preparing a counter-offensive. But Marshal Amer, in a state of panic and confusion, ordered a general retreat, which turned into a rout.
Having put Egypt out of action, the Israeli army turned towards Jerusalem and the West Bank, where it took control following a short street battle; then it turned towards Syria, which retreated from the Golan Heights without much resistance. Within a week, the fighting was over. The victors would call the conflict the Six Day War; for the defeated, it would be above all ‘al-anksa’ (‘the setback’), then quite simply ‘the June War’.
These bland names scarcely conceal the extent of the trauma suffered by the Arabs during these days. It is no exaggeration to say that for them, this short war remains the tragic reference point which colours their perception of the world and influences their behaviour.
Following the defeat, one question obsessed all Arabs and many Muslims throughout the world. Everyone framed it in his own way and came up with his own answers, but the substance was the same: how had such a defeat come about?
At first, in order to excuse his failure, Nasser had said that the attack had not come from Israel alone, but in conjunction with the Americans and the British. If this was not true, it was useful in the short term in order to mitigate the despair felt by the Egyptians and the wider Arab world. Being beaten by a great power was infuriating but it was in the order of things, and much less shameful than being beaten by a small state created twenty years earlier, which had a population a tenth the size of Egypt’s and a smaller army.
The war of 1967 should have washed away the stain of 1948, when the new Jewish state had stood up to a coalition of its neighbours. It was supposed to demonstrate that the Arabs had regained confidence, had reconnected with their former glory, and that their national renaissance under the aegis of Nasser had at last given them back their rightful place among the nations of the world. Instead of which, this lightning defeat had taken away their self-esteem and for years to come established a relationship of profound distrust with the rest of the world, which they perceived as a hostile place run by their enemies in which they themselves no longer belonged. They felt that everything which made up their identity was despised and scorned by the rest of the world and — more seriously still — something within them told them that such hatred and scorn were not completely unjustified. This double hatred — of the world and of themselves — explains in large part the destructive and suicidal behaviour which has characterised the past decade.
This behaviour has become such a frequent, even daily, occurrence in Iraq and elsewhere that it has ceased to be shocking. So it seems to me useful to remind ourselves that never before in the history of humanity have we seen such a widespread phenomenon, never have we lived through a period in which hundreds or thousands of men have shown such a propensity to sacrifice their lives. All of the historical parallels which are sometimes cited to relativise this phenomenon are grossly inappropriate. The Japanese kamikaze were, for example, members of a regular army and their attacks were only common during the last year of the war in the Pacific, and they came to a definitive end with the capitulation of their government. And, in Muslim history, members of the Order of the Assassins only attacked clearly defined targets and never killed at random. They allowed themselves to be taken prisoner and executed for their acts, but never took their own lives. Nor did they commit more than a handful of attacks in the course of two centuries, making them resemble Russian revolutionaries of the tsarist period much more closely than today’s ‘martyrs’.
The despair which fires these martyrs does not date from 1967 or 1948, or the end of the First World War. It is the culmination of a long historical process which no single date or event can adequately encapsulate. It is in the history of a people who have known a great moment of glory followed by a long decline. For two hundred years they have aspired to rise again, but each time they fall back down. Defeats, disappointments and humiliations had followed one after the other until the moment when Nasser appeared. With him, they believed it would once again be possible to get back on their feet, regain their self-esteem and the admiration of others. When they collapsed again in such a spectacular and degrading fashion, the Arabs, and the rest of the Muslim world, had the feeling that they had lost everything irremediably.
Since then, agonising self-examination has been going on, but in an atmosphere of bitterness and fear, and with an excess of faith which poorly masks infinite despair.
Nasser’s defeat, followed by his death in September 1970 at the age of fifty-two, encouraged the emergence of various competing political projects that claimed his legacy.
In Egypt itself, power was assumed by Anwar Sadat, a character previously thought dull and timorous, but who in fact turned out to be bold and flamboyant. That was not the strangest aspect of his career, however; pretenders who make themselves inconspicuous while the master is still alive only to reveal themselves as soon as they assume power are legion throughout world history. Strong men love to be surrounded by people who do not oppose them, who do not cast a shadow and who wait for their moment without showing signs of impatience. Nor was the strangest thing about Sadat that he managed in October 1973 to dislodge the Israeli army’s positions through a surprise attack along the Suez Canal, which in Israel is called the Yom Kippur War, and in Egypt the October War. The strangest thing is that in succeeding where Nasser had failed, the new leader was unable to supplant his predecessor in the hearts of the Arab people. He was even ridiculed and insulted, put in political quarantine and so demonised in some quarters that he ended up being assassinated.
It is strange and also highly revealing for anyone seeking to examine the delicate question of legitimacy. A people still living with the shock of a traumatic defeat suddenly find themselves with a new leader who attains, if not an outright victory, at least a more than honourable semi-success. He should have been adulated, lionised, immediately crowned among the great heroes of the nation, yet the exact opposite happened. If Sadat became an icon, it was for Western and not for Arabic opinion, which never identified with him: not before his spectacular trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, and certainly not after. The Arab people never accorded him that instinctive, almost carnal, legitimacy in their hearts, which Nasser, despite his setbacks, faults and defeats, benefited from until his death.
There was probably some unconscious resentment of Sadat for having succeeded Nasser, just as one may hate a mother’s new partner simply because he has taken the place of a beloved father. In France, for example, all those who held the reins of power after Napoleon suffered in comparison with him, especially those who bore the same name. That the reign of the great emperor had been ruinous and ended in defeat and foreign occupation did not matter. People are grateful to whoever offers them an epic, a dream, the admiration of others, and a scrap of pride. The Napoleonic period was the last during which France occupied first rank among the nations of the earth, and during which it tried to unite Europe around it through the combined force of its arms and ideas. Nasser’s moment was less ambitious, but by the yardstick of what still seemed possible for the Arabs, it played a similar role, and it remains in people’s memories as a moment of glory.
Chapter 10
Everyone will draw their own lessons from the failure of this venture. Sadat conceived a profound distrust of the Arab lands where his predecessor had constantly got bogged down: the Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Libyans and the rest were all ready to fight, he would mutter to those close to him, ‘right to the last Egyptian soldier’.
Reckoning that his country had endured enough without any recompense, he wished to withdraw once and for all from the Arab–Israeli conflict which had exhausted him, and which was damaging his relations with the prosperous West. He would come to think of the Arabs as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. Perhaps he would not say it overtly, but those with an interest picked up on it. As a result, when Sadat took a decision, the Arabs did not view it as theirs. And if he remained legitimate as Egyptian president, he was not perceived as — nor did he seek to be — the natural leader of the Arab nation.
At the end of his life, many Arabs even placed Sadat firmly among the enemies and the traitors — not just Arabs of nationalist and Islamist persuasion, who were outraged at his reconciliation with the Jewish state, but also a significant proportion of moderate, pro-Western leaders, who resented the fact that he had made any regional peace impossible by withdrawing Israel’s principal Arab neighbour from the conflict. Their reasoning went like this: the power relations in the Middle East were already unfavourable to the Arabs. If, in addition, Egypt disengaged
