Year 1961 - Part 8: Israel's Rocket Launch and Qasim's Threat to Annex Kuwait

Tuesday the 27th

I returned from Cairo the day before yesterday, Sunday the 25th. A matter came up requiring my presence in Beirut, so I made my way there.

While having lunch at the airport restaurant, Dr. Sami al-Jundi, a member of the National Assembly, told me of the diseased activity Michel Aflaq was carrying out against the Union.

Aflaq is residing in Beirut, as a refugee.

Dr. al-Jundi added:

"At a 'party' session, we were with Aflaq, and he directed us not to boycott the National Union's elections, and not to confront Abdel Nasser. He justified this 'directive' by saying that Abdel Nasser was a national hero, one of the great men of national history.

He could not be viewed the way we once viewed Adib al-Shishakli or Husni al-Za'im."

But today, his own direction has changed entirely, and he now works to undermine the Union without the slightest restraint of conscience. Fouad al-Rikabi has since broken away from them.

His own defection is considered a heavy blow to the Iraqi Baath.

He asked me to have the government do something to stop Aflaq's and his own brothers' activity in Lebanon.

Mr. Awni Farsakh records that Michel Aflaq called for a national congress in Beirut.

The congress was indeed held, on 27 August 1959, "and the party split against itself on its fifth day," the split arising over the United Arab Republic. Thirty-seven members out of ninety withdrew, and Aflaq was elected Secretary-General of the new National Command, settling in Beirut and raising the banner of "correcting conditions within the Republic," especially the absence of democracy, the lack of public freedoms, freedom of the press, and freedom to organize unions and parties, along with "the Republic's own deviation from its national course."

Saturday, 1 July: Qasim of Iraq and Kuwait

"Qasim of Iraq," as he had come to be known, stirred up a crisis across the Arab world, by demanding the annexation of Kuwait, claiming it as part of his own Iraqi state.

Britain seized the occasion, and sent its own forces back into Kuwait, to protect it. If it is true that the Arabs' own path lies toward unity, achieving it by war and force is simply not within their own reach, since the Arab region lies at the very center of gravity of foreign interests.

Israel itself was established to protect oil, and to protect these very interests, and military bases were established in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere for this same purpose. Abdel Nasser answered him at once, saying that he accepted the logic of Arab unity, provided it came about through the people's own consent and will, but rejected the logic of annexation and seizure.

If we go back to President Abdel Nasser's own speeches on the subject of Arab unity, we find him holding a firm, non-negotiable position: Arab unity, yes. Annexation by force, no.

In an address he gave on 10 March 1957, he said:

"I am not, at present, thinking of any kind of federal or confederal union, or any other form of unity, between the Arab states. My own attention is directed, first, toward unifying our own thinking and our own belief in Arab nationalism.

History has proven that unifying the Arab front has been the path to their own success in overcoming aggression and preserving their own independence."

In the first days of the Syrian-Egyptian union's establishment, with some neighboring Arab states standing fiercely against it, he said, in an address given on 1 March 1958:

"We must first rid ourselves of colonialism's own agents within the Arab homeland.

Iraq and Jordan conspired with colonialism in the loss of Palestine."

He meant, specifically, Nuri al-Said in Iraq, and King Hussein in Jordan, and he added the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to this list in an address given on 5 March of that same year, saying:

"The Saudi regime conspired to prevent the Egyptian-Syrian union."

When the army overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, the rule of the leader Abdul Karim Qasim continued its own hostility toward the United Arab Republic, allying itself with the Iraqi communists.

For this reason, Abdel Nasser added the Arab communists to his own list of enemies.

But he refused to use force against Iraq, when Qasim's own planes bombed a Syrian village in March 1959, saying, in an address given on 2 March 1959: "We could have measured out double in return, and answered aggression with aggression twice over, but we did not, because we do not wish to take Arab lives in an Iraqi town."

The revolutionary tide rose across the Arab countries with the establishment of the Syrian-Egyptian union, and Abdel Nasser's own firm stand beside the Palestinian cause, and his support for the Algerian revolution with every resource the Republic had, material and moral alike. The President wished to rein in the surge of unionist popular sentiment, so that emotion would not overwhelm reason and actual capability, and so announced his own belief in achieving Arab unity gradually, not through violence and force.

In the crisis of this rising emotional tide, he gave an address on 29 September 1958, in which he said:

"We must build dams upon our own hopes, opening within them channels of wisdom, just as we do with the water reservoirs we build against the flooding of raging rivers, so that the flow of our own hopes proceeds in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, were we to let matters run their own course unchecked, these very hopes would turn into a flood threatening our own existence."

He added:

"We do not seek, at all, to impose any single particular form of unity, to serve as the basis for Arab cooperation, for we believe that development must proceed naturally, on the basis of the peoples' own beliefs.

What matters to us, above all else, is solidarity."

In his address given on 21 February 1959, marking the first anniversary of the Union's establishment, he said:

"The question is not one of union or federation. It is solidarity.

As for unity itself, in my own belief, it will come inevitably, if it is the will of the Arab peoples that decides it. It will come through natural development, after a year, if the Arab people wish it to come after a year, or after ten years, if the people wish it to come after ten years.

It rests entirely on the will of the Arab peoples."

Indeed, he set as a condition for establishing any union not merely that it come about through the will of the Arab peoples, but that this will be a unanimous one.

He stressed this unanimity in an address given on 28 January 1959, saying:

"For any union between two or more countries to come about, it must be achieved with the consent and will of their own peoples, a unanimous consent and will, not merely the consent and will of a majority."

Amid the rush toward achieving Arab unity, he remains deeply concerned, before anything else, with the question of liberating the Arab countries still languishing under the colonizers' own yoke.

