Middle East - Anthony Ham [38]
The Sayyid Qutb Reader, by Albert Bergesen, compresses the prolific writings of one of militant Islam’s earliest scholars into an accessible form –
an important text for understanding the later ‘War on Terror’.
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ARAB-ISRAELI WARS
With the Arab world growing in confidence, war seemed inevitable. In May 1967, the Egyptian army moved into key points in Sinai and announced a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, effectively closing the southern Israeli port of Eilat. The Egyptian army was mobilised and the country put on a war footing. On 5 June, Israel responded with a devastating pre-emptive strike that wiped out virtually the entire Egyptian air force in a single day. The war lasted only six days (hence the ‘Six Day War’), and when it was over, Israel controlled all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. The West Bank, including Jerusalem’s Old City, had been seized from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
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Although the 1973 war is painted as a victory and reassertion of Arab pride by many historians, by the time it ended, the Israelis actually occupied more land than when it began.
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After more than a decade of swaggering between Cairo and Damascus, and empty promises to the Palestinians that they would soon be returning home, the unmitigated disaster that was the Six Day War sent shockwaves across the region. Not only were leaders like Nasser no match for the Israelis, despite the posturing, but also tens of thousands more Palestinian refugees were now in exile. The mood across the region was grim. A humiliated Nasser offered to resign, but in a spontaneous outpouring of support, the Egyptian people wouldn’t accept the move and he remained in office. However, it was to be for only another three years; abruptly in November 1970, the president died of a heart attack, reportedly a broken man.
With Palestinian militancy on the rise, the year 1970 saw the ascension of new leaders in both Egypt (Anwar Sadat) and Syria (Hafez al-Assad). Preparations were also well under way for the next Middle Eastern war, with these radical new leaders under constant pressure from their citizens to reclaim the land lost in 1967. On 6 October 1973, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal, taking Israel (at a standstill, observing the holy day of Yom Kippur) almost entirely by surprise. After advancing a short distance into Sinai, however, the Egyptian army stopped, giving Israel the opportunity to concentrate its forces against the Syrians on the Golan Heights and then turn back towards Egypt. Although the war preserved the military status quo, it was widely portrayed throughout the region as an Arab victory. True or not, the absence of overwhelming defeat restored to the region a large measure of the confidence it had lost in 1967.
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Mezzaterra, by the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, is an eloquent series of essays on the modern Middle East, challenging Western stereotypes about the region while being rooted in the lives of ordinary people.
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When the war ended in late 1973, months of shuttle diplomacy by the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, followed. Pressure on the USA to broker a deal was fuelled when the Gulf States embargoed oil supplies to the West 10 days after the war began. The embargo was relatively short-lived, but if the goal was to get the West’s attention, it succeeded. The embargo’s implications were massive, achieving nothing less than a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East. The oil states, rich but underpopulated and militarily weak, gained at the expense of poorer, more populous countries. Huge shifts of population followed the two oil booms of the 1970s, as millions of Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians and Yemenis went off to seek their fortunes in the oil states.
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NATIONS WITHOUT A STATE: PALESTINIANS & KURDS
Everyone seems to agree there will one day be a Palestinian state, even if no-one dares to predict when it might come to pass. The same cannot be said for the Kurds, despite