The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  It soon became apparent that unification had in effect meant Nasser’s takeover of Syria. Although his cabinet featured two Syrian vice presidents along with two Egyptians, almost all of the UAR’s key ministries were placed in Egyptian hands, and many well-known Syrians, including former president Quwatli, were either demoted or dropped from the cabinet altogether.9 Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, one of the UAR’s vice presidents and a longtime personal friend of Nasser, was put in charge of the Syrian region and given a mandate to implement sweeping economic, industrial, and land reforms. As a precondition for unification, Nasser had demanded that all Syrian parties, including the Baʿth, disband. Instead, political activists could join the National Union, another populist, mass-based party set up in Egypt in the same mold as the now-defunct Liberation Rally (see below). When the Syrian Communist Party failed to dissolve itself, scores of its members and sympathizers were arrested and its assets were seized by the government.

  Though never fully articulated, the vision that Baʿthist officers had had for the UAR was hardly consistent with what Nasser was implementing in the Syrian “region.” The Baʿthists were ideologues and visionaries, believing that in the postunification era they could implement their ideals in a federally governed Syria. But whatever ideals Nasser might have started with as a former revolutionary, by the late 1950s he had become a hardened pragmatist, eager not so much to put his experimental ideas into practice as to solidify his grip on power both domestically and internationally.10 Baʿth members were also disenchanted with the union because of their increasing political marginalization. The heavy hand of the Egyptian bureaucracy, Nasser’s penchant for personal political control, and his ill-advised plans to implement statist economic policies in Syria as he had done in Egypt only heightened popular Syrian anger against the unification process.11 Syrian military officers also resented the preferential treatment that their Egyptian counterparts were receiving in postings and promotions.

  Sensing tensions, in the summer of 1961 Nasser made some adjustments aimed at placating the brewing opposition in Syria. He ordered the transfer of an unpopular Syrian military commander (Abdel Hamid Sarraj) from Damascus to Cairo, promised to spend four months a year in Damascus, and gave Syrians more visible positions in his administration. But these efforts proved to be too little and too late. On September 21, Syrian army units marched on Damascus and, in yet another of the country’s many coups, proclaimed Syria’s independence from the UAR.

  The coup and Syria’s separation from the UAR were a crushing blow to Nasser. In many ways, he was defeated at his own game and by his own actions. This time, unlike in 1956, Nasser could not blame Western imperialism or Zionist conspiracy for his troubles. And he could not, even if he wanted to, turn this defeat into some sort of imagined victory. This was a defeat through and through—political, diplomatic, economic. As if to underscore the futility of the whole endeavor, Nasser made a halfhearted attempt to reverse the coup but then acknowledged the irreversibility of the secession in a radio broadcast the next day. Perhaps to hang on to some vestige of the unity experience, Nasser retained the name United Arab Republic for Egypt. In fact, in April 1963, following military coups in both Iraq and Syria, the three countries entered into negotiations over another proposed union, this time far less centralized and based on what one joint declaration characterized as “studied and clear foundations.”12 Before it got off the ground, however, this venture was also doomed, with Nasser declaring that “we cannot . . . have any link, any alliance, any unity or objective with a Fascist state in Syria.”13

  No sooner was the unification fiasco with Syria over than Nasser found himself in yet another quandary, this time in Yemen. Nasser needed a diplomatic victory and needed it fast. Syria’s secession from the UAR had occurred within the context of—and had in turn heightened—an Arab “cold war” of sorts.14 With Syria taking its case against Egypt before the Arab League, supported this time by Iraq and by the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies, Nasser the Pan-Arabist was finding himself increasingly isolated from the rest of the Arab world. He had also long been at odds with Tunisia’s strongman, President Habib Bourguiba. In fact, by the early 1960s, Nasser’s circle of Arab allies had largely been reduced to one, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, a fellow revolutionary. Nevertheless, his anti-imperialist rhetoric and his charisma still resonated with the Arab masses, and it was because of this continued popularity among aspiring Arab revolutionaries that he and his country were drawn into the Yemeni civil war.

