Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

In the international arena, the top priority of the new Egyptian government was to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal. It was the unfinished business of Egyptian nationalism since half a century before. In April 1953 Nasser and his men entered into negotiations with the British, brokered by the United States, to secure Britain’s complete withdrawal from Egypt. The stakes were very high for both sides. Nasser believed that failure would prove the downfall of the Free Officers, and Britain was very sensitive about its international position in an increasingly postcolonial world. The process dragged out over sixteen months, as negotiations broke down and resumed with some frequency. In the end, the British and Egyptians struck a compromise in which the British would withdraw all military personnel from Egyptian soil within twenty-four months, leaving some 1,200 civilian experts in the Canal Zone for a seven-year transition period. It was not a complete and unconditional British withdrawal: the two-year delay for military withdrawal and the concessions for a seven-year British civilian presence were grounds for criticism from some Egyptian nationalist circles. However, it was independence enough for Nasser to secure the RCC’s approval in July 1954. The settlement was concluded between the two governments on October 19, 1954, and the last British soldier left Egypt on June 19, 1956.

The new agreement with Great Britain faced criticism within Egypt. President Muhammad Naguib seized on the shortcomings of the agreement to batter his young rival Gamal Abdel Nasser. No longer satisfied with his role as figurehead, Naguib sought the full powers that he believed were his due as president. Nasser, through his control of the Revolutionary Command Council, was encroaching on the powers of the president. Relations between Nasser and Naguib had deteriorated by early 1954 to what some contemporaries described as hatred, and after Naguib criticized the British withdrawal, Nasser deployed his loyal followers to discredit Naguib and turn public opinion against a man they still revered. The Muslim Brotherhood also seized upon the incomplete British withdrawal to criticize the Free Officer regime. The Islamist organization, banned along with all the other political parties in 1953, already had its grievances with the new military regime. Early in 1954, Nasser’s clampdown on the Brotherhood made him the target of an Islamist splinter group bent on his assassination. They even considered deploying a suicide bomber wearing a dynamite belt who might get close enough to kill Nasser with the blast—one of the earliest suicide bomb plots in Middle Eastern history. However, the tactic did not appeal to the Islamists of 1954, and there were no volunteers.²⁰ On October 26, 1954, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood named Mahmoud Abd al-Latif tried to assassinate Nasser using a more traditional method. He fired eight bullets at Nasser during a speech celebrating the evacuation agreement with the British. Abd al-Latif was a very bad shot—none of the bullets so much as grazed their target. But with bullets whizzing around him, Nasser performed heroically. He did not flinch under fire and only briefly paused in his speech. When he resumed with great emotion, he electrified an audience that extended via radio broadcast across Egypt and the Arab world: “My countrymen,” Nasser shouted into the microphone, “my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake, die for the sake of your freedom and honor.” The crowd roared their approval. “Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser.”²¹ The moment could not have been more dramatic, and the Egyptian public declared Nasser their champion. With his newfound popularity, Nasser established his primacy over the revolution and now had a free hand to dispose of both President Muhammad Naguib and the Muslim Brotherhood—his two main rivals for the public’s allegiance. Thousands of Muslim Brothers were arrested, and in December six of their members were hanged for their role in the assassination attempt. Naguib was implicated in the trials and, though he was never charged of wrong-doing, was dismissed as president on November 15 and confined to house arrest for the next twenty years. Egypt now had one undisputed master. From the end of 1954 until his death in 1970, Nasser was president of Egypt and the commander in chief of the Arab world. No Arab leader has exercised such influence on the Arab stage before or since, and few would match Nasser?s impact on world affairs. Egypt was on the brink of a remarkable adventure, years of pure adrenaline when anything seemed possible.

