A few days later, three Israeli soldiers were killed by a mine explosion near the Jordanian frontier. Although Syria was clearly the main source of Palestinian sabotage attacks, Israel launched its customary heavy retaliation raid against a West Bank village. Protesting against their inadequate protection by the Jordanian army, the West Bankers rose in a revolt which was quelled only with difficulty. King Hussein angrily attacked Nasser for his criticism of Jordan’s handling of the affair and taunted him with hiding behind the protection of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), which had kept the Egyptian–Israeli front quiet since 1956.
Tension rose to a new height the following spring, as Israeli leaders issued increasingly severe warnings to Syria. Soviet, Syrian and Egyptian intelligence combined to warn Nasser that an Israeli attack on Syria was imminent. Nasser’s response on 18 May was to ask the UN secretary-general U Thant to withdraw the UNEF from Sinai (where, on Israel’s insistence, it was stationed only on Egypt’s side of the border). When U Thant complied, the road to war was wide open. Nasser ordered troops into Sinai and, with the eyes of the Arab world upon him, announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. King Hussein, realizing that he would be unable to stand aside from the inevitable war that was coming, flew to Cairo on 30 May to sign a defence pact with Egypt. Egypt now had defence agreements with both Syria and Jordan, but there was no real co-operation between them and no semblance of an Arab joint command.
The Arab countries were now in a state of emotional self-intoxication as the belief became widespread that final victory over Israel was imminent. Even Nasser abandoned his usual doubts about Arab military capabilities, although he had exaggerated faith in his own military commander, Field Marshal Amer. He also believed that it was possible that the United States would restrain Israel from attacking and that he could score a tactical victory without fighting. He himself promised the Soviet Union that Egypt would not strike first. However, experience should have told him of the high probability that Israel would act if international pressure was not going to reopen the Straits of Tiran to its shipping. Any last doubts should have been removed when the activist General Moshe Dayan joined the Israeli cabinet on 1 June.
On 5 June 1967 Israel attacked all seventeen of Egypt’s military airfields, destroying most of its airforce on the ground, and on 6 June Israeli forces advanced rapidly into Sinai. The seven Egyptian divisions in Sinai were defeated, and an estimated 10,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed or died of thirst in the struggle to return across the Suez Canal, which Israeli forces reached on 9 June. After destroying the Egyptian airforce, Israel could turn against Jordan, which had entered the war as Egypt’s ally. By the evening of 7 June, with the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank occupied, Jordan accepted the UN Security Council’s demand for a cease-fire. Egypt accepted on the following day. Israel was now free to turn against Syria, which had confined itself to probing attacks. Israeli troops stormed up the Golan Heights and occupied the key town of Quneitra on the Syrian plateau. Syria accepted the cease-fire on 10 June.
The swift and shattering course of the Six-Day War had many immediate and long-term consequences. The Zionist state of Israel had gained military control over all Jerusalem and the remaining 21 per cent of Palestine. Some 200,000 more Arab refugees crossed the River Jordan to the East Bank. Israel had occupied the whole of Sinai and its forces were on the banks of the Suez Canal, where this time they intended to stay. In seizing the Golan Heights, Israel had removed Syria’s strategic advantage.
While Israel’s victory had been too swift for the Soviet Union to help its Egyptian and Syrian friends, Western governments and public opinion were almost unanimously hostile towards the Arabs and favourable towards Israel. The only notable exception was France’s President de Gaulle, who during both the war and its aftermath showed some sympathy with the Arab position and warned against Israel’s domineering tendencies. Egypt’s break with Britain and the United States was complete. At the outset of the war, on the basis of information from King Hussein that Jordanian radar stations had detected approaching from the sea a large flight of aircraft which could come only from British and US carriers, Egypt broke off relations with the US and Britain and expelled all US and British citizens.