  Yemen had remained one of the world’s most isolated and conservative countries for more than a thousand years, ruled as a theocracy by a successive string of absolutist imams who governed under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1893, Britain occupied the southern dry port of Aden and established what came to be known as the Protectorate of Aden. Once the British withdrew in 1967, the leftist National Liberation Front seized power and, in 1970, renamed the country the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The north, meanwhile, had won its independence from Ottoman rule in 1918 but had remained isolated and deeply steeped in tradition. Palace coups had occurred in 1948 and again in 1955, but the overall nature of state-society relations and the absence of social progress had not changed.15 Imam Ahmad, the kingdom’s ruler, had been initially attracted to the ideals expounded by Nasser, to the extent that on the day the UAR was established, Yemen joined the two countries in a loose confederation called the United Arab States. But there was little substance to the confederation beyond the exchange of diplomatic pleasantries, and, along with Syria, Yemen terminated its association with the UAR in 1961. On September 26, 1962, a group of Yemeni officers launched a military takeover in the hope of ending their country’s conservative monarchy and replacing it with a progressive, republican regime. Despite declaring the establishment of a Yemen Arab Republic, the coup makers did not immediately succeed in overthrowing the monarchy. The day after the coup, Nasser rushed Egyptian troops to Yemen to help republican officers fight against royalist forces. But Nasser had miscalculated. Yemen was about to plunge into a protracted civil war that would last for five years—a nightmare for the people of Yemen and an intractable dilemma for Nasser. Yemen became “Nasser’s Vietnam.”16

  Nasser’s dispatch of troops to prop up the fledgling Yemen Arab Republic was a product of his efforts to reclaim his position as the undisputed leader of the Arab world.17 For revolutionaries, revolutions never end, and Nasser had to keep on fighting, even if thousands of miles away from Egypt. Yemen had originally offered Nasser the perfect opportunity to carry out the various facets of his revolution. It had all the right ingredients: a “revolutionary” military leadership willing to follow his lead; a chance to create state structures from scratch based on the Nasserist model; and, perhaps most important of all, a foothold deep inside the Arabian peninsula, long a bastion of monarchical conservatism as epitomized by the Saudis. But if Nasser saw Yemen as his golden opportunity, the Saudis saw it as a mortal threat, fearing that a republican victory in Yemen might inspire their own subjects to challenge the Saudi monarchy. Before long, therefore, the Yemeni civil war became a war by proxy between Egypt on the one side and Saudi Arabia and some of its allies—such as Jordan, Iran, and Pakistan—on the other. At their peak, Egyptian forces in Yemen numbered some seventy thousand.18 As it turned out, such a massive commitment of troops and resources only deepened what soon became Nasser’s Yemeni quagmire.

  For Nasser, involvement in Yemen turned out to be far from the quick military and hence political victory he had hoped. Initial estimates of the extent of the republicans’ success turned out to be exaggerated, and in less than a year it became obvious that a more sizable commitment of Egyptian troops was needed than originally thought.19 However, the numerical weight of the additional Egyptian troops was offset by their lack of preparedness to fight in Yemen and by the Saudis’ proportionate increase in their support for the royalists. The Egyptian army, trained and equipped for conventional warfare, found itself in unfamiliar terrain and
facing an enemy adept at using guerrilla tactics. Moreover, Yemen’s porous northern borders with Saudi Arabia enabled the Saudis to send additional supplies to their royalist allies with relative ease. The balance of power was made all the more complicated by the tendency of many Yemeni tribes, with which the country was replete, to change sides on the basis of practical considerations.20 By the summer of 1963, the civil war had degenerated into a stalemate that would last for nearly three more years.

  The longer it dragged on, the more of an obsession the Yemen war became for Nasser. By 1966, he was locked into a series of increasingly dangerous cat-and-mouse games with the Israelis, but he stubbornly refused to waver on his commitment to Yemen’s republicans. A series of diplomatic initiatives sponsored by the United Nations, the Arab League, and other regional actors all failed to bring a peaceful end to the Yemeni conflict. Only because of mounting expenses and increasing resentment at home did Egypt slowly begin reducing the number of its troops in Yemen in late 1966. But even after Egypt’s humiliating loss to Israel in June 1967 and the occupation of its territory, Nasser remained obsessed with his Yemeni venture, refusing to back down.21 In the end, however, he had no option but to withdraw his forces. He finally accepted the implementation of a 1965 agreement with Saudi Arabia for the joint withdrawal of all foreign forces from Yemen. By late summer 1967, Egypt’s military presence in Yemen had been significantly reduced. By October, with the last vestiges of the monarchy gone, Yemeni republican leaders finally assumed control over the country. And, as the victorious so often do, they also resumed their own internal squabbles.22

