John Leandro Reyes

2015-5919
HIST 128 – Introduction to the Middle East

THE DECLINE OF ARAB NATIONALISM

In the course of the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had led Egypt and
the Arab world through a string of improbable triumphs. “Nasserism” had become the dominant
expression of Arab nationalism. Men and women across the Arab world believed the Egyptian
president had a master plan for unifying the Arab people and leading them to a new age of
independence and power. They saw their hopes realized in the union of Syria and Egypt.

Nasser’s remarkable run of successes came to an end in the 1960s. The union with Syria
unraveled in 1961. The Egyptian army got mired in Yemen’s civil war. And Nasser led his
nation and its Arab allies into a disastrous war with Israel in 1967. The long-promised liberation
of Palestine was yet further set back by Israel’s occupation of the remaining Palestinian
territories, as well as the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights. The hopes of the
Arab world in 1960 had been worn down to disillusion and cynicism by the time of Nasser’s
death in 1970.

The events of the 1960s had a radicalizing impact on the Arab world. With British and
French imperialism increasingly a thing of the past, the Arabs found themselves drawn into the
politics of the Cold War. By the 1960s the Arab states had divided into pro-Western and pro-
Soviet blocs. The influence of the Cold War was most pronounced in the Arab-Israeli conflict,
which developed into a proxy war between Soviet and American arms. The Arab experience, it
seemed, would continue to be one of divide and rule.

“A Difficult Country to Govern”

The United Arab Republic would prove more of a challenge than Nasser had ever
anticipated. Shukri al-Quwatli, the twice-deposed president of Syria, reportedly warned Nasser
that he would find Syria “a difficult country to govern.” He explained: “Fifty per cent of the
Syrians consider themselves national leaders, twenty-five per cent think they are prophets, and
ten per cent imagine they are gods.

The Syrians chafed under Egyptian rule. The Syrian army, which had initially shown
such enthusiasm for the union, hated taking orders from Egyptian officers. The Syrian
landowning elites were outraged when Egypt’s land reform program was applied to Syria. By
January 1959 over one million acres of farmland had been confiscated from large landholders for
redistribution to Syrian peasants.

Moreover, The Syrians chafed under Egyptian rule. The Syrian army, which had initially
shown such enthusiasm for the union, hated taking orders from Egyptian officers. The Syrian
landowning elites were outraged when Egypt’s land reform program was applied to Syria. By
January 1959 over one million acres of farmland had been confiscated from large landholders for
redistribution to Syrian peasants. Syrian businessmen saw their position undermined by socialist
decrees that transferred their companies from private to state ownership, as the government
expanded its role in economic planning. The average Syrian was crushed under the weight of the
notorious paperwork of Egyptian bureaucracy.

Having led its country into union with Egypt in February 1958, the Syrian army now
organized a coup to sever ties and take Syria back again. Nasser was perplexed by Syria’s bid for
secession. His first reaction was to dispatch the Egyptian army to repress the coup with force. He
relented hours later and recalled his forces, accepting Syrian secession “so that no Arab blood
would be shed.” In the aftermath of the Syrian coup, Nasser initially pinned the blame for the
breakup of the UAR on its opponents—the Jordanians, the Saudis, even the Americans. 

Starting in 1962, Nasser took the Egyptian revolution down the road of Arab socialism—
an ambitious if quixotic reform agenda fusing Arab nationalism and Soviet-inspired
socialism. Egypt’s new political orientation was enshrined in the 1962 National Charter, which
sought to weave Islam, Arab nationalism, and socialism into a coherent political project. With
his turn to Arab socialism, Nasser gave up trying to subvert the rules of the Cold War and threw
in his lot with the Soviet Union, following its model of a state-led economy. Arab socialism
would exercise great influence in Egypt and divide the Arab world. The language of politics in
Egypt grew much more doctrinaire. Egypt was fairly isolated in this new division of the region,
as it had poor relations with the other emerging “progressive” Arab states—Iraq in particular.

Algerian War of Independence

The Algerian war of independence raged for nearly eight years, from the first uprising of
November 1, 1954, until the establishment of the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria in
September 1962. The conflict spared no part of Algeria, spreading from the cities to the
countryside. By war’s end, over one million Algerians and Frenchmen had lost their lives.

When the Algerians launched their bid for independence, they had every reason to expect high
casualties. In 1945 French repression of moderate nationalists in the eastern market town of Sétif
(the nationalists wished to carry Algerian flags alongside French flags in their local Victory in
Europe parade) resulted in riots that left forty Algerians and Europeans dead. 

