Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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The man who arrested and executed Husni al-Za‘im was a follower of Antun Sa’ada, one of the most influential nationalist leaders in the Arab world. Sa’ada (1904–1949) was a Christian intellectual who returned to his native Lebanon from Brazil in 1932 to found the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. A lecturer at the American University of Beirut, he opposed the French mandate and its efforts to break up Greater Syria, and he militated for a union of the states of Greater Syria. His political views provided an alternative to pan-Arab nationalism and, with his call for separation of religion from politics, appealed to a wide range of minority groups who feared Sunni Muslim domination in a pan-Arab state. In July 1949, Antun Sa’ada launched a guerrilla campaign to overturn the Lebanese government. His revolt was short-lived; he was caught by the Syrians within days of launching his campaign and handed over to the Lebanese authorities, who promptly tried and executed the would-be revolutionary on July 8, 1949. Sa‘ada’s zealous followers were quick to seek their revenge. On July 16, 1951, a Sa’ada partisan assassinated the former Lebanese premier, Riyad al-Sulh (whose government had executed Sa’ada) while he was on a visit to the Jordanian capital, Amman. Arab politics were growing increasingly violent as political coups, executions, and assassinations marked the change of leadership in Arab states. Only four days after the assassination of Riyad al-Sulh, King Abdullah of Transjordan was assassinated as he entered the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for Friday prayers. His fifteen-year-old grandson Hussein, the future king of Jordan, was with him when he was killed. ?I wonder now,? Hussein wrote in his autobiography, ?looking back across the years, whether my grandfather had an inner knowledge of the tragedy that was so close.? Hussein remembered a conversation with King Abdullah on the morning of his death. The old king spoke words ?so prophetic that I would hesitate to repeat them had they not been heard by a dozen men alive today,? Hussein recorded. ??When I have to die, I would like to be shot in the head by a nobody,? he said. ?That?s the simplest way of dying. I would rather have that than become old and a burden.?? The old king would see his wish granted sooner than he expected. King Abdullah knew that his life was in danger. He was surrounded by enemies in the Palestinian territories recently annexed to his kingdom. Many Palestinians accused him of striking a bargain with the Jews to expand his country at their expense, and Hajj Amin al-Husayni blamed King Abdullah for betraying Palestine. Yet, no one could have foreseen the new culture of Arab political violence reach right into one of the holiest Muslim places of worship. The “nobody” who shot King Abdullah was a twenty-one-year-old tailor’s apprentice from Jerusalem named Mustafa ‘Ashu. More a hired gun than a man with political motives, ’Ashu himself was shot dead instantly by the king’s guard. Scores of arrests were made, and ten men were charged with complicity in the assassination, though the trial did little to shed light on who lay behind the king’s murder. Four of the ten were acquitted, two condemned to death in absentia (both had defected to Egypt), and four men hanged for their role in the assassination. Three of the men who were executed were common tradesmen—a cattle broker, a butcher, and a cafй owner—with criminal records. The fourth, Musa al-Husayni, was a distant relative of the mufti’s.³⁹ Both the mufti and King Farouq of Egypt were suspected of bankrolling the assassination, though the truth has now surely been lost forever. Ultimately, King Abdullah was another victim of the Palestine disaster.

