Nasser's Long Road to Suez - Engelsberg Ideas

Suez erupted on July 26, 1956, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stepped to the podium in Alexandria’s Al-Manshiya Square and vowed to eradicate the past by restoring rights in the Suez Canal.

Reflections on the Suez Crisis’s anniversary frequently examine the event through the lens of great-power politics and Anglo-American relations. Nevertheless, the crisis fundamentally revolved around Egypt, where Egyptians also played a pivotal part.

As the historian John Bew recently emphasised on the EI Podcast, the Egyptians “had a vote” in 1956 through “their own ability to effect change and alter the political and geostrategic weather.” They were not simply pawns in a higher geopolitical game whose rules could be dictated in London, Paris or Washington.

The takeover was immediately triggered the preceding week when the Eisenhower Administration announced it was cutting off American financial support for the Aswan High Dam, a massive hydroelectric undertaking upon which Nasser had built his pledge to lift millions of Egyptians out of poverty.

Suspecting Washington sought to punish him for accepting a Soviet-backed, Czech-brokered arms deal and destabilize his government, Nasser opted to nationalise the Suez Canal and use its revenues to finance Egypt’s modernisation. To the crowds, he described the Suez Canal as “an edifice of humiliation” that had allowed his country to “become the property of the Canal.”

As Nasser repeatedly invoked the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps, listeners were somewhat puzzled: “Lesseps” was a code word.

This bold maneuver was the culmination of nearly a century of accumulated grievances. In the 1870s, Egypt’s indebted Ottoman viceroy was compelled to sell off his shares in the Suez Canal Company. Back in 1875, Britain secured a 44 per cent interest in the Company at a time when British commerce comprised 80 per cent of the commercial traffic passing through the Canal.

William Gladstone’s Liberal government invaded Egypt in 1882 to crush a nationalist revolt led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi, which threatened to upend the European system of financial control. That military intervention began Britain’s long occupation, which transformed into a formal British protectorate in 1914.

Even after a 1919 national uprising forced a unilateral declaration of independence in 1922, London retained control over the Suez Canal Zone. Egyptian nationalists demanded unqualified sovereign independence, but political exhaustion eventually led to the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which allowed the British to station 10,000 troops in the Canal Zone.

On February 4, 1942, humiliation reached its peak. While Erwin Rommel’s panzers threatened British troops in the Western Desert, British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson deployed troops and tanks around Abdeen Palace, compelling King Farouk to oust his administration.

For a young Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had enrolled in his country’s military academy in 1937, the Abdeen Palace Incident was an intolerable violation of national dignity. It left a deep, searing impression on him and his contemporaries, who viewed it as a national humiliation.

By July 1956, the accumulation of past grievances met Eisenhower’s withdrawal of dam funds. Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal transformed Egypt from a passive victim of empire into the active author of its own history.