By Mursi Saad El-Din The 50th anniversary of the "Suez Crisis", as the British call it, and the "Tripartite Aggression", as we call it, brings back some memories that I have not revisited in years. In July 1956, after 12 years in London as cultural attaché, I was on my way back to Egypt on an English liner. The sea journey used to take a week. It was on the fifth day of the trip, I remember, that it was announced on the ship's radio that President Nasser has nationalised the Suez Canal. This is how the event is referred to in shorthand, though it was the company that used to run and administer the canal that Nasser nationalised. Here I was, hearing this amazing piece of news, with my wife and young son, on an English liner, where we were the only Egyptians among hundreds of English passengers. The liner was on its way to the Far East, carrying a number of English administrators in the British colonies. By profession, at the very least, these were colonials and, not unexpectedly, some of them gave us the cold shoulder. My sense of elation was accompanied by apprehension, but any anxiety was allayed by a gesture from the ship's captain. For the next two days, he invited us to his table for our meals. It was a reflection of the liberal outlook among many English people. This liberal outlook was also reflected in the reaction to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt a few months later. On 4 November 1956, the London Observer published an editorial which was hailed as one of the most significant of the 20th century. The editors stated that: "[w]e wish to make an apology... Five weeks ago, we remarked that, although we knew our government would not make a military attack in defiance of its solemn international obligation, people abroad might think otherwise. The events of last week have proved us completely wrong; if we misled anyone, at home or abroad, we apologise unreservedly. We had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness." English historians dealt with events in a different manner: they perceived the Suez War as a nail in the coffin of the British empire, as in the case of Simon Schama in his three- volume History of Britain. Dealing with the end of the empire, he writes that "Churchill must have known that Britain's imperial history was, if not at an end, well beyond the beginning of the end." The Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, barely a year after Churchill had "belatedly and grudgingly" handed over power to Anthony Eden, had been a fiasco, "a bungled attack followed by a humiliating withdrawal". Elsewhere in the book, Schama is more explicit. "Egypt's president Colonel Gamal Abdel-Nasser was... absurdly portrayed as a Levantine Mussolini, whose violation of treaty agreements and 'grab' of the canal must at all costs be resisted if the torch of freedom were not to go out in the Middle East. The result, of course, was the pseudo-empire's most ignominious fiasco, a farcical replay of Gladstone's worst moment in 1882, when, in the name of preserving free trade and civilisation from the threat of 'anarchy' unleashed by a nationalist revolt, a British military occupation was imposed on Egypt. In 1956 the fraud was even more egregious, for the pretence was that red-beret paratroops would be loftily 'separating' the belligerent armies of Israel and Egypt from the confrontation that the British and French had planned in the first place." Schama ends this part of the account with the comment that "[a]fter Suez, Britain was forced to come to terms with its loss of assets, status and, in an intangible way, national swagger."
