346. From Suez To The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (Part 1)

Summary

Empire: World History Podcast Episode 346: Arab-Israeli Conflict: Palestine, Suez, & Closing The Straits of Tiran (Part 1) Date: March 30, 2026
Hosts: William Dalrymple & Anita Anand
Guest: Eugene Rogan (Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, St Anthony's College, Oxford)

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Overview

This episode launches a series tracing the twentieth-century roots of modern Middle Eastern conflicts—especially the Arab-Israeli wars. William Dalrymple, Anita Anand, and returning guest Eugene Rogan dissect the period between the Suez Crisis (1956) and the Six Day War (1967), illuminating how revolutionary ideologies, imperial legacies, and shifting power dynamics set the stage for the region’s enduring volatility. Rogan emphasizes the importance of seeing these events through Arab sources and perspectives, providing a deeper understanding of the people, nations, and psychodramas that led to watershed moments like the closing of the Straits of Tiran.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Examine This Period Now?

[02:00–03:36]

• Dalrymple explains the contemporary relevance: Ongoing wars in the Middle East can all trace “ancestors” back to the period 1956–1982—Suez, the ’67 and ’73 wars, and Lebanon.
• The hosts introduce Eugene Rogan as the authority to help connect modern events to their roots in this critical era.

2. Setting the Scene: Post-Suez Arab World

[03:52–05:22]

• Rogan describes the aftermath of Suez (1956), when Britain, France, and Israel colluded to attack Egypt and topple Gamal Abdel Nasser.
• Nasser’s Ascension:
  • Emerged from the Free Officers’ movement, overthrew King Farouk (1952), and became Egypt’s president (1954).
  • Advocated pan-Arabism, self-determination, and independence from imperial powers.
  • Tried to steer a “third way” between the American and Soviet spheres during the Cold War.

3. Whose Story Gets Told? The Arab Perspective

[05:22–06:46]

• Rogan discusses the importance of using Arab sources—not as propaganda, but to rebalance historical understanding, which is often filtered through Western or Israeli lenses.
• Quote:

  “If one wanted to write about the Russian Revolution, you’d probably be drawing on Russian sources… that logic prevails if one wants to try and approach modern Arab political history.” —Eugene Rogan [05:38]

4. Nasser’s Triumph and Dangerous Lessons

[07:09–08:47]

• Nasser’s post-Suez popularity “spread right across the Arabic-speaking world,” not just for surviving the military challenge but for forcing Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw.
• Diplomatic Victory:
  • Egypt’s endurance in Suez, despite military losses, led Nasser to believe that diplomatic wins could outweigh battlefield defeats—a lesson that would ironically set the stage for disaster in 1967.

5. The Nakba and the Fate of the Palestinians

[08:47–10:32]

• Dalrymple pivots to the Palestinian catastrophe (Nakba) of 1948—mass displacement, refugee camps, and political invisibility.
• Rogan notes that by the late 1950s, Palestinians were “more often referred to as refugees than actually as Palestinians,” with their fate largely in the hands of Arab states.
• UN Resolution 190 (right of return) was never honored in practice.

6. Arab Cold War: Fracture and Rivalry

[11:11–13:21]

• Rogan explains his term “Arab Cold War,” noting the internal diversity and rivalries among Arab states—“the diversity of Arab experience… is one of the defining features of Arab history.”
• Divide between:
  • Revolutionary republics (e.g., Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria): Soviet-influenced, anti-imperial.
  • Conservative monarchies (e.g., Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states): Pro-Western, anti-Nasser.

7. Yemen: Egypt’s Vietnam

[14:12–16:04]

• Involvement in Yemen’s civil war (1962–67) tied down one-third of Egypt’s best troops (“their most experienced troops, the people you would want to deploy on the front line”), weakening Egypt ahead of the looming conflict with Israel.
• Quote:

  “Don’t take on people who know the terrain better than you do. It’s a fool’s mission. And it had been Egypt’s Vietnam…” —Eugene Rogan [15:16]

8. Nasser and Amr: Dysfunction at the Top

[16:04–19:59]

• Rogan details the fraught, almost “bromantic” relationship between Nasser and Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amr.
• The failed union between Egypt and Syria (United Arab Republic, 1958–1961) exposed crucial leadership failings, especially Amr’s treatment of Syrians as subordinates.

9. Institutional Failure in Arab Republics

[21:22–22:30]

• Rogan: The biggest issue wasn’t a lack of courage or resources, but “institutional failure”—the dominance of military men in politics stifled dissent and critical feedback, making catastrophic misjudgments more likely.

