EGYPT: Someone Else with Troubles

Gamal Abdel Nasser felt the strain too. From the night of the first Anglo-French air assault on his country, Egypt’s strongman had remained constantly at his old revolutionary headquarters on Cairo’s Gezira Island. Last week, plagued by a persistent sore throat, he moved back to his Cairo home. He had been averaging only three or four hours’ sleep nightly, and had not helped matters by refusing to obey doctors’ orders to stop smoking. All week he stayed indoors, and for the first time since the invasion, failed to keep up his almost daily contacts with U.S. Ambassador Raymond A. Hare and Soviet Ambassador Eugeny D. Kiselev.

His regime continued to maintain the degree of control that had surprised so many outsiders. But there was an underlying hostility to the invaders that the regime could play on. The government ordered Egypt’s 35,000 Jews to leave the country within 24 hours. In Anglo-French occupied Port Said, infiltrating guerrillas plastered the walls with big signs saying: DEATH IF YOU STAY. Shopkeepers closed their stores, and the hostility and resentment mounted to a peak as the first U.N. forces marched in. Yelling “British Go Home” and “Long Live Nasser,” nearly 20,000 pajama-clad Egyptians crowded onto the streets and pressed against British troops standing with bayonets drawn. A few Britons jabbed out with rifle butts, but the only shooting took place in the Arab quarter, where a jeepload of French, caught in a crowd, fired, killing two boys aged twelve and 14. Cairo newspapers boasted that Egyptian irregulars in Port Said had “spread panic among the enemy troops.”

Nasser, sore throat and all, set to work reorganizing Egypt’s battered armed forces and totting up his new economic worries. With canal revenues blocked along with the canal, and with Egypt’s cotton income mortgaged for years to pay for Communist weapons, Nasser was likely to find himself more than ever in need of economic help—from the West if possible—if he was to keep both his power and his promises (see box).