The Journey of a Broken Transition from Nasser to His Sons and Grandsons

Asharq Al-Awsat

07-05-2025

The audio recording of Gamal Abdel Nasser continues to make noise. Some of this noise comes from the ideas that have been discovered, as this time, they diverged sharply from prevailing narratives; some of it stems from the fact that we were discovering things about Nasser, whose positions many test their own - be they opposed or aligned with his.
More than anything else, the recording is significant because it touches on an ongoing controversy that was blown up by the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation and its repercussions, particularly with regard to the binaries of war and peace, extremism and moderation, and maximalism and realism.
Naturally, much of this attention has been tinged with praise or derision, as well as agreement, reproach, skepticism, and repudiation, or attempts to defend his imperiled reputation or reactions that fall into the category of "I told you so." We also have intrigue and vitriol that, at times, rise to the scandalous heights that social media fawns over.
One basis for making judgments on the recording is to measure the Nasserist position against the positions (both explicit and implicit) of Nasser's sons and grandsons, and, in turn, to measure the sons and grandsons' positions against the explicit and implicit Nasserist position.
A stench comes out of this mutual exercise that resembles voyeurism, as we find lots of lying, as well as lots of duplicity in the name of Palestine and toward Palestinians; it also makes clear that neither side can extend the legitimacy both lack to the other. Indeed, it is as though the shattering of radical politics has deprived it of sustainability, with the grandfather seemingly sterile, with no offsprings, and the grandson a bastard who had come from nowhere.
The "sons," here, are those of Nasser's contemporaries who imitated him and, in his later years, began clawing at his leadership with the aim of becoming his heirs: Hafez al-Assad, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Jaafar Nimeiri... All of them seized power between 1968 and 1970 through coups and conspiracies, just as the "father" had done in 1952.
As for the grandsons, they are the ones who, without having necessarily branched out of Arab nationalism, devoted themselves to upholding the banner of the struggle, as well as to an antagonistic portrayal of the world and the self. The top spot, here, is occupied by Islamist forces and militias like Hamas and Hezbollah, for whom "Al-Aqsa Flood" was a doorway to great history.
The erosion (or rather obliteration) of the national and pan-Arab basis of this conflict's transnationalism might be the most consequential outcome of the process. Under the sons, the exploitation of Palestine and the Palestinians in the service of "pan-Arab" authoritarian projects, and the incitement and provocation of civil wars to this same end, became transparent and exposed.
When their time came, the grandsons sought to compensate for this by soliciting international foundations for the conflict - foundations that resist being tied to a particular country or the particular affairs of a specific country. Thus, Iran (a non-Arab state, evidently) came to play a central role in the conflict - one that was paralleled by student-led protest movements in the United States. Regardless of the wishes or intentions of either of the two parties, Khomeini's Iran was the ultimate and most powerful embodiment of "confronting imperialism" and "decolonization."
It might be fair, especially after the recent revelations, to say that in the final years of his life, Nasser abandoned a conception of politics grounded in transnational "solidarity" for another - a conception of politics that he had, at an earlier time, buried with his own hands. The slogan of "Undoing the effects of aggression," Nasser's focus on Sinai and nothing else, and his assertion that "We have nothing to do with the Palestinian cause," all underscore his prioritization of one particular country and state.
The defeat of 1967 was not the only reason for this shift; his policy of prioritizing "solidarity" had caused two setbacks before the Naksa (the Arabic word for setback, which is also used to refer to the Six Day War of 1967). The 1958 union between Egypt and Syria, which was said to have been intended to "save Syria from the Turkish and Hashemite threats," ultimately led to Syria's secession from the "United Arab Republic" in 1961. In turn, Egypt's intervention in the Yemen war, "in support of the republic and to save Yemen the imamate and reactionary forces," had only one outcome: weakening Egypt in the face of Israel in 1967.
The other distinction between Nasser's final years and his "children" and "grandchildren" generations, is that he acknowledged the defeat, resigned after the war, and learned something about war and the balance of power: "Are we going to wage a war against the entire world?!" he asks Ghaddafi with indignant sarcasm That Egypt could then count on the support of the Soviet Union, the world's second military power at the time, mattered little.
We know that their sons never behaved that way. Saddam Hussein, for example, would go from one "mother of all battles" to another, while Hafez al-Assad, to avoid finding himself at a dead end, would flee from one regional crisis to another.
It is with the descendants, however, that the aversion to acknowledging defeat appears to reach astronomical proportions. Indeed, "Axis of Resistance" forces continue to declare victory over the rubble that surrounds their broken peoples.
This is not alien to politics that dismiss their countries and peoples, striving to divide them, as Hamas has done with its coup and the Houthis did in Yemen, which has been turned into two Yemens. Moreover, their unequal relationships with Iran come to shape objectives and strategies. None of that can be said about Nasser's Egyptianism, even if he did not always advocate it compellingly.