Once the evacuation agreement had been concluded with the British, the next item on Egypt’s agenda was the unfinished business with the new state of Israel. Tensions ran high along the fragile border between Egypt and the Jewish state. Premier David Ben-Gurion made a number of attempts to sound out the intentions of the Free Officers, but Nasser and his men avoided direct contact with the Israelis (secret exchanges did take place between Israeli and Egyptian diplomats in Paris in 1953, with no result). Ben-Gurion came to the conclusion that Egypt under its new military rulers could turn into the Prussia of the Arab world and as such posed a clear and present danger to Israel. Yet Nasser knew his country was far from the necessary military strength to contain, let alone confront its hostile new neighbor. In order to pose a credible threat to Israel, Egypt needed to acquire materiel from abroad. Nasser quickly discovered, however, that in exchange for arms, foreign governments would inevitably set conditions that would compromise Egypt’s newfound independence. Nasser turned first to the United States, approaching the Americans for assistance in November 1952. In response the Free Officers were invited to send a delegation to the United States to state their needs: aircraft, tanks, artillery, and ships. The Americans were willing to assist in principal but wanted Egypt to commit to a regional defense pact before processing any orders for military hardware. In May 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles visited Cairo with the dual mission of promoting a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states, and isolating America’s super-power rival, the Soviet Union, in the Middle East. Discussions with the Egyptian government quickly turned to the subject of weapons. Dulles made clear that the United States remained willing to assist Egypt, on condition that it join a new regional defense pact called the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) that would bring Egypt into a formal alliance with the United States and Great Britain against the Soviet Union. Nasser rejected Dulles’s suggestion out of hand. MEDO provided a basis for extending the British military presence in Egypt—something no Egyptian leader could permit. What Nasser could not get Dulles to appreciate was that the Egyptians saw no grounds to fear a Soviet menace. The real threat for Egypt was Israel. Mohamed Heikal (b. 1923) was editor of the influential Egyptian daily Al-Ahram and a close confidant of Nasser’s. He remembered Nasser asking Dulles: “How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal [i.e., Israel] to worry about somebody who is holding a knife 5,000 miles away?”²² Relations between Egypt and Israel deteriorated following the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Evacuation Agreement in 1954. Ben-Gurion saw the British presence in the Suez Canal Zone as a buffer between the Egyptians and Israel, and the imminent withdrawal of British troops thus spelled disaster. In July 1954, Israeli military intelligence started covert operations in Egypt, planting incendiary devices in British and American institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. They apparently hoped to provoke a crisis in relations between Egypt, Britain, and the United States that might drive Britain to reconsider its withdrawal from the Suez Canal.²³ Much to Israel’s embarrassment, however, one of the Israeli spies was caught before planting his device, and the whole ring was exposed. Two of the men in the notorious Lavon Affair (named after the then defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was blamed for the fiasco) were later executed, one committed suicide in prison, and the others were sentenced to long prison terms. Tensions between Egypt and Israel reached a new height in the wake of the Lavon Affair and the subsequent execution of the Israeli agents. Ben-Gurion, who had stood down as prime minister for just over a year while the dovish Moshe Sharett headed the government, returned to the premiership in February 1955. He marked his return to office with a devastating attack on Egyptian forces in Gaza on February 28, 1955. The Gaza Strip was the only part of the Palestine mandate to remain in Egyptian hands at the end of the 1948 war, and it teemed with hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The border between Gaza and Israel was frequently infiltrated by dispossessed Palestinians, some to recover property from lost homes inside what was now Israel, others to inflict damage on the Jewish state that had displaced them. Two such infiltrations in February 1955 served as the Israeli government’s pretext for massive retaliation. Two companies of Israeli paratroopers crossed into Gaza and destroyed the Egyptian army’s local headquarters, killing thirty-seven Egyptian soldiers and wounding thirty-one. Israel had displayed its military superiority, and Nasser knew his days would be numbered if he did not provide his army with better weaponry with which to stand up to the Israelis. Egyptian losses in Gaza placed Nasser in a terrible bind. He needed foreign military assistance more than ever yet could not afford to make concessions to secure such aid. The British and the Americans continued to press Nasser to join a regional alliance before they would consider providing modern weapons to Egypt. The English-speaking powers were now urging Nasser to sign on to a NATO-sponsored alliance called the Baghdad Pact. Turkey and Iraq had concluded a treaty in February 1955 against Soviet expansion, to which Britain, Pakistan, and Iran all acceded in the course of the year. Nasser was bitterly opposed to the Baghdad Pact, which he saw as a British plot to perpetuate its influence over the Middle East and to promote its Hashemite allies in Iraq over the Free Officers in Egypt. Nasser condemned the Baghdad Pact in no uncertain terms and succeeded in preventing any other Arab state from acceding to the pact, despite British and American enticements. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden began to see Nasser’s influence behind every setback to British policy in the Middle East and hardened his line against the Egyptian leadership. In light of the growing antagonism between Nasser and Eden, there was no question of Britain supplying Egypt’s military with advanced weapons.