In an address given on 31 January 1961, he said:

"Our goal is to liberate every occupied Arab homeland, and every Arab individual, politically and socially.

As for the means by which we achieve this goal, we may well disagree over them, but on the condition that this disagreement never, under any circumstances, becomes a reason for us to forget the goal itself."

It appears that the method Abdel Nasser chose for his own political life, and in pursuing his own goals, was a gradual, logical method, free of rashness, and far removed from improvisation and impulse.

He drew this conviction of his from a higher conviction still within himself, his own Islamic faith.

In an address given on 9 July 1960, he said:

"Those who ask, 'what is the theory,' are simply trying to make things impossible.

God, glory be to Him, gave us an example in the Noble Quran, for us to apply in our own lives.

God was capable of sending down, with our master Gabriel, a printed, bound book, and saying:

Here is the complete (Islamic) theory. Here is the Quran itself.

But He did not do this. Instead, He guided His own servants stage by stage.

The prohibition of wine, for example, was not completed until 23 years after the Prophetic mission began, that is, in stages."

Even so, he refused to accept this same gradual approach on the question of development, given the enormous gaps between us and the developed world, for he wished to skip whole stages and achieve, for the country, a decent standard of living, one in which the poor man could find what he needed, live with dignity, and raise his own children well.

In this same address, given on 9 July 1960, he said:

"The world is advancing in great strides, and the gaps between the developed and the underdeveloped nations widen every day, indeed every hour.

Communications, and their own fantastic advances, and the direct intellectual contact this brings about on a global scale, combined with the pressure of the various doctrines the great powers themselves back, have made speed in action (on the question of development) a matter no less important than the action itself."

Wednesday, 5 July: The Israeli Rocket

Israeli radio broadcast a stunning piece of news, one that shook the very depths of Arab conscience, and carried real weight in international political circles.

Israel launched a rocket into space, and it began orbiting the earth at an altitude of eighty kilometers.

Prime Minister Ben-Gurion attended the launch ceremony in military uniform, along with army chief General Tzvi Tzur, and Golda Meir, the enemy's own foreign minister.

This rocket is a deadly stab to the very heart of the Arabs, a devastating danger threatening them with every manner of harm.

It comes on the heels of the announcement of work beginning on "a second nuclear reactor," for non-military purposes, so it is said.

And after a letter from President Kennedy to the Arab kings and presidents, proposing the return of a limited number of refugees, within the framework of a peace agreement with Israel.

It was said this letter carried a veiled threat to the Arabs, should they fail to accept the American proposal.

And what, exactly, are we Arabs doing about these deadly dangers?

I say it with complete honesty: we spread rumors, and circulate lies, out of a love for scheming and a passion for spite.

While remaining entirely indifferent to the real dangers surrounding us.

And worse than any of this, certain sidelined politicians work to tear the Union apart, simply because their own thirst for power was never quenched.

Especially when we know Israel is working to acquire nuclear weapons.

If it has not, in fact, already acquired them.

Abdel Nasser's own view was a measured one, in the address he gave on 16 April 1960, in which he tried to soften the impact of the leaked news about Israeli nuclear activity, saying, among other things:

"Were I given the choice between having atomic bombs on my side, or a moral force filled with faith and resolve, I would choose the moral force embodied in the will of the Arab people, and embodied too in the will of friendly peoples, for whoever possesses atomic bombs cannot protect himself from destruction, while whoever possesses moral force can represent the living conscience of the world."

But he changed this view by the end of that very same year, coming to regard the danger of Israeli nuclear weapons with the eyes of a responsible, clear-sighted leader, forming within himself a new conviction of the true gravity of the Zionist threat to the Arab nation.

Israel, he came to realize, was neither playing nor idling, but arming itself to the very teeth.

In an address he gave on 23 December 1960, he said:

"Should reliable information emerge that Israel is on the verge of acquiring the atomic bomb, it would become necessary to launch a preemptive strike against it."

But he, a military man who had known the true crucible of war on the battlefield, not on paper or in velvet drawing rooms, knew exactly what war truly meant.

And a commander's very first duty is to prepare for it.

In the address he gave on 22 June 1961, answering Ahmad Abdel Karim, Akram al-Hourani, and their own companions, who had once demanded that Israel's diversion of the Jordan River be prevented by armed force, he said:

"Were we to carry out such operations, how could I possibly guarantee that Ben-Gurion would limit himself to semi-military operations, and not launch full military operations of his own?

When I take a decision, I must never gamble with my own country's fate, plunging it into a catastrophe resembling that of 1948, with their own forces reaching Damascus.

Whoever wants war must prepare for it, and whoever wishes to achieve his own goal must never gamble with his own country's fate, or with the fate of others. There is no escaping the need to prepare for war, and whoever fails to prepare is a traitor to his own country and his own people."

Being prepared requires a country capable of waging war and winning it with real certainty. For this, it needs weapons and equipment matching its enemy's own, strong financial capacity to sustain the war effort, and overwhelming support from every stratum of its own people. Perhaps because he could not achieve this degree of readiness, he repeatedly declared, publicly, that he had no immediate plan to liberate Palestine, so as not to plunge into a labyrinth his own army and country could not actually handle.

Among the things he once said was that Arab unity was the only real hope of uprooting Zionism, and defeating Israel's own advanced weapons, drawn as they were from American and European arsenals, as freely and as generously as it pleased.

Even so, he declared to the whole world that he had a plan ready to confront Israel, should it ever attack any Arab country.

I find myself wondering: in circumstances as dangerous as these, is it truly the moment for the Baathists, the communists, and the capitalists to work at undermining the Union?

God help me against my own enemies, as Samson once said, when he brought the temple down.