NASSER

THE threat of summer heat already lies heavy over Cairo and the rest of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt. The city police have changed their blue flannel uniforms to summer whites. Jacaranda trees are blooming richly purple in suburban Heliopolis, remnants of the district's lost elegance. While the triple peaks of the pyramids of Giza shimmer on the horizon, stately feluccas sail down the Nile as silently as they have done for centuries. Overhead, hawks wheel lazily in gyres. The pace of the people in their flowing gallabia robes, never very fast, has grown a step or two slower.

Though much of Cairo's ancient rhythm is unchanged and unchanging, the city is in fact a capital at war, a war that rages daily along the Suez Canal, only 70 miles away. The war shows—in the shabby, weary, olive-drab ambiance of the city, in the preparations it has made against attack. Hundreds of brick blast walls stand on sidewalks in front of doorways. The entrances to a few public buildings are heavily sandbagged. Windows and car headlights are painted blue—the ancient color for warding off the evil eye—to conform to blackout regulations. In erratic fashion, street lights are out in various places. Soldiers slouch in the shade of girders on each of the Nile bridges, and guard the Cairo airport, the railroad terminal and key road junctions on the sprawling city's edges. Sonic booms occasionally rattle the windows of Cairenes as MIG fighters scramble daily on simulated interception missions. Through the clear air, as gun crews perfect their skills in the nearby desert, come the crump of artillery and the rhythmic tat too of antiaircraft fire.

Cairo and the rest of the Arab world are only three weeks away from a day that they would prefer to forget, June 5, the second anniversary of their crushing defeat by the Israelis in the Six-Day War. The war left Cairo shorn of part of its realm, ruling over a defeated people and a divided land. Lost in the war, the Sinai desert and Gaza remain in the hands of the conquering Israelis, who are solidly entrenched on the east bank of the Suez Canal.

Key to the Arab World

The occupation has burned deep into the Arab spirit and bred hatred, apprehension and frustration. The presence of the Israelis along the Canal is a constant reminder of the superiority of the Arabs' foe and — what is far harder for the Arabs to bear — of their own continuing inferiority and impotency despite their greater numbers of people, planes, tanks, guns and resources. All of this has fed a growing, fatalistic conviction within Egypt that the rapidly hardening status quo in the Middle East can be broken only by another war — even though most Egyptians do not want one, even though another war would almost certainly mean another defeat.

The man who must try somehow to find a way to bind up this hemorrhaging of Arab pride and self-respect by recovering Egypt's lost territory is Gamal Abdel Nasser. It may be true, as he now insists, that he was pushed by Syria into the showdown with Israel in 1967. But it was he, in his longtime self-appointed role as the leader of all Arabs, who led Egypt, Jordan and Iraq into the war, and his country was the heaviest loser in men, arms, land and prestige. Today Nasser is the one to whom most Arabs look to get back the land occupied by Israel. Among all the Arab rulers, he is the only

one who could make peace and survive politically — if he were given tolerable terms.

Though Nasser is no longer regarded by the Arab masses as a new Saladin, he remains their best-known and most respected leader, the man to whom all other leaders listen — in other words, the key to the Arab world today, and thus to peace. He remains for many the embodiment of the ancient Arab dream of Al Umma al Arabia, or unity of all the Arab nations, the hero who threw off foreign domination. He is, above all, the man with whom Israel and the West must deal in seeking a settlement in the Middle East.

The Search for a Solution

The search for that settlement is now taking place far from the desert firing lines. In New York, the U.N. ambassadors of the U.S., Russia, Britain and France are in their sixth week of diplomatic talks on the Middle East. At the same time, the U.S. and Russia are together exploring the shape of a possible settlement at high-level talks in Washington. As Israel's protector-state and, in effect, proxy in the talks, the U.S. is seeking for Israel the ironclad guarantees for peace that the young nation demands in return for handing back the captured territories. The Soviets ideally would like to recoup diplomatically all that the Arabs lost militarily. Though each side is under heavy pressure from its client states not to yield an inch, each is also aware that both the Israelis and Arabs will have to make concessions. The great concern is that, in the 20 months that Israel and the U.S. have waited for the Arabs to sue for peace, the chance for a diplomatic settlement has receded as the antagonists have accumulated new hatreds and new scores to settle.