After the post–World War I partition of the Middle East, the Palestine disaster stands as the most important turning point in twentieth century Arab history. We are still living its consequences today. Among the most enduring legacies of the war is the Arab-Israeli conflict that continues today. Between Arab refusal to accept the loss of Palestine and Israeli aspirations for more territory, further Arab-Israeli wars became inevitable and have recurred with deadly frequency over the past six decades. The human costs of this conflict have been devastating. The Palestinian refugee problem remains unresolved. The original 750,000 displaced persons now exceeds 4.3 million refugees registered with the United Nations, the result of further territorial losses in 1967 and natural growth over sixty years. Over the intervening decades, the Palestinians have created representative bodies to advance their goal of statehood, but they have also pursued their goals through armed struggle ranging from border raids on Israel to terrorist attacks on Israeli interests abroad, to popular insurrection and armed resistance in the Occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, and terror attacks against Israel. In spite of?some would argue, because of?these strategies, Palestinian national aspirations have gone unfulfilled. The Palestine disaster had a terrible impact on Arab politics. The hopes and aspirations of the newly independent Arab states were overshadowed by their failure in 1948. In the aftermath of defeat in Palestine, the Arab world witnessed tremendous political upheaval. The four states bordering Mandate Palestine were wracked with political assassinations, coups, and revolution. A major social revolution was taking place, as the old elites were overthrown by a younger generation of military men, many from rural backgrounds who were more in touch with popular politics than the foreign-educated political elites of the interwar years. Whereas the old-guard politicians struggled for national independence within the boundaries of their own states, the firebrand Free Officers were Arab nationalists who promoted pan-Arab unity. The ancien regime spoke European languages; the new vanguard spoke the language of the street. In a very real sense, the Palestine disaster spelled the end of European influence in the Arab world. Palestine was a problem made in Europe, and Europe’s inability to resolve the problem reflected its own weakness in the aftermath of the Second World War. Britain and France emerged from that conflict as second-rate powers. The British economy was in tatters after the war effort, and French morale was shattered by years of German occupation. Both had too much to rebuild at home to invest much abroad. Empire was on the retreat, and new powers dominated the international system. The young officers who came to power in Syria in 1949, in Egypt in 1952, and in Iraq in 1958 had no ties to Britain or France and looked instead to the new world powers—the United States and its superpower rival, the Soviet Union. It was the end of the imperial age and the beginning of the new age of the Cold War. The Arabs would have to adapt to a new set of rules.

CHAPTER 10

The Rise of Arab Nationalism

The Arab world entered the new era of the Cold War in a state of revolutionary ferment. The anti-imperialism of the interwar years gained renewed vigor at the end of the Second World War. Hostility toward Britain and France was rife in the aftermath of the Palestine War. This complicated Britain’s position in Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, where it still enjoyed preferential alliances with the monarchies it had created. The old nationalist politicians, and the kings they served, were discredited for their failure to make a clean break from British imperial rule. A host of radical new parties, ranging from the Islamist Muslim Brothers to the Communists, vied for the allegiance of a new generation of nationalists. The young officers in the military were not immune to the political ferment of the age. The younger generation questioned the legitimacy of Arab monarchies and the multiparty parliaments installed by the British, instead showing more enthusiasm for revolutionary republicanism. The transcendental ideology of the age was Arab nationalism. Liberation from colonial rule was the common wish of all Arab peoples by the 1940s, but they had yet higher political aspirations. Most people in the Arab world believed they were united by a common language, history, and culture grounded in the Islamic past, a culture shared by Muslims and non-Muslims. They wanted to dissolve the frontiers drafted by the imperial powers to divide the Arabs and build a new commonwealth based on the deep historic and cultural ties that bound the Arabs. They believed that Arab greatness in world affairs could only be restored through unity. And they took to the streets, in their thousands, to protest against imperialism, to criticize their governments’ failings, and to demand Arab unity. Egypt was in many ways at the forefront of these developments. Medical doctor and feminist intellectual Nawal El Saadawi entered medical school in Cairo in 1948.