Nasser next sounded out the French as an alternate source of military hardware. But the French, too, had grave misgivings about Nasser due to his support for nationalist movements in North Africa. Nationalists in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria were mobilizing to secure their full independence from France, and they looked to Egypt as both a role model and an ally. Nasser in turn sympathized with the North African nationalists and saw their struggle against imperialism as part of the broader Arab world’s resistance to foreign domination. Although he had little in the way of financial or military resources to offer, he was only too happy to provide refuge to exiled nationalists and to leave them the freedom to mobilize their independence struggle within Egypt’s frontiers. So long as Nasser provided a free haven to North African nationalists, the French refused to provide him with military assistance. When faced with a choice between the Arabs and the French, Nasser chose the Arabs. The fact that the French were fighting a losing battle with Arab nationalism made them resent Nasser’s position all the more.

French authority in North Africa had been dealt a fatal blow by France’s defeat by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II. The demoralized colonial officials of the collaborationist Vichy Regime were poor representatives of a once great empire. Nationalist movements in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were encouraged by the perception of French weakness. In November 1942, American troops easily defeated Vichy forces in Morocco. Two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca to plot the North African campaign. They invited the sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V, to join them for a dinner in which Roosevelt was outspoken in his criticism of French imperialism. The sultan’s son Hassan, who would later succeed to the Moroccan throne as King Hassan II, also attended the dinner. He quoted Roosevelt saying “the colonial system was out of date and doomed.” Churchill, himself prime minister of an imperial power, disagreed, but Roosevelt warmed to his theme. According to Hassan, Roosevelt ?foresaw the time after the war?which he hoped was not far off?when Morocco would freely gain her independence, according to the principles of the Atlantic Charter.? Roosevelt promised U.S. economic aid once Morocco achieved its independence.²⁴ Roosevelt’s words reached far beyond the dinner table. Two weeks after his visit, a group of nationalists drafted a manifesto and wrote to the U.S. president to request his support for Moroccan independence. The sultan even offered to declare war on Germany and Italy and to enter the war on the Allies’ side. However, both the British and the Americans were committed to supporting General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces and so, rather than accede to Moroccan demands for independence, the Americans handed Morocco over to de Gaulle’s Free French in June 1943. The Moroccans would have to achieve their own independence without foreign intervention. And so they did.

The strength of the Moroccan independence movement derived from the partnership between the monarchy and the nationalists. In January 1944 a new nationalist movement calling itself the Istiqlal, or Independence Party, published a manifesto calling for Moroccan independence. The Istiqlal was openly monarchist, and its manifesto proposed that the sultan negotiate with the French on behalf of the Moroccan nation. The party’s one condition was that the sultan establish the instruments of a democratic government. Mohammed V gave his full support to the Istiqlal, which placed him on a collision course with the French colonial authorities. As the nationalist movement spread from the narrow circle of political elites to the labor unions and urban masses in the late 1940s, the sultan increasingly was viewed by the colonial authorities as the head of the nationalist snake that threatened the French empire in North Africa. The broader Arab world offered moral support to the Moroccan nationalists. Exiled Moroccan militants established the Office of the Arab Maghrib in Cairo in 1947 where they could plan political action and spread propaganda without French intervention. The Maghrib Office made headlines when it freed the leader of the 1920s Rif War against Spain and France, Muhammad Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi, a.k.a. Abd el-Krim, from the French ship that was bringing him back from his exile in the island of Rйunion to Paris. Abd el-Krim was given a hero’s reception in Cairo and named the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of North Africa. The French were growing increasingly concerned that the tide of Arab nationalism might sweep away their North African possessions. Mohammed V began to place great emphasis on Morocco’s ties to