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.

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Sinai's Bedouins

Abu Daoud opens the back door to his Land Cruiser in the darkness of the open desert and flicks on his cigarette lighter to illuminate the large, mounted, belt-fed machine gun in the trunk. "This is for the Egyptians," he says, laughing.

Egyptian is not a label with which Abu Daoud (not his real name) identifies. Many of the Bedouin tribes who populate this mountainous desert region of the northern Sinai Peninsula, where Egypt shares a tense border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, have long been at odds with their government in Cairo.

"The government doesn't consider us Egyptians," says Abu Daoud, who has worked as a smuggler for the past half-century. "Sinai has never been Egyptian. Sinai has always belonged to the tribes."

The Bedouin are a historically nomadic people who migrated to Egypt from the Arabian Peninsula centuries ago. Locked out of development projects and tourism investment along Sinai's southern coast, the long-marginalized Bedouin have often been forced to work outside the law to make a living. But over the past two years, some of the tribesmen have prospered as a result of Israel's blockade on Gaza, which has turned smuggling into the territory's economic lifeline — and also a source of weapons for militants.

But the smuggling boom may soon be over, as Egypt constructs a subterranean steel wall along the border, designed to cut off the network of tunnels that have kept both Gaza and the Bedouin afloat — a move that will antagonize the tribes in a tinderbox region.

"[The Bedouin] have made a living out of smuggling between Sinai and Gaza," says Amr Hamzawy, an Egyptian political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Now with the wall and different steps that the government is taking to crack down on tunnels and other smuggling methods, my guess is that [the Bedouin] are going to be impacted heavily, which will mean more tensions between them and the central government."

Egyptian authorities say the smuggling is illegal, and have blamed the porous border with Gaza for instability and terrorism in Sinai. Speaking on live television on Jan. 24, President Hosni Mubarak said, "We have started construction along our borders not to appease anyone but to protect our nation from terrorist plots like the ones that took place in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab and Cairo."

Egypt's government may control its cities with an iron fist, but Sinai is unique. There, those who challenge Cairo's authority are armed, belligerent and, lately, flush with cash. Their history of discrimination and abuse at the hands of the security forces combined with a distinct cultural identity has produced political attitudes that even the most disgruntled Egyptian in Cairo would deem heretical.

"Tonight, we're cheering for Algeria," a smuggler announces as a dozen Bedouin men settle into an arms smuggler's desert mansion to watch Egypt's African Cup of Nations soccer showdown with its fiercest rival. "If a war ever happens between Egypt and Israel, you'll find us taking up arms against the Egyptians," adds another smuggler, Ibrahim. The others concur.

In Sinai, it may not even take a war to spark the fuse. Hamzawy says the past two years have seen a spike in social unrest in north Sinai, where a dense network of permanent police checkpoints create an atmosphere of occupation. Rights groups say Bedouin are routinely harassed and arrested at random. Torture in Egyptian prisons is rampant, and some Bedouin report stories of state security abducting their wives and children in an effort to coerce wanted men to come forward.

"People are tired of oppression here. We go into the street and get searched and arrested. There is discrimination here," says Om Ahmed, who has two adult sons in jail and two on the run. "The police don't treat our sons the way they treat the Egyptians' sons."

But current tensions are rooted in a cyclical history of mistrust. The Sinai Bedouin stand accused, in Egyptian schoolbooks and the popular imagination, of collaborating with Israel in its wars with Egypt, fueling mutual antagonism. More recently, Bedouin were implicated in a series of terrorist bombings that killed 130 people at Sinai beach resorts from 2004 to 2006. In the aftermath, some 3,000 Bedouin were arrested; up to 1,000 of them are still in detention, according to Ahmed Ragheb, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. He says that about 1,000 more are in prison for smuggling and related charges. The government has denied using abusive measures in Sinai, and there are no official statistics on the number of Bedouin in detention.

The Bedouin's harsh reality produces an anomalous politics that is sympathetic to Gaza's militant Hamas government while simultaneously praising Israeli justice and the late Saddam Hussein. The Bedouin see a cultural connection with Gaza's Palestinians, many of whom share tribal lineages. But as anger toward the Mubarak regime deepens, some also express nostalgia for the Israeli occupation of Sinai, which lasted from 1967 to 1982.

"We like Israel more [than Egypt] because there's justice," says Ibrahim, a young cement smuggler. "If you are a person living inside Israel, you live better than you would in Egypt, without any smuggling," he says. "They don't let you just sit on the street ... And Israel would never arrest your wife and father if you are the one wanted by the state."

