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Survival by Sumud
At 51, Nasser no longer shows the strain of his darkest days in the aftermath of the 1967 war. He appears robust, cured of a reported circulatory ailment by Russian doctors, who ordered him to quit smoking. He has resumed playing tennis and Ping-Pong and, he tells friends, has recently taken to reading the Old Testament "to better understand the Jewish mind." His living room in the Cairo district of Manshiet al Bakri is filled with pictures of world leaders, many of whom he has outlasted in power, from Indonesia's Sukarno to Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Intensely conscious of his place in history, Nasser, by a grandiose reach, sometimes likens himself to Winston Churchill in World War II, and Suez to the English Channel. He has declared, at least until recently, that he will not go down in history as the Arab leader who made peace with Israel. For two years, his tactic has been sumud—standing fast, or at least not admitting defeat, no matter what the odds. It is linked in his mind and rhetoric with two other words: radda, retaliation, and tahrir, liberation of the occupied lands. Says Nasser: "We are now in the phase of retaliation."
When Nasser came to power in 1952, he used to insist that any renewal of war with Israel would detract from his most important task, raising the standard of living of his people. "In Egypt today," he complained at the time, "a water buffalo is more valuable than a human being. I mean, it costs more to hire a water buffalo for a day's work than it does to hire a fellah." Today the same holds true, though the price has gone up for both a man's labor (58¢ a day) and a water buffalo's hire (69¢). Under Nasser's socialism, the fellah no longer has to make obeisance to the local pasha; instead, he is cheated by the corrupt administrator appointed by Cairo. Nasser's revolution, which began with bright hopes, is dismissed, like everything else in Egypt, with "ma-'alesh," a verbal shrug meaning roughly that nothing can be done about it.
To the fellaheen, who make up more than half of Egypt's population, the threat of Israel is as remote and unreal as any hope of improvement in their ancient way of life or freedom from their backbreaking, dawn-to-dark work on the land. The war is brought home daily to Cairenes in the shabbiness of their once-exciting city, in the tomblike echoes of the airport terminal, in the empty streets of the Moussky shopping district, where donkeys now outnumber tourists—and in the constant shortages. For four years the capital's citizens have endured three consecutive meatless days a week. Luxury goods have been banned in order to conserve scarce foreign exchange for necessities. Scotch is