the Arab world. In April 1947 he delivered a speech in Tangier in which he spoke of Morocco’s Arab ties without making any mention of France. In 1951 a hard-line French resident-general presented Mohammed V with an ultimatum: either disavow the Istiqlal or abdicate. Though the sultan conceded to French pressure, he still retained the full support of the nationalists and the Moroccan masses, who began to mobilize in mass demonstrations. Public order in Morocco broke down as the labor unions called for strikes and as nationalist demonstrations turned into riots. Nationalist demonstrations raged in Tunisia at the same time. In December 1952, the French assassinated a Tunisian labor leader named Farhat Hached. His murder provoked mass demonstrations in both Tunisia and Morocco. The French authorities suppressed the riots that broke out in the main cities of Morocco with such violence that they inadvertently encouraged the nationalist movement. Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid captured the intense shock provoked by the violence in her autobiographical novel, The Year of the Elephant. For Zahra, the book’s narrator, the violence of December 1952 marked the moment when she decided to join the underground nationalist movement. I did take a position years before actually joining the resistance. I remember the day and the occasion quite clearly. The slaughter that black day in Casablanca can never be forgotten. Whenever I think of it, my body goes numb. I see them, [French] soldiers from the Foreign Legion, emerging from a barracks close to our neighbourhood, their machine guns blasting down passersby. How long I lived with those shots reverberating in my ears and the sight of women and children falling constantly in my mind. Later I would see many corpses lying like garbage bags on the sidewalk, but they never affected me like the events of that horrible day.... That day I lost all affection for life.... The situation had to be changed or it was not worth living.²⁵

In the aftermath of the December 1952 riots, both the Istiqlal and the Communist Party were banned by the French authorities, and hundreds of political activists were exiled. However, the sultan remained the key rallying point of Moroccan nationalist aspirations, and the French were determined to secure his abdication. Working through a coterie of Moroccan notables loyal to France and opposed to Mohammed V, the French orchestrated an indigenous coup against the sultan. A group of religious leaders and heads of the Muslim mystical brotherhoods, convinced that Mohammed V’s nationalist politics were somehow contrary to their religion, declared their allegiance to a member of the royal family named Ben Arafa. The French authorities demanded that the sultan abdicate, and when he refused he was arrested by French police, on August 20, 1953, and flown from the country at gunpoint. For the next two years Mohammed V was held in exile on the East African island of Madagascar. The exile of Mohammed V did nothing to calm the situation in Morocco. The nationalists went underground and turned to violent tactics now that their right to political self-expression was denied. They attempted to assassinate several French colonial officials, notables collaborating with the French, and even the usurper sultan Ben Arafa. In response, the French settlers established their own terrorist organization, called Prйsence Franзaise (“the French Presence”), to assassinate nationalist figures and intimidate their supporters. The French police instigated a reign of terror, arresting suspected nationalists and torturing political prisoners. It was against this background that Zahra, the protagonist in Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographical novel, entered the resistance. Her first mission was to help one of the men in her husband’s secret cell to flee the French police and escape from Casablanca to the international zone in Tangier. The mission was all the more ironic because the fugitive was a veteran of the French war in Vietnam who had lost his leg in Dien Bien Phu. Yet Zahra managed to see her fellow-resistance fighter safely to the international zone in Tangier. After her first success, the leaders of the resistance gave Zahra more challenging tasks. She led an arson attack on the shop of a collaborator in the center of Casablanca and ran for her life from the crowded market, with police and tracker dogs in hot pursuit. Zahra took refuge in a courtyard where she found the women of the house cooking. “I’m a guerrilla fighter,” she told them, and they gave their protection without asking any questions. Finding herself under the protection of Moroccan women, Zahra mused on how politics had changed her life and the position of women in her country. “If my grandmother had returned from the dead and seen me setting shops ablaze, delivering guns, and smuggling men across borders, she would have died a second death,” Zahra reflected.²⁶

