, Tel Aviv stood on the verge of completing the National Water Carrier, a major infrastructure scheme designed to divert water from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the arid Negev Desert in the south. Israelis were excited about the project and the growth that it promised to bring. The Arabs, in contrast, found it deeply troubling. They feared that it would give Israel the arable land needed to absorb another three-million Jewish immigrants and would thus permit it to become so populous that its defeat and the restoration of the Palestinian refugees to their homes would become impossible.

Many Arab leaders saw not just crisis in the Israeli project, however, but opportunity as well. The opportunity, that is, to take Nasser down a peg or two. Tired of the Egyptian leader’s interference in their internal affairs, radical republicans and conservative monarchs alike had long had their eyes out for any means of chipping away at his dominant position in the Arab world. The gap between Nasser’s vocal anti-Zionism and his caution with regard to the water diversion plan seemed to provide just the opening they been looking for. Accordingly, taking advantage of a well-known fact in Arab political circles, that Arab leaders could weaken their rivals by denouncing them for being soft on Israel even when they themselves were privately opposed to any action that risked bringing down the wrath of the IDF, states like Jordan and Syria began firing off a series of withering propaganda attacks in which they criticized Nasser for his failure to match his anti-Israeli rhetoric with commensurate action against the water carrier. The critique proved effective. Indeed, in short order, the Egyptian leader’s standing in the Arab world began to sink.

Smarting from the criticism, Nasser moved to restore his anti-Zionist bona fides at an Arab League summit in Cairo called to address the water diversion scheme. Meeting in January 1964, the attendees agreed to put aside their differences and to unify in opposition to Israel and its plans to use Galilee water to reclaim land in the Negev. The meeting proposed two concrete actions. First, the attendees established the United Arab Command (UAC) to coordinate their militaries and placed it under Egyptian control. Second, with financial support from the other Arab states, they called on Syria to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River in order to deny Israel the water needed to irrigate the Negev. The summit thus appeared to have been a great success for Nasser. It had put a stop to the propaganda attacks against him and it had done so in a way that neither cost him his standing as the leading anti-Zionist figure nor required Egypt to fight a war with Israel that he believed, correctly, it would lose.

Begun with high hopes, the effort to redirect the Jordan proved to be entirely unsuccessful in the face of unusually fierce Israeli opposition. The intensity of the resistance to the scheme was a function of what Brigadier General Israel Lior called “Syrian Syndrome”: the tendency of IDF officers stationed on the northern front to hold a particularly strong commitment to the ideology of the Iron Wall. Enthusiastically employing disproportionate force against the bulldozers, tractors, and dredges involved in the diversion effort, those officers were able to prevent Syria from making any progress in 1964 and 1965. The failure of the diversion effort frustrated and embarrassed Syria’s Ba’athist government and led it to seek some way of hitting back at the Israelis. Aware that its military could not hope to stand against the might of the IDF, it opted for an alternative, asymmetric response in which Syrian-supported Palestinian guerrillas mounted raids into Israel either directly across the border or through Jordanian territory.

These incursions and the fighting in the Galilee put Nasser in a difficult position. That Syria rather than Egypt was leading the charge against Israel and that Damascus rather than Cairo was risking retaliation by permitting Palestinian raids from its territory was embarrassing to the man who had been the self-declared leader of the anti-Zionist cause since his diplomatic victory in the Suez Crisis. Even worse, his decision to accept command of the UAC, which seemed at the time to insulate him from censure, had left him vulnerable to renewed criticism from his Arab rivals. Most notably, after Israel dramatically raised tensions by retaliating for the Palestinian raids with a devastating attack on the West Bank village of Samu in 1966, they tore into him for his failure as UAC leader to respond. Long the subject of the Egyptian leader’s propaganda broadsides, Jordan’s King Hussein was particularly unstinting in his criticism. Where, he asked bitterly, was Nasser’s vaunted air force? More importantly, why did Egypt continue to hide behind the UNEF peacekeepers that separated its forces from Israel? By the end of 1966, these criticisms had put Nasser squarely on the defensive. Already weakened by his country’s seemingly endless entanglement in Yemen, he was now in danger of losing his influence in the Arab world.