In any other part of the world the military blows that are struck daily by each side would have long since led to the march of armies and declarations of war. For 33 of the past 36 days and every day last week, heavy artillery dueled across the Suez Canal. Israelis last week directed their fire for the first time at now-evacuated Port Said. The Egyptians in turn killed seven Israeli soldiers and two civilian bulldozer drivers. On Israel's eastern front, the guns of Suez are faithfully echoed in daily artillery, tank, mortar, machine-gun and rifle fire across the Jordan River.

From the air, Israeli jets repeatedly pound with rockets, bombs and napalm Arab towns and encampments in Jordan suspected of harboring the fedayeen, the Arab world's "men of sacrifice," who are carrying on a guerrilla war against Israel. Undeterred, the guerrillas cross frequently into Israel to ambush a patrol, plant a mine or leave a plastique explosive in a marketplace. Israeli commandos cross the other way in occasional retaliatory raids against fedayeen bases or positions.

Nasser's army has been re-equipped and retrained by the Russians since the Six-Day War. The MIG-17s and MIG-19s that the Israeli air force destroyed on the ground have been either replaced or augmented by supersonic MIG-21s; most are now protected by a concrete revetment. Egypt is estimated to have 400 combat aircraft (compared with Israel's 350) and 800 tanks (against Israel's 1,100). For the past 16 months, Soviet advisers have been training the Egyptians to use the new equipment, going about the task so methodically that they have even supplied English-language instruction manuals on how to use Russian arms.

For all of Egypt's numerical might, the Suez Canal "might as well be the Atlantic Ocean," as a realistic Egyptian officer put it last week. Military experts judge that Nasser could put no more than a company across the canal—and it would be slaughtered. The reason is that the Russians, anxious to avert a fourth round of the war, have carefully not supplied Nasser with the wherewithal for an offensive strike: the amphibious transports, armored personnel carriers and four-wheel-drive trucks that he would need in order to cross the Sinai. Underscoring their concern that the artillery battles might get out of hand, the Soviets last week dispatched a note to Cairo declaring that the cease-fire should be "strictly carried out."

Despite the well-founded Russian caution and his own recent admission in private that any strike across the canal would be "suicidal," Nasser has steadily stepped up the level of violence to a point where he might not be able to back down easily. After he was received in February with unprecedented coolness and even rudeness by Egyptian soldiers at the Suez front, who wanted to know when they could fight, Nasser authorized them to mount heavy artillery barrages against the Israelis. The move was intended to raise military morale. It did, for a time, but soon there were fresh demands for action. So, last month Nasser sent Egyptian commandos on raids across the canal.

As a result of such escalation, Cairenes talk increasingly of the inevitability of full-scale war sometime in the indeterminate future. Next time, they say, a surprise Israeli blitz will not succeed, because Israel is already at the limits of its natural military frontiers. If the Israelis cross the Suez, the Egyptians plan to take advantage of Israel's overextended supply lines by forcing a prolonged campaign inside Egypt—in Nasser's words, an "inch-by-inch war." It is historically such a Russian concept of defense by attrition that he just possibly did not think of it himself. Says Nasser's confidant, Al Ahram Editor Mohammed Hasanein Heikal: "If the Israelis want to take Cairo, Damascus or Amman—and I pray to God they will try to do one or all of these things —they will simply be absorbed. They are overextended now. The fourth round, if and when it comes, will be a Six-Year and not a Six-Day War. It won't be ended by anyone's coup de grâce. They can't win this kind of war again." That is probably wishful thinking.

It is Nasser's predicament that he must continually talk of war and show himself in action against Israel in order to retain the confidence of militant Arabs and, more crucially, of his own army. At the same time, it is doubtful whether he could long remain in power if he led the Arabs into another round and lost. He no longer shares power in Egypt with General Abdel Hakim Amer, who committed suicide—or so the government said—after the 1967 war, and so Nasser could not again place the blame for defeat on the army. Since 1967, he has had personal control of Egypt's military, and now he is alone at the top, without a scapegoat.

