Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein

Nasser was the son of a postal clerk and so the family moved often. His mother died when he was eight years old. He attended several different elementary and secondary schools, frequently getting into trouble for his rebellious behavior and clashes with teachers. He was a poor student who barely scraped thorugh his final exams. He demonstrated no distinction in his education and his main interest was in protesting the British control of Egypt. He dropped out at 18 but his application to join the Royal Military Academy was understandably rejected. and joined the army and graduated after 2 years as a second lieutenant. He understood what he needed to get ahead so he sucked up to the the person responsible for the Academy's selection board, gave him his well-rehearsed "dignity, glory, and freedom" spiel and was sponsored into the Academy due to his impressive command of bullshit.

His memoir of the 1948 war showed his scorn for the High Command of the Egytian army which they certainly seemed to deserve. He believed himself to be a better officer than others but admitted he spent more time trying to charm other officers and attract new members to the Free Officers conspiracy than preparing for the fighting. He wrote: "Our infantry was being expended in a terrible way in exposed, broad daylight attacks. Bare bodies unprotected by armour were being pitted against strongly fortified positions and guns manned by competent, well-trained defenders." Nasser's view of the command of the Egyptian Army was correct but that reuired no great insight. Nasser had the great good fortune to be part of the force surrounded and trapped in the Faluja Pocket commanded by General Said Taha Bey. This was the high point of the Egyptian Army in 1948 and he returned to Egypt a hero though he had spent more time conspiring amongst the other officers than fighting.

2 Jun 1948: Kibbutz Negba, Southern Sector
At 0700 hours Egyptian tanks and infantry – from the 1st Brigade under Brigadier Said Taha Bey – attacked Kibbutz Negba under cover of a smoke screen (Herzog, 1982; Kurzman, 1970). 1,000 Egyptians against 140 Israelis. The Egyptians made it to the inner fence but the Israeli’s sole piat (British man-portable anti-tank) team saw off six tanks, and others were driven off by molotov cocktails. An Israeli jeep force also threatened the Egyptian's rear. A second smoke screen shielded the mauled Egyptians as they withdrew. The Egyptians suffers over 100 casualties.

In his memoire he wrote about receving a flesh wound while leaving the battle ealy in an arnoured car.

Arial Sharon, who was the 32nd Battalion Intelligence Officer of the Alexandroni Brigade, recalled the battles in his autobiography:

The 4,000 trapped Egyptians were under the command of a Sudanese brigadier named Said Taha Bey, an old warhorse who had received his training in the British army. This Taha Bey was a true hero. Without any real hope of either breaking out or being rescued, his brigade was putting up a fierce resistance, repelling every attack. Despite his position, at first he refused to even talk with any of the Israeli commanders who tried to arrange negotiations. When finally he agreed to meet with Yigal Allon, he rejected Allon's offer to allow his troops to retire with their weapons. According to the story that made the rounds at the time, Taha Bey listened as Allon described the hopelessness of his situation, then told the Israeli commander that he was fighting for the honor of the Egyptian army and would not surrender under any conditions whatsoever.


Said Taha Bey conferring with Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin"

Despite our complete control over the battlefield, try what we might we could not break through Taha Bey's defenses. Since the end of October, attack after attack had been turned back with serious losses. Finally a major effort was planned for the night of December 27. Our battalion would keep the village of Faluja busy while a second battalion would carry out the main assault on Iraq Manshiyeh. It was a disaster. By the time we were able to disengage we had lost ninety-eight men out of a total of six hundred.

Taha Bey never was defeated. Eventually a special agreement was reached with him, and only then did his brigade march home.

Nasser's major youthful activity had been rebellious behaviour and in the army, conspiracy.

In 1952 a coup d'etat by a nationalist secret society, the "Free Officers' Movement" supposedly led by the popular General Mohamed Naguib brought Nasser into power. On October 1954 Vice-President Nasser negotiated the withdrawal of the last British soldiers from the Suez Canal. A few days later he was giving a speech in Alexandria when an apparent assassination attempt occurred. He was unharmed but a member of the Muslim Brotherhood was arrested and executed. Nasser had over 1,000 MuslimBrotherhood members arrested, including their leader. Six were executed. All political opponents were imprisoned in concentration camps including supporters of Naguib and Egypt became a one-party dictatorship under an absolute monarch, Nasser. Naturally he needed secret police forces, the Amn al-Dawla and the Mukhabarat and those too secret to have common names.

He began a land redistribution program, confiscating land from the big landowners and redistributing it to the peasants in a remarkably fair system for land redistribution. Early on he prohibited polygamy and legalised birth control. In the 1960s he established the Supreme Council for Family Planning, he even tried to regulate sex. To avoid alienating the Egyptian religious culture, he peformed Muslim ritual and duties and made several pilgrimages to Mecca but co-opted the major religious institutions just to be sure. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal was successful thanks to Eisenhower but his 1960s aggressive Islamic-Socialism regulatory expropriations and nationalisations stifled productivity, discouraged investment and resulted in bloated bureaucraciesa and massive exodus of the foreign commercial communities.

In a strange twist of fate the famous Palestinian refugee and academic, Edward Said and his family lived in the wealthiest suburbs in Cairo. His father, William "Wadie" Said was a citizen of the USA having served in the American army in WW1. His successful business career was damaged when a revolutionary mob burned down his flagship Cairo store as well as a local branch store in 1952. Several years later, the successfully rebuilt business was nationalized in a purge of Western influence instituted by Egypt's president, the "revolutionary" dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser. (Wadie Said, it will be remembered, was a foreigner with an American passport.) Edward Said's idyllic childhood in Jerusalem and having to flee in 1947 was a myth created for political purposes. So much of Palestinian "history" is mythical/

It seemed that Nasser had run his course by the mid-1960s. He had alienated the West and was dependent on the USSR. He secured another presidential term as the sole candidate under the single-party system. He was still the central pillar of Arab nationalism and pan-Arab politics, though he had strained relations with rival regimes in the region. He could have retired then and still be adored by billions for centuries. Maybe it rankled that he was a military failure. His publicity machine had framed the outcome of the 1956 Suez Crisis as a grand Egyptian victory but he knew he'd been rescued by Eisenhower. He decided it was time to crown his career with the destruction of Israel.