Word: nasser
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...Israelis realize full well that their relative strength has increased during the past year, if only because of the setbacks suffered by the Arabs. Two events overshadow all the others in the Arab world: the death of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arabs' only supranational leader, and the crushing by Jordan's King Hussein of the Palestinian guerrillas who long operated freely within his country's borders. Only last month, in a continuing display of disunity, Syria and Iraq closed their borders with Jordan in protest against Hussein's routing of the guerrillas...
That has been true from the first. In the early 1920s, Moscow was on excellent terms with Turkey's Kemal Atatürk. But this did not prevent Atatürk from killing off the leading Communists in his country. Egypt's late Gamal Abdel Nasser accepted Soviet money, advice and, in some areas, decisionmaking. But in 1959 he clapped hundreds of Communists into prison. Throughout the Middle East, the Communist Party is legal only in Lebanon-and, ironically, Israel. In Sudan, where it is technically banned but has operated openly, its continued existence is now threatened...
...Catholic Cuba and Confucianist China demonstrated that. But Islam has a permeating discipline in Arab culture that shapes politics and unites even dissident leaders like Libya's Gaddafi and Saudi Arabia's King Feisal. Gaddafi subscribes to the same simplistic explanation of the new order offered by Nasser before his death: "The reason that Arab socialism is different from Communism is because our socialism believes in God while Communism is atheistic...
More and more, Gaddafi has tended to ignore the plight of impoverished Libyans. His dual preoccupations are the destruction of Israel and, through lavish outlays of his country's oil money, making himself Nasser's successor as the leader of Pan-Arabism. He pays a $55 million annual subsidy to Egypt and, before Hussein cracked down on the fedayeen, he gave funds to Jordan as well, for the fight against Israel. Last fall, after General Hafez Assad seized power in Syria, Gaddafi insolently flew into Damascus to look him over. Apparently Gaddafi approved; he left Assad...
...Both Nasser and Algeria's Houari Boumedienne have had the unsettling experience of learning that a plane with Gaddafi aboard was buzzing their capitals without their having the faintest notion of why he had come. During Morocco's recent abortive coup, he offered King Hassan's enemies military aid before he even knew what was happening or who the rebels were. Then came last week's capture of a BOAC jet and the kidnaping of two of its Sudanese passengers. Gaddafi is young, dedicated, naive and, some say, irrational as well. He certainly is as impetuous...