Now They Call Me Infidel Read online

  Although I admired him, his typical Egyptian bravado and certainty did not assuage my fears. I had a very bad feeling about yet another war and viewed it as another potential round of death and destruction. As the drumbeat for war grew louder, foreigners began leaving Egypt. But most Egyptians believed in Nasser’s power, and their expectations for victory were very high.

  Ever since the 1956 war with Israel, Nasser had been attempting to unite the whole Arab world into a military alliance to attack Israel. He made no secret of it. In 1966 Egypt convinced Syria to sign a military pact that basically promised that one would join in if the other went to war. Nasser attempted to get the same agreement with Jordan. In the spring of 1967, Nasser publicly announced his plans to remilitarize the Sinai. One problem: the United Nations was stationed there as part of the cease-fire arrangement after the war of 1956 to prevent such a thing. On May 17, 1967, Nasser demanded that the UN forces be pulled out of their position between Egypt and Israel. Amazingly, UN Secretary-General U Thant complied, and Nasser, with the whole world watching, immediately began amassing tanks and troops on the border with Israel. About that time, border skirmishes began breaking out on the Syrian-Israeli border. Then on May 23, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran in the Red Sea, Israel’s major shipping lane for oil, and blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat. Now it was more than beating drums, rhetoric, and posturing. War was imminent.

  Historians say that this was the first time a U.S. president actually picked up the famous red phone to talk to Moscow. The United States pleaded with the Russians to use their influence with Nasser to avert war. The Soviets, despite their decades-long military support of Egypt, attempted to convince the Egyptians to at least not be the first to strike.

  Jordan’s King Hussein, who feared that Nasser’s plans would bring instability to the region, knew that most of his country supported Nasser’s vision, and he caved in rather than face an insurrection on his own streets. On May 30, Jordan signed a mutual defense treaty, joining the alliance with Egypt and Syria. Only days earlier, President Nasser had called King Hussein an “imperialist lackey,” among other insults. But now Hussein was on board. King Hussein even “allowed” an Egyptian general to come in and take command of his armed forces. This was an important part of Nasser’s plan. From a strategic place on the Jordanian border, it was only seventeen kilometers to Israel’s coastline. In only a matter of minutes or hours Israel could be cut in half as a first step to finally casting the Jewish state into the sea. Nasser declared for the whole world to hear: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” The Egyptian public was elated. Adrenaline flowed.

  On the morning of June 5, 1967, the Six Day War began.

  Some 400,000 Egyptian soldiers were sent into battle, among them my military officer friend. Once again a major war with Israel was on, and once again my family and I had to live through alarming sirens warning us of possible air raids on Cairo. Once again we were sitting in total darkness at night listening to faraway bombings. I was frightened.

  In Cairo we stayed tuned to our radios night and day to hear news of the war. The Egyptian media fed us lies. Songs of triumph on the radio proclaimed that we were winning the war against the Jews and the Zionist enemy. “Very soon Egypt will occupy Tel Aviv,” was the heady prediction heard on the streets.

  As Egyptians scanned the radio dial to hear the news of the war, many of us knew that we were probably hearing lies, and we began searching for foreign radio stations, such as the Voice of America, to learn the truth. The reception for the BBC and Voice of America was very weak and often jammed. But this did not stop us from listening eagerly.

  And we began hearing a different story. We heard of a devastating defeat and the loss of the Sinai. Even though I had predicted this result, I still could not believe it could happen that fast and that easily. The loss was a blow to Egyptians as they learned what had really happened the morning of June 5. The Egyptian Air Force, the largest, most modern of all the Arab forces, with more than 300 Soviet-built aircraft, had been destroyed on the ground by a pre-emptive Israeli attack. About 300 aircraft were demolished, 350 combat pilots were dead, and the runways shredded so the few remaining planes could not take off. Ironically, the Israelis had struck at a time when the Egyptians had turned off their air defense radar to perform an inspection.

