Suez 1956 and the struggle against imperialism

It is difficult to resist the comparison between the 2026 struggle over the Strait of Hormuz and the 1956 struggle over the Suez Canal. In both cases, the struggle is over a major artery of world capitalism; in both cases, it involves a confrontation between imperialism and a country of the Global South; and in both cases, there is imperial overreach, launched on the assumption of a swift victory that turned into a protracted war. Perhaps most significantly, both involve the state of Israel acting as an ally of Western imperialism and using the crisis to advance its own expansionist aims as a settler-colonial state—and therefore both involve the question of Palestine.

The comparison can nevertheless be deceiving, because the historical context in each case is fundamentally different. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt is a world apart from today’s Iran. The retreating imperialism of Britain and France in the 1950s bears only a superficial resemblance to the crisis the United States faces today. Moreover, although the genocidal and expansionist nature of the Zionist project, and the struggle of the Palestinian people against it, appear to be permanent features of the region, the regional and international context in which that struggle now unfolds makes both its dangers and its possibilities radically different.

This article focuses on the events leading to the Suez confrontation of 1956, 70 years ago, and on its consequences, in the hope that a deeper understanding of the struggle against imperialism then can help arm us for the struggles of today.

The nature of the Nasserist regime

The mid-20th century was a moment of severe social and political crisis in Egypt. British forces still occupied the Suez Canal Zone and most agricultural land was still owned by a tiny aristocracy of Turkish and Circassian origin. Although the country was formally a parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy, the levers of power were held by the king and Britain. These three factors—British occupation, a corrupt monarchy and the land question—were serious obstacles to Egypt’s independence and to its capitalist development.

In his theory of permanent revolution, Leon Trotsky argued that in such situations, workers rising up could merge the national democratic and socialist revolutions into a single process.1 Many of the ingredients of such a process existed in Egypt in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There was a militant working class concentrated in the textile industry (Egypt then had the largest textile mill in the world, employing over 40,000 workers), on the railways, on the docks and in other industries. The peasantry was seething over the land question. The bourgeoisie was reactionary and paralysed, both by its close links to the large landowners and to foreign capital and by its fear of a workers’ and peasants’ revolution. The main bourgeois nationalist party, the Wafd (“Delegation”), was therefore incapable of seriously challenging the British occupation or of solving Egypt’s fundamental problems. The role of the workers in the anti-colonial struggle was central. Despite their relatively small numbers, their concentration, organisation and militancy made their leadership of the movement for liberation a real possibility.

However, as Tony Cliff argued in an important article published in this journal in 1963, where the working class is for one reason or another incapable of leading that process, other social forces will emerge to lead it—not towards socialist revolution, but towards state-led capitalist development. Cliff called this process deflected permanent revolution, and although his focus was on China and Cuba, the emergence of the Nasserist regime in Egypt was seen as a variation on the same theme.

Suez and the anti-colonial struggle in Egypt

The struggle over the Suez Canal began years before the 1956 war. It was bound up both with the long anti-colonial struggle against the British occupation of Egypt and with the creation of Israel as an expansionist settler-colonial state and the Palestinian resistance to that project.

Egypt had gained formal independence in 1922, when Britain terminated the protectorate and recognised the country as “an independent sovereign state”. That sovereignty was, however, heavily restricted. Britain reserved a series of matters to itself, and these reservations gave it continued practical control: the security of imperial communications, which meant the continued occupation of the Suez Canal Zone; the defence of Egypt against foreign aggression; and the protection of foreign interests and of minorities.2 The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 modified the relationship only slightly. Britain agreed to withdraw its forces from most of Egypt but retained the right to station thousands of troops in the Canal Zone, along with wartime rights that were used extensively during the Second World War, when the whole of Egypt was occupied by British forces once again.3

By 1951, the political and social crisis in Egypt had reached a new peak. On 8 October that year, the Wafd government of Mustafa al-Nahhas announced the unilateral abrogation of the 1936 treaty, a decision forced on it by enormous popular pressure, as students and workers mounted mass demonstrations and strikes led both by the various communist parties and by the Muslim Brotherhood.4 Britain, of course, refused to evacuate. Their refusal triggered a new wave of strikes and a mass campaign of non-cooperation with the occupation, coupled with an intensification of armed attacks on British forces in the Canal Zone. The British Labour government responded by ordering reinforcements, until more than 80,000 troops were stationed there to hold the line against the growing resistance.5

