Word: nasserism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...threat of summer heat already lies heavy over Cairo and the rest of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt. The city police have changed their blue flannel uniforms to summer whites. Jacaranda trees are blooming richly purple in suburban Heliopolis, remnants of the district's lost elegance. While the triple peaks of the pyramids of Giza shimmer on the horizon, stately feluccas sail down the Nile as silently as they have done for centuries. Overhead, hawks wheel lazily in gyres. The pace of the people in their flowing gallabia robes, never very fast, has grown a step or two slower...
...must try somehow to find a way to bind up this hemorrhaging of Arab pride and self-respect by recovering Egypt's lost territory is Gamal Abdel Nasser. It may be true, as he now insists, that he was pushed by Syria into the showdown with Israel in 1967. But it was he, in his longtime self-appointed role as the leader of all Arabs, who led Egypt, Jordan and Iraq into the war, and his country was the heaviest loser in men, arms, land and prestige. Today Nasser is the one to whom most Arabs look to get back...
...eventually would force the Arabs to come to their own terms. It is a hubris that they have earned by successive conquests of arms, and it envisions the downfall of Nasser, long their most implacable enemy, as part of the final process. It may be a shortsighted view: there is no surer way to a lasting truce than forging it with the strongest of one's opponents...
...Nasser remains that?the only man who can make peace for all the Arabs and who as well can just possibly curb the fedayeen before it is too late. He too still nourishes his myths and his illusions, but the lessons of Israel's prowess have not been lost on him. Given a protective push from the big powers, and a little give from the Israelis, Gamal Abdel Nasser might yet provide Israel?and the world?with the means to a Middle East solution...
...Though Nasser is no longer regarded by the Arab masses as a new Saladin, he remains their best-known and most respected leader, the man to whom all other leaders listen ? in other words, the key to the Arab world today, and thus to peace. He remains for many the embodiment of the ancient Arab dream of Al Umma al Arabia, or unity of all the Arab nations, the hero who threw off foreign domination. He is, above all, the man with whom Israel and the West must deal in seeking a settlement in the Middle East...