10. Rise of the PLO and Fatah

[22:30–26:58]

• Emergence of the PLO (1964) as the first internationally recognized Palestinian body; it was more a creature of the Arab League than of the Palestinians themselves at first.
• Fatah, under Yasser Arafat, forms independently among Palestinians in the diaspora—brings direct action against Israel (first raid: New Year’s Eve, 1964).
• Quote:

  “The idea that Palestinians were taking their liberation in their own hands was a huge morale boost across Palestinian communities and diaspora.” —Eugene Rogan [26:29]

11. Run-up to the Six Day War

[27:44–31:12]

• Increased cross-border raids by Fatah and Israeli reprisals ratcheted up tensions.
• May 1967: Nasser demands UN Emergency Force withdrawal from Sinai, leading to Egyptian troop deployment and, crucially, closing the Straits of Tiran—a direct cause of the 1967 war.
• Nasser was trapped by his own rhetoric; closing the straits was “symbolic, but absolutely essential” and a recognized casus belli for Israel.

12. Arab Military Disunity vs. Israeli Preparation

[31:12–37:19]

• Despite talk of Arab solidarity, the front-line Arab states in 1967 were deeply divided, with poor coordination.
• On the Israeli side, considerable anxiety: Prime Minister Eshkol’s stammering radio address and Rabin’s nervous breakdown underscored existential fears (“Our country can never afford to lose a war” — Ben Gurion via Rogan [33:45]).
• In contrast, the Israeli military was extremely well-prepared, having planned extensively for just such a scenario.
• Key Anecdote:

  “Nasser asking his commander in chief… ‘Is the army ready?’ … ‘We’re in tip top shape, boss…’ And with that, the die is cast..” —Eugene Rogan [36:37]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Suez’s Legacy:

  “Nasser came away with a dangerous lesson, which is that you can lose militarily and win diplomatically… What worked in 1956 backfires terribly in 1967.” —Eugene Rogan [08:03]

• On Arab Cold War Dynamics:

  “The diversity of Arab experience… is one of the defining features of Arab history.” —Eugene Rogan [11:43]

• On Fatah’s First Raid:

  “It was the symbolic and the moral importance of the act which really rose morale among Palestinians who had felt forgotten by their Arab neighbors and by the world at large.” —Eugene Rogan [26:29]

• On Institutional Weakness:

  “No one ever speaks truth to power. You’re scared to death of power. And so Nasser and his government never really had anyone tell them when their ideas were bad…” —Eugene Rogan [21:38]

• The Closing Straits:

  “Nasser really didn’t have a way of backing down. He was a victim of his own rhetoric. And we see the law of unintended consequences kick in…” —Eugene Rogan [28:54]

• On Israeli Anxiety:

  “Our country can never afford to lose a war.” —Ben Gurion (recounted by Rogan) [33:45]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:00] Series introduction & why the Arab-Israeli wars matter now
• [03:52] Suez Crisis and Nasser’s rise
• [05:22] Importance of Arab perspectives in history
• [07:09] Nasser’s post-Suez status among Arabs
• [08:47] The Nakba and Palestinian displacement
• [11:29] The “Arab Cold War” and internal divisions
• [14:19] Egypt’s entanglement in Yemen (“Egypt’s Vietnam”)
• [16:46] Dysfunction between Nasser and Amr; United Arab Republic fails
• [21:22] Institutional failures in Arab republics
• [22:30] Creation of the PLO; emergence of Fatah and Arafat
• [26:29] First Fatah raid—symbolic Palestinian action begins
• [27:44] Pre-Six Day War tensions escalating
• [28:54] Nasser closes Straits of Tiran—war becomes “almost inevitable”
• [31:12] Arab disunity and lack of military coordination
• [33:45] Israeli existential anxiety before the war
• [36:37] Israeli vs. Egyptian military readiness and final “tipping point”

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Tone & Takeaways

Rich in nuance, the discussion foregrounds Arab sources and the personal, institutional, and ideological fractures that shaped this fateful period—eschewing caricature for complexity. The tone is conversational, at times wry, and maintains a scholarly yet accessible air, peppered with personal anecdotes, critical insights, and the occasional historical quip (including speculation on when Eugene last attended a pub quiz). The narrative deftly swaps from broad regional analysis to the “psychodramas” of key figures like Nasser, Amr, and Arafat, culminating in a tense snapshot just before the storm of June 1967.

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For Further Listening: This is Part 1 of the series; next episodes will continue to unpack how these events led directly into the Six Day War and its long aftermath.

