346. From Suez To The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (Part 1)

0:00William:If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk .com.

0:30Anita:Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.

0:34William:And me, William de Rumpel. And we are launching a new series today. And I want to start by telling you exactly why we are doing it right now. On February the 28th of this year, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. They called it Operation Epic Fury. The Middle East, which has already endured the Gaza War, the Lebanon War, the Syrian Civil War, the Yemen war, the emergence of ISIS, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq is on fire again. And it did not catch fire by accident.

1:09Anita:Every 21st century war in the Middle East has a 20th century ancestor. And this series on the Arab-Israeli wars is our attempt to trace those ancestors. So we're going to be exploring a 15-year period of conflict that created a domino effect that takes us to where we are today. from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the 1973 war and oil crisis to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now, to help us understand what's going on and why, we've brought back one of our favourite friends of the show. Listeners will know Eugene Rogan from our Gaza series. Eugene is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and a Fellow of St.

1:50Anita:Anthony's College, Oxford. He's Director of the Middle East Centre. He's the author of The Arabs. I hope it is one of the finest single volume histories of modern Arab world that you're ever going to get your hands on. Eugene, a very warm welcome back to Empire. Anita, Will, thank you so much for inviting me back to my very favourite history conversation. Let's, Eugene, go right back to the 1950s and see how the socio-political world of the modern Middle East was formed and the context building up to the Six-Day War.

2:19William:Maybe you should start by painting a picture of the Arab world after Suez. Well, it's such an interesting starting point, Willie, because in a sense, the last time great powers allied with Israel to prosecute a war against Israel's enemies in the region was the Suez Crisis. This is the collusion between France and Britain with Israel to bring around a crisis to topple the government of Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, one of the free officers who came to power in the July 1952 revolution that toppled the monarchy in Egypt, would emerge as the president and the real face of the Egyptian revolution in 1954.

3:06From 54 until the Suez Crisis, Nasser was really putting himself forward as a spokesperson not just for Egypt's revolution, but for revolutionary change in the Arab world, a radical departure from the imperial past, where the Arabs were under the control of Britain and France, towards a new age of assertive self-determination, sovereignty, where armies of the Arab world would guard Arab territory against their greatest threat, which was, of course, Israel at that point, and trying to find a third way between aligning themselves with the Soviet Union and the United States in what was emerging to be a very hard, cold war dividing the world between Soviet and American spheres of influence.

3:49And I think that's, in a sense, the world of 1956, where we begin our story.

3:54Anita:There are two very different tales that are told about this period of time. And often in the West, you know, the Arab voices are missing completely from the pages. Tell us why this difference of perspective is a clear line to where we are today. If one wanted to write about the Russian Revolution, You'd probably be drawing on Russian sources to capture what it was that motivated Russian actors to take dramatic political action. And I think that logic prevails if one wants to try and approach modern Arab political history. It's just, you'd want to go to the sources that captured not just the political elites, but also the participants, the soldier on the ground, the woman on the home front, the journalists or the diarists who seem to capture the zeitgeist of the mood of society at that moment.

4:43And so in writing the Arabs, I privileged Arab sources not as a way to kind of propagandize for the Arab perspective on things, but to help Western readers who all too often have understood this region through the biases and slants of their own perspective as Europeans or Americans, or those of their close allies in the region like Israel, or perhaps those politically aligned with Western powers. and instead to try and balance that out with a better understanding of how modern history has been lived by the Arabs and seen through Arab eyes.

5:18William:You spent a lot of your time as a PhD student in Damascus, didn't you? Studying in the archives there. That was where you, in a sense, cut your teeth on Arab opinion. I spent a lot of time in Damascus, in Beirut and in Amman, Jordan. I sort of started my own research career as someone focused on this sort of greater Syrian territory, Australia, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

5:42Anita:Speaking of the Arab perspective, you had a situation where Nasser became this hero, you know, sort of carried around on this palanquin of Arab opinion. You know, he had forced humiliation on the British and the French and the Israelis and everyone was forced to back down. Is there something to be said that that success laid the groundwork for the rest of the world's attitude towards that region? I think 1956 is hugely influential on Arab public opinion and on Western views of the Arab world. You can say that popular support for Nasser spread right across the Arabic-speaking world because he was able to take a stand against the European powers and against Israel.

6:24And though Egypt suffered military defeat by his endurance and survival, He was able to see Egypt win a diplomatic victory, the forced withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula, Britain and France forced to withdraw from Egypt in shame, and a kind of assertive American policy trying to refocus the world on the priorities of the Cold War rather than on trying to reestablish imperial priorities. For the Arab world to see Nasser emerge triumphant from that cloud of confusion and war of the Suez crisis was part of why he gained an Arab worldwide support base. But the other thing is, I think Nasser came away with a dangerous lesson, which is that you can lose militarily and win diplomatically.

7:13And Nasser will get reckless. What worked in 1956 backfires terribly in 1967.

