Nasser Flashcards
(36 cards)
Why was 1948 a watershed moment
Should have won the war. Led to disillusionment. Nasser fought in war and felt like they were not provided with thew right equipment or support from Egypt to win war. Nasser realised govt and monarch – dominated by Britain- did not create a good army to fight Israel etc. Felt betrayed by king and colonialism
Effect for leaders after 1948 war
Some countries effect dramatic for army officers and regimes in the way they were led into the war and led to a series of coup d’état
Coup in Egypt
Free Army Officers led by Nasser overthrew king Farouk in July 1952
Muslim Brotherhood and Nasser
1954 Nasser suppressed rival power bloc – Muslim brotherhood Islamic group
Nasser and Suez canal
1956 Suez crisis made Nasser most powerful man in Arab world because he challenged colonial power
British reaction to nationalisation of canal
Britain tried to take canal back by force. Britain had to retreat and Nasser won-Led to Al-Watan Al-Akbar (Arabic: الوطن الأكبر, translated The Greatest Homeland) was an Arab Nationalist song composed by the Egyptian Mohammed Abdel Wahab in 1960.
names for war over canal
suez crisis - europe
tripartite agression - arab
Why was Nasser so popular
Chasing down colonial masters, support Palestinians, redistribution of power from elites to peasants etc
What was the land reform implemented by Nasser?
Land reform – 2000 people owned a 1/5 of land in Egypt. Pay feudal dues to pasha who control land if on it. Can’t purchase any of it or the pasha henchmen will rip shirt off your back as getting above station. No control over land or means of production
above station. No control over land or means of production
Holding cut 4000 to 200 1961 only 100 acres
Gave peasantry opportunity to own and control land
Social reforms of Nasser
· Industrialisation, education, building of high dam,
People being able to make gains from countryside, get a job, get a pension
HOWEVER
Perceived lack of freedom in that era – woman talking- everything needed permission, stamp – so much bureaucracy. A lot of public expenditure allocated poor distribution Inc. education. Discriminative for middle class in expense of poor
Nasser seen by other Arab states?
Other Arab states perspective- on one grand epitome of person stood up to imperialism, very powerful figure. 1956 Iraqis under Hashemite monarchy, Algeria French rule – he gave them inspirations. Young Yemeni officer sae him as ideal to overthrow Yemeni monarchy. Monarchies saw him as a huge threat. He was attacking their allies but made a point that republican socialism was the future
What does Charles Tripp say about the UAR
· Charles Tripp political manoeuvring also play the role in coming demise. A socially divided unequal society - class, rich and poor. Communist parties became active. Fear of communism more that actual in Syria. Up and coming Baathist socialist party fear that communist taking their ideology. Solution to petition Nasser. Group of Syrian officers flew to Cairo to ask them to accept a union.
· Agreed union only if he could rule over Syria. United Arab Republic born.
When was the UAR created
1958
When was UAR dissolved
1961
Why was UAR dissolved
· Iraq Jordan and Lebanon seemed like they might join - In end none of it happened. For many in Syria Nasser’s nationalism was different from reality that ensued
· Syrian political institutions had to be dissolved, military had to be dissolved, positions of power given to Egyptians
· 3 years Syria ceded from UAR
· Experience of union had impact on Baath party. UAR demand Nasser demand that Baath and army dissolved. Resent. Baathist military officer stayed together. Jadid, al-Assad, maintained a consiprital organisation
· Pushed aside civilian nationalist like aflaq
· Rise of military in Syria normal in Arab world. The army revelaed as main decision maker and spearheads ruling elite. Produces political leader.
June 5 and 10, 1967 six day war
· Like many nationalist Nasser placed the Palestinian disaster at the top. However he saw Israel as a threat to Arab union. Israel considered Nasser a threat
· 1967 war broke out - Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Israel won
· Dream gone of nationalism, Nasser no longer infallible hero. 3 yrs. later Nasser dead. Arabs lost symbol and leader of nationalism
Bghdad pact
In 1955, the British formed an anti-Soviet alliance with Turkey and Iran, later called the Baghdad Pact. They tried to persuade the government of Iraq, which was an Arab state, to join. Nasser was furious. He did not want any Arab state to join. It seemed that the British were interfering in Arab affairs yet again. Nasser saw the alliance as an instrument of western intervention and he feared that Jordan, Lebanon and Syria might also be seduced into joining. That would leave Egypt very isolated. He therefore launched a massive propaganda campaign to prevent Iraq from joining.
nassers opposition to western imperialism
Nasser’s opposition to what he saw as Western imperialism won so much Arab support that only Iraq, out of all the Arab states, was able to join the Baghdad Pact. Public opinion in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, was swept along by Nasser’s dazzling oratory and made it impossible for their governments to join the alliance. It was Egypt’s opposition to any Western alliance that was thus the main contributor to the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. However, although Nasser was hugely popular in the Arab world, he felt he could not defend his country while the West refused to sell him arms. He needed these to defend Egypt against the threat of Israel. This became particularly urgent in 1955.