Egyptian workers began leaving, or refusing to take up, work in British military camps and installations. Railway workers refused to transport British troops and supplies. There were major strikes by construction workers, dock workers and shipping workers. An estimated 60,000 workers took part in what was in effect an anti-colonial political strike. Dock workers at Suez, oil workers at Port Said and white-collar workers in Ismailia collected money for those who had left British employment. Britain had to import workers from Cyprus and Mauritius, and the Royal Navy intervened to stop the movement of ships through the Canal from being paralysed altogether. Meanwhile, mass anti-colonial protests in Cairo and Alexandria drew in tens of thousands of students and workers.6

This wave of resistance continued for months, above all in the Canal Zone, and it even reached the armed police, who struck at their barracks in Ismailia. On 25 January 1952, the British army ordered the barracks to surrender. The police refused, held out for hours and gave in only after British forces had shot dead 46 of them.7 That day was later commemorated as Police Day—which is why it was no coincidence that the Egyptian revolution of 2011 was launched on 25 January. The following day, mass protests in Cairo turned violent, and significant parts of the commercial centre were burnt down, in particular properties associated with British and other European interests. This was the context in which Nasser and the Free Officers carried out their coup on 23 July 1952.

Neither the US nor Britain were particularly opposed to that coup. In August 1952, Winston Churchill, then British prime minister, went so far as to write about Mohamed Naguib, who later became Egypt’s first president:

The more I read the news from Egypt the more I like the Neguib programme. We ought to help Neguib and Co. all we can unless they turn spiteful. It is most important that we should not appear to be defending the landlords and Pashas against the long overdue reforms for the fellaheen.8

Although staunchly anti-imperialist, the new regime was deeply contradictory. It had consolidated its power by executing striking workers, banning political parties and imprisoning thousands of activists from both the left and the Muslim Brotherhood. It needed the support of workers and peasants, yet feared any independent mobilisation by them. These contradictions would prove catastrophic in the 1967 war with Israel.

By 1955, the Soviet Union had reversed its initial hostility to the new regime and entered into an alliance with it that would last into the early 1970s. For the British, meanwhile, Nasser, who ousted Naguib and succeeded him in 1954, had become the Hitler of the Middle East. Nasser faced two major challenges: how to finance his ambitious plan to build the Aswan Dam, and how to acquire arms for an army left exposed by the fiasco of the 1948 war and by constant Israeli threats. At that point, the Egyptian army had only six functioning aircraft—and 30 more were grounded because Britain had stopped delivering essential spare parts. There was practically no tank ammunition, and nearly 60 percent of the tanks needed major repairs.9

How acute this problem had become was made plain at the end of February 1955, when Israel attacked Egyptian forces in Gaza. Such raids were presented as reprisals for attempts by Palestinian refugees to cross back over the border. The Zionists had developed an entire doctrine of reprisal and had assigned the 202nd Paratroop Battalion under Ariel Sharon, later an Israeli prime minster, to carry it out. The logic was simple. Sharon spelt it out to his commanders in a lecture in 1955: their attacks should not be aimed at particular gangs of infiltrators, but at whatever would give the Arab authorities the greatest incentive to prevent a repetition. Sharon’s raid struck three Egyptian camps in Gaza and blew up the headquarters and the pump house, killing 36 Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers and wounding 29.10

The Soviet Union, Egypt and the Palestinian question

Nasser’s search for arms would soon take him to Moscow, and it is here that a Marxist reading of the road to 1956 has to pause. One aspect of that road deserves particular attention if we are to understand how the revolutionary potential of the period was thwarted: the attitudes and actions of the Soviet Union. From being a staunch and principled supporter of national liberation and the right of nations to self-determination in Lenin’s time, the Soviet Union had become an imperialist power in its own right—not only in the obvious sense of occupying large parts of Eastern Europe and haggling with the Western powers over the spoils of the Second World War, but in seeking, through the same haggling, a colonial presence in Africa. Stalin was particularly interested in Libya as a Mediterranean base, at a time when oil had not yet been discovered there.11