7:19William:I think one important thing we've got to establish before we plunge into 1967 is to talk about the Palestinians, the events that the Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe. And what Israelis remember is the birth of their state, this extraordinary moment in history when one people who had been homeless have a homeland and the Palestinians who had been rooted in the landscape of Palestine lose it. 85 % of them are expelled from their homes and end up in refugee camps. In the aftermath of Suez, what is the situation of the Palestinians? They had more or less disappeared from the political map, more often referred to as refugees than actually as Palestinians.

7:59They had delegated responsibility for achieving their national rights to the Arab states and the Arab League. Palestinians were left divided between the countries in which they took refuge, living in misery in squalid camps in Lebanon, integrated to a higher degree perhaps in the area around Damascus that comes to be known as the Armouk camp. It's only in Jordan where Palestinians are actually granted citizenship. The Jordanians annexed the territory of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which remained in Jordanian hands after the 1948 war. And by taking the land, the Jordanians had to confer citizenship on the people.

8:39In Gaza, Palestinians were left under an Egyptian trusteeship, where for a brief period, the Egyptians tried to foster institutions of self-rule called the All-Palestine Government. But the All-Palestine Government headquarters moved to Cairo, where it's very clear that this is not an instrument for Palestinian affirmation. The Palestinians in Gaza remain voiceless, voteless, basically another refugee community not represented politically.

9:05William:There's a UN resolution, isn't there, 194, which insists on the right of return, that they should be able to go back to their old homes. Now, it's been reaffirmed by the international community every year since 1948. But what was the practical effect? The resolution has never been respected. And in essence, the Israelis have passed laws to make sure that it never is. So the territory on which Palestinians might hope to achieve their right of return has been reduced to 22 % of the landmass of Mandate Palestine, the territories that had remained in Arab hands after 1948, and were going to be conquered by Israel in 1967.

9:44Anita:Can I ask, Eugene, about the Arab Cold War? It's a phrase you use in your book, and I think it's marvellous in capturing the complexity of the Arab political world during this period, because it's very easy, and people do use this word, you know, the Arab frame of mind, the Arab block, you know, it isn't a monolith, is it? No, thank you, Anita, and I think it's a really important point to stress. I'm perhaps guilty I wrote a book called The Arabs, which seemed to imply there was a history that belonged to a people in a monolithic sense. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to beat you up with the question.

10:15It's allowed, you know, one should be able to explain these things to reasonable people. But obviously, the diversity of Arab experience as one moves across North Africa, through the Middle East, to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, is one of the defining feature of Arab history. And in the years between 1956 and 1967, it's a very fractured part of the world. Though there is the aspiration for common Arab platforms, common Arab action, pan-Arab politics, the reality is the Arab world is divided between those revolutionary republics that overthrew the states inherited from British and French mandate in countries like Egypt in 1952, Syria that came out of French mandate rule in the 1940s, in Iraq, in Yemen, Algeria, which will emerge independent from the French in 1962.

11:09These become the kind of radical Arab states, as the West saw them, leaning towards the Soviet model, drawing on the Soviet Union to supply them with their military hardware and their development assistance. And then the more conservative Arab states, the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, Jordan, Morocco, throw in Lebanon and Tunisia for good measure, countries that remained aligned to the West and drew their military and their development support from the West. And in this sense, tensions between Arab states were quite real, particularly between, let's say, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, struggling a rearguard action against the charisma and the appeal of Abdel Nasser and the revolutionary movement.

11:52And you can understand the Arab Cold War.

11:54Anita:How did they talk about Nasser on that conservative side? What was their perception of what Nasser was doing? The Jordanians didn't like him at all, did they? Everyone had been very dismissive of the chances of Jordan to survive the revolutionary wave that swept the Arab world of the 1950s. A much stronger Hashemite monarchy crumbled in 1958. So people writing the obituary of the Jordanians. And I think the pressure came first and foremost from Egypt and the appeal of Nasserism. The Jordanians felt very vulnerable. They leaned very heavily on their old British allies, their new American allies, and regionally on fellow conservatives like Saudi Arabia.

12:33That will come to a head in a kind of Jordanian-Saudi alliance in confronting Egypt over Egypt's incursion to the next revolution to overturn a monarchy, which would be in Yemen in 1962.

12:45William:Tell us about that, because that's a crucial thing that you write about, which I have to say was new to me. I hadn't realized this whole Yemen quagmar that you write about. Well, this is why you've got to write a book about Arab history, Willie, because you learn stuff in writing books. I knew that there'd been a revolution in 62, and I was aware that Egypt had supported that revolutionary movement. But I just hadn't realized the extent to which Egyptian armed forces had been drawn into what would come to be called Egypt's Vietnam, in which easily one-third of the most experienced battle-hardened veterans of the Egyptian army would be pinned down in Yemen at the very moment where Egypt would be drawn into a critical situation in its frontier in the Sinai with Israel in 1967.

13:30I was absolutely fascinated by this delusional deployment of troops. Why? If you were genuinely mobilizing on a hostile footing, with your greatest military threat, a country that's defeated you in 1948 and again in 1956, why would you do so with one arm clearly tied behind your back?

