Gamal Abdel Nasser
The Egyptian colonel who nationalized the Suez Canal, made pan-Arabism a mass movement, and lost it all in six days in 1967.
For about fifteen years Gamal Abdel Nasser was the most popular man in the Arab world, and for a few of them he looked like he might unify it. He took power in Egypt through a colonels' coup in 1952, humiliated Britain and France over the Suez Canal in 1956, built a movement that carried his name from Morocco to Iraq, and then lost the Sinai, his air force, and his aura in six days in June 1967. The politics of the modern Middle East are still arranged around the space his rise opened and his defeat left empty.
The Free Officers
He was born in 1918 in Alexandria, the son of a postal clerk, and he came of age in an Egypt that was nominally independent and actually run from the British embassy. He fought in the 1948 war against Israel, an experience that convinced him and his fellow officers that the real enemy was not only in Tel Aviv but in Cairo: a corrupt monarchy and a political class that had sent them to fight with defective weapons.
On 23 July 1952 the Free Officers seized power and sent King Farouk into exile on his yacht. Nasser, the movement's actual leader, spent two years behind the figurehead General Muhammad Naguib before taking the presidency himself. He then did what Egyptian nationalists had wanted for seventy years: he negotiated the last British troops out of the Canal Zone.
Suez, and the making of a hero
The defining moment came in 1956. After Washington and London withdrew financing for the Aswan High Dam, Nasser announced on 26 July that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and would fund the dam with the tolls. Britain, France, and Israel responded with a secretly coordinated invasion.
Militarily it worked. Politically it was a catastrophe for the invaders. The United States, unwilling to be associated with an imperial adventure and furious at not being told, forced Britain and France into a humiliating withdrawal through financial pressure on the pound. Nasser had lost the battle and won everything else. He became the man who had faced down two empires and won, and pan-Arabism, the idea that the Arabs are one nation artificially divided by colonial borders, became a mass political force with him at its head.
What followed was the high tide. Syria dissolved its own state to merge with Egypt as the United Arab Republic in 1958. Nasser-inspired officers overthrew the monarchy in Iraq the same year. He nationalized banks and industry, redistributed land, expanded schooling enormously, and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement with Nehru and Tito. To a generation of Arabs he was the answer to a century of being governed by other people.
The six days
It did not hold. Syria left the union in 1961. Egyptian intervention in Yemen's civil war from 1962 became a draining occupation that some Egyptians called their Vietnam. The state Nasser built was a police state: the Muslim Brotherhood was crushed and its intellectual Sayyid Qutb hanged in 1966, an execution that seeded a generation of Islamist militancy that defined itself precisely against Nasserism.
Then came June 1967. In a spiral of miscalculation, Nasser expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and massed troops he did not intend to attack with. Israel struck first and destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground within hours. In six days Egypt lost the Sinai, Jordan lost the West Bank, Syria lost the Golan. Nasser resigned on television and was brought back by enormous crowds in the streets, but the thing that had made him was gone. He died of a heart attack in September 1970, aged fifty-two, with the Sinai still occupied.
What the vacuum filled with
Nasser's defeat is one of the most consequential events in modern Middle Eastern history because of what replaced him. Secular Arab nationalism had promised dignity through unity and modernization, and it had failed a public test in front of the entire region. The alternatives moved in: political Islam, which argued the defeat was punishment for abandoning the faith; Palestinian armed nationalism, which concluded that Arab states would not liberate Palestine for them; and Saudi Arabia, whose conservative monarchy Nasser had spent a decade attacking and which emerged from 1967 with its main rival broken and its oil revenues about to explode.
His successor Anwar Sadat expelled the Soviet advisers, made a separate peace with Israel, and turned Egypt toward Washington. Every part of the Nasser project was reversed within a decade of his death. The nostalgia for him in Arab politics is not really nostalgia for the man. It is for the last moment when the Arab world believed it was going somewhere on its own terms.