Some smugglers who have amassed wealth have become self-styled Robin Hoods of the desert, delivering food and blankets to the forgotten poor — many of whom still live without water or electricity in huts built of twigs among the dunes. "I'll bring a doctor tomorrow," promises Mohamed, one of Sinai's most powerful arms smugglers, after hearing the plea of a woman and her sick father living in a fly-infested dwelling of trash and debris, miles from any village.

But their life outside the law constantly threatens to erupt in violent conflagrations. The smugglers who run the show are gun-toting, trigger-happy cowboys of the desert, subverting police checkpoints through roadless sand dunes and hills in an army of Land Cruisers with no license plates and tinted windows. They carry Glock pistols, AK-47s and even a few M-16s. "I'm a wanted man. We're all wanted men, and we're all armed," says Abdullah, a tunnel owner who sleeps in a different place every night and says he would rather die than be captured.

And when Egypt's steel wall seals off trade with Gaza, tensions could explode in Sinai. "This is the beginning," says Abu Daoud, sipping tea next to an evening campfire. "The people are still poor, but there has to be a revolution someday. It has to happen because there is no democracy and there are no rights here."

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In the Siege of Gaza

Nothing unites Arab public opinion as much as hostility toward Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. The corollary is that there is no greater betrayal, in the minds of the Arab public, than taking Israel's side against the Palestinians — and on that count, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak finds himself on tricky ground.

On Jan. 6, Mubarak's security forces found themselves engaged in clashes with Palestinians demonstrating at the Gaza border against Egypt's enforcement of the Israeli blockade against the territory. Hamas, the Islamist party that governs Gaza and which is at odds with the Egyptian regime, had called the protest to pressure the Egyptians over their delay of a Gaza-bound aid convoy. Others came to demonstrate against Egypt's construction of an underground steel barrier meant to block off the smuggling tunnels that provide both a vital lifeline to Gaza's blockaded economy and a pipeline to resupply the arsenals of Hamas.

The perceived collusion of Mubarak with the Israeli effort to topple Hamas by choking the life out of Gaza's economy has fueled a political backlash. "We are, of course, calling for lifting the siege, and giving the Palestinians a normal life," says Essam al-Eryan, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition group. "But the Israelis and Americans are pushing Egypt to secure the Israelis. And this is not our duty ... the Palestinians are no threat to Egypt."

In last week's clashes, Palestinians pelted Egyptian forces across the border with rocks, and the Egyptians responded by firing shots and tear gas into the crowd. One Egyptian soldier was killed, reportedly by a Palestinian sniper, and scores of Palestinians were injured. Earlier, Egyptian security forces had clashed with international activists accompanying a relief convoy that had originated in Britain, leaving more than 50 people injured. The group's leader, leftist British MP George Galloway, was expelled from Egypt on Jan. 9, after exiting Gaza.

Restrictions on Gaza's economy began with Hamas' election victory in 2006, and became a full blockade after the movement's militias ejected security forces loyal to Fatah, whom they accused of plotting a coup. The Israelis hope that if they choke off the inflow of even basic goods to a bare minimum, the population will turn on Hamas. Israel has also presented most construction materials from entering the territory, which has prevented the reconstruction of thousands of homes and other structures damaged by last year's Israeli offensive aimed at stopping Hamas rocket fire. Egypt, which controls the only Gaza border crossing outside Israeli territory at Rafah, has cooperated in enforcing the blockade. It has also begun to move more forcefully against the tunnel economy.

Egypt, which depends on billions of dollars of annual aid from the U.S., says its actions in Gaza are driven by its own national interest. Not only is there pressure from Washington to stop smuggling into Gaza, but Mubarak is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and views Hamas as an ally of his own most feared opponents, the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

But although Egypt's compliance in the siege has been widely denounced in much of the Arab world and in Turkey, the Egyptian public remains largely oblivious. That's because the government has successfully persuaded much of its citizenry that the blame for Egyptian-Gazan tension lies with Hamas and Israel, even mobilizing state-funded religious authorities to criticize Hamas and give their blessing to Egyptian security measures on the Gaza border.

Hala Mustafa, editor of the state-funded Al-Ahram Quarterly Democracy Review, says Egypt's role in the blockade is based on its obligations under its peace agreement with Israel. "In this accord, Egypt has to watch its border and should not allow any third party to cross the border in order to attack Israel." As for blocked aid convoys, she says: "This aid has been used as ... a kind of propaganda to bring the attention of the other Arab communities and the international community against Egypt."

