“Fearful I have been of a day where Sinai would be retrieved but Egypt would have been lost.” This is the opening line of a novel by Youssef Al-Kaeid where he sheds light on how Egyptian society has failed to maintain the strength that helped it through the years of the 1967 defeat to the 1973 crossing and how the state of otherwise solid Egyptian patriotism has been thoroughly challenged — in ways that go perhaps beyond the images of his earlier novel The War in the Land of Egypt. In the book, the mayor of a village compromises the fate and the life of a poorer and retired security soldier to spare his fifth son from being conscripted in the war, just as he did with previous brothers. This week, reflecting on the war in which he took part, as a soldier of medical services, Al-Kaeid said that he was even more fearful for Egyptian society than he was when the “decline started to hit” shortly after the war. It was in 1965 that Al-Kaeid was conscripted from his north Egypt governorate of Beheira and just when he was ready to terminate his mandatory military service he knew that he could not go because the 1967 defeat had happened and all conscripts were kept pending the war of liberation. It took six more years for this war to actually happen in a way that allowed for the crossing to be completed, Al-Kaeid said while arguing that “in fact the war for the liberation of Sinai started well before — it was when Gamal Abdel-Nasser ordered the War of Attrition.” Al-Kaeid talks at length and certainly with pride of the years when Nasser, a man who is being glorified again today after having been tarnished under both successors Anwar Al-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, was working with his top military aides day and night to reverse the course of the defeat and where soldiers were keenly willing to die for the land to be retrieved. “We may just call it the War of Attrition but it was a saga of unending heroism and sacrifices; it was a war of heroes who seem to have been forgotten by a society that is only able to remember the self-claimed heroes,” Al-Kaeid stated. Al-Kaeid thinks of former president Mubarak and former presidential runner-up Ahmed Shafik when talking of false heroes while he remembers Abdel-Moneim Riad, who died during the War of Attrition and Saadeddin Al-Shazli who had a fallout with Sadat over the course of the October War. “Al-Shazli wanted to advance the military operation on the field because he knew otherwise that the army would be forced into an eventual retreat after the crossing but this is not what Sadat would have even tried to do because Sadat was just hoping to move the situation on the ground but not really to liberate Sinai,” Al-Kaeid said. “For Sadat it was a war that was designed to force political attention and the engagement of the US in settling the matter. Sadat had already received a message from Henry Kissinger suggesting that for the US to get engaged more things had to be happening on the ground,” Al-Kaeid argued. Al-Kaeid recalls the “huge public pressure that society was putting on Sadat to go to war. He hesitated but the people did not. The firm call at the time was ‘we shall fight'. It was this call that people were making right after 1967 and it was exactly the same call that the people made when they declined to allow Nasser to step down.” Sadat too, Al-Kaeid added, “needed a victory to attribute to himself to assert a much contested legitimacy in view of the endless comparisons that so many people were making between him and Nasser and that were never in his favour despite the 1967 defeat.” Sadat, Al-Kaeid argued, was “too eager”. He would not have wanted the war to properly take its course and he too prematurely showed an interest in starting secret contacts with the US leading to early negotiations in a way that made some of the army generals cry over how things were developing. “I clearly remember a day when Kissinger was arriving in Egypt and when Abdel-Ghani Al-Gamassi failed to hold his tears at what he was seeing to be coming the way of Egypt.” What came the way of Egypt, Al-Kaeid said, “was the ruthless commercialisation of the October War; it was turned into a propaganda tool to serve the image-lifting interest of Sadat and to help his attempts to sideline the top army generals in favour of lesser quality generals like Mubarak who was later assigned vice president despite being a man with unmasked limited capacities.” Al-Kaeid argued that with orchestrated advancement of “the exaggerated accounts of Sadat as the hero of war and the hero of peace” — a line that was coined after the signing of the Camp David Accords and that Mubarak also liked to keep — there was the adoption of a new economic policy that has since changed society from being production-oriented to being consumption-oriented. “He changed society in a way that would have made it easier for him to control it,” Al-Kaeid lamented. But Sadat did not live for much longer after the introduction of the open-door policy and he died, at the hands of one of the Islamists “he used to defy the Left”. “His calculations proved wrong and they wrecked society and this is precisely what I try to capture in the novel The Remains of the Morning which actually takes place 20 years after the October War,” Al-Kaeid said. One of the Sadat calculations that Al-Kaeid insists was proven wrong was the assumption that he would make Egyptians forget all about Nasser. “He was fighting so hard against the image of Nasser rather than anything else but here we are over four decades after the death of Nasser and he is proving to be bigger than life and stronger than death — not just because the media had decided to give him some of his due credit but because people never really stopped thinking of him as a symbol of the national pride and as a face of true patriotism.” “Today, it is this precise matter of patriotism that I think many people think of when making the comparison between Nasser and [Defence Minister] Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi — the latter being seen by many as a patriotic army leader who helped the people put an end to the rule of Mohamed Morsi who compromised national unity and national interests in a serious way,” Al-Kaeid suggested. He added that for many people Al-Sisi is the man who helped put an end to Morsi's compromise of “Egyptian control over Sinai when he turned it into a hub for militant terrorists coming from all over” the world, years after “Sadat had agreed to a peace deal that compromised the sacrifices made by this nation for its return and compromised Egypt's sovereignty over it under the pretext of political pragmatism and after Mubarak too had compromised Egypt's right to develop Sinai.” So is it the moment of hope for a possible rectification of the damage that was done? Al-Kaeid says yes. “But it is a long way to go.” And on the way, he added, maybe there will come a moment when “the full story of the October War, which really started with the War of Attrition, would be fully told and where justice would be made to all those who made the crossing possible and fairness would be done to the forgotten heroes whose victory was assumed by others. What we have seen so far are only sporadic accounts that are still to be verified and then put together one day when we would all be gone so we cannot influence the narratives.”
