Disordered World, page 11
On his return, Fawzi summed up the situation in a common Egyptian expression: ‘Ma fich haga!’ (‘Nothing’s happening!’) ‘How can that be?’ Nasser asked. The general replied, ‘The Israelis are not massed along the border, and the Syrians don’t look as though they are expecting an imminent invasion.’ Nasser was more puzzled than ever, but there was no longer any turning back. His troops were already deployed in Sinai, the blue helmets were packing up and the temperature of public opinion was rising all the time.
Like many great orators, Nasser was always sensitive to the mood of his audience and, especially when it came to the Arab–Israeli issue, often prisoner of his own rhetoric. In those torrid days of 1967, it was clear that public opinion could no longer be controlled and that the mood of the crowd was dictating the actions of the man whose name they chanted.
When on 22 May he declared that the Straits of Tiran were closed to shipping, the reverberations were greater than at any other moment in his career. That very day, lines of demonstrators formed in Arab cities from the Maghreb to Iraq. One slogan was repeated over and over: ‘Yesterday we nationalised the canal, and today we have closed the straits.’ With hindsight, this ‘we’ may provoke a smile, but it translated a genuine feeling. The Arab masses recognised themselves instinctively in Nasser and felt ownership of his political decisions as though they had issued them themselves. On reflection, this was at once both perfectly illusory and profoundly true.
The Egyptian president seemed during those days to be at the peak of his power. The support of the Arab peoples for the coming fight and for the leader who would lead it was so overwhelming that no other leader was able to stand in his way. The most astonishing reaction was that of King Hussein, who had been Nasser’s most determined enemy since the Egyptian came to power. Until that point, there had been a struggle without mercy between the two men. Then suddenly, at dawn on Tuesday 30 May, the Hashemite monarch’s private plane took off for Cairo, where he told his old enemy that he would put the full resources of his kingdom at his disposal in the coming war. Surprised and still distrustful, Nasser insisted that an officer of the Egyptian high command should be placed at the head of the Jordanian army. King Hussein accepted without protest.
This spectacular turnaround is worth pondering for a moment. The ‘little king’ was definitely not a demagogue, and he was passionately devoted to the independence of his country. Nor was he a sworn enemy of the Jewish state bent on military revenge. Throughout his long reign, which lasted almost half a century, he refused to yield to Arab taboos concerning relations with the ‘Zionist enemy’ and he frequently met with Israeli leaders during his travels overseas. He even went so far as to deliver the funeral oration for Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem in 1995, calling the man who had conquered the Holy City at his expense ‘my friend’.
If in May 1967 he decided to join Nasser, it was because it would have been suicidal to set himself against the patriotic legitimacy of the moment. Not taking part in the coming war would have been disastrous for the Hashemite monarchy, whatever the outcome of the fighting. An Arab victory would have placed Nasser in a position to destroy the Jordanian throne. An Arab defeat would have led to the finger of blame being pointed first at any nation which had refused to fight. From the moment war had become inevitable, King Hussein understood that he would have to fight alongside Egypt, and even under its command. That is how the instinct for legitimacy works. Jordan stood to lose the West Bank, but it was already as good as lost, either to the Israelis or to Arab insurgents, as soon as war broke out. King Hussein could not have continued to govern millions of Palestinians if he had refused to take part in the fight for Palestine.
The king would behave in the same way a quarter of a century later, during the first Gulf War. While the whole of the world joined forces against Saddam Hussein, the Hashemite king rallied to Iraq’s support. Was this because he wanted to see him win? Certainly not. Because he believed an Iraqi victory was possible? Absolutely not. It was simply because, at this other crucial turning point in Middle Eastern history, the king preferred to be wrong along with his people, rather than right in opposition to them.
King Hussein’s attitude in 1967 is easier to understand if you compare it with that of another of Israel’s neighbours, Lebanon. Its leaders took a decision not to participate in the war, which at the time seemed eminently reasonable. But in so doing, they lost their patriotic legitimacy in the eyes of a good proportion of the Lebanese people. As a result, the country became bogged down in a historical quagmire from which it still has not escaped forty years later.
From 1968, armed Palestinian groups began to launch attacks from Lebanon. When the Israelis responded violently and the authorities in Beirut, who were incapable of repelling the attacks of their powerful neighbour, decided to clamp down on the Fedayeen, a section of public opinion sided with the militants rather than their own government. The argument which was repeated endlessly was that the Lebanese army, which hadn’t fought against the enemy, should at least not be fighting with those who were.
Lebanon’s wisest politicians repeated that the 1967 war was one of the most unthinking acts that the Arab countries had committed in their history; that if Lebanon had taken part alongside Israel’s three other neighbours, it would have lost part of its territory, as Egypt, Syria and Jordan did; and that its army would probably have been destroyed without changing the power relations or the outcome of the fighting one iota. No one could seriously take issue with any of this. Nonetheless, a significant proportion of the population no longer recognised itself in its government or its army, and could not tolerate seeing it clamp down on those who were actively engaged in fighting. Some Lebanese, especially those who belonged to Muslim communities and left-wing parties, came to consider the Palestinian fighters as their army, and the regular army as belonging to the Christian parties and the right. That regular army began to fall apart and the state lost control of the country.