The turning point for the French Empire in North Africa came in 1954. Protests had been mounting against French rule in Morocco and Tunisia since the late 1940s, prompting the French authorities to reconsider their position in both protectorates. The two states were nominally ruled by indigenous dynasties—the Alaoui sultans in Morocco and the Husaynid Beys in Tunisia. The French believed they could better secure their interests in both countries by coming to an accommodation with the nationalists and conceding independence under friendly governments. Yet French imperial policy was thrown into disarray by two events that spelled the end of the French Empire: the loss of Indochina following the decisive French defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (March–May 1954), and the outbreak of the Algerian war for independence on November 2, 1954. The French did not consider Algeria a colony. Unlike Tunisia and Morocco, which were ruled as protectorates, the territory of Algeria had been annexed to the French state and divided into dйpartments just like the rest of metropolitan France. One million French citizens lived in Algeria, with their interests actively protected by elected representatives in the French parliament. As far as the French—government and people alike—were concerned, Algeria was French. So when Algerian nationalists declared war, the French responded rapidly and with full force. They sent their troops, already embittered by the defeat in Vietnam and determined never to face surrender again, to “defend” Algeria from the threat of nationalism. Faced with a war in Algeria, the government of Pierre Mendиs-France took decisive action to cut its losses and resolve relations with Tunisia and Morocco. The French premier went to Tunis in person to ask the ruling bey, Muhammad VIII al-Amin (r. 1943–1956) to appoint a new government to negotiate Tunisian independence. The bey, who sought to preserve his own power over the nationalists, tried to exclude the most popular nationalist party, Habib Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour. However, by March 1955 he was forced by popular demand to invite Bourguiba to participate in the negotiations. The charismatic Bourguiba quickly assumed the leadership position of the Tunisian negotiating team and secured agreement for autonomy in April 1955 before concluding the March 20, 1956, protocol in which France recognized Tunisia’s independence. Affirming the republican principle that sovereignty lay in the people, Bourguiba moved in July 1957 to abolish the monarchy in Tunisia, which had been compromised by its collaboration with French colonial rule. The Tunisian Republic elected Bourguiba its first president, which post he held for the next thirty years. In Morocco the French sought to calm the situation by allowing Sultan Mohammed V to return from Madagascar to resume the throne. On November 16, 1955, the sultan landed in Morocco to a rapturous reception. Two days later, Mohammed V addressed the nation from the Royal Palace in Rabat, on the occasion of the Fкte du Trфne, the Moroccan national day. “What to say that could describe that day?” reflected Zahra, the nationalist freedom fighter of Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographical novel. “The whole of Casablanca became one huge celebration connected by stages and loudspeakers. Songs and performances mingled with speeches, and the aroma of tea being prepared on sidewalks filled the air.” Zahra, her family, and friends boarded a bus from Casablanca to Rabat to hear the sultan’s address. She remembered the “incredible roar” that greeted Mohammed V and his two sons when they appeared on the balcony of the palace. “How many times have I listened to his throne speech delivered that November 18! What a speech! I learned it by heart and can still recite it to this day.” Zahra repeated the sultan’s words from memory: “On this joyous day God has blessed us twice over. The blessing of return to our most beloved homeland after a long and sorrowful absence, and the blessing of gathering again with the people we have so missed and to whom we have been unerringly faithful and who have been faithful to us in turn.? The sultan?s message was clear: Morocco had achieved its independence only because the monarch and the people had supported each other. To Zahra, the events of November 18 revealed nothing so much as the failure of French efforts to split the monarch from his people through exile. ?Fantastic what an effect [the sultan] had on our hearts! His exile had wrapped him in a sacred cloak, and for his sake the people had joined the resistance, as if he had become an ideal or a principle. Had the French not exiled him, their presence in Morocco would have continued much longer; I?m certain of that.?²⁷ On March 2, 1956, Morocco achieved its independence from France.