The leadership of the Arabs is probably the world's most precarious perch. "The presidency is a painful position to hold in present circumstances," he says. "Even now my wife is against my continuing. We do not lead a natural life. We have lived continuously in tension for the past 17 years." In a typically busy seven days, he received Jordan's King Hussein to hear a report on the King's visit to Washington, welcomed Kuwait's Defense Minister Sheikh Sa'ad Abdullah as-Salem to discuss military cooperation on the eastern front, conferred with Syria's President Noureddine Atassi and Defense Minister Hafez Assad, and personally appealed to Fedayeen Leader Yasser Arafat (TIME cover, Dec. 13) to intervene in a dispute between his Commandos and the government in Lebanon.

Survival by Sumud

At 51, Nasser no longer shows the strain of his darkest days in the aftermath of the 1967 war. He appears robust, cured of a reported circulatory ailment by Russian doctors, who ordered him to quit smoking. He has resumed playing tennis and Ping-Pong and, he tells friends, has recently taken to reading the Old Testament "to better understand the Jewish mind." His living room in the Cairo district of Manshiet al Bakri is filled with pictures of world leaders, many of whom he has outlasted in power, from Indonesia's Sukarno to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Intensely conscious of his place in history, Nasser, by a grandiose reach, sometimes likens himself to Winston Churchill in World War II, and Suez to the English Channel. He has declared, at least until recently, that he will not go down in history as the Arab leader who made peace with Israel. For two years, his tactic has been sumud—standing fast, or at least not admitting defeat, no matter what the odds. It is linked in his mind and rhetoric with two other words: radda, retaliation, and tahrir, liberation of the occupied lands. Says Nasser: "We are now in the phase of retaliation."

When Nasser came to power in 1952, he used to insist that any renewal of war with Israel would detract from his most important task, raising the standard of living of his people. "In Egypt today," he complained at the time, "a water buffalo is more valuable than a human being. I mean, it costs more to hire a water buffalo for a day's work than it does to hire a fellah." Today the same holds true, though the price has gone up for both a man's labor (58¢ a day) and a water buffalo's hire (69¢). Under Nasser's socialism, the fellah no longer has to make obeisance to the local pasha; instead, he is cheated by the corrupt administrator appointed by Cairo. Nasser's revolution, which began with bright hopes, is dismissed, like everything else in Egypt, with "ma-'alesh," a verbal shrug meaning roughly that nothing can be done about it.

To the fellaheen, who make up more than half of Egypt's population, the threat of Israel is as remote and unreal as any hope of improvement in their ancient way of life or freedom from their backbreaking, dawn-to-dark work on the land. The war is brought home daily to Cairenes in the shabbiness of their once-exciting city, in the tomblike echoes of the airport terminal, in the empty streets of the Moussky shopping district, where donkeys now outnumber tourists—and in the constant shortages. For four years the capital's citizens have endured three consecutive meatless days a week. Luxury goods have been banned in order to conserve scarce foreign exchange for necessities. Scotch is unobtainable, except in tourist hotels. Cosmetics are hard to get. Any visitor is likely to be offered more money for the clothes on his back than they were worth new; it matters only that they were not made in Egypt, for that is the mark of status today.

"If war comes, it comes," says a shopkeeper in the Moussky. "There is nothing I can do except protect myself and my family and my business from bombs the best I can." The attitude seems typical of Cairenes, preoccupied with living through whatever lies ahead in the safest and most comfortable way possible. The daily task of hacking a way through the urban jungle is difficult enough for ordinary Cairenes, visible in the streets as ranks of sullen men in unpressed suits. Bitterly insecure, frustrated and angry, they might, in a less apathetic country, provide the base for a revolution. In Egypt, carefully watched by Nasser's security police, they care for neither politics nor war—nor, for that matter, the empty sands of Sinai.

A Closed Society

The most disenchanted of Egyptians are the educated, the middle class, the few merchants who have survived the socialist regime, and the middle-to upper-level government employees. They have the pay packets to travel and to buy their luxuries on the black market. But they cannot get uncensored news, and miss "most of all an open society," as one said last week. They freely complain that their life was better in the long-gone days of King Farouk, blame Nasser for dragging them into a war in Yemen that was none of Egypt's concern, and were for the first time convinced, by the 1967 war, that Israel is their real enemy. With little or no hope for the future, they respond in many cases by simply packing up and leaving Egypt for good, "to live instead of exist." An average of 150 a day file papers to emigrate to the U.S., and visas will probably be issued for 10,000 this year. It is a brain drain that Egypt quietly encourages in order to make way for the 140,000 Egyptians now in college or technical schools who will be clamoring for jobs once they graduate.