  Egypt did not fare much better on the ground in the Sinai despite 100,000 troops, more than 1,000 tanks, and all kinds of state-of-the-art, Soviet-built artillery. Israeli paratroopers landed in the heavily fortified area of Abu-Ageila and destroyed much of the artillery, and combined Israeli forces attacked the Egyptians from the front and the rear. The battles were fierce and continued for three and a half days before Abu-Ageila fell. When Egyptian field marshal and war minister Abdel Hakim Amer heard about the fall of Abu-Ageila, he panicked and ordered all Egyptian units in the Sinai to retreat.

  Israeli forces attempted to block their retreat in the mountain passes but were only partially successful. Some Egyptian units made their escape across the Suez into safety. But fighting all along the escape route was heavy. It had taken the Israelis only three days to capture the entire Sinai.

  Besides the truth leaking out to us across foreign radio waves, there was the personal knowledge Egyptians were hearing from family members. In our case, my aunt’s whole family as well as her in-laws had to flee from the city of Suez as fighting reached there. The city of Suez was on the southern end of the Suez Canal where it joins the Red Sea. About twenty adults and children took refuge as guests at my grandmother’s house. They were sleeping everywhere.

  For many years before the 1967 war, my siblings and I had enjoyed carefree summers in my aunt’s cabin on the Red Sea resort of ‘Ein el Sokhna. My aunt and her family never returned to Suez after the 1967 war, since the apartment building she owned, with its breathtaking view of the Red Sea, was totally destroyed along with most of the city. Suez and most of the other canal cities were ruined and became ghost towns. Most of the population of these cities moved permanently to Cairo or Alexandria, placing further stress on these two crowded cities. It was especially hard on my aunt’s husband, who lost his business and source of livelihood in Suez. He died of a heart attack before the year was out.

  After the war, the once blue beautiful beach was contaminated by several oil spills, its once clean water covered with black crude. The Suez Canal itself was closed to navigation for many years, littered with broken ships hastily docked and left there. The good days at the Red Sea beach that we had looked forward to every summer ended because of the war. Only memories remained.

  It was no better for other Arab countries. In the first few hours of the war, when Nasser convinced King Hussein that Egypt was winning the air war, Jordan agreed to attack, moving against West Jerusalem, even temporarily occupying the UN Government House and shelling the city. They also fired in the direction of Tel Aviv. But their early successful attempts were cut short. Israel soon destroyed the entire Royal Jordanian Air Force and beat back the ground forces, capturing East Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount. Within two days, Israel had pushed Jordanian forces back and captured the West Bank. The Syrian front fared no better as Israel took the Golan Heights, even though other Arab nations such as Iraq had joined the fray.

  In a mere six days, the Arab nations were handed a humiliating defeat. While such numbers were never admitted to, around 10,000 Egyptian lives were lost (some estimates placed it as high as 15,000), not to mention thousands more wounded or maimed. Those 10,000 families knew their young men did not return. If every dead soldier had 100 extended family members plus close friends, there were at least a million Egyptians who knew the truth firsthand. It was impossible to hide that many deaths, let alone the fact that Egypt had lost the entire Sinai.

  The truth about the Arab’s devastating defeat came out after the war but was twisted and repackaged with many lies by the government and a corrupt media. Yet there was no public outcry over those media lies. O
nly through Arab media outlets can a military defeat be rewritten as a military conquest.

  After Arabs convinced themselves that their defeat was not really a defeat, they started making demands of an enemy who just resoundingly won the war. They truly expected Israel to immediately and unconditionally turn back all the lands conquered in the 1967 war. In this delusionary environment, Arabs actually believed that after each war Israel should hand them back their marbles in order to allow Arabs to get ready to start the next round of wars against the Jewish state. The thinking went that perhaps next time, if Israel does not “cheat” by defending itself, the Arabs would succeed and win.

  Even the educated Egyptians, myself included, did not comprehend why Israel was not immediately withdrawing from the occupied territories. They had done so after the 1956 war (at the insistence of other world powers unbeknownst to us), and we expected them to do it again. It was only “fair,” or so we thought.

