Gamal Abdel Nasser

Gamal Abdel Nasser (15 January 1918 to 28 September 1970) was Egypt’s second president and, for a decade and a half, the most powerful man in the Arab world: a military officer turned revolutionary who seized power in 1952, made the destruction of Israel the organizing goal of his foreign policy, and led his country into two wars against it that ended in defeat, humiliation and the loss of the Sinai Peninsula. He was also a genuine nationalist and modernizer who nationalized the Suez Canal, built the Aswan High Dam, and turned Cairo into the capital of Pan-Arabism. Both legacies are part of the honest record.

Who he was

Nasser was born in Alexandria, the son of a postal clerk, and entered the Royal Military Academy in Cairo, graduating in 1938. As a young officer he fought in the 1948 war against the new state of Israel, where Egyptian forces were defeated and Nasser himself was briefly trapped in the Faluja pocket, an experience he and fellow officers blamed on corruption and incompetence in King Farouk’s monarchy. That grievance became the seed of a coup.

What he did

On 23 July 1952, Nasser was the organizing force behind the Free Officers Movement that overthrew King Farouk, though he initially stayed in the background and let General Muhammad Naguib serve as the public face of the new republic. Nasser became prime minister in April 1954 and was formally elected president in 1956, the year that made him a global figure: on 26 July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal, seizing the British and French-controlled waterway to help fund the Aswan High Dam after Washington and London withdrew their financing offer. The move triggered the Suez Crisis: Israel struck first into Sinai on 29 October 1956, followed within days by British and French landings, but American pressure under President Eisenhower forced all three to withdraw, and Nasser emerged from a military defeat with a political triumph, hailed across the Arab world as the man who had stared down the old colonial powers.

That triumph built the base for Pan-Arabism, Nasser’s project to unite the Arab world under Egyptian leadership and Arab socialism, broadcast to every household through the Cairo radio station Sawt al-Arab, “Voice of the Arabs.” In 1958 Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic under his presidency; the union collapsed in 1961 when Syrian officers staged their own coup, but Nasser kept the name and the ambition. He positioned Egypt as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement after the 1955 Bandung Conference while drawing heavily on Soviet arms and financing, and he backed fedayeen raids into Israel from Egyptian-controlled Gaza through the 1950s and 1960s, part of the fedayeen campaign of cross-border infiltration and sabotage that Egypt sponsored and denied simultaneously.

Where and when it came to a head: 1967

Nasser’s defining act came in May 1967. On 18 May he ordered the United Nations Emergency Force, the buffer stationed in Sinai since 1956, to withdraw; UN Secretary-General U Thant complied without referring the matter to the General Assembly. On 23 May, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off Israel’s Red Sea trade and oil route to Eilat, an act Israel and international law both treated as a casus belli. Egyptian forces massed in Sinai on false Soviet intelligence of an Israeli buildup, and on 30 May Jordan’s King Hussein signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt, with Iraq joining days later. Nasser’s own rhetoric left no ambiguity about the goal. In 1965 he had declared that the Arabs “shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand” but “with its soil saturated in blood,” and in the tense weeks before the war Egyptian state radio proclaimed that the coming war would bring “the extermination of Zionist existence.” Israel struck preemptively on 5 June 1967, opening the Six-Day War, and within days Egypt lost the entire Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Nasser offered his resignation on television on 9 June; the Egyptian public poured into the streets to demand he stay, and he did, but the defeat, the “Naksa” or setback, broke the myth of Nasserist invincibility that Suez had built.

Why it mattered

Nasser’s defeat did not end his war. In September 1967 he hosted the Khartoum Resolutions, where Arab League states adopted the “three noes”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, foreclosing the diplomatic path for years. Nasser then launched the War of Attrition (1967 to 1970), a grinding campaign of artillery duels and commando raids along the Suez Canal intended to bleed Israel into concessions without another full war, backed increasingly by Soviet advisers and air defenses. He accepted a US-brokered ceasefire in August 1970 under the Rogers Plan, ending the fighting on Israel’s Egyptian front, but he did not live to see what came next. Nasser died of a heart attack on 28 September 1970, a day after mediating a ceasefire in Jordan’s “Black September” civil war against the PLO, and was succeeded by his vice president, Anwar Sadat, who would fight the 1973 war Nasser never got to and later make the peace Nasser had sworn never to make.

What the record actually shows

Nasserist and later revisionist accounts often present the 1967 war as unprovoked Israeli aggression against a defensive Egypt. The documented sequence runs the other way: Nasser expelled the UN peacekeeping force, blockaded an international waterway against a single country, mobilized for war, signed offensive military pacts, and had his own state media broadcasting annihilationist language, all before a single Israeli shot was fired. Israel’s first strike on 5 June was preemptive against a mobilization and blockade Egypt had already initiated; see who attacked first in the Six-Day War for the full sequence. The same record that convicts Nasser of engineering that war also credits him accurately for what he actually did at home: Suez nationalization was a legitimate act of sovereignty over Egyptian territory that ended a colonial-era concession, the Aswan Dam transformed Egyptian agriculture, and Nasser’s brand of secular Arab nationalism, for all its failures, offered an alternative to the Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood he suppressed, that would later fill the vacuum his death and Sadat’s assassination left behind.

Legacy

Nasser’s death marked the end of the high-water mark of Pan-Arabism as a governing ideology; no Arab leader since has commanded the pan-regional authority he held at his peak. His wars cost Egypt the Sinai twice and thousands of soldiers’ lives, and his rhetoric of annihilation, broadcast for a decade across the Arab world, helped normalize the language that Israel’s enemies still use. His domestic legacy, land reform, mass education, industrial nationalization and the Aswan Dam, remains genuinely popular in Egypt to this day, a reminder that the same leader can be both a serious state-builder and the man who set the terms for two catastrophic wars against the Jewish state.