THE ARAB WORLD TODAY

The atmosphere was charged with political tension. ?In those days,? she recalled in her autobiography, ?the university was the scene of almost continuous demonstrations.? Saadawi was no stranger to nationalist politics. Her father read the newspaper with her and condemned the corruption of the king, the military class, and the British occupation of Egypt. ?It?s a chronic triple misery and there?s no solution to it without a change in the regime,? he would tell his daughter. ?People must wake up, must rebel.?¹ The younger Saadawi took her father’s words to heart and by the time she was a high school student had already begun taking part in the mass demonstrations that brought Cairo to a standstill in the late 1940s. The demonstrations reflected the Egyptian people’s impatience for change. In the aftermath of the Palestine disaster Egyptians were disenchanted with political parties, disillusioned by King Farouq, and increasingly intolerant of the British position in their country. The postwar era was an age of decolonization, and the British had long outstayed their welcome in Egypt. Egypt went to the polls in 1950 to elect a new government after the turmoil of defeat in Palestine and the assassination of Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi in December 1948. The Wafd secured victory and formed a government that resumed negotiations with the British to achieve the full independence that had eluded Egyptian nationalists since 1919. Between March 1950 and October 1951, the Wafd conducted talks with the British government. After nineteen months of talks failed to produce results, the Wafd government unilaterally abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. The British refused to recognize the abrogation, which would have turned their forces in the Suez Canal Zone into an illegal army of occupation. And though the British Empire was on the retreat—the British had withdrawn from India in 1947—the strategic importance of the Suez Canal remained a cornerstone of British foreign policy. Having failed to achieve its goals through negotiation, the Wafd stepped up pressure on the British by other means. With the tacit approval of the Wafd government, young men—mostly Muslim Brothers, students, peasants, and workers—volunteered for guerrilla units, known as fida’iyin (literally, “fighters ready to sacrifice themselves”). In October 1951 the guerrilla bands began to attack British troops and facilities in the Canal Zone. The British responded to these attacks with force. One of Nawal El Saadawi’s classmates left his medical studies to join the fida’iyin and was killed in action against the British, a martyr for the cause. The armed struggle in the Canal Zone provoked intense political debates in Cairo. Saadawi remembered a student rally she attended at the university in November 1951. She listened with growing impatience to the student politicians—Wafdists, Communists, Muslim Brothers—as they struck heroic poses and waxed rhetorically. Then one of the fida’iyin, a man named Ahmed Helmi, was called to the podium. He was one of the freedom fighters who had taken part in the attacks on British troops occupying the Canal Zone. He appealed to his squabbling classmates in a quiet voice. ?Colleagues,? he explained, ?the freedom fighters in the Canal Zone need ammunition and rations, their rear lines have to be stable to protect them, there is no time, no room for partisan struggles. We need unity of the people.?² Saadawi was riveted by the intense young man and later married him. By January 1952 the British had decided to use military force to assert their control over the Suez Canal Zone. British forces began to occupy Egyptian police stations in the Canal Zone in order to prevent the policemen from lending their support to the fida’iyin. On January 24 the British secured the surrender of 160 policemen in their station in one of the canal towns without a fight. The Egyptian government was embarrassed by the ease with which the British had taken over the station, and in response it called on Egyptian policemen in the Canal Zone to resist the British “to the last bullet.” The opportunity came the very next day, when 1,500 British troops surrounded the governorate in Ismailiyya and demanded its surrender. The 250 policemen guarding the government offices refused. The British pummeled Egyptian positions with tank and artillery fire for nine hours, as the Egyptians fought until their ammunition was depleted. By the time they finally surrendered, the Egyptians had suffered forty-six dead and seventy-two wounded. News of the British assault provoked outrage across Egypt. A general strike was declared for the next day, Saturday, January 26, 1952. Workers and students converged on Cairo in the tens of thousands. The city braced itself for a day of mass demonstrations protesting the British action. Yet nothing had prepared the people or government of Egypt for Black Saturday. Dark forces were at work in Cairo on Black Saturday. What began as a series of angry demonstrations quickly degenerated into violence in which over fifty Egyptians and seventeen foreigners (including nine Britons) were killed by the crowd. Provocateurs and arsonists worked under the cover of the demonstrations to generate maximum disorder. Anouar Abdel Malek, a Communist intellectual who witnessed the events of Black Saturday, described how the demonstrators stood aside to watch in fascination as the arsonists put the richest quarters of central Cairo to the torch. “They watched as they did because the splendid capital belonged not to them but to the rich whose businesses were burning. So they let it go.”³ In the course of the day, crowds torched a British club, a Jewish school, an office of the Muslim Brothers, four hotels (including the famous Shepheard’s Hotel), four night clubs, seven department stores, seventeen cafйs and restaurants, eighteen cinemas, and seventy other commercial establishments, including banks, automobile display rooms, and airline ticket offices.⁴ The terrible events of January 25–26, 1952, spelled the end of the political order in Egypt. It was clear to all that the arson attacks, unprecedented in Egypt’s history, had been planned. Rumors and conspiracy theories swept the capital. The Communists blamed the Socialists and the Muslim Brothers. Some argued it was a plot to undermine the position of King Farouq (who hosted a banquet celebrating the birth of his son on the night Cairo burned). Others maintained the fire was planned by the king and the British to bring down the Wafd and to appoint a caretaker government that would be more responsive to the king?s wishes. Whatever his role in Black Saturday, King Farouq did dismiss the Wafd government of Mustafa Nahhas on January 27 and appointed a series of cabinets headed by independent politicians loyal to the throne. Parliament was dissolved on March 24, and elections for a new assembly were postponed indefinitely. It looked as though Farouq was following in his father’s footsteps and repeating the 1930 experiment of palace rule. Public confidence in the government of Egypt plummeted. Ultimately, it matters little who ordered the burning of Cairo (there never has been a conclusive answer to the question). The rumors and conspiracy theories revealed a crisis of confidence in both the monarchy and the government that presaged the coming revolution in Egypt.

