Arabs (63 page)

Nasser believed he had to strike a bold response and quickly. Within twenty-four hours he had a plan, and only six days to pull off his most ambitious coup yet.

 

Nasser was scheduled to give a major speech in Alexandria on July 26 marking the fourth anniversary of the revolution. His theme would be the Aswan Dam. If the Western powers refused to help the Egyptians, he planned to argue, then Egypt would pay for the dam itself by nationalizing the Suez Canal and diverting the canal’s revenues to meet the cost of the dam.

Legally, the Egyptian government had every right to nationalize the Suez Canal, so long as it paid shareholders in the Suez Canal Company fair compensation for their stock. However, as a public company listed in France, with the British government as the largest shareholder, Nasser knew that nationalization of the canal would provoke an international crisis. Britain in particular was determined to preserve its influence in the Middle East and would interpret the nationalization as another hostile measure by the Egyptian government. Nasser estimated the likelihood of foreign intervention to run as high as 80 percent.

In the event they opted for war, Nasser calculated that it would take the British and the French at least two months to raise the necessary military force to intervene. The two-month delay would give him crucial time to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. It was quite a gamble, but one Nasser believed he had to take to uphold Egypt’s independence from foreign domination.

Nasser tasked a young engineer named Colonel Mahmoud Younes with the actual takeover of the Suez Canal Company’s offices. On the evening of July 26, Younes was to tune into Nasser’s speech on the radio and launch the operation if and when he heard Nasser say the code words, “Ferdinand de Lesseps”—the architect of the Suez Canal. If Nasser did not mention the name during the speech, Younes was to do nothing and wait for further orders.

As was his habit, Nasser gave his speech from notes and launched into the background of the Aswan Dam crisis. He recounted the history of Egypt’s exploitation by the imperial powers, he cited the case of the Suez Canal, and he mentioned Ferdinand de Lesseps—many times over. “The President was so worried [Mahmoud
Younes] would miss it that he kept on repeating the Frenchman’s name,” Heikal recalled. “It was de Lesseps this and de Lesseps that until he had repeated it about ten times and people began to wonder why he was making such a fuss about de Lesseps, for the Egyptians had no real love for him.”

Nasser needn’t have worried, as the attentive Colonel Younes had heard the name on the first mention, turned off his radio, and went to work. “I’m sorry,” he later confessed to Nasser, “I missed the rest of your speech.”

His teams secured the Suez Canal Company branch offices in Cairo, Port Said, and Suez. Younes personally commanded the takeover of the company’s headquarters in Ismailiyya. As one of the men who accompanied Younes recalled, “We entered the offices in Ismailia at around 7pm and there was no staff in the offices, except the nightshift. We called the senior staff, foreigners of course because there was no Egyptian in the decision-making level . . . and they were taken by surprise.”
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The occupation of all three offices of the company was accomplished by a team of thirty officers and civil engineers.

By the time Nasser reached the climax of his speech, the canal was securely in Egyptian hands. “We will not allow the Suez Canal to be a state within a state,” Nasser told his enchanted audience. “Today the Suez Canal is an Egyptian company.” After declaring the nationalization of the canal, Nasser went on to pledge that the £35 million revenues from the canal would henceforth be applied to build the Aswan High Dam project. “The people went wild with excitement,” Heikal remembered.
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News of the nationalization of the Suez Canal sent shock waves through the international community. Ben-Gurion’s first thought was that it would provide the opportunity to topple Nasser. He made overtures to the United States but found the Eisenhower administration noncommittal. He confided to his diary: “The Western powers are furious . . . but I am afraid that they will not do anything. France will not dare to act alone; [British Prime Minister] Eden is not a man of action; Washington will avoid any reaction.”
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Yet Ben-Gurion underestimated the depth of British and French anger over Nasser’s move.

