Castro’s fiery speeches. It was celebrated as the only instance of peasant revolt in postcoup Egypt, though the reality was much more humble. Its true significance was that it accurately reflected the political configuration and power balances of the time. Lutfi al-Kholi, editor of the regime’s mouthpiece, Al-Tali’ah, thought it was “a political and economic thermometer” of the state of the country.59 In fact, the GIS director, Salah Nasr, described it as the “apex of the power struggle” that consumed the country during the 1960s.60
The whole affair began with peasant activists leading a campaign against the large landowning family of al-Feqi, which retained 650 feddans above the limit prescribed by the land-reform laws. Complaints against the formerly dominant landlords also incriminated ASU and security officials, who—together with village notables—facilitated the family’s fraudulent behavior. The campaign, which centered on petitions to the president and the ASU leadership in Cairo, was led by two Communists, Salah al-Din Hussein and his wife, Shahendah Maqlad. But Nasser’s security lieutenants kept a lid on it, making sure he never saw any of the letters addressed to him. But it all came into the open during the president’s tour of the countryside in March 1966, when he heard demonstrators chanting: “The Kamshish Revolution Salutes the Mother Revolution!” followed by Maqlad rushing toward his motorcade to hand him a memo detailing the whole story—how Kamshish peasants were among the first to back up the land-reform laws in 1952; how appalled they were when the “feudal” al-Feqis became the representatives of Nasser’s first popular organization (the Liberation Rally), and afterward made sure that NU and ASU dignitaries in the province were their junior allies; how al-Feqis regularly consorted with security officials to make sure peasant petitions were intercepted and their drafters detained; and finally, how this whole charade made it seem as if the revolution’s political organizations were “born dead.”61 Upon returning to Cairo, Nasser demanded a full investigation. Party and police officials claimed it was a minor affair stirred by Communist troublemakers, and decided to shelve the case. Weeks later, Hussein was shot dead by a police-hired peasant, sparking massive peasant riots that soon made local and international headlines. The press coverage highlighted how little the power structure had shifted in the countryside after a decade and a half of land reform.
In his dual capacity as intelligence operative and ASU functionary, Abu al-Fadl was asked to investigate the murder. A few weeks later, he reported that Hussein had in fact been submitting one complaint after another to ASU officials and the PBI concerning violations by al-Feqis. The complaints were ignored, and the Interior Ministry detained Hussein twice, once (between November 1954 and February 1956) for being a Communist, and the other (during the second week of September 1965) for being an Islamist.62 Hussein’s widow also provided investigators with a security memo written weeks before the murder (on March 3, 1966), accusing her husband of rabble-rousing and warning of his subversive activities, thus further implicating the security apparatus in his assassination.63 The investigation also revealed that the Speaker of Parliament, Anwar al-Sadat, intervened in al-Feqis’ favor, and that even after the murder he tried to shore them up by claiming that his own investigations (carried out by Mahmoud Game’, a confidant who also happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) confirmed their innocence of all charges—whether land-reform violations or incitement to murder. Sadat further claimed that Hussein and his wife were Soviet agents, who received regular visits and funding from the Russian embassy.64 Sadat was not the only actor in this unfolding drama who would later assume a high public position (that of president), but others who were also involved in the cover-up would rise to power and fame—rather than suffer for their complacency. Prominent examples included, on the political side, Kamal al-Shazly, future minister of parliamentary affairs and deputy secretary-general of the ruling party, who was back then the ASU representative in Munufiya, and on the security side, the future interior minister Abd al-Halim Musa, and the future director of state security Hassan Tal’at.65 And without getting too much ahead, it is worth mentioning that in September 1998 al-Feqi family and their hirelings spearheaded the repression of Kamshish peasants who resisted President Hosni Mubarak’s reversal of the state protection guaranteed to tenant farmers in the 1950s. Al-Feqis still owned land above the limit prescribed by law and were hungry for more, and Shahendah Maqlad, Hussein’s widow, was still there to lift the peasants’ spirits. Little had changed in three decades.*
The complacency of political and security cadres alarmed Nasser, who pointed to the “tragedy of Kamshish” during his May Day speech of 1967, as an indicator that opportunists had hijacked the ASU, and that even after he sequestered the lands of large landlords, “they remained emperors just as they were before, even more so.”66 A few days before, the daily Al-Akhbar came out with a dramatic headline that read: “Nasser Warns of Counter-Revolutionary Forces.”† But it was Amer who was truly disturbed by the intimate relations that were forming behind his back between the president’s ASU and security men (at the PBI and the Interior Ministry) and the rural elite, and saw this as a potential threat to the political influence of the army. Determined to liquidate this last bastion of social reaction, Nasser and Amer, each for his own reasons, agreed to form the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism. Infighting over who should be included, however, produced a catchall twenty-two-member committee with all the usual suspects from both security factions: Sabri, Sharaf, Gomaa, and others associated with Nasser, alongside Amer, Badran, Nasr, and their allies.67
In a matter of weeks, the committee received complaints from hundreds of villages against the still dominant power of large landowners. Investigations revealed that more than 45 percent of the peasants were still landless, that 95 percent of the landed peasants held less than 5 feddans, and that only 5 percent of landowners controlled 43 percent of all arable land. Petitions also highlighted how the rising agricultural bourgeoisie was gaining political control over the countryside. Soon the committee issued its final report: “After eight months of continued work … the Agricultural Reform [Agency] sequestered or placed under state guardianship about 200,000 feddans … banished 220 feudalists from the countryside … expelled hundreds of mayors, clerics, and officials who were dominated by feudalists, and dissolved dozens of ASU village committees … This was an ‘agricultural revolution.’ ”68 It was excellent propaganda for Amer and his associates.
In reality, the results had been much more modest. Probably under pressure from ASU-connected security officials, the committee examined only 330 cases out of Egypt’s five thousand villages before hastily concluding that there were no systematic violations, only a handful of pockets of illegality. It did not matter that some of these “irregularities” were as blatant as the six families that each held between 1,275 and 4,500 feddans, although the law allowed for only 300 feddans per family.69 Nor did it matter that, as the report confessed, there was as much as 200,000 feddans concealed from legal authorities. The problem was reduced to the survival of individual feudalists associated with the old regime, rather than an indicator of the emergence of a new landowning class nurtured by the new regime.70 The civilian and military security elite had no need to investigate how this happened—they were the ones who allowed it. Committee members also had no real stake in changing the situation. Nasser’s faction (probably without his consent) was determined not to alter the power structure it had developed in the countryside, and Amer decided—after flirting a bit with the possibility of sabotaging this arrangement—that this was perhaps too distracting, that his efforts should be entirely focused on military rather than social affairs. And it was this latter decision that set the stage for the final and painfully spectacular showdown of 1967.
THE MILITARY NEEDS A WAR
For such a brief encounter, the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 remains one of history’s most consequential confrontations. In Egypt, the defeat was “so unexpected in its totality, stunning in its proportion, and soul-destroying in its impact that it will be remembered as the greatest defeat of the Arabs in the twentieth century.”71 How can we explain the astonishing sequence of events that led up to this defeat? How can we solve the central puzzle of the war, which is how a politically astute leader like Nasser held firm on the path of escalation against Israel, even though he knew how little
