"The coming to power in Egypt of an energetic young warrior sent shockwaves through Britain, France and Israel. Leaders in all three countries feared him as a galvanising ruler who had the potential to unify the shattered Arab world at the expense of the West and Israel," says Donald Neff, author of several books on US-Middle East relations. Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion put it: "I always feared that a personality might rise such as arose among the Arab rulers in the seventh century or like Kemal Ataturk who rose in Turkey after its defeat in the First World War. He raised their spirits, changed their character, and turned them into a fighting nation. There was and still is a danger that Nasser is this man." "Britain and France held similar concerns. The rise of a strong Arab leader could not have come at a worse time for both nations. Drained by World War II, they were both in the process of losing their vast colonial empires. Both countries had already lost their mandates in the Middle East and both were desperately trying to maintain their influence in North Africa," argues Neff. Nasser, above all else, wanted Egypt rid of British troops stationed along the Suez Canal, London's passage to India. In 1954, Britain finally gave in to Nasser's demand and agreed to withdraw its 80,000 British troops since, indeed, there no longer existed any reason for their presence. India was now independent and the Canal had lost much of its strategic importance to Britain. The troops had been there since 1882, and their departure, the last foreign troops on Egyptian soil, was an enormous boost to Nasser's prestige. The historic agreement meant, in British diplomat Anthony Nutting's words: "For the first time in two and a half thousand years, the Egyptian people would know what it was to be independent, and not to be ruled or occupied or told what to do by some foreign power." The Anglo-EgyptianSuez Agreement, signed in Cairo on October 19, 1954, was widely regarded as a strategic defeat for Britain. Two weeks later, on November 1, Algerian Arabs, their morale boosted by Nasser's success, began their revolt against French colonial rule, which dated back to 1830. One of the many results of the insurrection was to convince France and Britain that Egypt, and specifically Nasser, was aiding the Algerians, and therefore was a dangerous common enemy of the West. [email protected]