By the time Morocco and Tunisia had achieved their independence, Algeria had descended to all-out war. What had started as a poorly organized insurgency by a small band (estimates range from 900 to 3,000 fighters on November 1, 1954) of underarmed men had developed into a mass popular uprising in which unarmed civilians—both settlers and native Algerians—were often the target of indiscriminate and murderous violence. In August 1955, the Algerian National Liberation Front, known by the French acronym, FLN attacked the settler village of Philippeville, killing 123 men, women, and children. The French retaliated with extraordinary brutality, killing thousands of Algerians (official French figures acknowledge 1,273 deaths whereas the FLN claimed 12,000 Algerians killed).²⁸ The Philippeville massacres intensified FLN resolve and also strengthened the organization by attracting large numbers of volunteers from those outraged by unmeasured French reprisals against Algerian citizens. The massacres also served as a stark reminder of the FLN’s strategic weakness in the face of the French army of occupation, with all of the resources of an industrial power. The Cairo office of the FLN was an important base for the movement’s international operations, and the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser had given full public support for the cause of Algerian independence. It was in order to isolate Algerian nationalists and to force Egypt to abandon its support for the FLN that France placed conditions on the sale of any military hardware to Nasser’s Egypt—conditions that, true to form, Nasser was unwilling to accept.

By 1955 Nasser had made some influential friends. He was respected by the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement—men like Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and China’s Zhou Enlai. Nonalignment was a natural line for Egypt to adopt, given its aversion to foreign domination. Like the other members of the movement, the Egyptian government wanted to preserve the freedom to enjoy cordial relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union without having to take sides in the Cold War. The organization also provided a forum for the countries of Asia and Africa to advance their goal of decolonization. Nasser, for example, proposed a resolution to the movement?s inaugural conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in support of Algerian independence that passed unanimously?much to France?s chagrin. The Egyptian people were delighted as their charismatic young president was recognized as a leader on the world’s stage. The Americans, however, were far less pleased. President Dwight Eisenhower rejected the politics of nonalignment out of hand. His administration believed there was no middle position between the United States and the USSR—ultimately, a country could only be with the Americans or against them. Nasser’s refusal to join a regional alliance against the Soviet Union had raised American ire, though many in the American administration still hoped to bring Nasser around. They were to be disappointed. Nasser’s pursuit of the arms denied him by the West ultimately led to the Communist bloc. He discussed the problem of securing modern weapons for his army with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, who offered to raise the matter with the Soviet Union on Egypt’s behalf. In May 1955, the Soviet ambassador in Cairo sought an audience with Nasser, initiating negotiations that ran through the summer months of 1955. Even as he turned to the Soviets for military assistance, Nasser tried to keep the Americans on his side. The Egyptian president informed the Americans about his communications with the Soviets and told the U.S. Ambassador to Cairo that he had a firm offer of arms from the Soviet Union, but that he would still prefer U.S. military assistance. In Mohamed Heikal’s view, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles first thought Nasser was bluffing. It was only after he had incontrovertible evidence that Nasser was about to conclude an agreement with the Soviets that Dulles sent envoys to prevent the deal from going through. In September 1955 Nasser presented the Americans with a fait accompli when he announced that Egypt would obtain arms from the Soviet satellite state of Czechoslovakia. ²⁹ The magnitude of the arms deal dramatically changed the balance of power in the Middle East as Egypt acquired 275 modern T-34 tanks and a fleet of 200 warplanes, including MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters and Ilyushin-28 bombers.³⁰ Following this first demarche toward the Communist bloc, the Egyptian government further alienated the Eisenhower administration in May 1956 when it extended diplomatic relations to the People’s Republic of China. Egypt had gravely undermined U.S. attempts to contain the spread of Communist influence in the Middle East, and the United States was determined to get Egypt to change its policies. The British, French, and Israelis were more ambitious still: they wanted to change Egypt’s government altogether. They saw Nasser as the champion of a dangerous new force known as Arab nationalism, which they believed he could mobilize against their vital interests in the Middle East. Ben-Gurion feared Nasser might rally the Arab states to mount a fatal attack on Israel. Prime Minister Anthony Eden believed Nasser deployed Arab nationalism to strip Britain of its influence in the Middle East. The French saw Nasser as encouraging the Algerians to intensify their war against France. Each of these states had a real reason to seek Nasser?s overthrow to advance their national interests. In the course of the year of 1956 these three states conspired to make war on Egypt in a fiasco dubbed both the Suez Crisis (in the West) and the Tripartite Aggression (by the Arabs).