The region which suffered most was the south. That was where the Fedayeen had gained a foothold; it was from there that they launched their attacks, and that was where the Israelis hit back. The local population, who were mainly Shi’ite, felt as though they were despised and abandoned, victims caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. They came in time to curse the Palestinians just as much as the Israelis.
It was from all these resentments that Hezbollah was born. In 1982, the Israeli army, following a war which had seen it get as far as Beirut, decided no longer to confine itself to limited punitive expeditions, but to occupy the south of Lebanon outright in such a way as to firmly close the border. Shi’ite militants, inspired, armed and financed by their fellow Shi’ites in Iran, threw themselves into a resistance movement which turned out to be highly effective from the start. Little by little, the Lebanese, who had long been mocked by other Arabs for having been the only ones not to take part in the fighting, appeared as the only ones who knew how to fight, to the point that they forced the Israeli army to evacuate their country in May 2000, and then held it in check during the war of the summer of 2006.
So, in the years that followed the war of 1967, Israel’s three neighbours that took part in the fighting managed to reach arrangements which made their borders with the Jewish state perfectly peaceful: with Egypt and Jordan there were treaties, and with Syria, a modus vivendi. Only the fourth neighbour, the one that had not wanted to go to war, was unable to achieve peace. Since then it has been in turmoil. In theory, its leaders in 1967 showed themselves to be reasonable in remaining outside the conflict. In practice, however, the price paid by Lebanon for not taking part in the war was a thousand times more costly than if it had done.
Chapter 9
I shall close this long parenthesis on the way in which legitimacy functions and return to those days in May and June 1967 when Nasser had taken up, or reacquired, the reins of the Arab nation, promising to lead it towards the hoped-for victory. His armed forces and those of Israel were now face to face.
Having originally planned to attack first, Nasser abandoned the idea, convinced that it would be politically disastrous as the Americans would get involved in force on the Israeli side and the Soviets would be embarrassed. If, by contrast, he allowed himself to be attacked, he would immediately find himself in an excellent diplomatic position: the whole world would be with him, not least General de Gaulle’s France; and the United States would find it difficult to get fully involved on the side of the aggressor. In any case, he thought the fighting would go on for weeks, encompassing many fronts, and that reinforcements would pour in from all over the Arab world, while the Israelis would inevitably become exhausted. It would all end in a settlement, he imagined, which would constitute a major political victory for Egypt and for him personally.
Of course, Nasser knew this policy would come at a price. By letting the Israelis strike first, he was taking a risk. But, he believed, it was a calculated one. His right-hand man, Marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer, had assured him that even if all of Israel’s bombers attacked at once, Egypt would only lose between 10 and 15 per cent of its planes. Within a few days, the Soviets would have replaced them.
What Nasser had completely failed to foresee was that the first blow dealt by the Israelis could wipe out the Egyptian air force. Yet that is what happened on the morning of Monday, 5 June 1967.
Flying at very low altitude, the Israeli bombers attacked all of Egypt’s military airports simultaneously, putting runways out of action and destroying planes on the ground. The land army remained intact and could have fought for a long time in Sinai, giving the president the possibility of recovering, replacing his lost aircraft and even preparing a counter-offensive. But Marshal Amer, in a state of panic and confusion, ordered a general retreat, which turned into a rout.
Having put Egypt out of action, the Israeli army turned towards Jerusalem and the West Bank, where it took control following a short street battle; then it turned towards Syria, which retreated from the Golan Heights without much resistance. Within a week, the fighting was over. The victors would call the conflict the Six Day War; for the defeated, it would be above all ‘al-anksa’ (‘the setback’), then quite simply ‘the June War’.
These bland names scarcely conceal the extent of the trauma suffered by the Arabs during these days. It is no exaggeration to say that for them, this short war remains the tragic reference point which colours their perception of the world and influences their behaviour.
Following the defeat, one question obsessed all Arabs and many Muslims throughout the world. Everyone framed it in his own way and came up with his own answers, but the substance was the same: how had such a defeat come about?
At first, in order to excuse his failure, Nasser had said that the attack had not come from Israel alone, but in conjunction with the Americans and the British. If this was not true, it was useful in the short term in order to mitigate the despair felt by the Egyptians and the wider Arab world. Being beaten by a great power was infuriating but it was in the order of things, and much less shameful than being beaten by a small state created twenty years earlier, which had a population a tenth the size of Egypt’s and a smaller army.
The war of 1967 should have washed away the stain of 1948, when the new Jewish state had stood up to a coalition of its neighbours. It was supposed to demonstrate that the Arabs had regained confidence, had reconnected with their former glory, and that their national renaissance under the aegis of Nasser had at last given them back their rightful place among the nations of the world. Instead of which, this lightning defeat had taken away their self-esteem and for years to come established a relationship of profound distrust with the rest of the world, which they perceived as a hostile place run by their enemies in which they themselves no longer belonged. They felt that everything which made up their identity was despised and scorned by the rest of the world and — more seriously still — something within them told them that such hatred and scorn were not completely unjustified. This double hatred — of the world and of themselves — explains in large part the destructive and suicidal behaviour which has characterised the past decade.