More relevant to Suez, however, is the Soviet position on Palestine. On 14 May 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative at the UN, declared that there was a Jewish homeland and an Arab homeland in Palestine, both of which had “equal historical roots in the country”. The Soviet Union also accepted the partition of Jerusalem, on the grounds that this was a solution “that would satisfy both parties to the conflict”.12 A Soviet delegation attended the opening of the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem in 1949. The Soviet Union and the Netherlands were the only two states that thereby implicitly recognised the Israeli government’s presence in the city.13 The Soviet Union also helped to arm the Zionist side for their war, agreeing that Czechoslovakia should deliver 10,000 rifles and 450 machine guns to the Zionist forces in early 1948.14

They regarded the Partition Plan as the appropriate and just solution for Arabs and Jews alike. Speaking at a meeting of the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists, Gromyko stated:

We do not agree with the claim that the Partition Plan for Palestine is directed against the Arabs and Arab countries. We are deeply convinced that the resolution is in line with the fundamental national interests of both Jews and Arabs… The Soviet Union necessarily supports the aspirations of any state and any people, no matter how small their stature in international affairs, in the struggle against foreign subjugation and the remnants of colonial oppression.15

Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, sent a telegram to his Israeli counterpart declaring that the establishment of an independent state by the Jewish people would serve the goal of strengthening peace and security in Palestine and the Middle East, and expressing his confidence that friendly relations between the Soviet Union and Israel would develop.16 When the 1948 war broke out, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced:

Despite all their sympathy for the national liberation of the Arab peoples, the Soviet public can only condemn the aggression of the Arab states against the State of Israel and against the right of the Jewish people to establish their own state in accordance with the resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly.17

David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, wrote to Stalin on the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1952: “At this juncture in our nation’s development…we reflect on the role played by the Soviet Union in defeating the Nazi enemy and feel grateful for the Soviet Union’s support of Israel since the establishment of the state”.18

It was only with the rise of Nasser that the Soviet Union, now under Nikita Khrushchev, reversed its position and began supporting Egypt as an alternative ally in the Middle East. By then, however, Soviet recognition of and support for the Zionist state had already had a catastrophic effect on the Egyptian left.

When the UN took up the partition of Palestine in 1947, the main Communist organisations in Egypt defended the Soviet position. One of their principal newspapers endorsed the partition plan—but only after Semyon Tsarapkin, Soviet deputy representative to the UN, had declared support for it. The Communists argued that partition had become necessary in order to expel British rule and achieve independence, following the failure of Arab-Jewish cooperation.19

As for the 1948 war, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (Al-Harakat al-Dimuqratiyya lil-Taharrur al-Watani, HADETU), one of the largest of the Communist organisations, judged it to be:

A military adventure that ended in disaster, not only for the Arab armies but especially for the Palestinian Arab nation, because the rulers of the Arab states bear the greatest share of responsibility for creating the refugee crisis, which arouses public sympathy; yet by provoking this war in obedience to the orders of their colonial masters, these ruling classes—who claimed to be helping the Arabs of Palestine—sought to achieve other objectives. They wanted to divert the Arab masses and the Arab states themselves from their own problems and seize the opportunity presented by the state of war to dismantle the popular organisations that had grown since the end of World War II and which threatened the outrageous privileges enjoyed by the ruling classes.20

This wholesale acceptance of the partition plan—and thus of the legitimacy of the State of Israel—was a direct result of political and ideological subservience to the Soviet Union and to a leadership that many regarded as the sole compass of international Communism during the Stalin era. Not every left-wing group in Egypt blindly accepted Soviet positions, however, least of all on Palestine. The New Dawn (Al-Fajr al-Jadid) group rejected the Partition Plan and considered the Soviet leadership’s stance on it mistaken. Since 1945, it had criticised the Zionist project sharply, fully aware of its settler-colonial and expansionist nature and of its organic connection to colonialism. An extract from an June 1945 article written by Ahmad Sadiq Saad on the Palestinian cause shows the foresight and the revolutionary character of that stance even at so early a stage:

