Nasser Resigned on Television. A Million Egyptians Said No | THE DREAM BRITAIN FEARED Part 4

History Onion · Part 4 · 2:56

In May 1967 a Soviet report reached Gamal Abdel Nasser: Israel was massing troops on Syria's border. It was false — the general he sent to look, Mohamed Fawzi, found nothing — but Nasser had a defence pact with Syria, an army worn down by five years in Yemen, and he had already ordered it into the Sinai. He did not call it back. Four days later he ordered the UN peacekeepers out; on 22 May he closed the Straits of Tiran, the channel carrying most of Israel's oil, which Israel had said since 1957 it would treat as an act of war. At 7:45 on 5 June Israeli jets came in low over the Mediterranean and hit eleven Egyptian airbases; by noon more than three hundred Egyptian aircraft were burning on the ground. Without air cover the army in the Sinai collapsed in three days. Jordan lost the West Bank, Syria the Golan. By 10 June it was over: between ten and fifteen thousand Egyptian soldiers dead, under a thousand Israelis. On 9 June Nasser went on television and resigned every post he held. By dawn a million people were in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria demanding he stay. He stayed, three more years, and died of a heart attack on 28 September 1970 at fifty-two; an estimated five million walked behind his coffin. His vice-president Anwar Sadat fought one more war across the canal in 1973, then in March 1979 signed a separate peace with Israel, and the Arab League suspended Egypt — the country where the plan for an Arab federation had been written in 1919. The dream passed to other hands: Hafez al-Assad in Damascus (1970), Saddam Hussein in Baghdad (1979), each in the name of Arab unity, each ruling alone. And the anti-imperial cause passed to a different kind of movement — the Muslim Brotherhood came out of Nasser's prisons under Sadat, and in Tehran, the year Egypt made its peace, Khomeini came home and a revolution made Iran a republic ruled by clerics.