The state-sponsored press has reinforced efforts to deflect criticism for Egypt's Gaza policies by appealing to nationalist sympathies, focusing on the killing of the Egyptian soldier during last week's clashes, and on Hamas extremism. Last weekend's opinion pages were flooded with vitriolic rants against Hamas that ranged from accusing it of having neither religion nor country to accusing it of acting in Israel's interests.

"Who killed the Egyptian soldier? Palestinians. Egypt would never fire on the Palestinians. That's a lie," said Mohamed al-Tamimi, a retired air-force pilot, who also admitted that he disliked the government. Others suggest that domestic social and economic woes have made most Egyptians indifferent to foreign affairs.

But while it may be ahead in the domestic p.r. game on Gaza thus far, the regime of the aging President Hosni Mubarak, who has held power for nearly three decades, is struggling to maintain legitimacy in the face of other domestic threats. Corruption, police brutality, a widening income gap and a recent spike in Muslim-Christian violence have added fuel to Egypt's disorganized but politically diverse opposition. And it may not be long before Gaza comes back to haunt it.

"From the reaction in the Arab press, and from people in the Arab world, there is no justification for what Egypt is doing [regarding Gaza]," says Marina Ottaway, Director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But it's unlikely to mean much in current domestic politics. "Essentially, it's just one more sign of the differences that exist between government actions and public opinion, but I do not expect any dramatic repercussions."

Indeed, public outrage may mean little for a regime that is not exactly dependent on a democratic mandate. "You are not talking about a Western society under a Western regime," says Hala Mustafa. "[Popularity] is not calculated this way in Egypt or in the Arab world in general. Popularity is not the element or the factor that could really influence the regime or push the regime to adopt this policy or that one." But for an already unpopular regime, an unpopular approach to Gaza may still be a step onto ever thinning ice.

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Egypt's Promise of Peace

"Peace is not an abstract. It means a better life for people. We have shaken off prejudice. Now we must destroy poverty, ignorance, hunger."

That is what Egypt's President Anwar Sadat says his country must gain as a result of his bold decision to make peace with Israel. Now, two years after his flight to Jerusalem and nine months after the signing of the treaty ending hostilities, some changes are appearing. Tourists wearing yarmulkes are visiting the pyramids, new high-rises spike the Cairo sky line, and signs hawking familiar brand names reflect increased Western business investment. The reopened Suez Canal is earning rich transit fees, and Egyptian engineers have taken over Alma, the largest of the oilfields being given up by the Israelis in the course of their three-year withdrawal from the Sinai.

Yet Egypt's economy today is a mix of unexpected strength and too familiar decay. The muscle is almost all in the country's robust foreign receipts. Despite the aid and trade boycott mounted against Egypt by other Arab nations after the peace treaty signing, Cairo can easily meet its foreign exchange needs. The largest source of funds is the money sent home by Egyptians working abroad; this will total $2 billion in 1979, up from just $200 million six years ago. Suez Canal revenues will bring in $600 million and could rise to $1 billion a year by 1982, after the waterway is widened to allow two-way traffic. Another burgeoning source is tourism, which will yield $700 million this year.

Then there is oil. An exporter only since 1974, Egypt will sell $1.1 billion worth of crude this year, accounting for 40% of its trade income. Never a member of OPEC, the country doubled the price of its oil early this year and now charges a robust $34 per bbl., except for what is sold to Israel. Egypt reportedly agreed to sell oil to the Israelis at a price of roughly $27 per bbl. in the hope that this would encourage investment in Egypt by Jewish-American businessmen. Oil-exploration deals have been signed with a number of Western firms, and hopes are high that new strikes may be made in the Sinai, the Gulf of Suez and the Western Desert. Oilmen reckon that by 1982 Egypt may nearly double its production to 1 million bbl. a day, which would put the country almost in a class with Algeria.

