Arabs (61 page)

Nasser rejected Dulles’s suggestion out of hand. MEDO provided a basis for extending the British military presence in Egypt—something no Egyptian leader could permit. What Nasser could not get Dulles to appreciate was that the Egyptians saw no grounds to fear a Soviet menace. The real threat for Egypt was Israel. Mohamed Heikal (b. 1923) was editor of the influential Egyptian daily
Al-Ahram
and a close confidant of Nasser’s. He remembered Nasser asking Dulles: “How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal [i.e., Israel] to worry about somebody who is holding a knife 5,000 miles away?”
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Relations between Egypt and Israel deteriorated following the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Evacuation Agreement in 1954. Ben-Gurion saw the British presence in the Suez Canal Zone as a buffer between the Egyptians and Israel, and the imminent withdrawal of British troops thus spelled disaster. In July 1954, Israeli military intelligence started covert operations in Egypt, planting incendiary devices in British and American institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. They apparently hoped to provoke a crisis in relations between Egypt, Britain, and the United States that might drive Britain to reconsider its withdrawal from the Suez Canal.
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Much to Israel’s embarrassment, however, one of the Israeli spies was caught before planting his device, and the whole ring was exposed. Two of the men in the notorious Lavon Affair (named after the then defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was blamed for the fiasco) were later executed, one committed suicide in prison, and the others were sentenced to long prison terms.

Tensions between Egypt and Israel reached a new height in the wake of the Lavon Affair and the subsequent execution of the Israeli agents. Ben-Gurion, who had stood down as prime minister for just over a year while the dovish Moshe Sharett headed the government, returned to the premiership in February 1955. He marked his return to office with a devastating attack on Egyptian forces in Gaza on February 28, 1955.

The Gaza Strip was the only part of the Palestine mandate to remain in Egyptian hands at the end of the 1948 war, and it teemed with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The border between Gaza and Israel was frequently infiltrated by dispossessed Palestinians, some to recover property from lost homes inside what was now Israel, others to inflict damage on the Jewish state that had displaced them. Two such infiltrations in February 1955 served as the Israeli government’s pretext for massive retaliation. Two companies of Israeli paratroopers crossed into Gaza and destroyed the Egyptian army’s local headquarters, killing thirty-seven Egyptian soldiers and wounding thirty-one. Israel had displayed its military superiority, and Nasser knew his days would be numbered if he did not provide his army with better weaponry with which to stand up to the Israelis.

Egyptian losses in Gaza placed Nasser in a terrible bind. He needed foreign military assistance more than ever yet could not afford to make concessions to secure such aid. The British and the Americans continued to press Nasser to join a regional alliance before they would consider providing modern weapons to Egypt. The English-speaking powers were now urging Nasser to sign on to a NATO-sponsored alliance called the Baghdad Pact. Turkey and Iraq had concluded a treaty in February 1955 against Soviet expansion, to which Britain, Pakistan, and Iran all acceded in the course of the year. Nasser was bitterly opposed to the Baghdad Pact, which he saw as a British plot to perpetuate its influence over the Middle East and to promote its Hashemite
allies in Iraq over the Free Officers in Egypt. Nasser condemned the Baghdad Pact in no uncertain terms and succeeded in preventing any other Arab state from acceding to the pact, despite British and American enticements.

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden began to see Nasser’s influence behind every setback to British policy in the Middle East and hardened his line against the Egyptian leadership. In light of the growing antagonism between Nasser and Eden, there was no question of Britain supplying Egypt’s military with advanced weapons.

Nasser next sounded out the French as an alternate source of military hardware. But the French, too, had grave misgivings about Nasser due to his support for nationalist movements in North Africa. Nationalists in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria were mobilizing to secure their full independence from France, and they looked to Egypt as both a role model and an ally. Nasser in turn sympathized with the North African nationalists and saw their struggle against imperialism as part of the broader Arab world’s resistance to foreign domination. Although he had little in the way of financial or military resources to offer, he was only too happy to provide refuge to exiled nationalists and to leave them the freedom to mobilize their independence struggle within Egypt’s frontiers.

So long as Nasser provided a free haven to North African nationalists, the French refused to provide him with military assistance. When faced with a choice between the Arabs and the French, Nasser chose the Arabs. The fact that the French were fighting a losing battle with Arab nationalism made them resent Nasser’s position all the more.

 

French authority in North Africa had been dealt a fatal blow by France’s defeat by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II. The demoralized colonial officials of the collaborationist Vichy Regime were poor representatives of a once great empire. Nationalist movements in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were encouraged by the perception of French weakness.

In November 1942, American troops easily defeated Vichy forces in Morocco. Two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca to plot the North African campaign. They invited the sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V, to join them for a dinner in which Roosevelt was outspoken in his criticism of French imperialism. The sultan’s son Hassan, who would later succeed to the Moroccan throne as King Hassan II, also attended the dinner. He quoted Roosevelt saying “the colonial system was out of date and doomed.” Churchill, himself prime minister of an imperial power, disagreed, but Roosevelt warmed to his theme.
According to Hassan, Roosevelt “foresaw the time after the war—which he hoped was not far off—when Morocco would freely gain her independence, according to the principles of the Atlantic Charter.” Roosevelt promised U.S. economic aid once Morocco achieved its independence.
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Roosevelt’s words reached far beyond the dinner table. Two weeks after his visit, a group of nationalists drafted a manifesto and wrote to the U.S. president to request his support for Moroccan independence. The sultan even offered to declare war on Germany and Italy and to enter the war on the Allies’ side. However, both the British and the Americans were committed to supporting General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces and so, rather than accede to Moroccan demands for independence, the Americans handed Morocco over to de Gaulle’s Free French in June 1943. The Moroccans would have to achieve their own independence without foreign intervention. And so they did.

