Arabs (64 page)

For Egypt, the Suez Crisis was the classic example of a military defeat turned to a political victory. Nasser’s bold rhetoric and defiance were not matched by any military accomplishments. The very act of survival was deemed a major political victory, and the Egyptians—and Nasser’s mass following across the Arab world—celebrated as though Nasser had in fact defeated Egypt’s enemies. Nasser knew that his nationalization of the Suez Canal would face no further challenge and that Egypt had achieved full sovereignty over all of its territory and resources.

For the Israelis, the Suez war represented a stunning military victory and a political setback. Although Ben-Gurion was embarrassed to have to retreat from territory the IDF had occupied by force of arms, he had demonstrated Israeli military prowess to his Arab neighbors once again. Yet Israeli participation in the Tripartite Aggression reinforced the widespread view in the Arab world that Israel was an extension of imperial policy in the region.

Israel’s association with imperialism made it all the more difficult for the Arab world to accept the Jewish state, let alone to extend recognition or to make peace. Rather, the defeat of Israel came to be associated with ridding the Middle East of imperialism, as well as the liberation of Palestine—powerful ideological impediments to any peace process in the 1950s.

France lost a great deal in the Suez Crisis. Its position in Algeria was undermined and its influence in the Arab world more generally decreased. For the remainder of the 1950s, the French gave up on the Arab world and threw their support behind Israel. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis the French armed the Israelis and helped them to establish their nuclear program, providing a reactor in 1957 twice the original capacity promised.

Britain, which had hoped to preserve a major influence in the Arab world, was undoubtedly the greatest loser of the Suez Crisis. The decision to go to war had engendered tremendous domestic opposition in Britain and provoked a number of high-level resignations from both government and Foreign Office officials. Anthony Eden suffered a major breakdown in the aftermath of Suez and resigned his premiership in January 1957. The impact of Suez on Britain’s position in the Middle East was even more devastating. As Heikal concluded, “No Arab leader could be Britain’s friend and Nasser’s enemy after Suez. Suez cost Britain Arabia.”
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N
asser’s remarkable string of successes propelled him to a position of dominance in the Arab world. His anti-imperial credentials and calls for Arab solidarity made him the champion of Arab nationalists across the region. Nasser took his message to the Arab masses across the airwaves, as the power of long-distance radio broadcasting
combined with the spread of affordable and portable transistor radios in the course of the 1950s. In an age of widespread adult illiteracy, Nasser was able to reach a vastly broader audience via radio than he ever could have through newspapers.

At the time, the most powerful and widely followed radio station in the Arab world was the Cairo-based Voice of the Arabs (Sawt al-’Arab). Launched in 1953 to promote the ideas of the Egyptian revolution, the Voice of the Arabs combined news, politics, and entertainment. It connected Arabic speakers across national boundaries through a common language and promoted the ideas of pan-Arab action and Arab nationalism. Listeners from across the Arab world were electrified: “People used to have their ears glued to the radio,” one contemporary recalled, “particularly when Arab nationalist songs were broadcast calling Arabs to raise their heads and defend their dignity and land from occupation.”
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Nasser conquered the Arab world by radio. Through the Voice of the Arabs, he was able to pressure other Arab rulers to toe his line, bypassing the heads of Arab governments to address their citizens directly. In a political report on the situation in Lebanon in 1957, the director of intelligence in Lebanon, Amir Farid Chehab, wrote: “Political propaganda in Nasser’s favour is what mostly occupies the spirit of the Muslim masses who consider him the only leader of the Arabs. They care for no other leader but him thanks to the influence of Egyptian and Syrian radio stations and his achievements in Egypt.”
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Some Arab nationalists began to take Nasser’s calls for Arab unity more literally than the Egyptian president intended—nowhere more so than in Syria.

Politics in Syria had been relentlessly volatile since Husni al-Zaim overthrew President Shukri al-Quwatli in 1949. Between al-Quwatli’s fall in 1949 and his return to power in 1955, Syria had witnessed five changes of leadership, and by the late summer of 1957 the country was on the verge of complete political disintegration. Caught between the Soviet Union and the United States (which were plotting the overthrow of the Quwatli government in 1956), and between inter-Arab rivalries in an age of revolutionary ferment, the country was also being torn from within by deep political divides.
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The two most influential parties in Syria in the late 1950s were the Communists and the Arab Renaissance Party, better known as the Ba‘th (literally, “Renaissance”). The Ba’th was founded by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar in the early 1940s as a secular pan-Arab nationalist party. Their motto was “One Arab nation with an eternal message.” The Ba’th eschewed smaller nation-state nationalism in individual countries in favor of a greater Arab nationalism uniting all Arab people. The ideologues of the Ba’th held that the Arabs could only achieve full independence from outside rule and social justice at home through full Arab unity—a utopian vision of a single Arab state freed from the imperial boundaries imposed by the 1919 Versailles
settlement. Branches of the party had cropped up in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq in the late 1940s.

Although Ba‘athism would become a major political force from the 1960s through the present day, the party was still quite weak in Syria in the 1950s. A middle-class intellectual’s party, the Ba’th had no mass support base. In the 1955 elections the party secured fewer than 15 percent of the seats in the Syrian parliament. The party was very much in need of a powerful ally, and its members found it in Egypt’s Nasser. They gave their wholehearted backing to Nasser both out of conviction—his anti-imperialism and pan-Arab rhetoric so closely matched their own—and to harness Nasser’s massive popularity in Syria to their own cause.

