Titans of History

Syria and Egypt formed a United Arab Republic under Nasser as president—though it soon fell apart. Nasser flew to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, alarming the Americans: he was anti-communist and persecuted Egyptian Marxists, but despite his nonaligned leadership, he leaned clearly toward the Soviets. A coup in North Yemen by Nasserist officers led to Nasser sending Egyptian troops to fight royalist forces backed by the Saudis.

In Egypt, Nasser—omnipotent, isolated and ill—came to understand that his regime had become a corrupt dictatorship with its rich army elite and its secret police. Above all he realized that Field Marshal Amer—powerful, hedonistic, and a drug addict—had failed to create a strong army. In 1967, Syrian clashes with Israel challenged Nasser, the most powerful Arab leader of the greatest Arab country, to live up to his years of bombast. Soviet leaders warned that Israel planned an attack on Syria—but this was utterly false.

Nasser probably hoped to raise the tension and demonstrate Egyptian power without actually fighting Israel. He expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran, promising a victorious war and the massacre of the Jews of Israel. At the same time, he allowed Amer to move Egyptian forces up into Sinai and prepare an attack while his officers assumed control of the Syrian and Jordanian armies. At the last moment, he panicked and ordered Amer to desist but the damage was done: Israelis were in a state of existential terror, convinced a second Holocaust was upon them. The prime minister Levi Eshkol was dithering; the chief of staff General Yitzak Rabin had a breakdown. Finally Eshkol brought Moshe Dayan, former general and now politician, famous for his cool intelligence and his trademark black eye-patch into the government as defense minister. Faced with an apparently imminent Egyptian attack coordinated with Syria and Jordan, Dayan launched a pre-emptive strike, wiping out the Egyptian air force in minutes and defeating Egyptian troops on the ground. Syrian and Jordanian forces attacked Israel, which defeated both in turn—while Egypt under Nasser and Amer still claimed victory. In fact Nasser’s clumsy brinkmanship and bullying domination of the other Arab countries, combined with Amer’s incompetence, had brought about a defeat even greater than that suffered by King Farouk.

Nasser offered to resign but vast crowds in Cairo insisted he remain president. However he was a broken man, dying of a massive heart attack in 1970, succeeded by his vice president, Anwar Sadat. Sadat was another dynamic and original army officer who was determined to overturn the Israeli military advantage and yet simultaneously to avoid Egypt becoming a Soviet satellite country. He threw out Soviet military advisers and coordinated a secret plan with Syria to attack Israel on Yom Kippur 1973: Israel was totally surprised by the attack. Though Israeli forces ultimately repelled the Egyptians and Syrians and managed to cross the Suez Canal to attack Egypt proper, Arab military pride was restored.

In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem and signed a peace treaty with Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, who returned Sinai in exchange for peace. Yet Sadat presided over a police state that was not delivering economic benefits to his people. There was considerable discontent and riots as well as rising activity by Islamic fundamentalists, appalled by Sadat’s growing alliance with the West. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated at a military parade, succeeded by his vice president, air force general Hosni Mubarak. The latter was cloddish and unsophisticated, but conservative and shrewd enough to rule Egypt for the next thirty years: the direct succession of pharaonic dictators had led from Nasser via Sadat to Mubarak, who received vast financial and military aid from America in return for suppressing Islamic fundamentalism and maintaining the peace with Israel. But Egypt was a one-party state with a brutal secret police, a corrupt military oligarchy, faked elections, a controlled press and brazen injustice.