 

The strength of the Moroccan independence movement derived from the partnership between the monarchy and the nationalists. In January 1944 a new nationalist movement calling itself the Istiqlal, or Independence Party, published a manifesto calling for Moroccan independence. The Istiqlal was openly monarchist, and its manifesto proposed that the sultan negotiate with the French on behalf of the Moroccan nation. The party’s one condition was that the sultan establish the instruments of a democratic government.

Mohammed V gave his full support to the Istiqlal, which placed him on a collision course with the French colonial authorities. As the nationalist movement spread from the narrow circle of political elites to the labor unions and urban masses in the late 1940s, the sultan increasingly was viewed by the colonial authorities as the head of the nationalist snake that threatened the French empire in North Africa.

The broader Arab world offered moral support to the Moroccan nationalists. Exiled Moroccan militants established the Office of the Arab Maghrib in Cairo in 1947 where they could plan political action and spread propaganda without French intervention. The Maghrib Office made headlines when it freed the leader of the 1920s Rif War against Spain and France, Muhammad Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi, a.k.a. Abd el-Krim, from the French ship that was bringing him back from his exile in the island of Réunion to Paris. Abd el-Krim was given a hero’s reception in Cairo and named the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa.

The French were growing increasingly concerned that the tide of Arab nationalism might sweep away their North African possessions. Mohammed V began to place great emphasis on Morocco’s ties to the Arab world. In April 1947 he delivered a speech in Tangier in which he spoke of Morocco’s Arab ties without making any mention of France. In 1951 a hard-line French resident-general presented Mohammed
V with an ultimatum: either disavow the Istiqlal or abdicate. Though the sultan conceded to French pressure, he still retained the full support of the nationalists and the Moroccan masses, who began to mobilize in mass demonstrations. Public order in Morocco broke down as the labor unions called for strikes and as nationalist demonstrations turned into riots.

Nationalist demonstrations raged in Tunisia at the same time. In December 1952, the French assassinated a Tunisian labor leader named Farhat Hached. His murder provoked mass demonstrations in both Tunisia and Morocco. The French authorities suppressed the riots that broke out in the main cities of Morocco with such violence that they inadvertently encouraged the nationalist movement. Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid captured the intense shock provoked by the violence in her autobiographical novel,
The Year of the Elephant
. For Zahra, the book’s narrator, the violence of December 1952 marked the moment when she decided to join the underground nationalist movement.

In the aftermath of the December 1952 riots, both the Istiqlal and the Communist Party were banned by the French authorities, and hundreds of political activists were exiled. However, the sultan remained the key rallying point of Moroccan nationalist aspirations, and the French were determined to secure his abdication. Working through a coterie of Moroccan notables loyal to France and opposed to Mohammed V, the French orchestrated an indigenous coup against the sultan. A group of religious leaders and heads of the Muslim mystical brotherhoods, convinced that Mohammed V’s nationalist politics were somehow contrary to their religion, declared their allegiance to a member of the royal family named Ben Arafa. The French authorities demanded that the sultan abdicate, and when he refused he was arrested by French police, on August 20, 1953, and flown from the country at gunpoint. For the next two years Mohammed V was held in exile on the East African island of Madagascar.

The exile of Mohammed V did nothing to calm the situation in Morocco. The nationalists went underground and turned to violent tactics now that their right to political self-expression was denied. They attempted to assassinate several French colonial officials, notables collaborating with the French, and even the usurper sultan Ben Arafa. In response, the French settlers established their own terrorist organization, called Présence Française (“the French Presence”), to assassinate nationalist figures and intimidate their supporters. The French police instigated a reign of terror, arresting suspected nationalists and torturing political prisoners.

It was against this background that Zahra, the protagonist in Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographical novel, entered the resistance. Her first mission was to help one of the men in her husband’s secret cell to flee the French police and escape from Casablanca to the international zone in Tangier. The mission was all the more ironic because the fugitive was a veteran of the French war in Vietnam who had lost his leg in Dien Bien Phu. Yet Zahra managed to see her fellow-resistance fighter safely to the international zone in Tangier.

After her first success, the leaders of the resistance gave Zahra more challenging tasks. She led an arson attack on the shop of a collaborator in the center of Casablanca and ran for her life from the crowded market, with police and tracker dogs in hot pursuit. Zahra took refuge in a courtyard where she found the women of the house cooking. “I’m a guerrilla fighter,” she told them, and they gave their protection without asking any questions. Finding herself under the protection of Moroccan women, Zahra mused on how politics had changed her life and the position of women in her country. “If my grandmother had returned from the dead and seen me setting shops ablaze, delivering guns, and smuggling men across borders, she would have died a second death,” Zahra reflected.
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