Anti-Colonial Defeat: The 1967 Naksa and Its Consequences

During the FIFA Arab World Cup 2021 in Qatar, the Algerian team won its quarter-final match against Morocco and the players celebrated by covering themselves with the Palestinian flag. Algeria went on to win the cup and the team’s coach dedicated it to the people of Palestine. Images of the Algerian team donning the Palestinian flag ignited social media with scores of people posting comments of praise including Palestinian politician, scholar, and activist Hanan Ashrawi who tweeted, “The honorable Algeria! They know what it means to live under a settler colonial regime & they know how to resist & liberate themselves!”

Ashrawi is drawing upon a rich history of Algeria that as a historian I often encounter in the archive, an Algeria at the helm of global anti-colonial struggle during the height of the Third World movement. The settler colonialism she refers to is the French colonization of Algeria which began in 1830 and ended after the eight-year bloody Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) costing millions of lives.¹ This was the Algeria of Frantz Fanon’s revolution, an Algeria that hosted the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Black Panther Party, and several other anti-colonial organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s from across the globe.² Algeria became a hub for what became known as the Third World movement or sometimes referred to as Third Worldism or Third World internationalism after the Bandung Conference of 1955.³ The Third World, contrary to popular belief, was meant to denote a third way and didn’t have the contemporary pejorative connotation of “backward people and places.” In fact, the foundation of modern area studies (Middle East studies, Slavic studies, Latin American studies etc.) in the US and British academy was a reaction to curb Soviet influence on the “Third World.” The Third World of the early Cold War period was not “recessive” countries considered as undesirable backwaters but rather highly desirable contested spaces of decolonization.⁴

In the Middle East and North Africa, perhaps the only place that rivaled Algeria as a revolutionary hub was the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser with his signature phrase “La Sharqiyya, la gharbiyya,” neither East nor West. Nasser was as much a symbol of anti-colonial struggle as he was an icon for Arab nationalism. And for Nasser’s Egypt as it was for Algeria, the Black Panther Party, Cuba, and the rest of the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s, the question of Palestine was paramount. Palestine, rhetorically at least, became the beating heart of the Third World movement as a historical project of liberation from imperialism and settler colonialism. From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Huey Newton, the dispossession of Palestinians, the establishment of the State of Israel as a settler colonial state on Palestinian land in 1948 known as al-Nakba (the catastrophe) and the ongoing dispossession that ensued during an era of decolonization became a rallying cry of global anti-colonial revolutionary struggle that linked Algeria, Palestine, Black liberation, and Pan-Africanism across the world.

If the moniker of the Third World was an anti-imperialist state, Egypt and Algeria arguably failed the litmus test, both with aspirational imperialist tendencies. Egypt, as Eve Troutt Powell argues, was a “colonized colonizer,” colonized by the British on the one hand while colonizing Sudan on the other.⁵ Algeria, after its independence, embarked on aggressive Arabization programs designed to all but erase its indigenous Amazigh population.⁶ I am not interested in merely resurrecting the nostalgia of this historical moment or simply contrasting it with the state’s authoritarianism. The recent forum on “The Third World Historical” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East provides an excellent framing to understanding the limits of state power and why we need to ask different questions de-centering the state as the only vehicle of holding political community in the Third World to move away from the Westphalian system.⁷ I am interested in the affective afterlives of defeat beyond the state and what space those afterlives can hold for Third Worlding.  

With the overwhelming attention (rightly so) in scholarship and in the media on the Nakba of 1948, our historical understanding of the role that the war of 1967, known to Arabs as al-Naksa (the resounding setback) played in shaping the Third World has been limited. In this piece, I consider what it means to revisit the 1967 Naksa within the context of the Third World movement and its influence on global solidarity in the ensuing decades following 1967.⁸ I argue that the fate of the Egyptians, the fate of the Palestinians, the fate of other Arabs, and the fate of anti-colonial global struggle each became siloed as individual concerns. Today’s calls for relinking global struggles for justice is a legacy of the Third World movement, and I historicize where it dovetails and departs from its antecedent. This contextualization in a moment of the resurgence of global solidarity lexicons allows for a reimagining of an alternative Third Worlding not as separate nation-state projects of decolonization as it once was, but with communities, individuals, and everyday people at its helm linking social, racial, climate, and gender justice underscoring why Third Worlding cannot be a project leaving it open to cooptation and appropriation. But rather, the project must be centered on the processes of learning and unlearning required for an alternative Third Worlding future. A process that allows space for defeat and mourning.