Transcript

[William Dalrymple]

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[Eugene Rogan]

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[Anita Anand]

Hello and welcome to Empire with me,

[William Dalrymple]

Anita Anand and me William Dalrymple. And we are launching a new series today and I want to start by telling you exactly why we are doing it right now. On February 28th of this year, the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. They called it Operation Epic Fury. The Middle east, which has already endured the Gaza War, the Lebanon War, the Syrian Civil War, the Yemen War, the emergence of ISIS, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq is on fire again. And it did not catch fire by accident.

[Anita Anand]

Every 21st century war in the Middle east has a 20th century ancestor and this series on the Arab Israeli wars is our attempt to trace those ancestors. So we're gonna be exploring a 15 year period of conflict that created A domino effect that takes us to where we are today. From the Six Day War of 1967 to the 1973 War and Oil crisis to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now to help us understand what's going on and why, we've brought back one of our favorite friends of the show. Listeners will know Eugene Rogan from our Gaza series. Eugene is professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and a fellow of St Anthony's College, Oxford. He's director of the Middle East Center. He's the author of the Arabs. It is one of the fin a single volume histories of modern Arab world that you're ever going to get your hands on. Eugene, a very warm welcome back to Empire.

[Eugene Rogan]

Anita Will thank you so much for inviting me back to my very favorite history conversation.

[Anita Anand]

Let's Eugene, go right back to the 1950s and see how the socio political world of the modern Middle east was formed and the context building up to the Six Day War.

[William Dalrymple]

Maybe you should start by painting a picture of the Arab world after Suez.

[Eugene Rogan]

Well, it's such an interesting starting point, Willi, because in a sense the last time great powers allied with Israel to prosecute a war against Israel's enemies in the region was the Suez crisis. This is the collusion between France and Britain with Israel to bring around a crisis to topple the government of Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, one of the free officers who came to power in the July 1952 revolution that toppled the monarchy in Egypt, would emerge as the president and the real face of the Egyptian revolution in 1954. From 54 until the Suez crisis, Nasser was really putting himself forward as a spokesperson not just for Egypt's revolution but for revolutionary change in the Arab world. A radical departure from the imperial past where the Arabs were under the control of Britain and France, towards a new age of assertive self determination sovereignty where armies of the Arab world would guard Arab territory against their greatest threat, which was of course Israel at that point and trying to find a third way between aligning themselves with the Soviet Union and the United States in what was emerging to be a very hard cold war dividing the world between Soviet and American spheres of influence. And I think that's in a sense the world of 1956 where we begin our story.

[Anita Anand]

There are two very different tales that are told about this period of time and often in the west. Our voices are missing completely from the pages. Tell us why this difference of perspective is a clear line to where we are today.

[Eugene Rogan]

If one wanted to write about the Russian Revolution you'd probably be drawing on Russian sources to capture what it was that motivated Russian actors to take dramatic political action. And I think that logic prevails if one wants to try and approach modern Arab political history. It's just you'd want to go to the sources that captured not just the political elites, but also the participants, the soldier on the ground, the woman on the home front, the journalists or the diarists who seem to capture the zeitgeist to the mood of society at that moment. And so in writing the Arabs, I privileged Arab sources not as a way to kind of propagandize for the Arab perspective on things, but to help Western readers who all too often have understood this region through the biases and slants of their own perspective as Europeans or Americans or those of their close allies in the region like Israel, or perhaps those politically aligned with Western powers, and instead to try and balance that out with a better understanding of how modern history has been lived by the Arabs and seen through Arab eyes.

[William Dalrymple]

You spent a lot of your time as a PhD student in Damascus, didn't you, studying in the archives there. That was where you in a sense, cut your teeth on Arab opinion.

[Eugene Rogan]

I spent a lot of time in Damascus, in Beirut and in Amman, Jordan. I sort of started my own research career as someone focused on the sort of greater Syrian territory. Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

[Anita Anand]

Speaking of the Arab perspective, you had a situation where Nasser became this hero, you know, sort of carried around on this palanquin of Arab opinion. He had forced humiliation on the British and the French and the Israelis and everyone was forced to back down. Is there something to be said that that success laid the groundwork for the rest of the world's attitude towards that region?

[Eugene Rogan]

I think 1956 is hugely influential on Arab public opinion and on Western views of the Arab world. You can say that popular support for Nasser spread right across the Arabic speaking world because he was able to take a stand against the European powers and against Israel. And though Egypt suffered military defeat by his endurance and survival, he was able to see Egypt win a diplomatic victory. The forced withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula, Britain and France forced to withdraw from Egypt in shame and a kind of assertive American policy trying to refocus the world on the priorities of the Cold War rather than on trying to re establish imperial priorities for the Arab world. To see Nasser emerge triumphant from that cloud of confusion and war of the Suez crisis was part of why he gained an Arab worldwide support base. But the other thing is, I think Nasser came away with a dangerous lesson, which is that you can lose militarily and win diplomatically and Nasser will get reckless. What worked in 1956 backfires terribly in 1967.

