Britain Deported One Man — And Egypt Rose the Next Day | THE DREAM BRITAIN FEARED Part 1 of 4

History Onion · Part 1 · 2:57

Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882. When Egyptian politicians asked to argue for independence at the Paris peace conference in 1919, Britain arrested them and deported their leader, Saad Zaghlul, to Malta. Cairo rose the next day, British armoured cars fired into the crowds, and at least eight hundred Egyptians were dead by July. Out of that revolt came a plan to bind the Arab world into a single federation — every Arab state keeping its own government, weighted so no one nation could outvote the rest; a state that stayed out of religion; and an economy held by Egyptians rather than foreign owners. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the name attached to that plan ever since, was one year old in Alexandria at the time. The men who wrote it were Egyptian Coptic Christians. It nearly happened once. In March 1920 an Arab congress in Damascus crowned Faisal bin Hussein king over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan — but Britain and France had secretly agreed in 1916 to divide those same lands, and four months later a French column broke his army at Maysalun. Part 1 of 4. Follow for Part 2 — The Thing Britain Feared, Britain Caused.