The Road to War

In the meantime, the situation on the Israeli-Syrian frontier intensified dangerously in early 1967. The proximate cause of the rise in tensions was the change that had occurred in Syria’s government in 1966. More extreme and aggressive than the government it replaced, Salah Jadid’s radical Ba’athist regime had encouraged the Palestinian guerrillas to step up the frequency of their attacks into Israel. IDF officers afflicted with “Syrian syndrome” had little patience for the resulting guerrilla incursions or for Syria’s tolerance of them and responded by seeking to incite a clash that could justify punitive action. Their efforts bore fruit on April 7 when Syrian forces fired on an armored tractor that the IDF had, as a provocation, sent into the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that had divided the two countries since 1948. Escalating rapidly, the incident ended with Israeli aircraft shooting down six Syrian MiGs and, to the intense embarrassment of the Syrian government, overflying Damascus.

The crisis soon widened. On May 13, 1967, Moscow, likely trying to bolster its Syrian ally, falsely informed Egypt that Israel was massing troops in the north for an invasion of Syria. Nasser quickly determined that the Soviet warning was untrue. Nonetheless, he followed it by taking a very public action that appeared to be designed to deter Israel. Shortly after he received the Soviet warning, he ordered the Egyptian army to call up its reserves and to deploy offensive units into the Sinai. If Israel invaded Syria, his action appeared to say, it would face an immediate Egyptian attack.

What impelled Nasser to undertake such a seemingly aggressive action if he knew that the Soviet report of an impending Israeli attack on Syria was false? He did so not because he wanted a war, he understood all too well that the Arabs lacked the power to defeat Israel, particularly with the cream of the Egyptian army hundreds of miles away in Yemen, but because he saw in it an opportunity to restore his standing as the leading anti-Zionist. That is, he deployed troops to the Sinai because he believed that doing so would allow him to credibly claim that he had intimidated the Israelis and had thus saved Syria from an IDF attack. Best of all, since Tel Aviv was not in fact preparing to attack Syria, he could act without running any real risk of war. The entire operation was an elaborate charade designed to impress Arab public opinion and to silence his critics without drawing Egypt into a conflict it could not win. As such, it had been a huge success. Nasser was once again the toast of the Arab world and the undisputed leader of the anti-Zionist cause.

It was at that point, however, that events began to get ahead of Nasser. Carried along by the accolades he had received in the Arab world, he followed the deployment in the Sinai by demanding that UN Secretary General U Thant (1909-1974) remove the UNEF peacekeepers that had been stationed along the Egyptian side of the border with Israel since the Suez Crisis. Nasser’s request posed a serious dilemma for the secretary general. On the one hand, protocol demanded that he withdraw the peacekeepers immediately. After all, Egypt was a sovereign state and thus had the right to order the UNEF forces to leave. On the other, the pursuit of a peaceful resolution of the crisis suggested that he should slow-walk Nasser’s request and thus give the Egyptian leader ample opportunity to reverse course.

Acting correctly but unwisely, U Thant went with protocol. Stressing that the UN had to respect the wishes of a sovereign state, he agreed to remove the UNEF troops. Worse, he not only insisted that the UN had to withdraw all of the peacekeepers, including those stationed in the Gaza Strip and, crucially, those positioned at Sharm al- Shaykh, but ordered them to leave on an accelerated timetable. By the end of May, as a result, no barrier separated Egyptian troops from Israeli soldiers, and nothing prevented Nasser from reoccupying the entire Sinai Peninsula. A victim of his own success, the Egyptian president now faced enormous pressure in the Arab world to deploy troops along the Israeli border and to reimpose the blockade of the Strait of Tiran. Unable to resist, he bowed to the might of popular opinion and did so, ordering his soldiers forward and declaring the strait once again closed to ships bound for Israel.

In the immediate term, Nasser’s actions were a huge success. Having apparently intimidated Israel, which had made no response to the Egyptian army’s redeployment, he had reclaimed his position as the leading anti-Zionist and had regained the adulation of the Arab world. Indeed, Baghdad, Beirut, Jerusalem, Hebron, and many other Arab cities saw massive, spontaneous rallies in favor of the Egyptian president and his aggressive actions. That public surge in support paid substantial and immediate diplomatic dividends for Nasser. Most notably, thanks to the Egyptian leader’s newfound popularity in Jordan, King Hussein, typically at odds with Nasser, felt compelled to travel to Cairo at the end of May and sign a mutual defense treaty with Egypt.