[William Dalrymple]

I think one important thing we've got to establish before we plunge into 1967 is to talk about the Palestinians. The events that the Palestinians called the Nakba, the catastrophe and what Israelis remember as the birth of their state. This extraordinary moment in history when one people who had been homeless have a homeland and the Palestinians who had been rooted in the landscape of Palestine lose it. 85% of them are expelled from their homes and end up in refugee camps. In the aftermath of Suez, what is the situation of the Palestinians?

[Eugene Rogan]

They had more or less disappeared from the political map. More often referred to as refugees than actually as Palestinians, they had delegated responsibility for achieving their national rights to the Arab states in the Arab League. Palestinians were left divided between the countries in which they took refuge, living in misery in squalid camps in Lebanon, integrated to a higher degree perhaps in the area around Damascus that comes to be known as the Armuk Camp. It's only in Jordan where Palestinians are actually granted citizenship. The Jordanians annex the territory of the west bank and East Jerusalem, which remained in Jordanian hands after the 1948 war. And by taking the land, the Jordanians had to confer citizenship on the people in Gaza. Palestinians were left under an Egyptian trusteeship where for a brief period the Egyptians tried to foster institutions of self rule called the All Palestine Government. But the All Palestine Government headquarters moved to Cairo, where it's very clear that this is not an instrument for Palestinian affirmation. The Palestinians in Gaza remained voiceless, voteless, basically another refugee community not represented politically.

[William Dalrymple]

There's a UN resolution, isn't there, 190 which insists on the right of return that they should be able to go back to their old homes. Now, it's been reaffirmed by the international community every year since 1948. But what was the practical effect?

[Eugene Rogan]

The resolution has never been respected and in a sense the Israelis have passed laws to make sure that it never is. So the territory on which Palestinians might hope to achieve their right of return has been reduced to 22% of the landmass of Mandate Palestine, the territories that had remained in Arab hands after 1948 and were going to be conquered by Israel in 1967.

[Anita Anand]

Can I ask Eugene about the Arab Cold War? It's a phrase you use in your book and I think it's marvellous in capturing the complexity of the Arab political world. During this period, because it's very easy and people do use this word, you know, the Arab frame of mind, the Arab block, you know, it isn't a monolith. No.

[Eugene Rogan]

Thank you, Anita. And I think it's a really important point to stress. I'm perhaps guilty. I wrote a book called the Arabs, which seemed to imply there was a history that belonged to our people in a monolithic sense.

[Anita Anand]

So, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to beat you up with a question, but it's allowed.

[Eugene Rogan]

You know, one should be able to explain these things to reasonable people. But obviously the diversity of Arab experience as one moves across North Africa, through the Middle east to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf is one of the defining feature of Arab history. And in the years between 1956 and 1967, it's a very fractured part of the world. Though there is the aspiration for common Arab platforms, common Arab action, pan Arab politics. The reality is the Arab world is divided between those revolutionary republics that overthrew the states inherited from British and French mandate. In countries like Egypt in 1952, Syria, that came out of French mandate rule in the 1940s, in Iraq, in Yemen, Algeria, which will emerge independent from the French in 1962. These become the kind of radical Arab states as the west saw them leaning towards the Soviet model, drawing on the Soviet Union to supply them with their military hardware and their development assistance. And then the more conservative Arab states, the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, Jordan, Morocco, throw in Lebanon and Tunisia for good measure, countries that remained aligned to the west and drew their military and their development support from the West. And in this sense, tensions between Arab states were quite real, particularly between, let's say, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, struggling a rear guard action against the charisma and the appeal of Abdel Nasser in the revolutionary movement. And you can understand the Arab Cold War.

[Anita Anand]

How did they talk about that Nasser on that conservative side? What was their perception of what Nasser was doing?

[William Dalrymple]

The Jordanians didn't like him at all, did they?

[Eugene Rogan]

Everyone had been very dismissive of the chances of Jordan to survive the revolutionary wave that swept the Arab world in the 1950s. A much stronger Hashemite monarchy crumbled in 1958. So people were writing the obituary of the Jordanians. And I think the pressure came first and foremost from Egypt and the appeal of Nasserism. The Jordanians felt very vulnerable. They leaned very heavily on their old British allies, their new American allies, and regionally on fellow conservatives like Saudi Arabia. That will come to a head in a Kind of Jordanian Saudi alliance in confronting Egypt over Egypt's incursion to the next revolution to overturn a monarchy which would be in Yemen in 1962.

