Causes Of War

9 Pages 2218 Words

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Returning back to the revolution, when a group of free officers , lead by Gamal Abdel-Nasser overthrew King Farouk in a nonviolent takeover, there was little opposition the streets of Cairo. Nasser immediately began to sell his “Egypt first” policy to the Egyptian masses. It was based around numerous broad themes that at the time were aimed at building Egyptian pride and winning over the public. Nasser’s goals included ending imperialism and riddling the country of a corrupt king, promoting vast economic and political reform, and in hindsight his most significant policy was his pledge to build a stronger and much more powerful army. This would seemingly set the country on a course of war. Underlying the revolution in Egypt was the tragic defeat of a coalition of infant Arab armies, including Egypt to the hands of the newly born Israel. The creation of Israel, although a direct crisis to the Palestinians, was also seen as a threat to Egypt, sharing a border and given their past. And most crucial to the events of the next half century, it was viewed as a direct conflict to the Arab world as a whole. Egyptians were by far no exception, as prior to leading the group of free officers in the revolution in Egypt, Nasser served as a brigade in the 1948 war. The loss of this first modern Arab- Israeli conflict took a heavy toll on all the Arabs throughout the Middle East, as characterized in the name for that war in Arabic- al nakba, or “the catastrophe”.
The defeat of the Arab armies and the new issue of the Palestinian fight for self-determination possessed the capacity to unite the Arab world and dismiss the notion that Arab nationalism was obsolete. For the first ten years after the creation of Israel, Egypt was the main Arab state most closely involved and would come to take the occupation of their fellow Arabs as a war of their own. Although Nasser was known...