Thanks to its foreign income, Egypt has not been hurt economically by the loss of the $800 million or so in Arab aid it used to get annually, or by the Arab countries' refusal to do business with Cairo; before the boycott, those states accounted for only 7% of Egypt's trade. Arab anger remains high; the Egyptians expect that all of their postal, telephone and telex links to other Arab countries, as well as the remaining airline flights, will be severed in March, when Egypt and Israel plan to open embassies in Jerusalem and Cairo. Still, some top Egyptians believe that the boycott will not last long, and may be softening already. In November, says one Sadat aide, the Saudis began sending "signals" that they would not undermine Egypt or the peace treaty; they would go on shipping oil through the canal and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline, and the $2 billion that they and Kuwait have in the Central Bank of Egypt would not be pulled out. The reason, says the aide: "The Saudis shudder at what is happening in Iran. They are beginning to understand the meaning of peace."

Nonetheless, Egypt is now heavily dependent on Western and Japanese aid and investment. Cairo officials fear that the Arab irritation with Egypt may deter Western companies from seeking out the joint-venture projects with Egyptian partners that Sadat is encouraging. Though the oil companies have been involved in exploration for some years, the list of other major U.S. investors that have moved into Egypt or are seriously considering doing so is still fairly short. Coca-Cola, 7-Up and Xerox have set up operations there; Ford, General Motors and Union Carbide have investment projects in the planning stage. Yet Egypt has secured much Western financial assistance. This year it will get more than $1.7 billion in loans and grants, including $1 billion from the U.S. (which is also giving Israel $2.3 billion in aid in 1979). The U.S. assistance, which has totaled about $4 billion since 1976, is channeled to specific projects, such as the modernization of electric-power and water and sewer facilities. (These funds are in addition to the aid packages of $4 billion to $5 billion that Washington is giving to Egypt and Israel as part of the Camp David agreements.)

Egypt's domestic economy is a mess. Despite a growth rate of about 8% this year, the bulk of the country's 40 million people remain desperately poor, with an average income of under $300 (vs. $2,700 for Israel). In the past year, thousands of peasants have abandoned the land to jam into the already swollen cities in hope of sharing in a peace-bred boom. Thus unemployment is soaring at a time when inflation is hovering above 25%.

That is largely a result of out-of-control government spending, which this year will produce a deficit of $4.3 billion in a budget of under $10 billion. Sadat will not cut defense outlays ($1.4 billion this year) until the last of the Sinai is returned after 1982, so he must trim the huge subsidies ($1.7 billion) used to hold down the cost of food and fuel, a vestige of Nasser-era socialism. Despite big hikes in the cost of imported wheat (Egypt produces less than 30% of its needs), bread has been held to 1¢; a loaf, the same as in the 1930s and a fifth of the real cost.

In 1977, when the government last tried to raise food prices (bread went to 2¢), riots erupted that nearly toppled Sadat. But if the President is to get more foreign loans—he has said that Egypt will need $18.5 billion over the next five years—he needs the approval of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has been pressing Egypt for economic reforms, particularly a cut in the subsidies, and it is sending a team to Cairo this month to see what progress has been made.
The crunch will come in January with the announcement of the 1980 budget, which will almost certainly contain some subsidy cuts. On that potentially explosive occasion, Sadat may need all of his considerable powers of persuasion to convince his people that the "better life" he has promised is still imminent.

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Invoking Islam to Combat Sexual Harassment

Doaa Kassem, like most Egyptian women, is used to being catcalled and grabbed at by men in the crowded streets of Cairo. The 24-year-old executive secretary is well versed in women's rights, having studied the subject in Sweden, and she is bolder than most when it comes to dealing with her harassers. "I'm brave enough to stop them and tell them [what they're doing is wrong]," she says. Sometimes she even chases them down.

Kassem may be brave, but she's under no illusions about the Egyptian government's attitude toward the issue. "The government has always denied sexual harassment [happens] in the street," she says. So when Kassem is shown the new government-issued pamphlet titled Sexual Harassment: Causes and Solutions, her eyes widen

Last week, Egypt's Ministry of Endowments, the government division responsible for the administration of mosques, distributed the informational booklet to mosques across the country in what appears to be one of the first serious government responses to a problem that has become impossible to ignore. While Egypt's sexual-harassment epidemic has earned the country a reputation as one of the worst harassment locations in the Middle East, the government has gained notoriety among bloggers and human-rights groups for denying the very existence of a problem. Then, in 2008, the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, a Cairo-based NGO, released the first extensive report on the issue. Out of 1,010 Egyptian women surveyed, 83% said they had experienced sexual harassment. Nearly half reported being subjected to harassment on a daily basis, with abuses ranging from lewd comments to violent molestation.