[William Dalrymple]

Tell us about that. Because that's a crucial thing that you write about, which I have to say was new to me. I hadn't realized this whole Yemen quagmire that you write about.

[Eugene Rogan]

Well, this is why you've got write a book about Arab history, will he? Because you learn stuff in writing books. I knew that there'd been a revolution in 62 and I was aware that Egypt had supported that revolutionary movement. But I just hadn't realized the extent to which Egyptian armed forces had been drawn into what would come to be called Egypt's Vietnam, in which easily one third of the most experienced battle hardened veterans of the Egyptian army would be pinned down in Yemen. At the very moment where Egypt would be drawn into a critical situation in its frontier in the Sinai with Israel in 1967, I was absolutely fascinated by this delusional deployment of troops. Why, if you were genuinely mobilizing on a hostile footing with your greatest military threat, a country that's defeated you in 1948 and again in 1956, why would you do so with, with one arm clearly tied behind your back?

[Anita Anand]

When you say the one arm, we're talking about 70,000 soldiers, I mean that's nearly a third of Egypt's entire army.

[Eugene Rogan]

Absolutely true. And as I said, they're most experienced troops, the people you would want to deploy on the front line if you wish to pose a credible threat to your most serious rival and enemy, Israel. And there they were, thousands of kilometers away, fighting a losing battle to try and contain a threat which left Egypt as vulnerable as every occupier in mountainous countries. Think about Russia's occupation of Afghanistan or when the Saudis and Emiratis recently tried to intervene in Yemen. Don't take on people who know the terrain better than you do. It's a fool's mission. And it had been Egypt's Vietnam right between 1962-67.

[Anita Anand]

We're going to take a break. We've been talking about cross border tensions that exist, but I want to come back and talk about the tensions that exist within Egypt itself because there is a massive dysfunctional relationship that's really fascinating between Nasser and his commander in chief. Join us after the break and we'll tell you more. So welcome back. Now look, we were talking about the tensions that existed between Arab sovereigns in the 60s, but I just want to sort of hone in on this really interesting psychodrama between Nasser and his commander in chief, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amr.

[Eugene Rogan]

Oh, it's a tragedy, Anita. I mean, you're dealing here with a real bromance. I think that Abdel Nasser and Abdelki Ma', Amr, they really loved each other. They saw each other through their war service. They were shoulder to shoulder in the revolution. They were thick as thieves in the early years about how to reorganize the government. I think Nasser trusted Amr totally and though Amr didn't have the rank and experience to do so, he's promoted the Field Marshal and he's put in charge of Egyptian forces. When Egypt unites with Syria, he's sent by Nasser to be the kind of generalissimo who will oversee Syria as a sort of viceroy while it's united to Egypt between 1958 and 1961 in the United Arab Republic.

[William Dalrymple]

This is a very key part. Again, this is that people don't know well. So Egypt and Syria join up, but it's only last three years, partly because Nasser's mate is behaving like a viceroy and treating the Assyrians slightly like colonized figures.

[Eugene Rogan]

I mean, we haven't really talked about the United Arab Republic. And it was in a sense a moment where I think Nasser's standing in the Arab world reached unprecedented heights because he delivered on the dreams of Arabs going right through the 20th century for undoing the borders imposed by Europe in the Middle east and creating a greater Arab Union, a critical mass with which Arabs might stand up to the other powers of the day. So there are huge aspirations pinned to a union of Egypt and Syria.

[Anita Anand]

I'm taking you back to the bromance though, because I'm very much into this story. So when you've got these two people who adore each other, you've got the world watching as Nasser promotes his bro to the highest possible position. But that's all fine. That works as long as you have two people on the same page. It's when one starts moving off the page and that becomes the pivotal problem here, doesn't it?

[Eugene Rogan]

It does at the top, but certainly not in public perception because you're living in an age of propaganda. And I think the image cast by the free officers was of dedicated, patriotic, ideologically motivated leaders people believed in. The Syrians were deeply resentful of the high handed way in which the Egyptians under Amr's viceroyalty treated Syria. They really treated it like a colony. They cut the Syrians out of governing their own territory. They weakened the military, made it totally subordinate to Egyptian commanders. They really hurt the Syrian economy by imposing measures that they introduced in Egypt that just didn't work in Syria. So, you know, if you wanted to make a union of Arab states work, you wouldn't have gone about it the way that you did. And what ultimately drives the Syrians to break with the union in September of 1961? The fault really lies with Ahmad. And I think it should have been a warning sign to Nasser that his trusted best friend was perhaps not entirely in command of the situation and has bad judgment.

[Anita Anand]

I mean, quite simply put, just, you know, makes bad calls.