  United Nations Resolution 242, which grew out of the war of 1967, was portrayed in Arab media as an order from the UN for Israel to give back occupied territories. Arab media never told the public that the resolution also required peaceful negotiations that would provide Israel with security guarantees. To this day, Arabs ignore that half of the resolution and only discuss “the occupation,” refusing to hold up their end of the bargain to achieve their goals. The only true and consistent goal in the Arab mind was to get rid of Israel.

  But even more bewildering, despite the devastating defeat, there was no public demand for an investigation of what really happened. People only whispered about Nasser’s bad choice of the military leadership of Amer but never dared to blame Nasser for it. Arab media managed to portray Nasser and Egypt as the victims of Israeli aggression rather than the perpetrators of the war. The bigger the lie, the more believable it becomes to the average Arab citizen. Thus, Arab media never fail to be less than outrageous. They blamed the defeat on none other than Israel, as though self-defense and self-preservation was not a right to be exercised by the Jewish enemy. They simply accused Israel of wanting to conquer the Arab world and that would become the excuse for conducting one unsuccessful war after the other. They also claimed that American and British warplanes had actually attacked Egypt from aircraft carriers and bases in Libya, and that American and British troops also ran support on the ground. The claim was patently false, yet to this day, many Arabs believe it to be true. It came to be referred to in the West as the “Big Lie.”

  It was not the first time Nasser had successfully manipulated his population by using the technique of the Big Lie. Nasser’s revolution had explained away the 1948 defeat in their war against Israel by claiming that King Farouk and the British were traitors who conspired to cause the Arab defeat by giving Egyptian soldiers defective weapons that fired back at them instead of at the enemy. That’s what we were told in school, the media, and movies. It was particularly touching when we saw a movie about how the poor Egyptian soldiers were getting killed by their own weapons. I truly believed the story as a child—after all, it was in our school textbooks. But I was later amazed that what we had seen in the movies was not confirmed by any army officers who participated in that war.

  Nasser used this propaganda to make Egyptians feel victimized in a war that he claimed would have otherwise been winnable. That kept an opening and a yearning in the minds of people to correct the results of that war by getting into another one, but next time with the best possible armaments from the Soviet Union.

  The Big Lie to explain away the defeat in 1967 was that the Egyptian Air Force was actually destroyed by American and British warplanes, not the Israelis. Based on this lie, which was accepted without question in every Arab capital in the Middle East, oil-producing states announced an embargo on the United States and Great Britain and in some cases stopped all shipments of oil to the West.

  It’s true that in the postwar rumblings, Nasser attempted to symbolically resign from his position, but the Egyptian people poured into the streets asking him to remain in power. To many he was the Great Daddy who needed to comfort his children after the defeat—a defeat that they still continued to deny happened.

  Despite his “symbolic” gesture, Nasser failed to take responsibility for the national disaster of that war or the strategic blunders of his administration. Instead he blamed others, placing several top government officials under house arrest. Given the up-to-date weaponry supplied by the Soviets, this time Nasser could not place the blame on “defective weapons,” as his revolution had done in the 1948 defeat. However, Nasser never failed to find reasons outside of himself for Egypt’s problems, which were piling up on all fronts.

  The head of Egyptian intelligence, Salah Nasr, who was our next-door neighbor, was one of those placed under house arrest. Government police replaced his security guards around his house, and some of them were positioned in part of our own side yard. Later Salah Nasr was taken to jail, where he remained for many years. My mother, who comforted his wife, reminded us that my father was supposed to have held Salah Nasr’s position had he lived. My family could not help but wonder: Had our father not been killed in Gaza, might he have ended up in jail like Nasr, a scapegoat for Nasser’s failures?

  Such arrests and political intrigues were not unusual in Egypt, which had become a police state under Nasser.