Cynical Egyptians have a saying that "in Iraq, Nasser wouldn't last six months. Here he can last forever." The reason is a pervasive, fatalistic apathy. One potent force for reform might be Egypt's students. Last year they took to the streets demanding an end to "the society of coined slogans" and of harsh regulations on their conduct. Nasser smoothly promised to grant every one of their requests—as soon as the Israelis departed from Egypt. With nothing else to be said, the students returned to class. "If we tore up the country, only the Israelis would benefit," said a Cairo University student last week. "On the other hand, if we don't reform the country, it won't be worth living in, so what can we do? Most of my friends say eat, drink and be merry, for there is no future; others are trying to emigrate."

Nasser is neither much threatened by Egypt's civilian population nor pressed by them into fresh military adventures against Israel. Politics in Egypt is essentially army politics. Some of the younger officers of the army bitterly recall how they were spat on in the streets of Cairo after the war, and would like to wipe out that memory. If there is an Egyptian alternative to Nasser, he is most likely an unknown army officer, as Nasser was in 1952.

If Egyptians were more given to revolting, they would find abundant cause in Nasser's brand of socialism, which has put one of the world's largest, most inept bureaucracies in charge of the day-to-day functioning of Egypt's economy. Its mismanagement is to blame for epidemic shortages, nonexistent planning and, ultimately, that Egypt's average income per person has gone up only from $120 a year in 1952 to $170 today. Much of even that modest improvement is swallowed up by increased taxes and inflation. By contrast, nearby Lebanon, which has far fewer resources but a policy of free-wheeling private enterprise, has a per-capita income of $450 a year.

Bureaucratic Mismanagement

Egypt's bureaucrats have probably done more damage to its economy than has Israel. As compensation for lost revenues from Suez, Egypt receives a total of $266 million a year from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya, $46 million more than the Suez Canal produced in its last year of operation. Egypt has also benefited in the postwar years from the fact that world prices of its principal import—wheat—have fallen, while prices of its exports—mainly cotton, rice, sugar, onions and potatoes —have all risen.

Egypt's hopes for the future rest largely with Allah, oil and Aswan. The Israelis hold Egypt's Sinai fields, but Pan American, a U.S. subsidiary of Standard Oil (Indiana), has brought in an offshore field in the Gulf of Suez; its reserves are estimated at 1 billion bbl. Phillips Petroleum is pumping 40,000 bbl. a day at El Alamein, and Egypt's daily production of oil is expected to be 450,000 bbl. by next year.

Egyptians consider the Aswan High Dam, built with Soviet aid, to be Nasser's most signal accomplishment. Now 95% complete, it rises 364 feet above the flat Nile plain 560 miles south of Cairo, and behind it Lake Nasser is gradually filling up. Aswan will supply electricity to Cairo at less than the cost in New York, but there are no plans yet to use the mineral and petroleum resources of the region to build an industrial complex. Aswan, as its most immediate benefit, will widen the narrow ribbon of fertile acreage along the Nile by 1.5 million acres, and allow double-cropping on another 4,000,000 acres. Even so, Egypt's ratio of land to people will be the same as when work on the dam began nine years ago. Underlying and aggravating all of Egypt's other woes is a runaway birth rate. During Nasser's term alone, Egypt's population has jumped from 21 million to 33.5 million; by 1980, at the current growth rate, it will be 50 million.

For the masses of the Arab world, an emotional alternative to Nasserism is provided by the Palestinian fedayeen. So far, they have failed in their primary goal of rousing the population of the occupied West Bank to revolt, and militarily they amount to no more than an irritation to Israel. But they are so inundated with volunteers that they claim to have higher recruitment standards than the Arab armies.

In their growing power, the fedayeen are potentially more of a threat to Arab governments than to the Israelis—a fact of which every Arab ruler is well aware. Syria trains commandos within its borders, but mostly sends them to attack Israel from Jordan or Lebanon. Iraq stations army units around their camps "for protection." Only Algeria gives the fedayeen unstinting support, in part because it is safe 1,350 miles away from Israel.

