Summary
Egyptian officer in the Falluja Pocket in 1948 and later Egypt’s leader, who in Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace appears first as a witness that the Egyptian army’s real battlefield was Egypt itself, and, in the authors’ 1999 introduction, as the first Arab leader to propose peace with Israel, whose 1955 proposal Ben-Gurion rejected in favour of the Sèvres invasion accord (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.7-8, p.36-38).
Details
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Nasser was one of the Egyptian commanders besieged in the Falluja Pocket in 1948, and followed with great interest Allon’s conversation with Col. Taha there (PDF p.36, p.38).
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His Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution (1955) is quoted: “we were fighting in Palestine, but our dreams were centred in Egypt. Our bullets were aimed at the enemy in its trenches, but our hearts hovered over our distant country, which we had left to the care of the wolves” (PDF p.37); Free Officer cells met in the Faluja trenches, and the dying Ahmad Abdul Aziz’s words were “the biggest battlefield is in Egypt” (PDF p.37).
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Nasser records that in armistice-negotiation meetings with the Israeli officer Yeruhan [sic] Cohen, the subject he always talked about was Israel’s struggle against the English and how the Jews organized the underground resistance and mustered world public opinion against them (PDF p.37).
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In the 1999 introduction: after Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser feared the Franco-British invasion plan and was prepared to reach a peace accord with Israel; he was the first Arab leader who proposed peace with Israel (at the Bandung conference in 1955), provided Israel complied with the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947 and restored to Palestinians the territory allocated to them by the UN (PDF p.7).
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Ben-Gurion rejected the proposal and labelled it a “sanctimonious accusation”; the authors argue an accord with Nasser, held in high esteem in the Arab world, could have led to a resolution of the conflict (PDF p.8).
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In Chapter 5 of the same book: Nasser said Israel’s Gaza raid of 28/2/55, in which 38 of his soldiers were killed, was “the turning point” — “Until that moment,” said Nasser later, “I felt the possibility of real peace was near” (Time, 27 August 1956, quoted PDF p.208); his Radio Cairo announcement of the Czech-Egyptian arms deal (27/9/55) is quoted at length, including his answer to talk of Russian penetration (PDF p.208-209).
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After Ben-Gurion’s Knesset peace proposal of 2/11/55, with the al-Sabha battle raging hours later (50 Egyptian soldiers killed, 49 captured), Nasser told the Arab News Agency’s Tom Little the battle was “decisive proof that Ben-Gurion was not honest in his proposal for peace” (PDF p.217-218).
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On 26 July 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, “the hardest blow that the West had ever sustained in the Middle East”; all Western pressure to reverse it failed (PDF p.227).
Related pages
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, David Ben-Gurion, Czech-Egyptian arms deal, Gaza raid (1955), Baghdad Pact