The report, which also documented the widespread belief that women are largely to blame for their harassment woes, set off a debate in the Egyptian and foreign press over who is at fault and what steps — if any — to take. The government decided that one way to tackle the problem was to address it through the teachings of Islam. Sexual Harassment: Causes and Solutions, which was distributed to 50,000 imams nationwide, lists five causes of harassment, including weak religious awareness and mental and cultural emptiness. It also suggests ways to tackle the problem. "When the imams realize that sexual harassment is a social hazard, and they understand the reasons behind it, then they start spreading the message," says Salem Geleil, Egypt's Deputy Minister of Endowments and the booklet's editor. "Egyptians are very religious ... So when you approach a cause from a religious point of view, the response is very strong."

It's not the first educational pamphlet of its kind. In the past, the ministry has offered mosques similar guidebooks on issues ranging from terrorism to women's dress. And the solutions proposed in the booklet — which range from a greater adherence to religious and family values to better law enforcement — don't necessarily match the advice preached by women's groups, which focus primarily on drafting formal legislation on the matter and promoting female empowerment. Nevertheless, the ministry's decision to address the issue at all, and on such a scale, may indicate a marked shift from the government's stance just last year: that sexual harassment is the problem of just a few individuals. "It's a big change," says Rasha Hassan, the main researcher at the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR). "Of course, the government still needs to do a lot. But nowadays we can see some change in the ministries."

And there have been other indicators of change as well. Last fall, an Egyptian man was sentenced to three years in prison in the first known conviction on sexual-harassment charges in the nation's history. In November, the police initiated a harassment crackdown, arresting more than 500 men in a single day — although since then, action to combat the problem has been inconsistent. Women's rights groups are urging that more women take matters into their own hands and file formal complaints — a daunting task, especially as women point to police as being among their daily harassers. "There is a culture here: when someone goes to the police to file a report, it is considered scandalous, so for that reason, women stay home to avoid scandal," says Geleil.

But tackling sexual harassment also means addressing the wider issue of Egypt's social malaise. When looking for the roots of the problem, sociologists and community leaders point to a generation of underemployed, frustrated young men struggling against the backdrop of a worsening economy, in a culture that frowns upon premarital relationships and demands that a man reach a certain level of economic stability before considering marriage. "We have been discussing the issue of harassment for years, because it's an old phenomenon," says Sheik Ahmed Turky, an imam who leads a congregation of several thousand at one of Cairo's largest mosques, Masjid al-Noor. Still, he says, "the pressures of living and the costs of marriage" have added to it

There are calls for the government to draft a law specifically aimed at curbing sexual harassment, but even that may not be enough. "I think that any law against sexual harassment in the streets or in the workplace is a good step forward," says Nadya Khalife, a Middle East expert in the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch. "However, [it] still requires the government to effectively enforce the law by creating mechanisms to ensure that women do report sexual-harassment incidents and that these incidents are dealt with appropriately."

Change may be slow to come, but in Egypt some activists are encouraged by the small signs of progress. "We can't change the culture or the people in one day," says ECWR's Hassan. "But we are trying to do a lot of things ... We try to make changes with the government first, and then the people."

Says Kassem, examining the pages of the government's first-ever sexual-harassment pamphlet: "It's a step."

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THE SUDAN

Arrival. Premier Saad Zaghlul of Egypt arrived in London to confer with Premier Ramsay MacDonald upon the Sudan dispute. At Victoria Station, he and Mme. Zaghlul were hailed with enthusiasm by Egyptian students who lustily cried: "Long live British Democracy! Egypt and the Sudan for the Egyptians! 

Representatives of the British Premier and Foreign Office met the Egyptian Premier; Londoners gave him a quiet, but friendly, welcome.

Interviewed, Saad Zaghlul Pasha stated:

"I will find myself in the face of the greatest power in the world. I support myself upon the confidence of my country and the justice of my cause. I feel myself stronger. I have the greatest hope of arriving at a satisfactory accord; but if success does not reward my efforts, I will continue to fight by the way of law and justice."

Unless the aged Zaghlul Pasha succeeds in arranging a "favorable settlement" with Britain, his political future is precarious.

Three men. Before leaving the U. S. for Cairo a fortnight ago, Dr. J. Morton Howell, U. S. Minister to Egypt, gave his opinion of three men most closely concerned with Egyptian affairs:

King Fuad. "I have known King Fuad for three years, commencing with the time when he was Sultan, and have watched his activities with great interest. He is an able ruler and an upright and just man in all his dealings with his Ministers and his people. King Fuad is a man in every way equipped to be a sovereign of the best type—and such he is.

