THE MIDDLE EAST: Pan-Arab League

Last week Egypt’s Premier Mustafa El Nahas Pasha folded his tent and stole out of the Government, at the insistence of King Farouk and amid the chatter of the coffeehouses. King and Premier had worked in uneasy partnership for two and a half years. Four months ago the King banned Nahas Pasha from the palace for a fortnight, was induced to receive him again only on the intercession of British Ambassador Lord Killearn. This time Britain did not intercede. To the Abdine Palace to form a new Government the King summoned portly Achmed Maher Pasha, President of the Chamber of Deputies, whose political credo is: Egypt’s destiny is linked with Britain’s.

Effendis and fellahin gossiped excitedly about the news, wondered if Nationalist Nahas Pasha’s dismissal might be connected with the Pan-Arab conference, which wound up its sessions in Alexandria last week. Nahas’s downfall had come just a day after his triumphant radio message to the Arab peoples of the Middle East. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Trans-Jordan, he announced, had agreed to join a League of Independent Arab States “to achieve the welfare of all Arab countries and safeguard their independence against all aggression.” Had Pan-Arabia been born at last?

Observers noted with surprise that the Pan-Arab agreement covered not only education, finance, trade and law, but, unexpectedly, Arab foreign policy, which has hitherto mostly been a British preserve. No Arab state would be permitted to conclude a treaty with a foreign power “contrary to general Arab policy or the interests of any Arab State.” Was the foreign power Britain, which has extensive treaty relations with the Arab states? Would Britain acquiesce?

Prudence Before Presence. But not all the Arab states had yet agreed to the League. Saudi Arabia and Yemen had not come in. Saudi Arabia’s far-sighted Ibn Saud and Yemen’s prudent Iman Yahya had sent no delegates to Alexandria, only “observers”—two elderly sheiks taking a seaside cure. They had not signed.

Nevertheless, Nahas had persuaded five Arab states* to unite politically, culturally, economically, and to issue a blunt Pan-Arab pronouncement that “the rights of Palestine Arabs could not be violated without the risk of disturbing peace in the Arab world.”

Nahas’ sudden dismissal would rock the new Pan-Arab League. There was a slight morning-after feeling as two other signatory Premiers — Syria’s Saadallah El Jabry and Lebanon’s Riadh El Solh—emplaned for home on “urgent business.”

* Mainly because of the objections of the Christian Lebanese, who feared engulfment in an Arab bloc, the conference had for the present abandoned the smaller Greater Syria Federation designed to reunite Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Trans-Jordan (TIME, Aug. 28).