Though many were talking about revolution in Egypt in 1952, only a small group of army officers was actively plotting the overthrow of the government at the time. They called themselves the Free Officers, and their leader was a young colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Free Officers were united by their patriotism and the firm belief that Egypt’s monarchy and parliamentary government had failed the country. Nasser and his colleagues had been appalled by their experiences in the Palestine War, when they were sent to battle without adequate weapons and found themselves besieged by the Israelis for months and ultimately defeated. The Free Officers came together initially to oppose British imperialism in Egypt. In time, they came to see the political system of Egypt as the main obstacle to realizing their aspirations for total independence from Britain. In the aftermath of the Palestine War, Nasser recruited some of his most trusted colleagues to join a secret political cell of military men. He drew Palestine War veterans like Abd al-Hakim Amer and Salah Salem; men with connections to the Muslim Brothers, like Anwar Sadat; and Communists, like Khaled Mohi El Din, in an effort to secure the broadest support for their actions. They held their first meeting in Nasser’s living room in the autumn of 1949. As the Free Officers organization grew, new cells were created independent of each other to evade detection. Members of each cell recruited like-minded officers from across the different branches of the Egyptian armed forces.⁵ They issued their first leaflet in fall 1950 to generate support in the officer corps for their anti-imperialist cause.⁶ The events of Black Saturday transformed the Free Officers movement. Until January 1952 their focus had been on combating imperialism, and they had restricted their criticism of the government to issues of corruption and collaboration with the British. After January 1952 the Free Officers began to discuss openly the overthrow of King Farouq and the royalist governments he appointed. They set a target date for their coup in November 1952 and began to escalate their recruitment and mobilization of opposition officers. The confrontation between the palace and the Free Officers came to a head over the seemingly innocuous elections to the Egyptian Officers’ Club executive in December 1951. For Farouq, the Officers’ Club served as a barometer of the military’s loyalty to the monarchy. The Free Officers decided to use the elections as a means to confront the king and his supporters. Nasser and his colleagues convinced the popular general Muhammad Naguib to run for president of the club at the head of an opposition slate for the board of directors. When Naguib and the opposition slate swept the elections, King Farouq tried by all means to have the results overturned. Finally, in July 1952, Farouq intervened personally to dismiss Naguib and to dissolve the board of the Officers’ Club. The Free Officers recognized that they would lose all credibility if they did not respond to the king’s challenge immediately. As Abd al-Hakim Amer, one of Nasser’s closest colleagues, warned the other Free Officers, “The King has dealt us a strong blow, and unless we reply in the same manner, our organization will lose its credibility with the officers and no one will agree to join us.”⁷ The Free Officers were in total agreement that failure to act quickly and decisively would land them all in jail. Nasser met with the senior statesman of the Free Officers, General Naguib, to plan an immediate coup against the monarchy. “We unanimously agreed that Egypt was now fully ripe for a revolution,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs. The king and his cabinet were in their summer residences in Alexandria, leaving Cairo to the military men. “It was so hot and sultry that no one besides ourselves would be thinking in terms of an immediate revolution,” Naguib reasoned. “It was therefore the ideal time for us to strike.” They resolved to act before the king had time to appoint a new cabinet “and before his spies had time to discover who we were and what we had in mind.”⁸