The Communist Party in Syria had less need of Nasser, as its position was growing with the expansion of Soviet influence in the country. The Syrian Communists also were wary of Nasser because he had suppressed the Egyptian Communist Party. Yet they too sought to profit from Nasser’s mass appeal in Syria.

By 1957 both the Ba‘th and the Communists approached Nasser with proposals to unite Syria and Egypt, with the rival Syrian parties outbidding each other in their efforts to court Nasser’s favor. Whereas the Ba’th proposed a federal union, the Communists raised the stakes with the suggestion of a full merger of the two countries into a single state—confident that Nasser would reject the offer. It was all a bit of a game, as neither the Ba’th nor the Communists had the power to conclude a union with Egypt.

The game became serious, however, when the Syrian army got involved in the merger. The army had already staged three coups against the Syrian government, and many of its officers were avowed Ba’thists. They were drawn to the military-led government of Nasser’s Egypt and believed that union would favor them as the dominant power in Syrian politics. On January 12, 1958, without prior warning to their own government, the Syrian chief of staff and thirteen of his top officers flew to Cairo to discuss a union with Nasser. A high-ranking Syrian officer called on cabinet ministers—including Khalid al-Azm, then minister of finance—to inform them of the army’s actions only after the chief of staff had left for Cairo. “Wouldn’t it have been better for you to inform the government of your decision and discuss the matter with them before going to Cairo?” al-Azm asked the officer.

“What’s done is done,” the officer replied, and withdrew.

Al-Azm was one of the patrician nationalist politicians who had fought for Syria’s independence from the French mandate and had withstood the terrible bombardment of Damascus in 1945. He was convinced that the military would bring disaster to Syria. “If Abdel Nasser agrees to this proposal,” he reflected in his diary, “Syria will disappear altogether, and if he refuses the Army will occupy the offices of state and bring down both the government and the parliament.”
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The Syrian government decided to send the foreign minister, Salah al-Din Bitar, who was also one of the cofounders of the Ba’th, to Cairo to sound out Nasser’s
views and report back to the cabinet. Once in Cairo, Bitar got caught up in the excitement of the moment and traded observer status for that of self-declared negotiator. Bitar entered into direct discussions with Nasser as an official representative of the Syrian government.

Nasser was bemused by the steady stream of Syrian politicians and military men who flocked to Cairo to fling their country at his feet. Although he had always promoted Arab unity, he understood the expression to mean Arab
solidarity
, a unity of purpose and of goals. He had never aspired to formal union with other Arab states. Egypt, he recognized, had a very distinct history from the rest of the Arab world. Prior to the revolution, most Egyptians would not have identified themselves as Arabs, reserving the term either for the residents of the Arabian Peninsula or for the desert Bedouin. The proposal was all the more unlikely given that Egypt and Syria shared no borders but were separated by the iron wall raised by Israel.

Yet Nasser saw how a union with Syria could advance his interests. As head of a union of two major Arab states, Nasser could secure his position as the unrivaled leader of the Arab world. The union would be hugely popular with the Arab masses beyond Egypt and Syria, reinforcing their greater loyalty to Nasser than to their own national rulers. It would also demonstrate to the great powers—the Americans and Soviets, the British and French—that the new political order in the Middle East was being shaped by Egypt. Having overcome imperialism, Nasser was now circumventing the Cold War.

Nasser received his Syrian visitors and imposed his terms: full union, with Syria ruled from Cairo by the same institutions that governed Egypt. The Syrian army would come under Egyptian command and would have to stay out of politics and return to the barracks. All political parties were to be disbanded and replaced with a single state party to be known as the National Union, party pluralism being equated with divisive factionalism.

Nasser’s terms came as something of a shock to his Syrian guests. The Ba‘th representatives were appalled by the prospect of dissolving their party, but Nasser reassured them that they would dominate the National Union, which would prove their vehicle to shape the political culture of the United Arab Republic (UAR), as the new state was to be called. The name was deliberately open ended, as the union of Syria and Egypt was to be but the first step toward a broader Arab union and toward the Arab renaissance to which the Ba’th aspired. Though Nasser set terms that disenfranchised both the Ba’th and the military in politics, both groups came away from the Cairo discussions under the illusion that they would exercise predominant influence in Syria through the union with Egypt.

After ten days’ discussion, Bitar and the officers returned from Cairo to brief the Syrian cabinet on the union scheme they had agreed with Nasser. Khalid al-Azm made no effort to hide his opposition to their proposals, but he found himself in
the minority. Al-Azm watched in dismay as the elected leadership of Syria blithely surrendered their country’s hard-gained independence on what he saw as an Arab nationalist whim. He mocked President al-Quwatli’s opening remarks, using “words like ‘Arabness’ and ‘the Arabs’ and ‘glory’” to “fill an otherwise empty speech.” Al-Quwatli then gave the floor to the foreign minister. Bitar told his colleagues that he and Nasser had agreed to a full union of Syria and Egypt into a single state, and that they proposed to put the matter to a public referendum in both countries—knowing full well that the union would enjoy massive public support in both Syria and Egypt.

When Bitar finished, many of his cabinet colleagues affirmed their support for the union. “When they all had had their say,” al-Azm related, “I asked for the session to be adjourned to give those present the opportunity to study the proposal. They all looked astonished by the suggestion. It was now my turn to be amazed. I could not believe that the Cabinet would be presented with so significant a proposal, which entailed nothing less than the dissolution of the Syrian entity, without allowing the ministers sufficient time to study the matter and to sound out the views of their parties, members of parliament, and policy makers in the country.”
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He succeeded only in securing a twenty-four hour adjournment.