13:53Anita:When you say the one arm, we're talking about 70 ,000 soldiers. I mean, that's nearly a third of Egypt's entire army. Absolutely true. And as I said, they're most experienced troops, the people you would want to deploy on the front line if you wish to pose a credible threat to your most serious rival and enemy Israel. And there they were, thousands of kilometers away, fighting a losing battle to try and contain a threat which left Egypt as vulnerable as every occupier in mountainous countries. Think about Russia's occupation of Afghanistan, or when the Saudis and Emiratis recently tried to intervene in Yemen.

14:29Don't take on people who know the terrain better than you do. It's a fool's mission, and it had been Egypt's Vietnam right between 1962 to 67. them.

14:37Anita:We're going to take a break. We've been talking about cross-border tensions that exist, but I want to come back and talk about the tensions that exist within Egypt itself, because there is a massive dysfunctional relationship that's really fascinating between Nasser and his commander-in-chief. Join us after the break and we'll tell you more.

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15:32Anita:So welcome back. Now, look, we were talking about the tensions that existed between Arab sovereigns in the 60s. But I just want to sort of hone in on this really interesting psychodrama between Nasser and his commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Ammar. Oh, it's a tragedy, Anita. I mean, you're dealing here with a real bromance. I think that Abdel Nasser and Abdel Hakim Amr, they really loved each other. They saw each other through their war service. They were shoulder to shoulder in the revolution. They were thick as thieves in the early years about how to reorganize the government. I think Nasser trusted Amr totally.

16:13And though Amr didn't have the rank and experience to do so, he's promoted the field marshal and he's put in charge of Egyptian forces. when Egypt unites with Syria, he's sent by Nasser to be the kind of generalissimo who will oversee Syria as a sort of viceroy while it's united to Egypt between 1958 and 1961 in the United Arab Republic. This is a very key part.

16:39William:Again, this is something that people don't know well. So Egypt and Syria join up, but it's only last three years, partly because Nasser's mate is behaving like a viceroy and treating the Assyrians certainly like colonized figures. I mean, we haven't really talked about the United Arab Republic. And it was, in a sense, a moment where I think Nasser's standing in the Arab world reached unprecedented heights, because he delivered on the dreams of Arabs going right through the 20th century for undoing the borders imposed by Europe in the Middle East and creating a greater Arab union, a critical mass with which Arabs might stand up to the other powers of the day.

17:21So there are huge aspirations pinned to a union of Egypt and Syria.

17:26Anita:I'm taking you back to the bromance though, because I'm very much into this story. So you've got these two people who adore each other. You've got the world watching as Nasser promotes his bro to the highest possible position. But that's all fine. That works as long as you have two people on the same page. It's when one starts moving off the page and that becomes the pivotal problem here, doesn't it? It does at the top, but certainly not in public perception because you're living in an age of propaganda. And I think the image cast by the free officers was of dedicated, patriotic, ideologically motivated leaders.

18:04People believed it. The Syrians were deeply resentful of the high-handed way in which the Egyptians under Amr's viceroyalty treated Syria. They really treated it like a colony. They cut the Syrians out of governing their own territory. They weakened the military, made it totally subordinate to Egyptian commanders. They really hurt the Syrian economy by imposing measures that they introduced in Egypt that just didn't work in Syria. So, if you wanted to make a union of Arab states work, you wouldn't have gone about it the way that you did. And what ultimately drives the Syrians to break with the Union in September of 1961, the fault really lies with Ahmed.

18:45And I think it should have been a warning sign to Nasser that his trusted best friend was perhaps not entirely in command of the situation.

18:56Anita:And has bad judgment. I mean, quite simply put, just, you know, makes bad calls. Yeah, but there was no accountability. In a sense, it would have almost looked like the revolution failing to have said that Amr failed. And so they preferred to lay the blame on reactionaries in Syria. And in a sense, Egypt is going to enter into a more ideological and less realist phase after 1961, very linked to this Arab Cold War thinking, where in trying to explain what led to the defeat of the United Arab Republic, the secession of Syria, the failure of the Arab dream, They blamed it on the forces of reaction and that the revolution had not gone far enough in advancing the progressive agenda and in crushing reactionaries.

19:42And this is, if you like, going to take Egypt into a yet more ideological, less grounded in reality series of policies, which is where their departure from reality only broadens as we go through the experience of intervening in the Yemen war the next year in 1962. and then why Egypt would find it normal to be pinned down in a losing conflict in Yemen and go on to a war footing with Israel in 1967. It's ideological, it's not realistic, and they're losing their grip on reality. And I think the relationship between Amir's command of the military, Nasser's control over the political sphere, is leading them into a conflict that will come to a head in 1967 as well.

20:25William:Eugene, this connects with one of your big arguments, I think, in the Arabs, that the Arab state's failure, which we see at this period repeatedly, is not failures of will or courage or a lack of resources. It's an institutional failure that lets them down time and again. I think the institutions of revolutionary republics were flawed because they did not provide voice to citizens. You didn't really have, let us say, a parliament with a government and an opposition that was allowed to debate policies. The revolutionary republics were all headed by military men. And the culture of the military was that offices give orders and subalterns follow.