While Nasser and Egypt were flying high, Israel was gripped with indecision and anxiety. The deployment of Egyptian forces to the Sinai had not initially alarmed most Israelis; after all, the UN continued to maintain peacekeepers along the border. Complacency had given way to shock and fear, however, when U Thant had ordered the removal of UNEF forces and, especially, when Nasser had reinstituted the blockade of the Strait of Tiran. From that point, the country experienced “the waiting,” a time of searing anxiety during which its people, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, dug trenches, filled sandbags, and prepared for the worst. The mood was little better in the government. Consumed by fear that the Jewish state was in mortal peril, the cabinet engaged in a tense debate in late May about how Israel should respond to Nasser’s provocative actions. On one side were those like Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (1922- 1995) who, contending that the IDF’s deterrent value would wither away if it failed to respond to the closure of the strait, called for an immediate, preemptive attack. On the other, were those like Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (r. 1963-1969) who urged caution and who argued that Israel could only act if it could first convince a reluctant Washington to support such a move.

It was a peculiarly difficult few weeks for the cabinet. Caught between American reluctance and Egyptian bellicosity, Israeli leaders found themselves operating under crushing stress. Finally, in early June, a path forward opened up: American Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009) informed the head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, that President Johnson had experienced a change of heart and was now willing to support an IDF preemptive attack. The news came as an enormous relief to Eshkol’s government and ended the indecision that had paralyzed the cabinet. Now enjoying a clear green light from Washington, it promptly voted to launch a surprise attack scheduled to begin at daybreak on June 5.

The Conflict, June 5-10, 1967

Ironically in light of the handwringing in Tel Aviv that preceded it, the war was an Israeli rout from start to finish. The IDF initiated the conflict on June 5 by mounting a surprise, dawn air attack that annihilated nearly the entire Egyptian air force as it sat defenseless on the ground. Desperate for assistance, Nasser lured Jordan, Iraq, and Syria into launching a series of air strikes against Israel later that morning by claiming that Egypt was in the process of inflicting a decisive defeat on the IDF. Israel easily parried those attacks and followed with a sequence of devastating, late-afternoon retaliatory raids on Jordanian and Syrian air bases. By nightfall, it had become clear that the IDF’s first-day air offensive had been a total success. All told, its planes had destroyed more than 400 Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian aircraft and had, in doing so, secured total air superiority.

The ground war was similarly one-sided. Israeli troops launched a series of devastating and well-executed offensive drives beginning on June 5 that sent Arab armies reeling. As a result, by the time the war ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire on June 10, the IDF had seized the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In doing so, it had tripled the territory that Israel controlled.

Aftermath

The sheer totality of Israel’s victory over the Arabs had consequences that were both profound and ironic. Four stand out. First, the defeat thoroughly discredited many of the Arab governments. Indeed, much as the 1948 War had delegitimized earlier regimes and generated a wave of political change, the Six-Day War produced a series of coups that altered the political landscape in the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa. Ironically, however, none of the changes in government that followed the Six-Day War involved the overthrow of the officer-dominated regimes that had failed so spectacularly in the recent conflict with Israel. Instead, the wave of coups that began in 1967 either reshuffled the leadership of the existing military-controlled governments, as happened in Syria and Iraq, or resulted in radical Arab nationalists toppling conservative regimes such as occurred in Libya.

Second, the war altered and complicated the relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington. Following the conflict, the US pursued a two-pronged approach to Israel. On the one hand, it pressed Tel Aviv to accept a comprehensive settlement with the Arab states on the basis of the exchange of the land it had conquered in 1967 for peace and recognition. On the other, it abandoned its earlier pretense of neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict and thereafter assumed the role of Israel’s military, diplomatic, and economic patron, a relationship to which Washington lent substance by providing Tel Aviv with fifty advanced, F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers in 1968. Though it was not entirely obvious at first, these policies worked at cross purposes. Ironically in fact, the more that the US provided Israel with military and diplomatic support, the more that Tel Aviv could safely ignore Washington’s efforts to press it to trade land for peace.

Third, the war set in motion a process that would fundamentally change the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At first, the sheer scale of the IDF victory seemed to suggest that the contest was effectively over. Indeed, Israel’s triumph had been so total that it appeared to have accorded the Jewish state complete dominance in the struggle. However, even as Israel’s success had given it a commanding position vis-à-vis the Arab states, its assumption of control over the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip had revived the older conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Thereafter, Israeli rule created a new, shared experience of oppression among the Palestinians that would quickly reinvigorate their sense of national identity and their demands for self-rule. Ironically, in other words, as total as the Israeli triumph over the Arab states may have been, it merely created a more visceral and immediate clash between Zionists and Palestinians and, thus, as we shall see in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen, a return of the struggle to its origins as a contest between competing nationalisms.