The Free Officers had reached the point of no return. The risks of plotting against the regime were high. The Free Officers knew they would face charges of treason if they failed. They went over their plans very carefully: the simultaneous occupation of the radio station and the military headquarters. The mobilization of loyal military units behind the coup plotters. Measures to ensure public security and to prevent foreign intervention. There were many details to get right in advance of the coup date of July 23, 1952. The coup plotters were under close government scrutiny, adding to the intense pressures of the last days before the coup. General Naguib was warned by one of his officers on the eve of the coup that he was about to be arrested on suspicion of leading a conspiracy against the government. “I did my best to conceal my alarm,” Naguib confessed in his memoirs. He decided to stay at home that night, while the coup unfolded, claiming he was under surveillance and feared he might compromise the Free Officers? plans.⁹ Anwar Sadat took his wife to the cinema that night, where he got into a very noisy fight with another moviegoer and went to the police station to file a complaint—as good an alibi as a coup plotter could hope for in case of failure. ¹⁰ Even Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abd al-Hakim Amer surprised their supporters when they showed up for the coup dressed in civilian clothes (they later changed into uniform).¹¹ In spite of their doubts and fears, the Free Officers succeeded in orchestrating a near-bloodless coup. Rebel military units surrounded Egyptian army headquarters and overcame light resistance to occupy the facility by 2:00 A.M. on the morning of July 23. Once the headquarters had been secured, the military units supporting the coup were given the go-ahead to occupy strategic points in Cairo while the city slumbered. When the army had taken its positions, Anwar Sadat went to the national radio station and announced the coup in the name of General Muhammad Naguib, as commander in chief of the armed forces, completing what had been a classic coup d’йtat. Nawal El Saadawi was working in the Kasr al-Aini Hospital in central Cairo on July 23, and she described the exultation that followed on from the announcement. “In the wards the patients had been listening to the radio. Suddenly the music broke off for an important announcement which said that the army had taken over control of the country and that Farouk was no longer king.” She was astonished by the patients’ spontaneous reaction. “Suddenly as we stood there the patients rushed out of the wards shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ I could see their mouths wide open, their arms waving in the air, their tattered shirts fluttering around their bodies. It was as though the corpses from the dissecting hall had suddenly risen from the dead and were shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’” Indeed, even the dead were stopped in their tracks, as she saw a funeral cortege leaving the hospital brought to a halt by the news. “The men carrying the coffin put it down on the pavement and mixed with the crowd shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ and the women who a moment ago had been mourning the defunct started to shrill out [in celebration] instead of shrieks.”¹²

King Farouq and his government crumpled on July 23. Yet the Free Officers had little idea of how to proceed now that their movement had succeeded. “It was obvious that we hadn’t prepared ourselves, when we carried out our revolution, for taking over government posts,” Sadat reflected in his memoirs. “We had no ambition to be government ministers. We had not envisaged that and had not even drawn up a specific government program.”¹³ They decided to ask veteran politician Ali Maher to form a new government. The Free Officers had no idea what to do with Farouq himself: Arrest him? Execute him? Nasser made the wise decision to secure Farouq?s abdication and allow him to go into exile rather than risk tying up the new government with potentially divisive judicial proceedings or turning an unpopular monarch into a martyr through a messy execution. Farouq abdicated in favor of his infant son Ahmed Fuad II, under a regent, and was seen off by General Naguib on July 26 with a twenty-one-gun salute from Alexandria in the royal yacht Mahroussa. “I saluted him and he returned my salute,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs:A long and embarrassing pause ensued. Neither of us knew what to say. “It was you, effendim [My Lord], who forced us to do what we have done.” Faruk’s reply will puzzle me for the rest of my life. “I know,” he said. “You’ve done what I always intended to do myself.” I was so surprised that I could think of nothing more to say. I saluted and the others did likewise. Faruk returned our salutes and we all shook hands. “I hope you’ll take good care of the Army,” he said. “My grandfather, you know, created it.” “The Egyptian Army,” I said, “is in good hands.” “Your task will be difficult. It isn’t easy, you know, to govern Egypt.”¹⁴

General Naguib in fact would be given little chance to govern Egypt. The real leader in Egypt was Nasser, as would soon become apparent.