"It has been stated here that King Fuad was educated in Italy, and is anxious to leave Egypt and get back to Europe when he has made sure of getting a good portion of his present income as a civil pension in his retirement, and that he speaks Turkish and Arabic with a foreign accent. It is true that the ruler of Egypt was educated in Italy; but it is untrue that he wishes to leave his throne and his people to return there. He has lived in Egypt for many years and speaks his native tongue like an Egyptian, and Turkish also.

"Reports have been circulated in America that many attempts have been made to assassinate King Fuad and that he is afraid for his life. This is also untrue. No attempt has been made upon the life of the King. He has great courage, which has won for him the respect of his Ministers and the affection of the Egyptian people."

Premier Saad Zaghlul. "Zaghlul is 77 years old and is not the demagog leader of the people that he was a few years ago, when he was fighting politically against England. He is Prime Minister and has heavy responsibilities on his shoulders, which make men think before they speak or act."

Lord Allenby. British High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan. "At present Lord Allenby, a man to whom the Egyptians are indebted for their independence in 1922, is conferring amicably with the Premier, Zaghlul Pasha; and I have no doubt that some agreement will be reached that will settle the questions in dispute between England and Egypt. . . . Despite all that has happened between Lord Allenby and the Premier, they are good friends, and entertain at each other's homes, and appear together frequently in public. Lord Allenby is 64 years old and a splendid man in every way. Both sides have been softened by experience and age."

History. Not during 6,000 years of history had Egypt claimed suzerainty over the Sudan until the year 1820 when Mehemet Ali, "barbarian of genius," and Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey succeeded in conquering the country. But even this victory was only nominal; for the Turko-Egyptians were never able to assert complete mastery over the country which they contemptuously called Bilad-es-Sudan, "country of the blacks." In 1882 came the revolt of the Mahdi, "Guide of Islam," aimed specifically at the Egyptians whose corrupt practices were thoroughly despised. The regime of the Mahdi was later replaced by that of the Khalifa. Under the latter, the country sank from bad to worse—virtually to a sparsely populated and barren wilderness. Sixteen years after the rise of the Mahdi, the Sudan was conquered by British and Egyptian troops, under the able leadership of Sir H. H. (afterwards Lord) Kitchener. The next year, 1899, an Anglo-Egyptian condominum in the Sudan was established. Under the terms of this agreement, Britain claimed, "by right of conquest," a share in the legislation and administration of the country. This claim has ever since been asserted (TIME, Aug. 25). Moreover, during this period, Britain has rescued Egypt from the hands of the Turks, under whom she was a "tribute-paying viceroyalty"; and, from a British Protectorate, has made her a quasi-independent state with a King of her own.

Britain's Case. Since the year 1899, the whole face of the Sudan— at present about one-third the size of the U. S. with a population just under 6 million people—has been changed. The most stupendous of British-built irrigation systems, by which the flow of the Nile is regulated, have greatly assisted the revitalization of the country. Naturally, Great Britain is adverse to renouncing her claims over such a territory.

Then there is the Suez Canal problem. The Canal is owned 'by an international company operating from Paris. Its defense was undertaken entirely by Britain, and, in order to defend it, a share in the government of the Sudan was a most necessary condition. Moreover, the Suez is the "Gate to India" and Britain is never likely to relinquish the key without a considerable struggle.

Lastly, there is a fine moral issue. Britain is bound by promises given to the Sudanese people. Premier MacDonald recently said: "It must clearly be understood that Great Britain cannot throw off its responsibilities contracted to the Sudan and the Sudanese by withdrawing and handing the government of that country to any other government. . . . We must stand by the people of the Sudan; we have a moral obligation to them."

This summarized the normal British point of view. Of course there are the extreme Imperialists who visualize the Sudan as a great cotton-growing ,area and advocate the development of the country under purely British auspices and in terms far from conciliating to the Egyptians.

Egypt's Case. The Egyptian point ; of view is more complicated. Aside from questions which affect Egypt proper—such as the maintenance of British troops at Cairo, Alexandria and other points, the right which Britain has reserved to herself to protect foreigners in Egypt and the British guarantee of defense against foreign aggression—the Sudan problem resolves itself into a straight demand for exclusive control of the country by Egypt.

So far as the Nationalists are concerned, the basis of this demand rests upon a geographical claim which, although unsupported ethnographic cally, is borne out by the fact that the two countries would form a single and convenient political entity. Moreover, they claim that it is unnecessary for Britain to maintain a garrison on Sudan territory for the protection of the Suez Canal.