The final irony was that neither side was prepared, despite the enormity of Israel’s military victory, to engage in peace negotiations. In Tel Aviv, a sense of hubris almost instantly replaced the fear that had gripped the nation during “the waiting”; as a result, while the government theoretically endorsed the idea of trading land for peace, it felt no pressure to negotiate with the Arab states or to yield any of the strategic territory it had acquired. For Arab leaders, in contrast, both the sheer extent of their defeat and the vast degree of Israel’s continued military superiority rendered productive talks impossible. How could they negotiate when Israel held all the cards? As a result, even as it was clear that their armies lacked the strength to regain the territory lost in June, the Arab governments issued the famous “three nos” at the Khartoum Conference in September 1967: no negotiations, no recognition of Israel, and no peace.

Resolution 242

In November, meanwhile, the UN Security Council established the parameters for a broad settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the passage of Resolution 242. On the surface, its call for Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and its declaration that “every state in the area had the right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries” appeared to establish the basis for a straightforward settlement in which Israel would exchange the land it had taken in the Six-Day War for peace and recognition. In reality, Resolution 242 was a complex and slippery document that employed intentionally vague language that left it subject to competing interpretation. Pointing to the French version, which used the definite article, the Arabs argued that it required Israel to withdraw from all of the territories it had taken in 1967. Tel Aviv, in contrast, maintained that the reference to secure borders left open the possibility that it could retain Jerusalem and those portions of the West Bank that it felt were necessary for its national security. Thus, in the short term, the resolution designed to establish the basis of a durable peace merely served to create a new arena of rhetorical dispute. Still, Resolution 242 did mark an important milestone in the Arab-Israeli conflict and remains to the present day the starting point for all negotiations between Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the Palestinians.

The Historical Debate: Israel’s Motives

Unsurprisingly, given its significance, the Six-Day War has proven to be an enormously contentious subject. Nasser’s decision making, Washington’s role, and the Soviet Union’s actions in the run up to war have all received scrutiny. However, the most contentious debate has centered on the question of why Tel Aviv decided to launch the surprise attack on June 5. Calling attention to the speed and extent of the IDF’s achievement on the first day of the war, many Arab governments contended even before the fighting had ceased that Israel had initiated the war not out of fear or for defensive purposes, but instead out of a desire to seize territory. In support of this argument, they have noted that the Israeli government was well aware that the most experienced Egyptian formations remained mired in Yemen and have pointed out that the US had shared intelligence with Tel Aviv indicating that the formations Nasser had sent into the Sinai had assumed a defensive posture and were thus in no position to attack Israel.

However, other officials and scholars, even many who are often critical of Israel, dispute this view. Noting the deep concern that gripped the Jewish state in the weeks leading up to the conflict, for example, the historian Avi Shlaim contends that Tel Aviv acted out of a fundamental concern for its security and that it gained land through opportunity and military exigencies rather than through a preconceived strategy. As he writes, the Eshkol government had no “master plan for territorial aggrandizement. Its territorial aims were defined not in advance but in response to developments on the battlefield.” Others emphasize the role of credibility in Israeli thinking. As the historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren argues, Eshkol’s government went to war not to gain land but instead because it feared that failing to do so would suggest weakness and would thus invite a devastating Arab attack.

Conclusion

Though the pan-Arabist officer-dominated states survived and even flourished in the years following the Arabs’ stunning defeat, the Age of Nasser itself came to an abrupt end the moment Israeli bombs began to strike their targets on the morning of June 5. Indeed, the enormity of Nasserism’s defeat in the Six Day War had, with shocking suddenness, laid bare the movement’s fundamental failings. It had promised political populism but had delivered dictatorship and corruption. Had championed pan-Arabism but had left the Arab states locked in petty ideological and political feuds. Additionally, it had pledged independence from the imperial powers but had rendered Egypt dependent on the USSR for military and economic aid. Above all, its adherents had declared loudly and repeatedly that Nasserism would bring Israel to heel and permit the Palestinians to return to their homes. However, as the smoking remains of the Egyptian air force made emphatically clear, Nasserism had failed utterly to do so and had, in the process, left the Palestinians even further from statehood than they had been at the end of the 1948 War. Over the following decade, as a result, proponents of new, more extreme variants of Arab nationalism and, later, Islamism would gain popular support at the expense of Nasserism by claiming that they could achieve the ends that the Egyptian leader had promised but had failed to deliver: Israel’s defeat, the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homes, and sustained economic growth.

However, those new ideologies did not emerge in isolation. Instead, events occurring at the same time outside the core of the Middle East would influence them in critical ways. It is to the post-World War II experience of those geographically peripheral areas, the Gulf States, Türkiye, and, especially, Iran that we will next turn.