Nasser and History of the Third World Movement

The Non-Alignment Movement, Afro-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, Third Worldism, Third World internationalism, and decolonialization each had their own interlocutors and separate ideologies.⁹ As slippery as the concept of the Third World was as a place, as a project, and as an ideology, it was in praxis inextricably linked to anti-colonial struggle. The defining marker of the historical Third World movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was a global solidarity that believed anti-colonial struggles to be linked.

Although there were certainly artists, activists, and individuals involved, the Third World as a historical project with anti-colonial struggle as its ethos was devised and supported by a nascent postcolonial state apparatus across newly independent nation-states. For postcolonial Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana, among many others, it became a state project—a state project built upon authoritarian tendencies, cooptation of anti-colonial and feminist politics, uneven power dynamics between new postcolonial states and their leaders, as well as racist undertones. Many of the figures and names associated with the Third World movement—Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru—were heads of nascent postcolonial states with their own political agendas and were often at odds with each other.

This was certainly the case for Nasser’s Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser, former President of Egypt and engineer of the Free Officers Coup that overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, is likely the most studied figure of Egyptian, if not Arab, history writ large.¹⁰ In Egypt and the broader Arab world, he is either remembered as the hero who cared about the poor and instituted a number of socialist programs that actually helped the lives of people or as the father of modern Egyptian authoritarianism and mastermind of the contemporary Egyptian police state of which current Egyptian President Abd el-Fattah el-Sisi is an inheritor. Nasser became a Third World hero after he boldly and successfully nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956.¹¹ Britain, France, and Israel tried to invade the canal but were met by global condemnation and were forced to withdraw in utter humiliation.¹² 

Third Worldism offered Nasser a convenient platform with wide popular cachet to build out his international persona. Nasser’s Egypt moved between several ideological positions depending on convenience and circumstance—a Pan-Arab leader, a Pan-African hub, a socialist haven, an authoritarian chokehold, an anti-colonial hero, a feminist utopia. For instance, Nasser’s treatment of Egypt’s own Black population, notably the Nubians, and its southern neighbor, the Sudan, exposed the underlying anti-Blackness that shaped Egyptian policies. The racism and condescending attitudes Nasser employed against his so-called African brethren is often swept under the rug. Scholars have written about Nasser’s utilitarian view of Pan-Africanism and paternalistic policies towards the Sudan as a “rightful” extension of Egypt.¹³ In building the Aswan High Dam, Nasser implemented a mass forced displacement of the Black Nubian population of Upper (southern) Egypt and destruction of their homes.¹⁴ The memory of displacement and dispossession is very much still alive among the Nubian communities in Egypt. 

Global solidarity at the state level was no different than the utilitarian nature of the way various agendas were endorsed for state benefit. Between 1956 and 1967, Nasser’s Egypt had its hand in many anti-colonial struggles, positioning Egypt not only as the leader of Pan-Arabism but also at the helm of African liberation from European colonialism. It is precisely this placement of Egypt as Arab and African that Nasser capitalized on situating it as the ideal hub for Afro-Asian solidarity. Egypt was a founding member of the Organization for African Unity and Nasser attended its inaugural meeting in Addis Ababa in 1963 with Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella.¹⁵ The first Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity conference was held in Cairo in January 1958 as shown in the poster below,¹⁶ followed by an Afro-Asian Youth conference later that year and culminating in an Afro-Asian women’s solidarity conference in 1961.¹⁷ University education in Egypt was free for any student from anywhere in the Afro-Asian world, offering quotas for countries from Senegal to Indonesia. In the 1959–60 school year, 14,349 students from 57 countries studied in Egypt.¹⁸

I want to focus on Nasser here because Egypt’s trajectory and involvement in the Third World movement and its sharp departure from it after the 1967 war is symbolic of a broader trend in Third Worldism at the time that shifted away from global solidarity towards domestic politics and market forces as soon as things became difficult exposing the fragile foundations of state power and global solidarity. 