The Fedayeen

No such sanctuary is allowed in Jordan, where the fedayeen make their headquarters and from whence they launch the majority of their raids. The East Bank of the Jordan River is virtually a no man's land, and many of the country's villages have been heavily damaged by retaliating Israeli jets. The fedayeen swagger openly through the streets of Amman, Kalashnikov assault rifles at the ready, in defiance of an agreement between their leaders and the King that they will submit to civil law. Eventually, Hussein must face the cruel choice of Israeli devastation of his kingdom if he does not curb the fedayeen, or civil war with the Palestinians if he tries.

Hussein's dilemma is a vivid lesson to any country that might let the fedayeen operate within its borders. Nonetheless, the most peaceable Arab land of all, Lebanon, is being inexorably drawn toward the same fate. Three weeks ago, its government resigned in the wake of riots by Palestinians and students demanding freedom of action for the fedayeen. Last week Lebanon was still without a government, as its politicians vainly sought a compromise that would, in the words of President Charles Helou, allow Lebanon to "support this just struggle within our sovereignty and integrity"—in other words, without incurring Israel's wrath. Pushing the issue, commandos last week attacked a police post and a key road junction in southern Lebanon, and in the brief battles two Lebanese soldiers and seven commandos died. Al-Fatah Commander Arafat flew to Beirut to negotiate a truce. No matter what the outcome, Lebanon will almost certainly be the loser.

The fedayeen draw their main strength from the 1.3 million Palestinian refugees, and have the political power to endanger any peace agreement that does not include an offer that the refugees would consider, finally, just. The Palestinians are among the bitterest people in the world, and with reason. In the wake of the 1948 war, they scattered throughout the Arab lands. Educated, intelligent, some of them staff the ranks of governments and the faculties of Arab universities. But the majority were herded into squalid camps, fed by the United Nations on 7¢ a day and used as pawns by Arab politicians —particularly Nasser—to justify the continuing struggle with Israel. While diplomats spent over 20 years discussing and dropping various plans for resettling them, the Palestinian children were being taught as their primary subjects hatred for Israel and a determination to regain their land in the same way it was taken away—by force. Now grown to young manhood, they are the world's dividend of neglect, the fedayeen.

The cries for revenge of the fedayeen and the militancy of Egypt's army have their echoes in Israel. Israelis ended the Six-Day War with secure frontiers and a strategic geographic advantage that they had never had before. Their military is stronger than in 1967, and their Arab enemies are still divided. Moreover, the war sparked an economic boom that will have raised the national product 25% by the end of this year, and brought to Israel a political unity that has been made even more cohesive by Premier Golda Meir.

Fortress Israel

Yet in the past two years, 274 Israeli soldiers and 48 civilians have died, and 1,343 Israelis have been wounded at Arab hands, and the country is under almost daily attacks that all the Israeli retaliation strikes have not been able to still. In their cafes and kibbutzim, Israelis, too, talk of a fourth round—while disparaging the Arab "war propaganda" as designed only to frighten the big-power diplomats. Within what they consider Fortress Israel, the Israelis regard with deep suspicion any outside attempt to bargain away the occupied territories that provide them with a measure of security, if not of peace.

Israel's price for handing over that security is in a way nearly as unrealistic as the Arabs' demand that Israel give up the occupied lands for nothing. Justifying her country's demand for face-to-face negotiations, Premier Meir last week declared that "when the Arab representatives overcome their reluctance and reach the stage of direct negotiations, the transformation will be so profound that they themselves and their people will come to realize how many are the advantages that they and not only Israel can derive from peace."

Israel's negotiating position, understandably, is a full 180° from that of the Arabs, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union have staked out bargaining bases between the two. The diverse views are causing complications on four main issues:

∙ THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES. Russia originally agreed with the Arabs that Israel must withdraw to prewar positions before negotiations could begin, but now indicates that an Israeli declaration of intention to withdraw is sufficient at the outset. Israel, realizing that the return of Sinai to Egypt would enhance Nasser's prestige, will trade it off only in return for face-to-face negotiations with the Arabs.

∙ TREATIES. Premier Meir is more vocal than her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, about the need for bilateral talks and a formal treaty as the only means to a lasting peace. Taking Arab intransigence into account, the U.S. is pressing Israel to accept another kind of diplomatic solution. Specifically, the U.S. proposes a declaration of a state of peace, partly inspired by one that in 1956 formalized the end of the Russo-Japanese World War II hostilities. Under such a declaration, the Middle East combatants would separately declare to the United Nations that they were at peace again.