nasser and soviets
. This he did through the Soviet Union’s Communist ally, Czechoslovakia. In September 1955, Nasser announced that he had agreed to buy arms from the Czech government. In return for sales of cotton and rice, Egypt was to be supplied with weapons, including Soviet aircraft and tanks. Now, at last, Nasser had secured the weapons Egypt needed to defend itself. The announcement of the Czech arms deal had an electrifying effect. On the streets of the Arab cities of Damascus, Amman, and Baghdad there was rejoicing. Nasser was seen as a saviour, throwing off the domination of the West and securing the defence of the Arab world. Now at last, the Arabs had achieved their victory over ‘imperialism’ and its ‘illegitimate offspring’, Israel.
winning suez war
Nasser himself recognised that he had been saved by American intervention but, on the radio and throughout the Arab world, it was Egyptian resistance that was portrayed as having won the day. Nasser became the hero of the Arab world. He had stood up to Britain and France and had gained complete control of the Suez Canal and of a large quantity of British military stores. With American aid, the Canal was cleared and reopened in April 1957.
Arab cities erupted in anti-Western demonstrations and riots, Nasser’s name was chanted and Arab governments came under huge pressure to bring their policies into line with Egypt. Syria and Saudi Arabia broke off relations with Britain and France, while Jordan signed a military pact with Syria and Egypt. Nasser’s charisma, his perceived victory over Suez and the predominance of Cairo radio had contributed to an ever-rising tide of Arab nationalism. This reached its height, in 1958, when Syria demanded a complete merger with Egypt so as to form one state.
plo and nasser
Presenting the Israeli project as an act of aggression and a challenge to the whole Arab world, Nasser called for a conference of Arab leaders in Cairo in January 1964. At this conference, the leaders agreed to set up the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to represent the Palestinian people in the struggle for the ‘liberation of Palestine’. In effect, the Arab leaders had postponed the issue of how to deal with the Israeli threat but had put on a show of solidarity.
Over the next three years, the new Syrian government actively supported the PLO in launching guerrilla raids into Israel. Nasser did not yet want war with Israel: he knew that Israel was a stronger military power than Syria and Egypt combined. Yet he felt drawn to support radical, Arab nationalists, especially in the struggle with Israel. In 1966, the Egyptian government signed a defence agreement with Syria which stated that aggression against either state would be considered an attack on the other. Nasser rose again as the outstanding champion of the Arab cause. But the agreement with Syria paved the way for the chain of events that led to the Six Day War in 1967. This war was a disaster for the Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
nasser a revolutionary and stabling influence
Nasser left his mark on nearly two decades of Egyptian, Arab and world history. In so doing he evoked strong and conflicting feelings. To some he was a nationalist hero, to others a war-mongering dictator and international troublemaker. He was in fact both a revolutionary and a stabilising influence in the Middle East. At a time: when Arab society was in danger of collapse and of leaving the field to the Communists, the reactionary fanaticism of the Muslim Brothers, a narrow nationalistic military fascism; or chaos, Nasser’s provision of continuous, stable and relatively progressive government in the biggest and most developed Arab state, helped to ensure that in most cases change in Arab society took place in a comparatively bloodless way - the Yemen revolution and civil war were an outstanding exception.
nasser leading anti colonial power
Nasser was the most important statesman thrown up by the Arab renaissance. He was also a leading figure in the anti-colonial revolutions, one of the great world political movements of the twentieth century. An Egyptian, a Muslim and a self-proclaimed Arab, he was also a product and animator of the same anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and modernising revolution that produced Nehru and Mao Tse-tung, Sukarno and Nkrumah, Castro and Ho Chi Minh. He belonged to the heroic age of national liberation movements. But he also overlapped into the second stage of Third World concern with social, economic and unification problems - how to organise newly liberated nation-states, above all how to achieve economic as well as political independence, now the central theme of Third World politics in the movement for a ‘new international economic order’.
1967 and nasser
Until his colossal blunder of the 1967 war, Nasser’s reputation as a ruler of Egypt seemed to be securely based. He had achieved complete independence through the end of the British occupation and the removal of a subservient monarchy of foreign origins. He had accepted the independence of the Sudan. He had nationalised the Suez Canal Company and built the High Dam, carried out land reform and launched a broad programme of industrialisation, mass education and social reform. His relative and varied success in these respects was qualified by his failure to create a self-sustaining dynamic political system which would dispense with control through the army, secret police and press censorship; by the ineffectual restraints on Egypt’s rapid population growth; by the persistence of massive unemployment and rural poverty and - as the most developed countries - the accumulation of a heavy foreign debt; and by the large sums spent on the armed forces and the intervention in the Yemen.