Nasser’s heavy share of responsibility in the disaster was clear, and his position, both in Egypt and among the Arabs, was irrepar-ably damaged. In dark tones on the third evening of the war he announced on Cairo Radio his acceptance of full personal responsibility and his intention to resign and hand over power to his vice-president, Zakariya Mohieddin. He also dismissed his right-hand man Field Marshal Amer. Whether or not Nasser had expected it, the reaction was an overwhelming public demand that he should remain in office. The extraordinary dominance which he had achieved in Egypt, and his position as the generally well-loved father figure of a nation accustomed to paternalistic rule, meant that he was not allowed to abandon the presidency at a time of such desperate crisis. His health was deteriorating – he suffered from ‘black diabetes’, which caused defective blood circulation – and there is little doubt that the 1967 disaster shortened his life. But in one sense Egypt’s situation made his position easier, since those who might have challenged his power were restrained by their lack of any practical alternative to his policies. In August 1967 he was faced with a conspiracy to restore Field Marshal Amer as head of the armed forces, and in 1968 and 1969 there were serious outbreaks of student and industrial unrest, but he overcame these with a mixture of firmness and mild concessions. While there was considerable dissatisfaction, especially among the professional classes and intelligentsia, because the old power structure had not been radically changed, the continuing state of emergency with Israel provided a powerful argument for postponing fundamental reforms.
The Soviet Union at once showed its readiness to repair Egypt’s enormous military losses, and Soviet arms and equipment poured into the country. But although Nasser’s public speeches were defiant and even bellicose in tone, in reality he accepted that Egypt’s military options were extremely limited. In November 1967 he accepted the UN Security Council Resolution 242 calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for Arab de facto recognition of Israel, and he publicly agreed with the Soviet leaders on the need for a political settlement in the Middle East.
As Egypt’s armed forces recovered, in 1969–70 Nasser allowed them to conduct a ‘war of attrition’ against Israel along the Suez Canal. The Egyptians scored several successes, which raised public morale, but Israel exacted a heavy cost by bombarding Egypt’s Canal cities and conducting commando raids deep into Egyptian territory. Nasser asked the Soviet Union to step up its aid, and the number of Soviet military advisers in Egypt was increased from about 3,000 to 10,000. But Nasser still had not abandoned hope that a political solution to the Arab– Israeli conflict could be achieved through US pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories. On 1 May 1970 he made what he called a ‘final appeal’ to President Nixon to withhold support for Israel so long as it continued to occupy Arab lands, and on 23 July he announced Egypt’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan, sponsored by the US secretary of state William Rogers and based on UN Resolution 242, which led to a cease-fire in the Suez Canal area on 7 August.
The burden of Arab leadership had finally proved too heavy for Egypt. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Nasser era in the Middle East came to an end during the six fateful days in June 1967, although it began an irreversible decline then. In fact Arab shame and humiliation caused by the catastrophe intensified the anti-Western trend in parts of the Arab world. In South Arabia (the former British Aden Colony and Protectorate) left-wing extremists took power when Britain withdrew in 1967 and created the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In 1969 the conservative parliamentary regime in Sudan was overthrown by radical socialist army officers led by Colonel Jaafar Nimeiry, who moved the country leftwards towards closer relations with Egypt and the Soviet Union. A few months late
r the aged King Idris of Libya was ousted in a coup led by a passionately Nasserist young beduin colonel named Muammar Qaddafy. The events in Sudan and Libya were a boost for Nasser in his decline; they offered the prospect of strategic depth for Egypt’s armed forces and of economic help through Libya’s oil wealth. On Qaddafy’s insistence, Libya, Sudan and Egypt began to discuss plans for a federation. But Nasser’s experience could not make him enthusiastic about such a prospect, and in 1969 neither Sudan nor Libya could be of much help in Egypt’s immediate difficulties.
The support of Sudan and Libya could not outbalance two greater realities which tended to diminish Egypt’s role in the Arab world. One was the fact that Egypt’s defeat greatly enhanced the position of King Feisal, the leader of the conservative and fundamentally pro-Western oil states of Arabia. At the Khartoum summit meeting which followed the 1967 war, Feisal secured Nasser’s agreement to withdraw all his troops from Yemen. Although the Arab leaders at the summit reached the apparently intransigent conclusion that there should be no peace, no direct negotiations and no recognition of Israel, the reality was that, in return for substantial economic aid which would continue ‘until the traces of aggression are removed’, Nasser agreed that the Arab oil states could lift the half-hearted boycott they had imposed on Britain and the United States during the Six-Day War.
