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Midnight in Cairo on the last day of August. In the Revolutionary Command Council headquarters in ex-King Farouk's old pleasure house on the Nile, a phone rings. A big man with grizzled hair answers it.
"The Jews are in Khan Yunis," says a tense voice. "I am ready to move now."
The speaker is Major General Abdel Hakim Amer, commander in chief of the Egyptian army. It has been a shooting week on the Israeli-Egyptian border, and a U.N. cease-fire is pending. Sent to the Gaza area with orders that any further Israeli action is to be met by massed retaliation. Major General Amer has action to report: an Israeli armored force has just crossed the ploughed furrow dividing the two countries and is laying siege to an old British police fort five miles inside the border.
"Hold it until daylight and then call me first," says the big man in Cairo.
By daylight, the Israelis have blasted the old police fort to rubble, killed 35 Arabs.
Amer asks permission to smash into Israel. "Don't do it," says the man in Cairo.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, a handsome, dedicated soldier of only 37, is the one man in Egypt who could give such an order and have it obeyed. Last week, further curbing some of his impatient lieutenants and the Moslem hotheads who would like to provoke a full-scale war with Israel, he endorsed United Nations efforts to create a buffer zone or stretch a barrier along the border dividing Israel and Egypt at the hypersensitive Gaza strip. There is an intimate connection between Nasser and The Strip. It was there that the fuse was lit to Egypt's 1952 revolution, and it was Gamal Nasser who struck the match.
Seven years ago, Egypt, a power in the Moslem world, had come sweeping across the Sinai Peninsula to throttle the infant Israel at its U.N. birth. But decades of corruption in palace and government paid off disastrously in lack of ammunition, inferior arms and cowardly officering. Captain Nasser's unit was surrounded at Faluja, a few miles from Gaza. He saw his commanding officer wringing his hands and crying: "The soldiers are dying! The soldiers are dying!"
Dug in under Israeli fire, Nasser, as he later wrote, reflected: "Here we are in these foxholes, surrounded, in danger, thrust treacherously into a battle we were not ready for our lives the playthings of greed, conspiracy and lust which have left us here weaponless under fire." Said a comrade, "Gamal, the front is not here, it is in Cairo." Nasser turned to the front, plotted a revolution, toppled a king and rose to be ruler of Egypt's 22,500,000, the most powerful, most energetic and potentially most promising leader among the long divided, long misled Moslems of the Middle East.