Tag: nasser

Rashad

Posted on By 3arabawy

Another pic from the Family Album:

Rashad رشاد

My dad, standing first to the right, wrote on the back of the photo, “Fayoum” but no date is mentioned. I’d suggest it was taken sometime in 1966 or 1967 before the June War. One of the persons I recognize in that pic is his best friend, whom I won’t name or point out at the moment since he’s still alive and I didn’t consult with him whether he wanted to talk about this part of his and my dad’s lives or not. But it was through this friend that my father was first introduced to Fatah, during his post-graduate years.

Launching the “Palestinian Revolution” in January 1965, Fatah earned the suspicion and the denunciation of the Nasserist regime. Despite using the Palestinian cause as a cornerstone for his legitimacy in Egypt and the Arab World, Nasser was sure to exert full control on the Palestinian armed activities, setting up the PLO and imposing his stooge Ahmad el-Shoqueri whose job was praising Nasser and making sure no “miscalculated and adventurist” armed Palestinian resistance operations occurred against the Zionist state.

When Arafat and his posse took up arms in 1965, Nasser naturally viewed them with suspicion as “Syrian agents” and accused them of “adventurism.” News about the group’s (few, but were picking up) armed operations were censored in the Egyptian state-controlled press. But news were leaking into the Egyptian universities about this new mysterious Fatah group through the Palestinian students…

My father’s best friend was dating, and later married, a Palestinian who was affiliated to Fatah, and was studying in Cairo when they met and fell in love. Both him and my dad were staunch believers in Nasser, and sincerely believed he was working towards liberating Palestine. But the two were also on the more radical left side of their peers in the (regime-sponsored) Organization of the Socialist Youth. They looked up to Nasser, but felt “more was needed.” So they got into an endless cycle of love-hate towards Nasser, and already felt before the 1967 defeat that some “extra push” was needed to make Nasser tackle this or that.

The 1967 defeat came as an earthquake and shattered many of their illusions, radicalizing them further to the left. While his friend went on to get more involved in supporting Fatah, my father started sniffing around for a communist organization to join.

Rashad رشاد

The Egyptian ’68

Posted on By 3arabawy

Via Al-Ahram Weekly:

24 February 1968: Cairo University students take to the streets, protesting the light sentences given to the Air Force generals blamed by Nasser for the 1967 defeat, and calling for political reforms, freedom of expression, the liberation of the universities from the control of the security services. The students, in the pic, are crossing a bridge, heading to the parliament.

The radicalization was to continue. In November, 1968, mass confrontations took place in the streets of Alexandria, between the Alexandria University students joined by the citizens vs the security forces.

1968

Posted on By 3arabawy

In most books you come across, it’s worth noting that the Arab ’68 is largely forgotten in the international leftist literature, except for references to the radicalization of Palestinian resistance with the formation of the PFLP, and the victory of the Fatah fighters in the Karamah battle. However, Egypt and the other Arab countries were also having their own ’68.

It was in February 1968 that both the Egyptian student and the labor movements were revived with the outbreak of the first anti-Nasser demos since 1954.

Historians and ME scholars tend to trace the rise of Islamism as a mechanical reaction to the defeat of secular nationalist politics in 1967. But this is partially misleading and factually wrong coz the catastrophic defeat of Arab nationalism in 1967 led to a process of radicalization further to the left among a good number of those who looked up to Nasser as an agent of social change and liberation.

Someone like my father for example, who was a staunch Nasser supporter and a member of his Organization of Socialist Youth (the Nasserist regime youth group) was so SHOCKED by the defeat, but did not resort to the Quran in order to get out of his demoralization. He took down Nasser’s photo he had on the wall of his room, and put up Mao’s instead. And he wasn’t alone. 1968 witnessed the birth of the so called Third Communist Wave in Egypt.

I’ll try to put together a posting in the near future about that topic.