King Feisal was now in a stronger position to press his view that Islamic unity was at least as important as Arab unity. In 1969 he secured the holding of the first conference of Islamic heads of state at Rabat, before the Arab summit for which Nasser was pressing. The Islamic summit was a triumph for Feisal as it agreed to the founding of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) with its permanent headquarters in Jedda. When the Arab summit did take place a few months later, Nasser failed to secure Feisal’s agreement that the Arabs should devote all their resources to supporting Egypt in its struggle with Israel. It was a tired and disillusioned Nasser who accepted the US-sponsored cease-fire on the Suez Canal a few months later.
The other major consequence of Egypt’s defeat was that the Palestinian Arabs no longer looked to the Arab regular armies led by Egypt to liberate Palestine. Neither the Palestine Liberation Organization created by the Arab heads of state nor the Palestine Liberation Army, excluded from Jordan, played any role in the Six-Day War. On the other hand, al-Fatah, the largest of the unofficial Palestinian guerrilla organizations, had since 1965 been carrying out operations against Israel from Jordan and Syria. After the 1967 war it chose one of its leaders, the small and dynamic Yasir Arafat, as its spokesman. Guerrilla operations against Israel faced formidable difficulties and made little military impression, but in the wake of the war they aroused enormous public enthusiasm. In 1969 al-Fatah and its allies succeeded in ousting the discredited Ahmed Shukairy from the leadership and Arafat was elected chairman of a new PLO executive. The PLO could never be wholly independent of the Arab states as it could only operate in their territory, but it was not controlled by any one of them. A genuine new political entity in the Arab world – the embryo of a future Palestinian state – had emerged.
The radical anti-Western trend among the Arabs which followed the Six-Day War ran counter to the increased influence of Saudi Arabia. But the Palestinian guerrillas, and the Baathists who controlled Syria and Iraq, were no more inclined to accept Egyptian leadership than King Feisal. Nasser could still act as a mediator, however. When in Jordan in September 1970 a civil war broke out between the Jordanian armed forces and Palestinian resistance organizations, which had bitterly criticized his acceptance of the US peace plan, he was able to call the Arab heads of state to an emergency summit in Cairo at which he succeeded in bringing Yasir Arafat and King Hussein together. It was his last political act. On 28 September, as his guests departed, he died – exhausted – of a heart attack.
Gamal Abdul Nasser has sometimes been compared to Muhammad Ali. Like the pasha, for a time he dominated much of the Middle East from Cairo and gave Egypt a power and influence in the world beyond its natural strength. He also for a time successfully exploited the rivalries of stronger powers, but ultimately ended in failure. But the comparison does not go very far. Unlike Muhammad Ali, Nasser was a native Egyptian – the first to rule Egypt for more than 2,000 years – with a passionate love for his country. But he was an Egyptian who developed a genuine belief in the movement to unite the Arabs, of which he saw Egypt as the natural leader. His attempts to modernize and industrialize Egypt and to carry out social and economic reforms were as much intended to create a better educated and fairer society for the mass of Egyptians as to add to the country’s strength. After their long period of humiliation, he gave them a new sense of pride and dignity which by no means entirely disappeared after his downfall.
Yet Nasser was essentially a man of his time – that of the decolonization of the Arab world – who, as he perceived himself in his early tract The Philosophy of the Revolution, fulfilled a role that was waiting to be filled. His influence was in decline before his early death at fifty-two, and ‘Nasserism’ – a term he personally disliked – could not long survive his disappearance. In a sense, the way in which he came to personify the Arabs in the eyes of the world gave the Arab East an unnatural and temporary unity following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. After his death, underlying forces came to the surface and soon revealed how fragmented the Middle East had become.