  THE 1967 WAR

  Nasser’s Yemeni misadventure presented him with yet another imperative to salvage his international prestige and his faltering leadership of the Arab cause. Far from unifying the Arabs, the civil war in Yemen had significantly heightened inter-Arab rivalries, with Saudi Arabia and Jordan on one side and Nasser’s UAR on another. The ruling Baʿthists in Damascus also remained mistrustful of Nasser and his designs on Syria. Moreover, while by this time Baʿthist officers had also taken over the reins of power in Baghdad, relations between Iraq and Syria remained cool and often tense. Elsewhere in North Africa, only revolutionary Algeria remained resolutely supportive of Nasser, having finally defeated the French in 1962 after a long, bloody war of liberation, and then having experienced a military coup of its own in 1965. Libya remained under the control of an archaic monarchy and, for now, was militarily and diplomatically marginal to the rest of the Middle East. Morocco had its own border conflict with Algeria, and Nasser’s support of the Algerian position did not endear him to the Moroccans. And Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba had repeatedly criticized Nasser and other Arab “radicals” for their lack of realism and moderation.23

  By 1966, however, these divisions were temporarily masked because of heightened tensions between Israel and three of the frontline Arab states: Jordan, Syria, and the UAR. After Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961, Palestinians were becoming increasingly suspicious of the commitments of the various Arab states to their cause; many feared that the state of Israel would become a permanent reality unless the entire political geography of the region was changed. The only way to bring about such a change, many reasoned, was to encourage the Arab countries to wage another war on Israel. Toward this end, to increase the potential for conflict, Palestinian commandos called the Fedayeen launched a low-intensity campaign of infiltrations and hit-and-run attacks against Israeli targets beginning in the early 1960s. In May 1964, the Arab League, and especially Egypt, had taken the lead in creating the PLO for the specific purpose of curtailing Fedayeen attacks on Israeli targets, thereby reducing the potential for war. These efforts were of little consequence, however. By 1966, because of Fedayeen raids as well as a number of other factors, Israel and its Arab neighbors were on a collision course, one that culminated in the Six Days’ War in June 1967.

  The immediate causes of the 1967 War can be divided into three general categories: the highly volatile atmosphere of the region throughout 1966 and 1967, made all the more explosive by a series of bellicose statements coming out of Damascus and Cairo; the regional and international predicaments of Nasser; and the domestic political predicament of the Israeli prime minister at the time, Levi Eshkol. To begin with, there were the provocative activities of the Fedayeen. These commando raids had intensified after yet another coup in Syria in February 1966, when the new crop of ruling officers in Damascus were more sympathetic to the PLO’s main guerrilla unit, the Fatah. Adding to the tension between Israel and Syria were disputes over water resources and cultivation activities in their border areas, which had resulted in the massive aerial bombardment of Syrian villages by Israeli jets on several occasions.24 Toward the end of 1966, the Soviet Union, which by now had started supplying a limited number of arms to Syria, announced that Israel was amassing troops along the Syrian border in preparation for an all-out invasion.

  Nasser once again found himself in a quandary. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world and the liberator of the Palestinians, the Egyptian leader could not remain on the sidelines for long. On November 4, 1966, the UAR and Syria signed a mutual defense pact, set up a joint military command, and agreed to place their forces under the command of the Egyptian chief of staff in the event of war. Nasser hoped that this show of unity and force would deter Israel from further attacks on Arab targets.25 But this was not to be, for shortly thereafter Israel mounted a serious attack on a Jordanian village, resulting in many casualties and the demolition of a mosque.