One of the most important characteristics of the Palestinian movement at present is that it has succeeded in rousing all strata of the Arab people and has been able to enlist their forces in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Zionism has never, not even for a single day, defended the Jews or fought their enemies; rather, in the plain and simple truth, it has exploited their suffering and capitalised on their tragedies and misfortunes to colonise Palestine and exploit its resources.21

Nonetheless, the acceptance of the partition resolution by most Communist groups cost the left dearly, in a country where sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinian people and hostility towards Zionism were widespread. It was a gift to the Muslim Brotherhood: while Brotherhood fighters were dying at the front in 1948, major currents of the left stood aside and recognised Israel, declaring that the war was no more than a ploy by colonialists and reactionaries to divert the Egyptian masses from their own struggle.

Nationalisation and the road to war

Nasser’s turn to Moscow bore fruit in the Czech arms deal of September 1955, which broke the Western monopoly on supplying weapons to the region and confirmed him, in British, French and Israeli eyes, as a menace to be removed. Several other elements had already made him at once a symbol of anti-imperialism across the Global South and a target for the three powers. The first was his rejection of the Baghdad Pact and his efforts to undermine it.22 The second was his emergence at Bandung in April 1955, alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, Josip Broz Tito and Zhou Enlai, as a leader of the non-aligned movement. The third was his recognition of Mao Zedong’s China in May 1956, which infuriated the US in particular. The fourth was his intransigence towards Israel: he insisted on major territorial concessions and on the return of Palestinian refugees. The last, but by no means the least—especially for France—was his support for anti-colonial movements, above all the National Liberation Front in Algeria.

It was the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, announced after the US and Britain withdrew their offer to fund the Aswan Dam, that marked the peak of Nasser’s popularity in the Middle East in particular and the Global South in general. It also made war inevitable. Britain reacted to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company with panicked hyperbole. Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared: “One thing is certain: the Egyptian dictator was not to be permitted to have his hand on our windpipe.” The Daily Telegraph wrote: “In the manner of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company only one thing is lacking: it should have been announced late on Saturday night, as was the way in Hitler and Mussolini’s day”.23

The British reaction becomes intelligible in the light of what had happened in Iran a few years earlier. The chain of events leading to the Suez war began, at least for London, in March 1951, when the Iranian parliament voted under the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to nationalise the oil industry—until then dominated by the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which operated the great refinery at Abadan. Iranian oil was strategically vital to Britain, and Abadan was one of its largest remaining overseas assets.24

Britain’s Labour government of the time did not simply oppose the nationalisation; it immediately drew up military plans for an intervention around Abadan. Two factors prevented that intervention from materialising. Britain was not capable of mounting the necessary invasion of Iran on its own, and the US was strongly opposed to any such action. By 27 September 1951, the cabinet had decided against authorising force and resolved instead to take the dispute to the UN. At that meeting, the British foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, backed by the defence minister, had put a powerful case for the use of force at Abadan. Otherwise, Morrison warned, “Egypt might be emboldened…to bring the Suez Canal under Egyptian control and British legal rights in many parts of the world would be placed in jeopardy”.25 In the event, British intelligence and the US Central Intelligence Agency cooperated in the operation that brought Mossadegh down in August 1953. The Shah’s position was restored, and a new international oil consortium was established in place of the old monopoly.26

After the experiences with Iran, which had been resolved only when the US agreed to join the British in removing Mossadegh, it is no wonder that Nasser’s move sent London into a panic—and no wonder, either, that Morrison’s prophecy was quoted back at Eden’s critics. The British government now argued to the rest of the world that the Canal “was not a piece of Egyptian property but an international asset of the highest importance which should be managed as an international trust…made up of the principal maritime powers, on which Egypt would be given ‘suitable’ representation.” Eden cabled the US president, Dwight Eisenhower, the same day to say that “they could not allow Nasser to seize control of the Canal in defiance of international agreements…otherwise, our influence and yours throughout the Middle East will, we are convinced, be finally destroyed”.27