The Free Officers revolution represented the advent of a newer, younger generation in Egyptian politics. Naguib, at age fifty-one, was the old man in a movement whose average age was thirty-four. All were native-born Egyptians of rural origins who had risen through the military to positions of responsibility—much like the men around Colonel Ahmad Urabi in the 1880s. Like Urabi, the Free Officers chafed at the privileges and pretensions of the Turco-Circassian elites that had surrounded the royal family. One of their first decrees after taking power was to abolish all Turkish titles such as bey and pasha, which they believed had been conferred by “an abnormal King . . . on people who did not deserve them.”¹⁵ Stripped of its titles, the Egyptian aristocracy was next deprived of its land. The Free Officers initiated a major land reform, passing laws that limited individual land holdings to 200 acres. The vast plantations of the royal family were confiscated by the state, and some 1,700 large landholders saw their estates expropriated by the government, which reimbursed them in thirty-year bonds. In all, some 365,000 acres were seized from Egypt’s landed elite. These lands were then redistributed to small holders with no more than five acres of property. The program passed over the strenuous objections of Prime Minister Ali Maher, who represented a civilian elite whose wealth lay in landed property. The Free Officers valued mass support over the wishes of the propertied elite and secured Maher?s resignation in September 1952. The land reform measure secured tangible political benefits for the Free Officers. Although only a fraction of Egypt’s farming population actually benefited from the land reform measures of 1952—about 146,000 families in all, out of a total Egyptian population of 21.5 million—it engendered tremendous goodwill among the citizens of Egypt.¹⁶ With the backing of the Egyptian masses, the military men were emboldened to take the reins of power and play a more direct role in politics. Once the Free Officers entered politics, they proved very decisive. General Naguib agreed to form a new, largely civilian, government in September 1952. Nasser created a committee of military men to oversee the work of the revolution, ostensibly in collaboration with the government, but increasingly in rivalry with Naguib, called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The military men were quick to purge Egyptian politics of party pluralism. In January 1953, in response to pressures from the Wafd and the Muslim Brothers, the RCC banned all parties and expropriated their funds for the state. Working behind the scenes, Colonel Nasser introduced a new state-sponsored party known as the Liberation Rally. Nasser argued that party factionalism was largely responsible for the divisive politics of the interwar years. He hoped the Liberation Rally would serve to mobilize popular support behind the new regime. Nasser made the final break with the old order when the RCC abolished the monarchy, on June 18, 1953. Egypt was declared a republic and Muhammad Naguib named its first president. For the first time since the Pharaonic era, Egypt was ruled by native-born Egyptians. As Nawal El Saadawi put it, Naguib was “the first Egyptian to rule since King Mena in ancient Egypt.”¹⁷ The Egyptian republic was now a government of the people, and it enjoyed the full support of the great mass of the Egyptian people. “The atmosphere in the country changed,” Saadawi recalled. “People used to walk along with grim, silent faces. Now the streets had changed. People . . . chatted, smiled, said good morning, shook hands with complete strangers, asked about one another’s health, about recent events, congratulated one another for the change of regime, discussed, tried to foretell future events, [and] kept expecting changes to happen every day.” The challenge for the new government would be to meet the high expectations of a people eager for change. It would not be easy. The new Egyptian government inherited an intimidating array of economic problems. The country was over-reliant on agriculture, and agricultural output was constrained by Egypt’s desert environment. There was no way to expand the land under cultivation without the water resources for desert reclamation. Egyptian industry remained largely underdeveloped. Whereas agriculture contributed 35 percent of the Egyptian gross domestic product in 1953, industry contributed only 13 percent (with services accounting for the remaining 52 percent of GDP).¹⁸ The slow pace of industrialization was in large part due to low levels of public and private investment. Overall population growth well outstripped the rate of job creation, which meant that fewer Egyptians would get the steady jobs necessary for a significant improvement in their standard of living. The officers of the Revolutionary Command Council had a radical solution to all their problems: a hydroelectric dam on the Nile. Engineers had identified the ideal place for the dam in Upper Egypt near the town of Aswan. The new Aswan High Dam would store enough water to allow an expansion of land under cultivation from 6 million acres to between 8 and 9.5 million acres, and would generate enough electricity to permit Egypt’s industrialization and provide affordable electricity to the country as a whole.¹⁹ Such a project would cost hundreds of millions of dollars—far more than Egypt could raise from its own resources. To finance the Aswan Dam, and to secure Egypt’s economic independence, the ruling officers would have to engage with the international community. Yet Egypt was intensely jealous of its independence, and sought at all costs to secure its aims without compromises to its sovereignty. The Free Officers were soon to discover how hard it was to engage with the rest of the world without making compromises.