The heavy casualties of the 1954–1962 Algerian War reflected an implacable logic of violent
retribution. The Algerian nationalists of the National Liberation Front (FLN) believed they had
to inflict terror on the French that would provoke a terrible retaliation from them, which would
force the colonial power from the country. Atrocities against civilians began with FLN attacks on
the French settlers in Philippeville in August 1955, when Algerian fighters killed 123 men,
women, and children. After the experience of Sétif, the FLN knew the French would retaliate
with a vengeance that would generate broad-based Algerian hatred for the French. As thousands
of Algerians volunteered to join the national liberation struggle, the FLN managed to consolidate
its hold over Algerian politics through a combination of conviction and intimidation. 
 The leadership of the FLN was divided between six internal commanders, who organized
resistance within five insurrectionary provinces, or wilayas, and three external leaders based in
Cairo. Of the three external leaders of the FLN—Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Ait Ahmed, and
Mohamed Khider—Ben Bella gained the most prominence (he would later become the first
president of independent Algeria). Born in a village in western Algeria in 1918, Ben Bella was in
every sense a child of French Algeria. The French succeeded in decapitating the leadership of the
FLN in October 1956. Following reliable intelligence, the French air force intercepted a
Moroccan DC-3 carrying Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed, and Khider, as well as the supreme commander
of the internal leadership, Mohamed Boudiaf, and forced the plane to land in the western
Algerian city of Oran.  The French public celebrated the arrests of the FLN leadership as if this
development marked the end of the Algerian War. By the time of Ben Bella’s arrest, the violence
had already moved from the countryside to the cities.

Mouloud Faraoun observed the violence in Algiers with horror and condemned both the
French and the FLN for the murder of innocents. “The attacks in the cities are multiplying,” he
wrote in his diary in October 1956, “stupid, atrocious. The FLN mobilized all segments of the
society in the Battle of Algiers. Women in particular played a central role, carrying bombs,
running guns, serving as couriers between leaders in hiding, and providing a safe refuge for
activists wanted by the French. 

Fatiha Bouhired and her twenty-two-year-old niece Djamila played central roles in the
Battle of Algiers. Fatiha Bouhired’s husband was one of the first men in her quarter of the
Casbah, or old city of Algiers, to join the independence movement. He was arrested by the
French early in 1957 and killed while trying to escape.

Over the next seventeen days she was subjected to horrific torture, clinically described in
her deposition to the kangaroo court that ultimately condemned her to death. She never
cracked. Fatiha Bouhired continued to serve the FLN after her niece was arrested. She bought a
house in the Casbah to provide a new refuge for Saadi Yacef and Ali la Pointe. The French were
relentless in their pursuit of the surviving FLN leadership in Algiers. In July 1957, Yacef’s sister
was arrested. Under torture, she revealed Fatiha Bouhired’s role in the movement and her
connections to Saadi Yacef and a female bomber named Hassiba.

Even with French agents in Fatiha Bouhired’s house, Ali la Pointe and Saadi Yacef
remained in place. This led to the ironic situation of the French providing security to the FLN’s
covert command center, with Ali la Pointe safely in the attic and French soldiers on the ground
floor. Fatiha chafed in her new role as make-believe informant to the French, but her play-acting
came to a sudden end when the French discovered Yacef’s hiding place and arrested him along
with Fatiha in September 1957. 

With all of the senior leadership of the FLN in the capital dead or imprisoned, the Battle
of Algiers came to an end in autumn 1957. But the larger Algerian War raged on.

Buoyed by its hard-fought success in defeating the insurgency in Algiers, the French
army renewed its effort to break the National Liberation Front in the countryside. The French
further isolated the FLN by closing the frontiers between Algeria and its neighbors with
electrified fences and mine fields, thus preventing the migration of arms, fighters, and supplies
from Morocco and Tunisia.

In military terms, the French had contained and defeated the insurgency in Algeria by
1958. However, the FLN opened new fronts in its war of independence, bringing its cause to the
attention of the international community. France itself was increasingly divided over the Algeria
question by 1958. French taxpayers were beginning to feel the enormous cost of war. The French
force in Algeria, only 60,000 men in 1954, had expanded ninefold to over 500,000 by 1956. The
army and the settler community in Algeria were alarmed by the wavering French support for the
Algerian colony. The French military in Algeria was in full sympathy with the settlers’
movement. General Raoul Salan, commander in chief of French forces in Algeria, had
dispatched a long telegram to his superiors in Paris on May 9.