Under pressure from the US administration, Britain and France first attempted to make Nasser reverse the decision by diplomatic means: at the UN, and then at a conference in London. When those attempts failed, they turned to a conspiratorial plan of war in collusion with Israel. Representatives of the three countries met secretly at a villa in Sèvres, outside Paris. What the French and the British needed was a pretext for invading Egypt, and Israel, the obliging watchdog of imperialism, would supply it by invading the Sinai Peninsula on 29 October 1956 and advancing towards the Canal. Once the fighting had begun, Britain and France would issue an ultimatum to both sides, demanding an end to hostilities and the withdrawal of their forces from the vicinity of the Canal. Egypt would of course reject a demand to withdraw from its own sovereign territory and that anticipated refusal would furnish the two powers with their stated justification for military intervention. British and French forces would then occupy the Canal Zone, and Egypt would have to accept “the temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by Anglo-French forces to guarantee freedom of passage through the Canal by vessels of all nations until a final arrangement”.28

The Israelis were glad to be of service, but they had ambitions of their own. Ben-Gurion announced that Israel’s main interest in the war was to capture Sharm el-Sheikh and the island of Tiran, and so to open the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Nasser’s closure of the straits had made Israel’s plan of transforming Eilat into a major port impossible. Israel also wanted to expand into Lebanon, pushing its border to the Litani (something it is still attempting today), and to take Gaza, the main source of fedayeen raids across the border.29

War and resistance

As planned, the tripartite war opened with an Israeli invasion, which the Egyptian army and air force fought fiercely. Israel was nonetheless able to prevail, above all because of close and intense French support, which extended to the shelling of Rafah by a French cruiser and the use of a French ship to bring supplies to Israeli troops.30 France and Britain entered the war on 31 October 1956 with an intense bombing campaign. Once Egyptian forces had withdrawn from Sinai towards the Canal Zone, Israel was able to take most of the peninsula, along with Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh. British and French paratroops landed at Port Said and Port Fuad on 5 November 1956.31

It should be remembered that Port Said was a particularly proletarian city. Canal employees, port workers, dockers, boatmen, petroleum workers, transport workers, artisans and service workers lived alongside merchants and the city’s foreign communities. Committees sprang up all over the city. The Workers’ Committee for Popular Resistance was formed by workers organised mainly in the petroleum sector; the Black Hand Committee organised youth resistance in the Al-Arab neighbourhood; the Free Avengers brought together a variety of militants in the Al-Ifranj neighbourhood. The Communists, mainly from HADETU, formed the Supreme Committee of Popular Resistance in an attempt to coordinate the different committees, and established the United Front of Popular Resistance. Many Communists were smuggled into the city, and they played an important role in coordination, intelligence, printing leaflets and organising resistance groups.32 Workers organised themselves into functional groups: some fired rifles at aircraft, others collected and buried the dead; neighbourhood committees protected property; other committees distributed supplies; and residents refused all cooperation with the occupying forces.33

Once Port Said was occupied, the problem was not simply one of fighting Britain and the France. Resistance depended on maintaining contact between the occupied city and the rest of Egypt. Lake Manzala became an underground corridor: intelligence was carried out through fishermen, weapons were brought across the water, and women helped to move them onward to the resistance groups. Women were particularly involved in transporting and concealing weapons, and in intelligence, leaflets, food, medical assistance and communications. Port Said’s Greek, Italian, Sudanese and Nubian communities also took part in the resistance, joining local committees and forming solidarity committees of their own—among them members of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, EOKA), the Cypriot liberation organisation, and the Sudanese Committee for the Resistance Against Colonialism.34

Facing fierce resistance, Britain turned to bombing from the air, targeting in particular the working-class neighbourhoods where the resistance was concentrated: the densely populated Al-Manakh quarter, with its wooden houses, home to workers, fishermen and artisans, and Al-Arab, where lower-level civil servants lived. Inside the city, and despite the catastrophic conditions, workers continued to gather to clean and maintain weapons, to collect bodies with handcarts and to help treat the wounded. More than a thousand civilians were killed.35

The Egyptian Communists played a crucial role in the battles of 1956, and in doing so demonstrated the potential for an independent revolutionary left rooted in working-class struggle. That potential was squandered: in 1964, the largest of the Communist organisations would dissolve themselves, joining Nasser’s ruling party.

