ABSTRACT
The crushing Arab defeat in the ‘Six Day War’ of June 1967 had a cataclysmic effect on the Egyptian decision-making environment.1 In the short term, President Gamal Abdel Nasser seems to have been affected by the shock of defeat to the point of irrationality – although there is no evidence that the condition persisted.2 In the longer term, the ‘setback’ caused the autocratic Egyptian leader to be subject to greater domestic constraints.3 Although he had turned potential disaster into triumph with the popular response to his 9 June resignation speech, Nasser’s position had become less secure. There were increased internal regime divisions between the pro-Western right and the left, which was supported by Soviet patronage.4 The army was dangerously discontented and kept temporarily in barracks.5 Growing support for the fida ‘iyun was a major problem, as were unprecedented student riots.6 The economic situation was particularly bad, and continued to deteriorate. Even before the war, Egypt had been saddled with a large, unserviceable foreign debt.7 Now she had lost her major sources of revenue, and the loss was only partially made good by Arab aid – which was in any case dependent on the appearance of continuing the fight against Israel.8
More than at any period since the beginning of his rule, Nasser was forced to pay attention to the opinions of others regarding foreign policy. Nonetheless, his control of the state-run media allowed him to influence opinion formation, and he remained the principal decisionmaker within the Cairo regime. The fundamental issue dominating Egyptian foreign policy during this
period was the Israeli occupation of Sinai – and, to a lesser extent, the other territories occupied in June 1967. One major controversy concerns whether Nasser was ultimately seeking a military or a political solution to this problem. Small linguistic nuances came to be of great importance. The political solution (‘al-hal al-siyasiyy’) called for in the international arena was distinguished both from a peaceful solution (‘al-hal al-silmiyy’), which would rule out the use of military means, and from political action/means
(‘taharruk’/’wasa’il’), emphasized more in a domestic context, which would not ultimately rule out a military solution. To probe for the consistent purposes behind this creative ambiguity, this chapter considers developments immediately after the 1967 war, as well as during the subsequent ‘War of Attrition’ between Egypt and Israel. Finally, it asks whether Egyptian policy before Nasser’s death in 1970 constituted any sort of coherent strategy, leading to a planned endgame.