The French were the first to react. The day after the nationalization, Maurice Bourès-Maunoury, the French minister of defense, called Shimon Peres, then serving as director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, to ask him how long it would take the Israel Defense Force to conquer the Sinai Peninsula to the Suez Canal. Peres made a rough guess: two weeks. The French minister came straight to the point: Would Israel agree to take part in a tripartite attack on Egypt, in which Israel’s role would be to seize the Sinai, and a joint Anglo-French force would occupy the Suez Canal Zone? Peres was in no position to commit the Israeli government to a war alliance, but he gave the French an encouraging reply and initiated a collusion that would result in the Second Arab-Israeli War.

The French next approached Sir Anthony Eden with the plan, in which an Israeli attack on Egypt in the Sinai would provide the pretext for a joint Anglo-French military intervention to “restore peace” in the Canal Zone. The assumptions were that Nasser’s government could not survive such an attack, that Israel would secure its frontiers with Egypt, and that Britain and France could reassert their control over the canal by such improbable means. The whole mad plan reveals nothing so much as a collective lapse in judgment.

To conclude the unlikely tripartite alliance, a meeting was convened in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, attended by Christian Pineau and Selwyn Lloyd—the French and British foreign ministers—and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was an uncomfortable conversation marked by deep mistrust between the Israelis and the British, reflecting the bitterness of the end of the Palestine mandate. But the conspirators were held together by their shared hatred of Nasser and their determination to see him destroyed.

After forty-eight hours of intense negotiations, the three parties struck a secret agreement on October 24, 1956. First Israel would invade Egypt, provoking an Arab-Israeli conflict that placed maritime communications through the Suez Canal in jeopardy. Britain and France would insist on a cessation of hostilities, which would of course be ignored. The Anglo-French alliance would then intervene with their own troops to occupy the Canal Zone. So little did the Israeli diplomats trust their French and English counterparts that they insisted that all parties sign a written agreement, lest the Europeans try to back out after Israel’s initial invasion.

Britain and France both had good reason to reconsider their collusion with Israel. France had gained widespread hostility for providing arms to the Israelis after 1948, and for denying Algerian demands for independence. Britain’s imperial past continued to bedevil its relations with Arab nationalists. For the former imperial powers to side with Israel was a plan destined to poison the European powers’ relations to the Arab world. And there was little chance of such a conspiracy long remaining a secret.

Yet the improbable plan went into effect when Israel attacked Egypt on October 29, initiating a war in the Sinai and a rush to the Suez Canal. The next day, Britain and France delivered the agreed ultimatum to both the Egyptians and the Israelis to cease hostilities and withdraw their forces 10 miles from their respective banks of the Suez Canal. The French and British revealed their hand in the crisis by mistiming their announcement. They demanded the withdrawal of all belligerents from the Canal Zone while Israel was still miles from the canal. As Nasser’s confidant Mohamed Heikal reasoned, “What justification was there in the demand for a mutual withdrawal ten miles from the Canal when the Israelis at that stage had only one battalion of lightly armed paratroopers still forty miles from the Canal?” The only reason why Britain and France might expect the Israelis to be at the canal was if they had played a role in planning the attack.

As evidence of British collusion in Israel’s attack mounted—British surveillance aircraft were spotted flying over the Sinai—the Egyptians were forced to accept the unthinkable. As Heikal recalled, “Nasser just could not bring himself to believe that Eden, with all the knowledge he claimed of the Middle East, would jeopardise the security of all Britain’s friends and Britain’s own standing in the Arab world by making war alongside Israel on an Arab nation.”
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The United States was also incredulous as it watched the Suez Crisis unfold. Certainly, the Americans were not above such tactics—the Central Intelligence Agency had itself been plotting a coup against the Syrian government, to be executed on the very day the Israelis began their attack.
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The Syrians had accepted Soviet economic assistance, and the United States wanted to contain the threat of Soviet expansion into the Middle East. Such an operation was entirely consistent with the U.S. worldview in 1956.

