What Lessons Can Be Learned From History?

Annika Rabo
Stockholm U, Sweden

Almost 50 years ago, Abdel Qader, a young Syrian paratrooper, found himself aligned with President Eisenhower. This was during the Suez Crisis in late 1956 when Israel, supported by Britain and France, attacked Egypt. In July of that year the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The canal was owned by a private company and although the British, in 1954, had agreed to give up their political control over the traffic, the nationalization galled Prime Minister Eden.

Nasser’s support to the Algerian struggle for independence stirred the French government. Together with the French Foreign Minister Pireau, Eden planned to provoke a war in which the Canal Zone would be occupied by the two countries. Britain and France were joined by Israel in secret negotiations where the toppling of the Nasser government was high on the agenda.

President Eisenhower, however, had clearly signaled that a war against Egypt was out of the question. But in the end of October—as preplanned by the Israelis, the French and the British, without the knowledge of the US—Israeli paratroopers were dropped close to the Suez Canal. The war was on. Soon the UN—supported by the US—asked for the immediate end of all violence. Britain, as a member of the Security Council, vetoed the resolution and instead used its warplanes to attack Cairo in the beginning of November. French paratroopers were deployed from the war in Algeria.

Militarily the Suez War was a British-French success. The Egyptian army was quickly defeated. But politically it was a total failure. The Soviet Union threatened military action against Britain and France. The US had no wish for a military conflict with the Soviet Union at that particular time, and put pressure on the attackers to withdraw from Egypt. By December 1956 the French and the British had gone, and by March 1957 the Israelis as well.

Lester Pearson, Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, convinced the UN to create an Emergency Force to neutralize the tensions in the Canal Zone. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for these efforts. Prime Minister Eden, on the other hand, was forced to resign. The immediate winner of the Suez War was instead Gamal Abdel Nasser. His support in Egypt and the Arab world soared to dizzying heights and he was seen as a hero whose steadfast politics had defeated strong enemies.

But the Suez War also had repercussions on the Cold War. The influence of the Soviet Union in the region prompted the US president to launch a political counter-attack. Through the so called Eisenhower Doctrine, Congress endorsed the deployment of US military in the region, and the use of vast amounts of money to help pro-US regimes in the region. The concord with Syria did not last long. In 1958 US Marines were sent to Lebanon to bolster a regime claiming to be undermined by Syrian-Egyptian interferences.

A Syrian Paratrooper

I first met Abdel Qader in Aleppo in 1997 when starting research on traders in that city. He was a frequent visitor in the shops and offices in a particular corner of the vast covered market. Abdel Qader was an appreciated guest because he was a fountain of religious knowledge as well as extremely witty and funny. I understood that he had failed in trade but he was enormously liked and respected by his friends.

When he, quite by chance a few years later, told me of his experiences as a 19-year-old paratrooper in the Suez War, I was very much surprised. I did not know that Syrians were sent to support Egypt, nor that they had regular paratroopers in the mid-1950s. And it would never have occurred to me to guess that this particular man had such a past.

Abdel Qader told me how he felt—excited and frightened—when he jumped off the airplane above the Canal Zone: excited about defending the honor of the Arabs, and frightened that he would not do that well enough. He also told me that he had been part of the Syrian UN troops in the Congo in 1961, at the height of the war between the newly independent Congolese government and the irredentist Katanga province. With a polite reference to my nationality, Abdel Qader said that he had made friends among Swedish UN soldiers in the Congo. He also told me of his distress when the airplane of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was shot down.

These disclosures, I wrote in my fieldnotes later that day, once again highlighted the need to be constantly, anthropologically alert and avoid forcing informants, or their narratives, into any glib preconceived classificatory slot. During almost three decades, I had met any number of Syrians with military experience from World War II and onwards, but I had forgotten about the Suez War. And I had never heard about the Syrian engagement with the UN Peace Keeping Forces.

Whose History?

We are often told—and tell ourselves—“to learn from history.” But whose history should we learn from? There are no innocent positions from which we can learn. Some positions, however, are privileged, compelling and closed, thus excluding ambiguous and open-ended interpretations. Lately in Sweden, for example, there have been public conferences under such rubrics as “Is there a future for democracy in the Middle East?” in which the clearly implied “no!” makes no references to the democratic developments in the post-independent countries of the 1950s.

A paratrooper on November 16, 1956, cleaning his rifle at a temporary encampment near the De Lesseps statue at Port Said, during the Suez Crisis. Photo courtesy of Joseph McKeown/Picture Post/Getty Images

Through a 2006 Parliamentary Report, it is obvious that Sweden no longer has foreign relations with the Middle East, but instead with “the Muslim World.” “The Middle East” is a problematic geopolitical label tainted by a colonial past. But “the Muslim World”—covering the same geographical area—is not a good substitute. It has led the Swedish parliament to regard people in that region mainly in terms of a problematic and narrow religious affiliation.

Turkey, finally, is nowadays commonly referred to in the mass media as a “Muslim” or even “Islamic” state, although religion was separated from the state in Turkey in 1924, more than 75 years before this happened in Sweden; one of the—supposedly—most secular countries in the world.

Clearly there are many lessons still to be learned, in Sweden and elsewhere. It is perhaps here that anthropology can play an important role. We can relay stories such as Abdel Qader’s; a paratrooper, an Arab Nationalist, a UN Peace Keeper and a devout Muslim. But we are obliged, I think, not only to relay, but also to analyze such stories as they are shaped through a myriad of narrative threads which directly, and indirectly, connect us today from, and back into, the past—a past we must constantly explore, scrutinize and question in order to invent a common future.

Annika Rabo is a researcher at the Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Stockholm University, Sweden. She has written on the Middle East, particularly Syria, since the late 1970s focusing on various aspects of state-citizen relations. Her latest ethnography is A Shop of One’s Own: Independence and Reputation among Traders in Aleppo (2005).