[Eugene Rogan]

Yeah, but there was no accountability. In a sense, it would have almost looked like the revolution failing to have said that AMR failed. And so they preferred to lay the blame on reactionaries in Syria. And in a sense, Egypt is going to enter into a more ideological and less realist phase after 1961. Very linked to this Arab Cold War thinking, where in trying to explain what led to the defeat of the United Arab Republic, the secession of Syria, the failure of the Arab dream, they blamed it on the forces of reaction and that the revolution had not gone far enough in advancing the progressive agenda and in crushing reactionaries. And this is, if you like, going to take Egypt into a yet more ideological, less grounded in reality series of policies, which is where their departure from reality only broadens as we go through the experience of intervening in the Yemen war the next year in 1962, and then why Egypt would find it normal to be pinned down in a losing conflict in Yemen and go onto a war footing with Israel in 1967. It's ideological, it's not realistic, and they're losing their grip on reality. And I think the relationship between Amir's command of the military, Nasser's control over the political sphere is leading them into a conflict that will come to a head in 1967 as well.

[William Dalrymple]

Eugene, this connects with one of your big arguments, I think, in the Arabs that the Arab states failure, which we see at this period repeatedly is not failures of will or courage or a lack of resources. It's institutional failure that lets them down time and again.

[Eugene Rogan]

I think the institutions of revolutionary republics were flawed because they did not provide voice to citizens. You didn't really have, let us say, a parliament with a government and an opposition that was allowed to debate policies. The revolutionary republics were all headed by military men. And the culture of the military was that officers give orders and subalterns follow. And if you don't obey orders in the military, you're punished severely. That culture was brought to politics, and that means no one ever speaks truth to power. You're scared to death of power. And so Nasser and his government never really had anyone tell them when their ideas were bad and they became more in capture of their ideology without grounding in reality. And I think this is where the Arab states go off the rails in the lead up to 1967. They just behave in a surreal way.

[William Dalrymple]

One group we haven't talked about, Eugene, in this is the Palestinians. And the PLO was founded in 1964. Tell us about that. How did that alter the dynamic?

[Eugene Rogan]

It's a very important development that for the first time since 1948, there is an internationally recognized body representing Palestinian national aspirations. And of course, it was still at the height of Arab rejectionism of Israel and its right to exist. So really, the PLO was established under the rubric of the total liberation of Palestine, the total defeat of Israel. But before we think that this is an institution that represents the Palestinian people, remember it is a creature of the Arab League. So the idea for the creation of a PLO was first mooted in the very first Arab Summit in Cairo in 1964, where the Arab states come together and agree to allow the Palestinians to form an organization. They do so later in a meeting in Jerusalem, later in 1964. But the PLO that's created there, headed by a man named Ahmed Shukheri, born of a Palestinian father and a Turkish mother in southern Lebanon, who had served as a member of the Syrian delegation to the United nations, most recently as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United Nations. So a man who was more Arab than Palestinian in many ways was entrusted by Nasser and the Arab League to oversee the formation of a body that would fall in line with Arab policy and Arab policy led by Nasser, on how the Arab world would partner with the Palestinians for the liberation of their territory, but under very strict control and as a way to try and contain those Palestinian organizations that had been emerging in the early 1960s that were desperate to take the fight to the Israelis.

[William Dalrymple]

Which is Fatah. Exactly. So tell us about Fatah. Tell us about Arafat.

[Eugene Rogan]

So Fatah will emerge among a group of diaspora Palestinians based in Kuwait, where they have the distance from the front line, they're far from Palestine and Israel, that they represent less of a threat to the host government in Kuwait. The Kuwaitis are actually very supportive of Palestinian aspirations and allow a movement for the liberation of Palestine. The Fatah, it's a reverse acronym for those who Want to win this question in the next pub quiz of how to get Tahrir Philistine, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine.

[William Dalrymple]

That sounds like a very Oxford pub quiz for Eugene.

[Anita Anand]

Literally going through my head. When was the last time Eugene was at a pub quiz?

[Eugene Rogan]

But when that question was asked, dear listeners, I nailed it. This is exactly the kind of activist organization made by Palestinians for Palestinians, raising funds to buy weapons to come to the frontline states, infiltrate Israel and try and strike a blow against the Israeli state built on Palestinian land. And the PLO was created by the Arab League to try and control all such movements and to subordinate them to an umbrella organization. So the PLO was meant to bring in not just Fatah, but other movements like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front, George Habash, Nayef Al Hawatmeh, all the kind of local leaders emerging, inspired by the Arab National Movement, by various Marxist visions, by Nasserist movements, try and bring them under an umbrella, control them, keep Palestinians in line with Arab League thinking dominated by Nasser.