The Eisenhower administration found the Suez conflict incomprehensible. Britain and France were still acting like imperial powers at the height of the Cold War. For the Americans, the containment of Soviet expansion was the only geostrategic game that mattered, in the Middle East as in other critical parts of the world. They could not conceive of their NATO allies Britain and France going to war over a once-strategic waterway that led to their now-defunct empires in South and South-east Asia. Eisenhower was also furious with his European allies for undertaking such a major military operation without consulting the United States. Had they been consulted, the Americans certainly would have opposed the Suez war. The British and French governments knew perfectly well how the Americans would respond and chose to leave Washington in the dark.

From the American perspective, the Suez Crisis was an unmitigated disaster. The disruption to an American covert operation in Syria was completely overshadowed by events in Hungary. On October 23, just six days before the Israeli attack on Egypt, a revolution had erupted in Hungary. Student demonstrations against the Stalinist regime in Budapest had led to nationwide protests. Within days, the Soviet-supported government fell, and a new cabinet was formed under the leadership of reformer Imre Nagy, who quickly moved to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, effectively ending military cooperation with the Soviets and their allies. It was the first crack in the Iron Curtain separating Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from the West, and the most important development since the start of the Cold War.

Working the halls of the United Nations to protect the movement in Hungary from Soviet retaliation, the Eisenhower administration watched in fury as the British and French began hostilities in Egypt. The Anglo-French intervention provided a better distraction than the Soviets could have dreamed of. After their bombers blitzed Egyptian air bases on October 31, the British and French dropped paratroops into
the Canal Zone in early November. Soviet diplomats were able to seize the moral high ground in defending Nasser’s Egypt against Western aggression, all the while deploying their own forces in Hungary to restore their authority over Eastern Europe. NATO solidarity was undermined just when the West most needed to provide a solid front to contain the USSR. Eisenhower placed full responsibility for the loss of Hungary on Britain and France.

In Egypt, Nasser found himself fighting a war he could not win against three better-armed enemies. In the opening days of the war he ordered his forces to retreat from Gaza and the Sinai, which fell rapidly to the Israelis, and to concentrate on defending the Canal Zone. Nawal El Saadawi was serving as a doctor in a village clinic in the Delta and remembered hearing Nasser’s speech echoing “from thousands of radios in the houses and on the streets: ‘We shall go on fighting until the invaders leave. We will never surrender.’” His defiance in the face of an unprovoked attack by superior forces once again electrified the Egyptian people, who volunteered en masse to assist the national effort. “I took off my doctor’s coat,” Saadawi recalled, “and put on fatigues.”

Saadawi, like many other Egyptians, was prepared to go to the war zone to assist the effort, but in the disorder that followed she never got the call; she thus followed events from her village in the Delta. When, on November 6, British and French paratroops laid siege to Port Said, she—like all Egyptians—was horrified. “Rockets and bombs were dropped by thousands from planes, naval ships bombarded it from the sea, tanks roared through the streets, and sharpshooters were parachuted on to the roofs of houses,” Saadawi wrote. The Egyptians mounted civilian resistance that fought alongside their army. “Groups of guerrilla fighters, most of them very young, were formed and began to fight with guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails.”
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In all, some 1,100 civilians were killed in the fighting in the Canal Zone.

The Americans placed great pressure on Britain and France to stop fighting and withdraw their troops. American efforts in the Security Council were stymied by Britain and France exercising their vetoes to prevent the passage of any resolutions constraining their actions in Suez. With the Soviets and their allies threatening to intervene in the conflict on Egypt’s side, the Eisenhower administration resorted to outright threats against Britain and France to secure compliance with their demands for an immediate cease-fire. Both countries were threatened with expulsion from NATO, and the U.S. Treasury warned it would sell part of its Sterling bond holdings to force a devaluation of the British currency, which would have had a catastrophic impact on the British economy. The threats were effective, and Britain and France conceded to a United Nations cease-fire on November 7. All British and French troops were withdrawn from Egypt by December 22, 1956, and the last Israeli forces withdrew from Egypt in March 1957, to be replaced by a United Nations peacekeeping force.