∙ REFUGEES. Jordan's King Hussein conjectures that few Palestinians are willing to return to a Jewish state. Nevertheless, the U.S. urges a plebiscite offering a choice of return or compensation. The fedayeen would doubtless make the outcome meaningless by turning out a sizable yes vote in order to prove that the Palestinian issue is still volcanic, and threaten to overwhelm Israel with Arabs.

∙ JERUSALEM. The holy city of three faiths threatens to become an unholy obstacle to any solution. Israel intends to retain all of the city but would allow Arabs access to Moslem shrines. Hussein demands the return of the Jordanian sector but would let Jews visit the Wailing Wall. The Soviets are proposing that the status of Jerusalem be left for the parties involved to settle themselves.

The Israelis' insistence on keeping Jerusalem and part of the occupied territories has raised in many minds the question of what they really want. They obviously do not want a settlement agreed on by the Big Two powers. They do not want another war. Their policy, as recently defined by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, aims at the creation of "new facts" through occupation and the passage of time. This means forcing the Arabs, by pressure of occupation, to change their attitudes—a highly unlikely prospect. To many Israelis, "new facts" would include the fall of Nasser, whom they consider to be the main stumbling block to peace.

Israelis validly point out that any successor to Nasser, no matter how extreme, would at least not be in the Russians' debt, nor necessarily able to invoke Soviet aid. But, with no successor in sight, the search for a settlement comes down to what Israel will give up and what Nasser could sell to his army and to the other Arab lands. So long as their deadlock persists, Israel gets to keep the occupied territories, which it is putting to profitable use, and Nasser enjoys an external aid to survival, presented by the fact of the Israeli enemy at Egypt's gates. It is a treacherously thin high wire that Nasser walks, and he could easily fall—or jump—from it.

The ultimate conflict between Arabs and Israelis, however, is not so much a matter of land or race or religion as it is one of culture. The Arabs are light-years behind the European Israelis in education and modern managerial and technical skills. The struggle is between a highly developed nation and a woefully underdeveloped nation. Nasser led his revolt in 1952 not only to free Egypt from 4,000 years of misrule and foreign domination, but to bring it into the modern world by the simplistic techniques of socialism. Distrusted by the Israelis, the loser in two wars, he has not, after 17 years, been able to make his land any more of a modern nation state. Arabs are all too keenly aware of the gap between themselves and the Israelis, and Nasser's promise and unfulfilled hopes are the tragedy of his years of power.

Nasser's Role

If he has not been able to bring change to the Arabs, Nasser himself has been changed by being the leader of their world. From the personification of Arab militancy, able to send crowds into the streets screaming for war, he has become a relative moderate, seeking a way out of another round of war that he cannot win and an unfinished peace that he cannot long endure. In a sense, he has come a long way toward compromise, and is willing at last to concede Israel's right to exist in the Arabs' midst.

In a way, it is the Israelis who are now the more intransigent party. They would have settled before the Six-Day War for what is now available to them from the Arabs. But no country in history has ever won a war without keeping some of the spoils. With victory, the appetite of the Israelis has increased, fostering widespread Arab fears that they are indeed bent on expansion and a little neighborhood imperialism. Some diplomats believe that it would help if the Israelis at least stated their willingness in principle to withdraw from the occupied territories, provided that their other legitimate security needs were met. It would also help the situation if they made a substantive recognition of the plight of Palestinian refugees.

Unrealism still exists in abundance on both sides of the conflict. The Israelis cherish the notion that, left alone by the big powers, they eventually would force the Arabs to come to their own terms. It is a hubris that they have earned by successive conquests of arms, and it envisions the downfall of Nasser, long their most implacable enemy, as part of the final process. It may be a shortsighted view: there is no surer way to a lasting truce than forging it with the strongest of one's opponents.

Nasser remains that—the only man who can make peace for all the Arabs and who as well can just possibly curb the fedayeen before it is too late. He too still nourishes his myths and his illusions, but the lessons of Israel's prowess have not been lost on him. Given a protective push from the big powers, and a little give from the Israelis, Gamal Abdel Nasser might yet provide Israel—and the world—with the means to a Middle East solution.