On September 28, 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack at his house in Cairo, at 52, a few hours after he had brokered a ceasefire between King Hussein of Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He had been at the airport seeing off the emir of Kuwait when he was taken ill. Cairo radio announced it at 6 o'clock, and about five million people came into the streets for the funeral on October 1.
He had been president of Egypt for sixteen years and the leading figure in Arab politics for most of them. Nasser was the son of a post office clerk, an army officer who had served in the Palestine war of 1948, and the effective leader of the Free Officers movement that overthrew King Farouk in July 1952. He became prime minister in 1954. He was president in 1956.
What he did was the Suez nationalisation and what survived him was the idea. In July 1956 he nationalised the Suez Canal Company, and Britain, France and Israel attacked; he lost the Sinai militarily and won politically, because American and Soviet pressure forced the withdrawal, and because the Arab world read it as a defeat for the old empires. After that, Arab nationalism was Nasser's, and the voice of Sawt al-Arab broadcast it from Cairo across the region.
The programme was a mixture: land reform and the redistribution of the large estates, the nationalisation of the banks and of much of industry, an expansion of education and of the state sector, and a one-party state with a very effective internal security service. The Aswan High Dam, financed by the Soviet Union after the Americans withdrew in 1956, was the emblem of it. Egypt's population was about 26 million in 1952 and about 34 million when he died.
Then came the defeat. In May 1967 Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, moved troops into Sinai and asked the UN peacekeepers to leave, and Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground on June 5. The Six-Day War cost Egypt the Sinai and Gaza, about 10,000 to 15,000 dead, and most of its air force and armour. Nasser announced his resignation on June 9 and withdrew it the next day after demonstrations.
He spent the last three years rebuilding the army, with Soviet help, and fighting the War of Attrition along the canal. He negotiated nothing with Israel. What he had just done when he died was to stop the Jordanian army from destroying the Palestinian fedayeen, which had been taken to the brink of war two weeks earlier.
Anwar Sadat succeeded him, expelled the Soviet advisers in 1972, attacked across the canal in October 1973, and made peace with Israel in 1979.