Aside from these specious arguments, which only color the picture, the real casus foederis is the promise, made at the time Britain relinquished her Protectorate over Egypt (TIME, Apr. 28, 1923), that the whole question of the Sudan would be reserved for later settlement. The Moderates recognize that Britain has rights in the Sudan, but "what are those rights?" What is Britain's legitimate share in the administration of the Sudan now that Egypt is supposed to be an independent country? Does not the willingness of the British Government to settle the future status of the country imply some compromise? What is the real claim of Egypt? Britons answer that capital in the country has largely been supplied by Britain; that she has a claim "by right of conquest." The Egyptians feel they are competent to carry on the administration of the country, which they conquered in 1820 and administered until the arrival of the Mahdi. They make it a question of national honor—a strong and powerful argument with the Egyptians.

The Egyptian Extremists assert, however, that the British irrigation schemes in the Sudan will cut off the water supply of the Nile in Egyptian territory. As Egypt is predominantly an agricultural country, this would be a fatal blow. As a matter of fact, as the British have pointed out, not "one single pint" of water would be kept from Egypt. Those in authority on both sides well know this.

These are some of the conflicting points of view—the reconciliation of which is to be attempted by Britain and Egypt.

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Youssef Chahine

Where does the truth hide?
Truth is my death; truth is my life.
Before the apocalypse comes, I search in vain for a way to protect you,
My Egypt, my homeland.

This song for a land in distress, with lyrics by the poet Abdel Rahim Mansour, comes from the 1982 film An Egyptian Story. It might have been the personal anthem of the movie's writer-director, Youssef Chahine, who died Sunday at 82, six weeks after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. His passing ended a busy, exemplary 

career that spanned nearly six decades making movies, myths and troubl.

Chahine is not well-known in the United States, even to lovers of foreign films. Few of his 40-plus features achieved any kind of release here, and you'll go nuts trying to find his stuff on DVD. But at film festivals, he was for decades the prime, often the only, representative of an entire continent, Africa, and a world religion, Islam — this though his family was Christian and his ancestors came from Greece and Lebanon. He was born in Alexandria and grew up during a chaotic time for the planet and for Egypt: World War II, when Rommel's Army marched toward his hometown, and the postwar invention of the state of Israel, which the Arab world viewed as a catastrophe. With various shades of commitment and ambivalence, Chahine would dramatize the Arab-Israeli split in many of his films, most notably his autobiographical near-masterpiece, the 1978 film Alexandria...Why?

He was both a nationalist and an internationalist. He loved Hollywood movies — as a young man he went to Los Angeles, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse — and he learned as much from their robust pace as he did from the gritty humanism of Italian neo-realist films and the romantic sweep of Indian cinema in its postwar Golden Age. He was both an art-house auteur and a director of popular hits, at least in the Arab crescent. He made political points, often different ones in different movies, but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain.

Chahine established his early rep in the '50s, when Egypt rivaled India as the Hollywood of the Arabic-speaking world, and stars like Omar Sharif and Faten Hamama set moviegoers' heart aglow in Islamic countries from Morocco to Indonesia. In 1954 Chahine cast Hamama, who had been in movies since girlhood, and the 22-year-old Sharif, a recent college graduate making his first film, in Siraa Fil-Wadi / The Blazing Sky / Sky of Hell. This Romeo-and-Juliet drama set on sugarcane plantations was Egypt's entry at the Cannes Film Festival, and a pan-Arabic smash. It established the two actors as the great love pair of their time; their marriage the next year was a star alliance akin to that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the '60s.

Of his '50s films, the one to track down is the 1958 Cairo Station, which documents the tough lives of people peddling newspapers and soft drinks to train travelers. Though it moves on the tracks of tragedy, for much of its brief length the movie has the exuberance of '50s Italian comedies, with bawdy banter, tabloid stories of decapitations, and a saucy heroine (the Lollobrigida-like Hind Rostom) who tries to evade both the rail authorities and a sullen suitor (played by Chahine). At one point the girl sweeps her younger brother from the tracks as a train rushes by — no back projection, no stunt doubles, just plain old daredevil moviemaking. What's Arabic for "brio"?

Twenty years later Chahine made Alexandria...Why, which would launch his own Alexandria quartet; it was followed by An Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria Again and Again (1990), and Alexandria...New York (2004). The first film is set in Egypt during the war, when Arab nationalists were killing English soldiers and plotting the assassination of Winston Churchill — anything to get the British Empire out of Palestine.