  Another mistake Nasser never admitted to was his poor choice for head of the Egyptian armed forces, Mushier Abdel Hakim Amer, who was such a close friend of Nasser’s that they named their children after each other. Our cook from my father’s days, Mahmoud, who had become Amer’s cook, used to tell us how Nasser and Amer were very close family friends. Amer was a known womanizer who indulged in many pleasures, including regular use of hashish. He had at least one famous movie actress as a second wife and with whom he had a son. But despite their supposed “close friendship,” Amer was blamed by Nasser for losing the war and was placed under house arrest. Amer was later found dead from a gunshot wound. Despite the claim by the government that Amer committed suicide, many Egyptians believe that he was murdered by Nasser.

  Nasser believed his own propaganda. Blinded by his obsessions, he overestimated his own power and his military’s readiness, competence, and commitment to the goal of destroying Israel. But, according to military analysts, he also failed to pick the right person to head the Egyptian military in order to achieve these goals. Amer was a popular figure in the military and known for keeping the officers happy. Nasser’s choice of Amer as the stabilizing factor in the military was more important to Nasser than having a competent man for the job. His choice of Amer kept Nasser safe from a military coup, which is very telling as to where Nasser’s priorities lay. But Amer’s friendship and loyalty was meaningless in the end. He died a convenient scapegoat.

  Another reason why the Arabs lose wars is that they are not fighting for survival. As a result, they lack cohesion and the sense of working as a team. In 1967 Egyptian soldiers were not fighting a war for Egypt’s survival. Israel, however, was fighting for its survival. The class factor also played a crucial role. The majority of Egyptian lower-rank soldiers were very poor peasants who were underpaid, illiterate, malnourished, and held in low regard by their leadership. I witnessed this dynamic in 1976 at a 3M demonstration to the Egyptian military when I was working as a translator for the 3M Company in Cairo. After the event, there was a banquet given for the top officers, while the lower soldiers were treated as their servants. Egyptian military lower-ranking soldiers are often literally treated as servants. Many end up as household help in officer’s homes and are sent on personal errands. That dynamic of relationships in the Egyptian military does not produce the cohesion and unity necessary for armies to win wars. Rank-and-file Egyptian soldiers had little motivation to fight Israel since their true oppressors were, in fact, their superiors within the army. In this aspect, the Egyptian military suffered from the same social and political problems of the larger society.

  My navy officer friend later ad
mitted to me that I was the only one he knew who had rightly predicted the outcome of the 1967 war. Nevertheless, my officer friend remained a loyal military man, totally committed to the Egyptian obsession to annihilate Israel. He would later participate in the War of Attrition between 1969 and 1970, as Nasser maintained a constant state of military activity against Israel along the Suez Canal. My friend was involved in many covert operations against the Israeli soldiers who were stationed on the eastern side of the Suez Canal. He once showed me a very fancy pair of boots he was wearing and proudly stated that they were made in America. He had taken them off the feet of an Israeli soldier after killing him. My friend then nonchalantly added that the Israeli boot was of a much better quality and far more comfortable than the boots provided by the Egyptian military.

  My friend also participated in a relatively unknown war started by Nasser, the Egyptian war on Yemen. That was a war against a brother Arab Muslim nation. Many atrocities were committed in that “little” war that the world didn’t notice, and many were killed on both sides. Egyptian military officers, such as my friend, were happy to participate in the war against Yemen because it brought them additional and desperately needed income. Profiting financially from the war against Yemen was the only motivation for many Egyptians to go to war. My friend told me he was able to save a lot of money from the Yemen war.

  People in Egypt never asked “why” about any war, even if it was against another Arab Muslim country. When a dictator decides he has an enemy and takes the country to war, the people go blindfolded. To this day, it is not clear to most Egyptians why they went to war against Yemen.

  My military officer friend might have become a romantic interest in my life—there was no such thing as dating in our culture—we were friends and able to talk only because our families were friends. But, even as I confided in and enjoyed his confidences, it was clear to me that I was not really part of the culture that he wholeheartedly accepted, a culture that glorified war and wished to eliminate Israel. Furthermore, I had no desire to follow in my mother’s footsteps and become an unhappy, sacrificial widow to our wars against Israel. I was already the unwilling and resentful daughter of a shahid.