[William Dalrymple]

And is Fatah breaking out of that at this point? Is it able to operate independently or is it still very much sort of under the Arab League hat, so to speak?

[Eugene Rogan]

I mean, Fatah is desperately trying to act and they do manage a first cross border raid into Israel which proves to have no impact on the ground.

[Anita Anand]

New Year's Eve, 1964. We ought to anchor this in people's minds.

[Eugene Rogan]

In the timeline, they didn't take credit under their own name. They called themselves the Storm. They were able to come out with the first communique. But it was the symbolic and the moral importance of the act which really rose morale among Palestinians who had felt forgotten by their Arab neighbors and, and by the world at large. And so the idea the Palestinians were taking their liberation in their own hands was a huge morale boost across Palestinian communities and diaspora.

[Anita Anand]

I mean, this seems hugely significant then, Eugene, because you've got a Palestinian organization taking unilateral armed action against Israel without the blessing of the Arab League, without the knowledge of the Arab League.

[Eugene Rogan]

I think the Arab side would have been supportive of Palestinian action against Israel. We have to remember that you weren't even allowed to pronounce the name Israel in the Arab world. It was consistently referred to as the Zionist entity. It was dismissed as illegitimate. And so what, in let's say the public's eye would have been seen as a valiant Palestinian strike against the Zionist entity was exactly the kind of danger to the frontiers that countries like Egypt, Jordan and Syria were trying to stop by creating the PLO and controlling it.

[William Dalrymple]

So things are beginning to heat up properly. In May 1967, Fatah is making raids into Israel and there are retaliatory raids from the Israelis over the border, causing enormous tension in both directions. Just when you think things can't get Any worse, in May 1967, Nasser demands the removal of of the United nations emergency force from Sinai. He expects probably a refusal, but it doesn't come. And the United Nations Secretary General U Thant agrees without delay and begins withdrawing that force, which is not what Nasser anticipates. He now cannot back down publicly, so he moves Egyptian troops into Sinai, which is a direct challenge to Israel. And then on the 22nd of May, he makes the crucial move which makes war almost inevitable. He closes the Straits of Tehran to Israeli shipping, cutting off Israel from access to the Red Sea. That is a casus beli under international law. Israel has already explicitly stated in 1957 that it would treat such a closure as an act of war, and Nasser has done that.

[Eugene Rogan]

Nasser's hand was forced because the Straits of Tiran were kept open only by the fact that you had a UN buffer force that controlled the line between Israel and Egypt, and that went right down to the tip of the Sinai Peninsula. And it was while you had UN troops there that Israeli ships were allowed to transit. The moment you withdrew the UN buffer force, then Egypt was exercising total sovereign control over the Sinai right up to the border with Israel, including the streets of Tiran. And suddenly Nasser, who had been so harsh on his more conservative neighbors like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, comes under fierce criticism, not least by the Syrians, whose Ba' Athist government is growing increasingly hostile to Nasser's Egypt and rival with Nasser's Egypt. They're all putting great pressure on Nasser to demonstrate his bona fides by closing the straits. And Nasser really didn't have a way of backing down. He was a victim of his own rhetoric. And we see the law of unintended consequences kick in, because once you set one change in motion, many other dominoes will begin to fall. And some of those dominoes fall in ways that I don't think Nasser had anticipated, but begin to take control of the situation.

[William Dalrymple]

Eugene said that we're clear about this. Closing the Straits of Tehran means basically strangling Israel from the south. They can't get oil in, they can't get goods in through the Red Sea. Eilat is blockaded.

[Eugene Rogan]

Effectively, it did close Israel off from Red Sea shipping routes, but I think it was also the Symbolic importance. I don't know whether the volume of shipping through the states of Tiran was such a vital supply line to Israel compared to its Mediterranean Sea lanes. But symbolically it was absolutely essential not to allow neighboring states to exercise control over Israel's territorial waters, for instance. So the Israelis made clear that closure of the Straits of Tehran would be seen as casus belli. And Nasser knew from the moment that he closed the straits, that he had increased the chance that the pressures he was bringing to bear against the Israelis along the Sinai frontier could well go beyond symbolic action to a real war.

[Anita Anand]

In effect, when the Arab world goes to war in June 1967, you've got military powers that what, are barely on speaking terms. I mean, how is that working?