The “real” imperialists intervene

Soviet support was very limited at the start of the war. Egyptian requests for direct intervention were, of course, put on hold, and Soviet promises to send volunteers never materialised. On 5 November 1956, however, Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet premier, sent public letters to Britain and France, calling on them to back off or risk attack from “a more powerful state which possesses all means of modern destructive weapons”.36 This was plainly a bluff. The Soviet army was busy crushing the Hungarian revolution that same month—a far more pressing threat to Moscow than a British and French occupation of the Canal Zone.

The pressure that actually forced the three invaders to back down came from the US. The most rapid response was the French one. As a French official explained: “either we must bring the United States to share our views…on the policy to be followed or, if we cannot arrange this, we must adapt ourselves to theirs”.37 For Britain, it was economic reality and the extent of their dependence on Washington that made the difference. The loss of reserves in November was estimated at over £250 million, and without US help, the pound would have collapsed. Once Britain had taken the decision to withdraw its troops completely, US officials welcomed the move: oil supplies began to move from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe, Britain was allowed to draw on the International Monetary Fund, and in December, the US Export-Import Bank announced a loan of $500 million (£4.53 billion today).38

Israel was more stubborn and needed more direct threats. Herbert Hoover Jr, the US undersecretary of state, sent the Israeli leadership an unambiguous message: “Israel’s attitude will inevitably lead to most serious measures such as the termination of all US governmental and private aid, UN sanctions and eventual expulsion from the UN. I speak with the utmost seriousness and gravity”.39 A ceasefire was announced and accepted by Britain on 7 November. British and French forces had withdrawn completely by 22 December, and Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza by March 1957.

1956 and 2026

Today, US imperialism faces the real possibility of a major defeat in its war with Iran. Its position in the region and in the world, however, is very different from Britain’s in 1956.

Britain by then had already lost its standing as a major world power, economically and militarily alike. The US had become the hegemon by a wide margin: it accounted for close to half of world gross domestic product (GDP), the dollar had already become the linchpin of the world economy, and US military power was unmatched, challenged only—and only to a degree—by the Soviet Union. Today’s relative economic weight of the US has receded to less than a quarter of world GDP, even though the world economy remains financially anchored in the dollar. The rise of China is of course a challenge, but China is still a long way from replacing the US as a financial, and to an extent even as a military, world power. Perhaps more significant still has been the emergence of competing regional powers, far stronger both economically and militarily than anything Nasser’s Egypt could aspire to in the 1950s and 1960s. Contemporary Iran, for example, has a much deeper social and industrial base for sustaining a technologically sophisticated and militarily capable state than Egypt possessed in 1956. The financial clout of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, non-existent in the 1950s, now translates into competing geopolitical influence in Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt itself.

The transition from British hegemony in the 19th century to US hegemony in the 20th century, though punctuated by world wars and crises, was a gradual and relatively orderly process. The present situation is far more volatile. US hegemony is declining and is being seriously challenged, not only by China but by regional powers such as Iran, in a multipolar world in which the scope for multiple military confrontations can only grow.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 showed the potential not only to be rid of the region’s corrupt dictatorships but also to break the stranglehold that the Zionist state and the US hold over the Palestinian people in particular and the peoples of the region in general. That potential still lies in the workplaces and the working-class neighbourhoods of the Arab cities—including Suez and Port Said, whose people revived their 1956 experience of resistance in the battles of 2011.

The fight against imperialism—with all that it entails of devastating wars, genocide, climate catastrophe and systematic racism—has become still more existential than it was in 1956. Socialists then stood firmly against the British, French and Israeli war on Egypt, just as today we stand against the US and Israeli wars on Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and the West Bank. Yet, the stakes this time round are much higher.

Sameh Naguib is an Egyptian socialist.

Notes