But this sprawling epic is mainly the story of a young man, transparently Chahine himself, who loves Shakespeare and American movies. Before the movie is over, fate will get him to Pasadena. What an elder says of him was also true of Chahine: "The boy knows exactly what he wants. He'll make it." At the end he sails into New York Harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty as Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" plays on the sound track. He glimpses some Hassidic Jews on the deck below him, and the Statue morphs into a heavy-set actress he knew back home. She lets out a ribald laugh — just the reaction Chahine so often wanted from his audiences when they were faced with the historical and emotional collisions of life in the modern world.

Chahine loved his country, but he was the lover as critic — the kind who says she's put on a little weight and she didn't hold a free Presidential election for 24 years. Egypt loved him right back, but as a mother adores her son (like Mrs. Iselin toward Raymond in The Manchurian Candidate). When Chahine behaved well and got festival prizes, Egypt was proud; when he criticized powerful political interests, she sent him to bed without supper. His epic Once Upon a Time on the Nile, about the building of the Aswan Dam, was the first Egyptian-Soviet coproduction, but both sponsors were displeased by the director's cut, demanding reshooting and re-editing. The film, begun in 1968, was not released until 1972.

With Nasser, Sadat and Mubarek effectively playing his studio bosses, it's a miracle Chahine could get as much said in his movies as he did. One of the most sympathetic characters in Alexandria...Why is a young Jewish woman who had Hitler's Germany for British Palestine. "I thought I had escaped the Nazi inferno," she says. "Yet in Haifa I faced another." Destiny, Chahine's 1997 a bio-pic of the medieval liberal Muslim philosopher Averroes, was a forthright attack on religious fundamentalism; it begins with a burning at the stake and ends with the burning of books.

Chahine's derision toward fundamentalists goes back at least to Cairo Station, where he portrays them as comic relief: when they see dancers gyrating to rock n roll, the clerics mutter, "God protect us!" and "All these new-fangled ideas lead to Hell!" But Chahine was also a nationalist. His 1963 bio-pic Saladin, about the 12th-century sultan of Egypt and Syria, found a clear connection between Saladin's uniting of North African and Mideast Arabs against the Christian Crusaders and Nasser's formation of the Egypt-Syria United Arab Republic to fight Israel. (Saladin was played by Ahmed Mazhar, who had attended the Cairo Military Academy with Nasser and Sadat.) Several Chahine films, including The Sparrow in 1973 and the 1978 The Return of the Prodigal Son (loosely based on the Andre Gide novel), were set during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973; there was no question which side the films were on.

His fondness for America, and his reservations about it, found their final expression in Alexandria...New York, where an old filmmaker runs into an American woman he'd loved a half-century before. Yet Chahine always made distinctions between the American people and the U.S. government. In his contribution to the 2002 omnibus film 11'09"01: September 11, shown at the Toronto Film Festival on the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, he floats the argument that Islamic militants had the right to kill civilians in the U.S. and Israel — because these are democracies, where the people choose their leaders and thus are responsible for policies that enslave the rest of the world. The hand he stretched out here meant to slap the politicians but instead hit the mourning citizens of the country whose movies had taught him so much.

The problem with considering Chahine's career is that, just when you feel he deserves a good spanking, his movies play the cunning jester, and all is forgiven. Destiny, though its beginning and ending are literally incendiary, is at heart a ripping yarn with much buckling of swashes, and musical numbers, too. The Other, a hit at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival (where Chahine received a 50th Anniversary life-achievement award) and at the Toronto and New York fests, is a delirious blast — a politico-romantic amalgam of melodrama and music, at a pace and pitch that Bollywood directors wouldn't dare dream of.

In fact, it's a shame Chahine's work isn't familiar in this benighted part of the movie world. He was no minimalist Sphinx; he believed less was never enough. Embracing a splashy masala of styles, he threw everything — ideas, people, whole nations and regions — up in the air for the viewer to try to catch. And beyond his movies' entertainment value, it wouldn't hurt for Americans to see the visions of a cosmopolitan filmmaker from the Arab world, who speaks for himself but reflects the dreams and fears of a people whose popular culture is nearly unknown in the U.S. In the lyrics from that song in An Egyptian Story we hear, in all their naked emotion, the national fervor and questing heart of Youssef Chahine. 

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