12. The Years of Turbulence
With the ending of the Nasser era, the trends which had been apparent since the Arab disaster of 1967 asserted themselves more strongly. There was a further shift in power and influence towards the oil-producing states of the Middle East. At the same time, Israel, which had suffered a period of economic crisis and self-doubt before the Six-Day War, gained new confidence as the indisputably dominant military power in the region. On the other hand, the Arabs of Palestine, whose suffering and oppression had intensified, began the process of asserting their own national identity.
In the two key states of the Arab East – Syria and Iraq – younger leaders emerged in Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, who, against powerful opposition, succeeded in dominating their country’s affairs till the end of the century. Neither could hope to don Nasser’s mantle of Arab leadership, if only because of intense rivalry between them, but they were able to make the Syrian and Iraqi nation-states become regional powers of significance. They were helped by the fact that Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor, effectively abandoned Egypt’s claim to Arab leadership by setting out on his own course which led to a separate peace with Israel. The tragic victim of the variety of conflicting religious/political and socio-economic forces in the Middle East was the tiny republic of Lebanon, which from 1975 was devastated by a 15-year civil war.
The post-Nasser era was marked by a sharp decline in the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and some improvement in relations between the United States and most of the Arab regimes, although these relations were always endangered by the virtually unswerving US support for Israel. By the end of the 1960s Britain had withdrawn from the Gulf and southern Arabia, and the quasi-imperial British role in the Middle East had been finally liquidated.
The Rise of the Oil States
Before the Second World War, the Middle East countries – principally Iran and Iraq – produced less than 5 per cent of the world’s output of crude oil. By 1949, as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia joined the ranks of the big producers and western Europe was ravenous for oil to fuel its post-war recovery, the proportion rose to 12 per cent and a decade later to 25 per cent. As Middle East oil was uniquely plentiful and easy to produce and the economies of the rich industrialized states continued to expand, the upward trend seemed inevitable. By 1970 the Middle East was producing half the oil of the non-communist world.
The Middle Eastern oil-producing states began to become relatively wealthy in the post-war period. In 1950 the oil companies’ practice of making modest royalty payments for each tonne of crude oil extracted was abandoned
for a new system of a fifty–fifty division of net profits between the oil companies and the ruler or government of the producing state. Since output was also increasing steadily, government revenues rose rapidly. In Iraq they went from £13.9 million in 1951 to £51.3 million in 1953. In Saudi Arabia, where revenues were barely half a million dollars before the Second World War, they reached $56 million in 1950 and over $200 million by 1956.
This new wealth transformed the outlook for these previously impoverished countries and enabled them to embark on the building of schools and hospitals and the creation of an economic infrastructure. But their needs were great and their income was still limited in relation to their population and extensive territories. Iran, which had enjoyed some oil income for two generations, had the largest population – about 20 million in 1960. The exception was Kuwait, whose population of fewer than 200,000 was gathered mainly in Kuwait City at the head of the Gulf. Kuwait’s oil revenues increased astronomically – from £3 million in 1949 to £60 million in 1952 – making it the first of the oil city-states (to be followed a decade later by the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai), and it was possible for the modest but exceptionally wise Emir Abdullah Salem al-Sabah (1950–65) to envisage Western living standards for his people within a generation.
In the 1950s Kuwait was still tied to Britain by the Anglo-Kuwaiti treaty of 1899. To the outside world, and especially to the other Arab states, it appeared as little more than a British colony. For Kuwait to become fully independent was difficult, because of the lack of educated Kuwaitis who would be capable of running the administration. However, in 1961 the Kuwait government asked for the abrogation of the treaty, and Britain complied. The risks were immediately apparent when the unstable Iraqi dictator Abdul Karim Kassem revived a long-standing claim to Kuwait and threatened to occupy it by force. The emir appealed to Britain, which landed troops – the Macmillan government seeing an opportunity to redeem the shame of the Suez episode – but two months later they were withdrawn and replaced by an Arab League force. Kuwait had skilfully demonstrated that, though the other Arab states might formerly have regarded Kuwait as an artificial entity, they now wanted its independence. This was the best guarantee for the country’s future.
A History of the Middle East Page 35