Nasser’s position towards revolutionary struggle across the Third World (including Algeria, Palestine, Yemen), came with Egyptian military aid provided by Russian weapons. Nasser provided military aid to the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the eight-year Algerian revolutionary war against the French that would see Ben Bella, an FLN member himself (1962–1965), become president of a newly independent Algeria in 1962.¹⁹ The liberation of Palestine was a shared cause between Nasser and Ben Bella. The Jewish Telegraphic Service published a joint letter from Nasser and Ben Bella issued during Ben Bella’s visit to Egypt in 1963 confirming Algeria and Egypt’s commitment to “liberate Palestine.”²⁰

Egypt’s stature as a beacon of revolutionary struggle before 1967 was undeniable. For many African American activists involved in anti-colonial struggle, Egypt was seen as the heart of Africa. In a letter to his friend Ethel Minor, Stokley Carmichael, Black Power activist and head of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC) wrote about the 1967 war, “we should include in the propaganda the fact that the Zionists have invaded Egypt [i.e., Sinai]—that Egypt is in Africa and Africa is our motherland and an aggression against the motherland is an aggression against us . . . ”²¹ This understanding of Egypt as Africa was not unique to Carmichael, either; Malcolm X, Shirley Graham DuBois, and many other Black Americans had echoed similar sentiments.²² It should come as no surprise then that the reverberations of the Arab, and especially Egypt’s, defeat in the face of Israel in 1967 was felt across the Third World.

Defeat and De-Linking of Global Struggle

The Six Day War of 1967 was an Israeli offensive attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Within six days Israel had captured and occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Of these territories occupied by Israel in 1967, only the Sinai has been returned to Egypt. The remaining territories of the Syrian Golan Heights, and Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip remain under Israeli military occupation.²³ This resounding defeat (al-Naksa) cannot be overstated. Arab governments were humiliated. Nasser, who many saw as provoking the Israelis by closing the Straits of Tiran, had boasted the ability to deliver a crushing Israeli defeat and Arab victory. He emerged the most scarred, even resigning as president (which Egyptians refused) and losing much of his anti-colonial prestige. For Arabs, the defeat was a shock of seismic proportions and for the anti-colonial struggle, it was the beginning of its undoing.

The defeat of 1967 has been written about extensively as an explanation for the political failures and political-economic developments that would unfold across the Arab world. One of which was the rise of Islamic movements and their mass popularity as people started retreating further into religion and away from the secular agenda of a now seemingly defunct Arab nationalism.²⁴ Many historians of Arab nationalism documented a shift away from qawmiya (Arab nationalism) to wataniya (individual nationalism i.e., Egyptian nationalism).²⁵ But the consequences this had on the Third World movement have not been fully considered or understood. As Egypt retreated inward dealing with the aftermath of the devastation of 1967, many other Arab nations followed suit, cleaning up camp and trying to minimize humiliation in front of their own people. But Egypt’s move inwards, as a leader of the Third World Movement, had serious reverberations across the postcolonial world. The anti-colonial activities that Egypt had been heavily involved in during the 1950s and 1960s, whether through Radio Cairo, sending teachers abroad, free university education, organizing solidarity conferences, had suddenly largely come to a halt.²⁶ Egypt’s stature as an Arab and African anti-colonial leader who stood up to the West dissipated.²⁷ Additionally, the socialist policies that Nasser’s regime was known for of free schooling, guaranteed employment, and free daycare facilities became increasingly untenable, and students from the Afro-Asian world no longer looked to Cairo as the locus of anti-colonial pedagogy but rather of colonial defeat. Revolutionary liberation through the state apparatus proved the limits of state power in reversing the dispossession of Palestinians.

When Nasser died suddenly in 1970 (many believe the defeat contributed to his untimely death), Anwar el-Sadat became President and radically redirected Egypt towards the Global North and neoliberal market forces, distancing himself from Nasser’s failures, deciding that Egypt needed a peace treaty with Israel for the revitalization of its economy through foreign investment. The nail in the coffin for Pan-Arabism and for its position in the broader anti-colonial struggle was the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed at Camp David in 1978. Sadat had sold out Syria, the Palestinians, Jordan’s King Husayn, and the entire anti-colonial agenda for an Egyptian peace treaty with Israel that would secure Western aid money and investments for Egypt.²⁸

The Arab defeat also brought the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and various Palestinian resistance groups, effectively de-linking the Palestinian cause from Pan-Arabism and from worldwide state sponsored anti-colonial struggle at the time. The PLO realized they needed to take matters into their own hands and could not rely on other Arab states such as Egypt for liberation. But this effectively de-linked the Palestinian struggle from Egypt, from other Arabs, and from the broader Third World. And without the backing of a political giant like Egypt and Nasser, support for Palestinian liberation came primarily from other anti-colonial revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the United States, which would by the mid-1970s focus on internal politics.²⁹ Defeat of the Arab states provided the impetus for the strengthening of political organizations and civil society groups to lead the revolutionary vanguard against Israeli occupation and state oppression of Palestinians.

