When Israel’s Great Nemesis Accepted Peace

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When Israel’s Great Nemesis Accepted Peace

Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to destroy the Jewish state in the 1960s, before endorsing a negotiated settlement. Could a defeated Hamas make the same turn?

Nasser is cheered in Cairo after his 1956 decision to nationalize the Suez Canal, leading Israel, Britain and France to try to topple him by force later that year.

By Alex Rowell, WSJ

Nov. 22, 2023 1:36 pm ET

With Israeli and Palestinian forces likely to resume hostilities after the four-day pause starting Thursday, the prospects for a more lasting peace in the Middle East remain dim. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to utterly defeat Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that governs the coastal enclave and stunned the world with its killing spree on Oct. 7. For their part, Hamas officials have said they will conduct similar attacks again, as many times as is necessary to achieve the complete destruction of Israel.

It is tempting to conclude that, after this, Israelis and Palestinians simply will never be able to agree on a political settlement capable of bringing an end to more than a century of conflict. Yet history is replete with examples of apparently implacable enemies tiring, eventually, of war and coming to the table—including in the Arab-Israeli context.

The late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, once seen by Israel as the arch-terrorist, signed the Oslo Accords with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in consequence. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein both led their countries to war against Israel before signing full peace treaties that have held to this day.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, right, shake hands alongside President Bill Clinton at the White House after signing the Oslo II follow-up to the Oslo Accords, Sept. 28, 1995.

PHOTO: DOUG MILLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

And before them all, there was the man who first set the precedent, for this as for so much else in Arab politics: Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Like Hamas’s leaders today, and Arafat before them, Nasser was once regarded as the ultimate menace to Israel. The Jewish state’s first premier, David Ben-Gurion, loathed him and compared him to Hitler (much as Netanyahu now calls Hamas “the new Nazis”). In 1956, Ben-Gurion invaded Egypt in tandem with Britain and France—colonial powers aghast at Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company—in an unsuccessful bid to topple Nasser by force.

Nasser’s survival of that onslaught made him a hero to millions of Arabs, not least to Palestinians, many of whom saw him as the man of destiny who would recover their lost homeland. It was Nasser who, in 1964, summoned the Arab heads of state to Egypt to approve the establishment of the PLO, whose declared aim was the liberation of all of historic Palestine from the Israeli state. Nasser provided the PLO with funding, training and equipment and hosted its main radio station, “The Voice of Palestine.”

Three years later, Nasser put Egypt on a war footing, expelling U.N. peacekeepers from his border with Israel and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, blockading Israel’s port of Eilat. “The Jews threaten war,” he said in a speech on May 22, 1967. “We tell them, ‘You’re most welcome. We’re ready for war.’” Four days later, he pledged that, in the event Israel were to attack Egypt, “The battle will be a comprehensive one and our main objective will be to destroy Israel.”

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, seen in 1959. He compared Nasser to Hitler . PHOTO: FRED STEIN/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It was a calamitous misjudgment. Ten days later, Israeli bombers obliterated the Egyptian air force in a matter of hours. Over the course of six days, Israel routed not just the Egyptian but also the Syrian and Jordanian armies. In the process, it seized vast swaths of new territory, including the Gaza Strip (occupied until then by Egypt), the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The humiliating defeat prompted a sea change in Nasser’s position. In the war’s aftermath, Egypt approved UN Security Council Resolution 242, which acknowledged Israel’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence,” as well as its “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” The resolution also called on Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and facilitate “a just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee issue. Establishing what became known as the “land-for-peace” formula, whereby Israel would return the land occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Arab states, the resolution has been the basis of negotiations for a political settlement of the conflict ever since.

The PLO rejected Resolution 242, being unwilling at the time to recognize Israeli sovereignty of any kind. This marked a rift between Nasser and the Palestinians, which widened in 1970, when Nasser reiterated his support for a two-state solution, publicly endorsing a proposal by President Nixon’s secretary of state, William P. Rogers, to cease hostilities with Israel and resume peace talks in line with Resolution 242. “We have declared before the whole world that we seek peace,” proclaimed Nasser on July 24, 1970.

This time, Nasser was openly denounced by several PLO factions, who staged turbulent street protests outside Egyptian embassies in Lebanon and Jordan, in which Nasser was branded a traitor, “coward” and “agent of imperialism.” The furious Nasser responded by closing two PLO radio stations in Cairo that had broadcast stinging criticisms of his policy. He also suspended the funding and equipping of militants in Gaza.

The breach polarized the Arab world, with rejectionist states such as Iraq and Algeria backing the Palestinian position, while the likes of Jordan, Lebanon and Sudan sided with Nasser. The man who had lived for so many years as the iconic symbol of Arab revolution would end his days condemned by his own disciples as a sellout. Two months later, the 52-year-old Nasser died of a heart attack.

Looking back on this episode today, it is striking to reflect how far opinion in the Middle East has moved away from centrist positions to what were once fringe views. While even Nasser could once endorse a two-state solution—and a peace initiative proposed by a Republican administration in Washington—it is de rigueur today in many pro-Palestine circles and among the hard-liners who populate Netanyahu’s cabinet to reject the two-state formula as unworkable, undesirable or both.

To be sure, several factors complicate any comparison between Nasser’s time and our own. One is the construction of hundreds of Israeli settlements, housing some 700,000 people, in the Palestinian West Bank since Israel’s occupation began in 1967, which has done much to undermine the feasibility of a Palestinian state. Another is Hamas’s uncompromising Islamist ideology, which differs in important respects from Nasser’s self-styled “Arab socialism.” (Indeed, Nasser vigorously repressed Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a Palestinian offshoot.) Where Nasser, Arafat, Sadat and Hussein were all ideologically agile, moving with the winds and changing with the times, the same can hardly be said of Hamas, especially after Oct. 7.

Is it conceivable, nonetheless, that some yet-unseen future iteration of Hamas—assuming it survives the current war—might, in the fullness of time, seek a settlement? It is nearly impossible to imagine today, but it was also once nearly impossible to imagine of Nasser and Arafat. In the end, as Rabin said, one makes peace with one’s enemies, not with one’s friends.

And that, above all, must be the outcome sought most urgently by responsible actors and stakeholders in Israel-Palestine today—with or without Hamas. If there is one lesson that can be drawn with very high confidence from history, it is that military action alone can bring neither security to Israelis nor liberation to Palestinians. Both Hamas and Israel’s own extremists live and breathe to sabotage all meaningful efforts toward a just and sustainable political resolution of this conflict. It is precisely for that reason that the rest of us must redouble our resolve to achieve it.

Alex Rowell’s new book is, “We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World,” published by W.W. Norton.