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The days of intense negotiation had taken their toll on the Egyptian president. After seeing off Hussein and Arafat on September 28, 1970, Nasser returned home, where he suffered a massive heart attack and died at 5:00 P.M. that very evening. Cairo Radio interrupted its regular programs to broadcast a solemn recital of verses from the Qur’an. After a suitable delay, Vice President Anwar Sadat a
The grief over-spilled Egypt’s borders to spread across the Arab world. Mass demonstrations filled the major cities of the Arab world. Nasser, more than any other leader before or since, embodied the hopes and aspirations of Arab nationalists across the Middle East. Yet Arab nationalism had already died before Nasser. Syrian secession from the United Arab Republic, the inter-Arab war in the Yemen, and the massive defeat of 1967 and the loss of all of Palestine had dealt Pan-Arab aspirations successive blows from which it would not recover. The events of Black September cast the deep divisions between Arab states in sharp relief. Only Nasser seemed to transcend the fault lines growing between the Arab states, increasingly divided along Cold War lines into allies of the United States and partisans of the Soviet Union. By 1970 the Arab world was firmly divided into distinct states with their own interests to uphold. There would be further high-profile unity schemes between Arab states after 1970, but none ever challenged the integrity of the states involved, and none endured. The unity schemes of the 1970s and 1980s were public relations exercises designed to confer legitimacy on Arab governments that knew that Arab nationalism still held a strong appeal to their citizens. Governments continued to pay lip service to common Arab themes of fighting the Zionist enemy and liberating the Palestinian homeland. But they were all looking out for their own interests. And a new force was taking hold of the Middle East, as the region’s oil resources began to generate tremendous wealth and give the Arabs influence over the world economy.
CHAPTER 12
The Age of Oil
The Arab world was shaped by the power of oil in the eventful years of the 1970s. Nature spread oil unevenly among the Arab states. With the exception of Iraq, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers have supported large agrarian populations for mille