At first, after the 1967 defeat, Black power activists in the United States became more vocal of their support of Palestinians especially with the establishment of an international office in Algeria in 1970 where the PLO was also being housed at the time. Michael Fischbach in Black Power and Palestine highlights a postcolonial Third World vision that brought Black Americans, Palestinians, and Arabs together in anti-colonial struggle connecting solidarities across the Atlantic between African Americans and Arabs. Fischbach argues that the 1967 war was a turning point in creating a rift between mainstream African American civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Black Power groups.³⁰ After the Naksa, Black Power activists like Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver came out more vocally in support of the Palestinians, while Jewish Americans put immense pressure on more mainstream civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. to show support for Israel. After BPP leader Huey Newton was released from two years in prison in 1970, his position on Palestine changed. He started walking back previous BPP comments against Israel, which triggered the famous split between Newton and Cleaver, who was in Algeria. The rift was fueled by the FBI’s COINTELPRO misinformation program to inflame factionalism within the BPP. Newton wanted to focus on domestic concerns and work within the system, while Cleaver wanted to continue his commitment to revolutionary anti-colonial struggle. By 1974, the revolutionary arm of the BPP was in decline as was its pro-revolutionary anti-colonial Palestinian stance, and Newton’s emphasis on domestic politics won out.³¹ The PLO too became mired in factionalism, targeted assassinations, and forced to negotiate with state power, moving from Cairo to Jordan to Lebanon and then to Algeria and Tunis. Egypt by 1974 was firmly under Sadat’s control who radically redirected Egypt away from its previous anti-colonial agenda and chiefly focused on Egyptian domestic policy.³²

Losing Egypt on the international stage, as an African, Arab, Asian symbol of anti-imperialism was a monumental loss for the Third World and has not subsequently been understood. Bandung, decolonization, and the lexicon of the Third World movement as a historical struggle against colonialism recast as the “Global South” has been resurrected in the academy and in activist circles during the past several years.³³ However, the association of the Third World as synonymous with global anti-colonial solidarity was a short-lived historical moment that became overshadowed by many decades of individual nation-state politics and replaced by neoliberal market economics in much of the world. Egypt and Algeria today as nation-states couldn’t be further from the bastions of revolution and anti-imperial liberation they once stood for. It is not just Arabs or Egyptians or Palestinians who were defeated, it is a whole anti-colonial ethos. The fate of the Arabs, fate of the Palestinians, and fate of anti-colonial global struggle each became siloed as individual concerns over internal domestic politics and market concerns.³⁴ All this anti-colonial energy that had been building up in Africa and the Middle East, deflated slowly over the next several years after the Naksa, exposing the uneven and shaky foundations it had been built upon. The Naksa was certainly not the only reason for the steady decline of global anti-colonial solidarities, but it needs serious further exploration especially if we are to reimagine an alternate Third Worlding for our time with individuals, reimagined institutions, and communities, not states, at the helm.    

Rather than provide a hard definition for what Third Worlding should look like, my entry, like others in this forum, offers an opening to think about how we, as a collective of well-intentioned allies who believe in the Third World’s calling, can rebuild the foundations of global solidarity. If we imagine “Third Worlding” as a process of learning and unlearning, and the Global South as the place (figuratively and geographically) for that process—what would it mean to remove the state from the history of the Third World and reimagine its foundations from its roots, grappling with defeat as a necessary part of that process? What would it mean to sit with the loss of the state as a vehicle for revolutionary liberation, for Palestinians, for Arabs, for Africans, and for the post-colony?

The affective daily lives of Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories has worsened as the discourse for global solidarity with Palestine is arguably at its highest since pre-1967.³⁵ To (un)learn from the way the Third World has been positioned within a materialist discourse around the centrality of state power, the Third World cannot be a project as it once was.³⁶ State power was indeed authoritarian and global solidarity in that era was superfluous, but it still meant something to people then and now. Losing it was felt. Its loss provided for alternative paths to revolutionary struggle (the PLO, the BPP) but they were still tied to the state. The Naksa was not only a defeat for the state (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon) but it was embodied by virtually every person in the Arab world and beyond. The feeling of loss has been inherited by successive generations whose parents and grandparents had at once lived the hope for liberation and the subsequent humiliation and hopelessness.³⁷ We have not properly mourned what could have been (the process of unlearning). The state as a tool for liberation was defeated. The liberation for Palestine and Palestinians therefore cannot come from the state project because the state failed the postcolonial condition in every way. And that is a loss worth mourning.