[Eugene Rogan]

So it's very difficult for the Arab world to try and coordinate their militaries. They are very fractured and divided. There are, as we've already said, divisions between the kind of revolutionary republics and the conservative monarchies. And the frontline states around Israel are themselves quite divided. In a sense, though the prelude to war in 67 will be driven by Soviet disinformation about Israeli troop buildups on the Syrian frontier and the Egyptians intervening in defense of Syrian territory. We now know that there wasn't an Israeli troop buildup. We don't really know what lay behind. What we can only see is Soviet disinformation. But the intentions of the Egyptians to put pressure on Israel to take pressure off Syria is perhaps one of those moments where Nasser was hoping that without actually having to go to war, he could secure a diplomatic victory that would add to his long list of winning battles without fighting wars. But it is what sets things in motion. You have a new Ba' Athist government in Syria that's a rival to Nasser's Egypt, where relations between the Syrian Ba'ath and the Egyptians are actually quite poor. And this means that there's not the line of communications that would allow for good war planning to coordinate forces and use a two front war to put pressure on Israel. If it comes to that, that wasn't happening. But for the Israelis it just reinforced their own sense of vulnerability. And all I would stress is that we can look to Israel's success in the 1948 war, in the Suez crisis in 1956, at the power of Israel today, and believe that Israel saw itself in a very strong position and could anticipate total victory were they to go to war with the Arab world. It wasn't the case for Israel. The building antagonism with Egypt, the removal of UN buffered troops in the Sinai. The coordination between Egypt and Syria, however weak we now know it was, was creating a sense of an existential threat. And I think that Israel was extraordinarily concerned from the very top of government. The Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, was not a charismatic figure. And when he went on the radio to try and reassure Israelis, he had a stammer. And instead of projecting a strong and confident voice, there was a slightly diffident stammering Prime Minister which sent panic waves through Israeli society. Even the military commanders were not immune. And there's a very famous meeting between Yitzhak Rabin, who was commander of the air Force, and the founder prime minister of Israel, Ben Gurion, in Ben Gurion's retirement home in stablecare. And Ben Gurion is berating Rabin and saying to him, how dare you risk all we have built by the adventure of a war when if we lose one, we lose everything. Our country can never afford to lose a war. And Rabin, under tremendous pressure, suffers what all historians have described as a. A nervous breakdown. And so it's really worth remembering just how high the stakes were for Israel and how low its confidence was that it could strike the kind of blow that would allow it to defeat enemies on three fronts at the same time. All of that was really not to be known. May, June 1967. In the lead up to war, Eugene,

[William Dalrymple]

just give us a quick snap then of this moment before the outbreak of war where the different armies are the different forces.

[Eugene Rogan]

From the moment Egypt closes the straits at Tiran, all parties in the conflict go onto a war footing. And the Egyptians way of addressing this is perhaps the most foolish. They march their troops, their tanks into the Sinai on national television, which allows all the Israeli intelligence people simply to count numbers by watching Egyptian tv. The Syrians begin to mobilize their troops and take defensive positions that, as we will know, they are no longer able to defend. And the Israelis begin to plan for a conflict which would take them to war with all of their neighbors at one time. Under the pressure of common Arab mobilization, the King of Jordan, long seen as a fossil of a British imperial age, realized that if he doesn't side with the Arabs in the coming conflict with Israel, that it could cost him his throne. And so, weighing the dangers of entering into a war that he doesn't believe he can win, but staying out of the war that would lead to his being overthrown, he flies to Cairo and signs a pact to commit his forces to Abdel Nasser's command. And at that moment, the law of unintended consequences takes over because all the states involved are moving towards a collision course, and none of them is confident that they can come through it.

[William Dalrymple]

One last question, Eugene. So we've got all these different pieces on the chessboard massing now on the map around Israel. And we've got this picture of political fracture in Israel, too, with Ben Gurion ranting at Ravine and so on. Ravine having a nervous breakdown. But the Israeli military, they have got plans, haven't they?

[Eugene Rogan]

This is the big contrast, Willie, is between the planning that's gone into Israeli war preparation, and they have been putting together plans and contingencies for just this moment. And the Egyptians who had not planned a thing. And there's a telling moment. And we have this from one of Nasser's closest confidants, Mohammed Hassanein Haikal, the journalist who witnesses Nasser asking his commander in chief, Field Marshal Amr Abdul Hakim, is the army ready? And Amir says to Nasser, we're in tip top shape, boss. We're ready to go. And with that, the die is cast and the countries will go to war.

[Anita Anand]

Eugene, thank you. And we will be speaking to Eugene

[William Dalrymple]

again, our number one friend of the show.

[Eugene Rogan]

Floudry will get you everywhere. Thank you, guys.

[Anita Anand]

If you can't wait for the next episode, you know, you don't have to. You just become a member of our club. And it's very easy to do empirepoduk.com, that's empowerpoduk.com and if you are a member of the club, you get these mini series all in one go and lots more. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan, and

[William Dalrymple]

goodbye from me, William Durample.