Summary
President of Egypt whose nationalization of the Suez Canal Eisenhower supported as a right while opposing his blocking of Israeli passage and the 1956 invasion, and whose pan-Arabism, in Christison’s account, attracted many Palestinians in the 1950s and early 1960s before the 1967 war showed it an empty force (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1060-1074, 1228-1246).
Details
- Eisenhower and Kennedy both courted Nasser and both failed: Kennedy believed Eisenhower had placed his efforts too exclusively in an East-West context and that the United States should befriend rather than repress Arab nationalism, but it proved impossible both to accept Nasser’s pan-Arabism and to maintain friendly ties with the conservative regimes he was trying to subvert (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1114-1130).
- Johnson turned away from attempting to befriend him and developed a strong hostility toward him (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1208-1220).
- Nixon, recalling a 1963 private meeting, could think of no reason for Nasser’s enmity toward Israel other than “his blind intolerance of the Jews” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1360-1376).
- Israeli newspapers continually identified Nasser with Hitler in the run-up to the 1967 war (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 1248-1300).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Anwar al-Sadat