This behaviour has become such a frequent, even daily, occurrence in Iraq and elsewhere that it has ceased to be shocking. So it seems to me useful to remind ourselves that never before in the history of humanity have we seen such a widespread phenomenon, never have we lived through a period in which hundreds or thousands of men have shown such a propensity to sacrifice their lives. All of the historical parallels which are sometimes cited to relativise this phenomenon are grossly inappropriate. The Japanese kamikaze were, for example, members of a regular army and their attacks were only common during the last year of the war in the Pacific, and they came to a definitive end with the capitulation of their government. And, in Muslim history, members of the Order of the Assassins only attacked clearly defined targets and never killed at random. They allowed themselves to be taken prisoner and executed for their acts, but never took their own lives. Nor did they commit more than a handful of attacks in the course of two centuries, making them resemble Russian revolutionaries of the tsarist period much more closely than today’s ‘martyrs’.
The despair which fires these martyrs does not date from 1967 or 1948, or the end of the First World War. It is the culmination of a long historical process which no single date or event can adequately encapsulate. It is in the history of a people who have known a great moment of glory followed by a long decline. For two hundred years they have aspired to rise again, but each time they fall back down. Defeats, disappointments and humiliations had followed one after the other until the moment when Nasser appeared. With him, they believed it would once again be possible to get back on their feet, regain their self-esteem and the admiration of others. When they collapsed again in such a spectacular and degrading fashion, the Arabs, and the rest of the Muslim world, had the feeling that they had lost everything irremediably.
Since then, agonising self-examination has been going on, but in an atmosphere of bitterness and fear, and with an excess of faith which poorly masks infinite despair.
Nasser’s defeat, followed by his death in September 1970 at the age of fifty-two, encouraged the emergence of various competing political projects that claimed his legacy.
In Egypt itself, power was assumed by Anwar Sadat, a character previously thought dull and timorous, but who in fact turned out to be bold and flamboyant. That was not the strangest aspect of his career, however; pretenders who make themselves inconspicuous while the master is still alive only to reveal themselves as soon as they assume power are legion throughout world history. Strong men love to be surrounded by people who do not oppose them, who do not cast a shadow and who wait for their moment without showing signs of impatience. Nor was the strangest thing about Sadat that he managed in October 1973 to dislodge the Israeli army’s positions through a surprise attack along the Suez Canal, which in Israel is called the Yom Kippur War, and in Egypt the October War. The strangest thing is that in succeeding where Nasser had failed, the new leader was unable to supplant his predecessor in the hearts of the Arab people. He was even ridiculed and insulted, put in political quarantine and so demonised in some quarters that he ended up being assassinated.
It is strange and also highly revealing for anyone seeking to examine the delicate question of legitimacy. A people still living with the shock of a traumatic defeat suddenly find themselves with a new leader who attains, if not an outright victory, at least a more than honourable semi-success. He should have been adulated, lionised, immediately crowned among the great heroes of the nation, yet the exact opposite happened. If Sadat became an icon, it was for Western and not for Arabic opinion, which never identified with him: not before his spectacular trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, and certainly not after. The Arab people never accorded him that instinctive, almost carnal, legitimacy in their hearts, which Nasser, despite his setbacks, faults and defeats, benefited from until his death.
There was probably some unconscious resentment of Sadat for having succeeded Nasser, just as one may hate a mother’s new partner simply because he has taken the place of a beloved father. In France, for example, all those who held the reins of power after Napoleon suffered in comparison with him, especially those who bore the same name. That the reign of the great emperor had been ruinous and ended in defeat and foreign occupation did not matter. People are grateful to whoever offers them an epic, a dream, the admiration of others, and a scrap of pride. The Napoleonic period was the last during which France occupied first rank among the nations of the earth, and during which it tried to unite Europe around it through the combined force of its arms and ideas. Nasser’s moment was less ambitious, but by the yardstick of what still seemed possible for the Arabs, it played a similar role, and it remains in people’s memories as a moment of glory.
Chapter 10
Everyone will draw their own lessons from the failure of this venture. Sadat conceived a profound distrust of the Arab lands where his predecessor had constantly got bogged down: the Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Libyans and the rest were all ready to fight, he would mutter to those close to him, ‘right to the last Egyptian soldier’.
Reckoning that his country had endured enough without any recompense, he wished to withdraw once and for all from the Arab–Israeli conflict which had exhausted him, and which was damaging his relations with the prosperous West. He would come to think of the Arabs as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. Perhaps he would not say it overtly, but those with an interest picked up on it. As a result, when Sadat took a decision, the Arabs did not view it as theirs. And if he remained legitimate as Egyptian president, he was not perceived as — nor did he seek to be — the natural leader of the Arab nation.