Soon after, Pfimlin’s government fell, and the hero of the French resistance in World War
II, General Charles de Gaulle, was returned to power by public acclaim in June 1958. One of de
Gaulle’s first acts was to fly to Algeria to face the rebellious settler community. De Gaulle’s
proposals were clearly intended to reassure the army and settlers in Algeria and bring an end to
General Salan’s Committee of Public Safety. However, his comments demonstrated how little he
understood the nationalist movement behind the FLN’s war. 

In the face of stubborn FLN resistance, de Gaulle was forced to come to terms with
Algerian demands for total independence. In spite of his early promises, de Gaulle reversed his
position and began to prepare his countrymen for Algeria’s secession from France. Hard-liners in
the settler movement and their allies in the army began to see de Gaulle as a traitor. The Evian
negotiations, combined with the breakdown in public security, provoked a political crisis among
the settlers and military in Algeria.

As the settlers’ position in Algeria grew more tenuous in 1961 and early 1962, the OAS
stepped up its terrorist violence inside Algeria. While violence continued to rage in Algeria, the
FLN and de Gaulle’s government made steady progress in their negotiations in Evian. Ongoing
terror and an uncertain future drove the French community from Algeria in massive waves—
300,000 left in the month of June 1962 alone. But most destructive was the bitter fighting that
swiftly broke out between the internal and external leadership of the National Liberation Front in
a desperate bid to seize power in the country they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to
win. For the battle-weary Algerian people it was too much.

It was not until Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne secured Algiers in
September 1962 that the fighting came to an end. or many, independence proved a hollow
victory—particularly for Algerian women. After their courage and sacrifice, they were appalled
to hear FLN leader Mohamed Khider insist that women should “return to their couscous.” 1962
was a black hole. Algeria had achieved independence—but at a high price. Its population had
suffered death and dislocation on a scale unprecedented in Arab history.

With the success of the Algerian revolution, Nasser had a new ally in his battle against
Arab “reaction.” Egypt, still known as the United Arab Republic after the Syrian secession, had
set its sites on wholescale reform of the Arab world as the prelude to achieving Arab unity. 
Nasser took some credit for having supported the Algerian revolution from inception to
independence.

Autonomous Yemen

Yemen, long autonomous within the Ottoman Empire, had secured its independence as a
kingdom in 1918. The first ruler of independent Yemen was the Imam Yahya (1869–1948), who
as head of the Zaydi sect, a small Shiite community found only in Yemen, provided both
religious and political leadership to his country. In the 1920s and 1930s,Yahya extended his rule
by dint of conquest over tribal lands across the territory of northern Yemen, much of it inhabited
by Sunni Muslims.

Throughout his reign, Yahya faced pressures from Saudi Arabia to the north, which
seized ’Asir and Najran from what Yahya considered “historic Yemen,” and from the British in
the south, who had held the port city of Aden and its hinterlands as a colony since the
1830s. Yemen’s isolation came to an end with Imam Yahya’s rule. Yahya was assassinated by a
tribal shaykh in 1948 and was succeeded by his son, the Imam Ahmad (r. 1948–1962). Ahmad
had a reputation for ruthlessness that was reinforced when he ascended to power and had his
rivals imprisoned and executed.

Yet Ahmad was not secure on his throne. An attempted coup in 1955 made him
increasingly suspicious of domestic rivals and threats from abroad—particularly Nasser and his
relentless calls for overturning “feudal” regimes. However, Nasser was not consistently hostile to
the Yemenis. In 1956 Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia concluded an anti-British pact in Jiddah,
and in 1958 Imam Ahmad gave his full support to the union of Egypt and Syria, joining a
federation scheme with the UAR known as the United Arab States. 

Coming right after Syria’s secession from the UAR in 1961, Ahmad’s lecture on Islamic
law infuriated Nasser. The opportunity arose the following year. Imam Ahmad died in his sleep
in September 1962, putting the kingdom in the hands of his son and successor Imam
Badr. Supporters of the Yemeni royal family challenged the coup, with support from the
neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni revolution quickly devolved into a civil war
within Yemen itself, and an inter-Arab war between the Egyptians and the Saudis, between the
“progressive” republican order and the “conservative” monarchies in a battle for the future of the
Arab world.

Egyptian troops began to flood into Yemen after the September 1962 coup. Over the next
three years the total deployment swelled from 30,000 at the end of 1963 to a peak of 70,000 in
1965—nearly half the Egyptian army. From the start, the war in Yemen was unwinnable. The
Egyptians faced tribal guerrillas fighting on their own terrain, and more than 10,000 soldiers and
officers were killed over the course of five years of war. 
 Nasser readily acknowledged that he saw the Yemen War as “more a political operation
than a military one.” What he failed to appreciate was the Yemen War’s impact on Egypt’s
military preparedness to confront the more immediate threat of Israel.