  Throughout these months and into 1967, Nasser was keenly aware that the Arab armies were not prepared for war against Israel.26 His strategy appears to have been one of trying to buy time until the Arab armies would be more united and stronger. “I am not in a position to go to war,” Nasser is quoted as having said around this time. “I tell you this frankly, and it is not shameful to say it publicly. To go to war without having the sufficient means would be to lead the country and the people to disaster.”27 The bulk of his own forces were bogged down in Yemen, and those in Egypt had not had sufficient time yet to train and familiarize themselves with the advanced Soviet weaponry they were receiving. But Nasser had once again become a victim of his own rhetoric. When on April 7, 1967, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot down six Syrian jet fighters over Syrian territory, Syria and Jordan both criticized Nasser for not having done anything in Syria’s defense. At this time the Egyptian president embarked on a campaign of intimidation against Israel, one over which he was soon to lose control.

  Events now began unfolding far more rapidly than Nasser had anticipated. On May 15, amid maximum publicity, Egyptian troops started marching toward the country’s borders with Israel in the Sinai desert. Nasser also asked for the formal removal of the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF), which had been stationed along the Egyptian-Israeli border following the 1956 conflict. The UN secretary-general, U Thant, quickly agreed. Nasser then closed the Strait of Tiran, located at the southern tip of the Sinai, to Israeli shipping, an act Israel had vowed not to tolerate. Nasser’s fiery rhetoric continued unabated, however, and, in a dramatic gesture of unity, Jordan and the UAR announced the signing of a joint defense agreement and the placing of Jordanian troops under the command of an Egyptian general. Iraq and Saudi Arabia also announced their readiness to send troops in support of the Arab armies.

  Throughout, Nasser had hoped to avoid a military confrontation with Israel and had at times moderated his rhetoric with proclamations to that effect. His primary goal was to score a political victory at Israel’s expense by forcing the Israelis to stop their massive retaliatory attacks on Jordan and Syria.28 But the more he pursued this goal the more intractable and inflexible his position became, to the point that he could not go back on his statements. Ironically, this was the same predicament in which the Israeli prime minister found himself in relation to other Israeli political actors. Levi Eshkol had often been accused of being weak and indecisive by
the opposition Rafi Party and by members of his own Mapai Party.29 Like Nasser, Eshkol was reluctant to wage war, fearing, among other things, that it might provoke retaliatory measures by the Soviet Union.30 But once Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran, Eshkol had no option but to act. He brought in the popular retired general Moshe Dayan as the country’s new defense minister, and, in the early hours of June 4, the Israeli cabinet voted in favor of war. At 7:30 A.M. on June 5, Israel commenced a relentless campaign of aerial assault against Egypt.

  The Israeli campaign was brilliantly planned and executed. Because of Israel’s small size and population, its military doctrine had long been based on massive, surprise, offensive attacks that concentrated the greatest firepower on the biggest foe.31 Accordingly, within the first few hours of the war, the Israeli air force managed to destroy almost all of the Egyptian airplanes that were parked in air bases within range of its jet fighters. These included seventeen airfields and approximately 300 aircraft.32 By the end of the second day, the IDF claimed, it had destroyed a total of 418 aircraft from Arab countries, including 309 from Egypt, 60 from Syria, 29 from Jordan, 17 from Iraq, and 1 from Lebanon.33 Left with no support from the air, Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip were overwhelmed by the end of the second day, and by the end of the third day the entire Sinai, extending as far west as the Suez Canal, was in Israeli hands (map 5). Highways leading out of the peninsula were littered with bombed-out cars and buses carrying fleeing Egyptians.

  On the morning of the third day, June 7, Israeli forces turned their attention toward the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and, once again in complete control of the skies, overran Jordanian forces by that evening. The city of Jerusalem, with all its religious and historical significance for the Jews, was now in Israeli hands. For the first few days, the Syrian front had been relatively quiet, and activity there had been limited to isolated runs over Israeli territory by the remaining Syrian jets. On the fifth day of fight--ing, however, Israel initiated a massive attack on Syria, by the end of which it had captured the strategic Golan Heights. The Golan had housed Syria’s strategic missile batteries, whose positions had earlier been revealed to the IDF by an Israeli undercover spy named Elie Cohen.34 The Syrians initial--ly put up a stiff resistance, but by early afternoon of the next day their defenses had collapsed and they retreated. Earlier, on June 7 and 8, Jordan and Egypt, respectively, had agreed to a UN-sponsored cease-fire. Syria had also agreed to a cease-fire on June 9. Only after its capture of the Golan was complete, on June 11, would Israel agree to stop all hostilities.