Seventy-four years after the July Revolution, the issues of independence, unity, and the liberation of Palestine are still lingering, after the settlements took Egypt out of the confrontation and left the Arab world helpless in the face of American hegemony and the Zionist project.
Afrasianet - Dr. Hassan Nafia - We are celebrating the 74th anniversary of the July Revolution. Because I was less than 6 years old at the time, my first memories of it were associated with the "Triple Aggression".
I was approaching ten, and I was in my first year of middle school, when the teacher came into class and started talking about the subject he wanted us to turn into a color picture in the "sketchbook."
He stated that President Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted to build a "high dam" capable of storing large quantities of Nile River water behind it, to benefit from it in generating electricity and expanding the agricultural area in Egypt, but the United States withdrew its offer to participate in its funding, and Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal, so that it could use its resources to finance the project, which angered Britain and France, and pushed them to collude with Israel to wage war and topple Nasser.
Because the people of Egypt resisted the aggression, and the Arab peoples stood in solidarity with it, the aggressor countries were forced to stop the war and withdraw.
When I grabbed colored pens, trying to draw what was imprinted in my mind about "The Tale of Dam and Aggression", I found myself drawing planes filling the clear skies of Egypt, troops landing with flaky parachutes, and an audience on the ground carrying sticks and guns, ready to pounce on them.
Interestingly, I kept this particular notebook for many years, for no apparent reason. So I was very surprised when I found it while rearranging my personal papers, in preparation for my return home, after receiving my doctorate in political science from the Sorbonne University in 1977.
The strangest thing is that, the day after this return, I was watching on television from Egypt the scene of President Sadat landing at Ben Gurion Airport, and then I began to sweat with sadness and anger, as he began to shake hands with Menachem Begin, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and other criminals who killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Palestinians and Arabs.
I don't know, until this moment, why the two scenes were constantly connected in my mind: the scene of a first-year preparatory student writing in his sketchbook the picture that was imprinted in his mind about the tripartite aggression, and the scene of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem.
From the image of resistance Egypt to a visit to Jerusalem
It was not easy for a child whose image of struggling Egypt was settled, when it was resisting with the glory of treacherous aggression waged against it by an alien entity, carried on the backs of the two largest colonial powers in the history of mankind, to endure the scene of a weak Egypt, when its president was heading, for no acceptable or understandable reason, to visit the capital of occupied Palestine, while part of his own land was still occupied.
Then, young and old, he continued to follow the resounding impact of this fall on an Arab world whose decade was gradually disintegrating, under a presidency that was unable to realize and absorb Egypt's leadership role and its importance to all the peoples of the region.
It is astonishing that the wheel of this fall began to set in motion after a massive victory in 1973 and the shame of a major defeat inflicted on Egypt and the Arab world in 1967.
When Sadat was able to wage a coordinated war with Syria on October 6, 1973, during which he succeeded in uniting the Arab states in order to teach the Zionist entity an unforgettable lesson, we were all overwhelmed with a tremendous sense of euphoria, and we thought that he had succeeded in what Nasser himself, the Arab, had failed to the core.
However, it soon became clear that there was something behind the pile, and that the miraculous victory achieved on the battlefields was at risk of collapse in the political salons, through a Zionist-American penetration of the region led by Henry Kissinger himself, the US Secretary of State at the time.
Its main goal was to remove Egypt from the equation of the military conflict in the region, which was already done through a series of interrelated steps, beginning with Sadat's slogan "The October War is the last war in the region," and ending with his signing of a unilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1979, before the Palestinian people obtained an independent state, and even before the withdrawal from occupied Sinai was completed.
Egypt's exit and the rise of resistance forces
The October 1973 war was indeed the last war fought by the Arab armies against the Zionist entity, but the armed conflict with it continued and began to intensify over time.
All that has changed since then is that the desire and keenness to manage it has shifted from the hands of armies, states, and official Arab regimes to the hands of non-state actors: the PLO, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen. etc.
Since Egypt's exit from the arena of confrontation coincided with an Islamic revolution that moved Iran from orbiting the orbit of Zionist-American policies to the position of a country naturally qualified to lead forces opposed to policies of dependency, it was natural that this shift would have enormous repercussions on the map of power and its balance of power in the region.
At the time, the logic of the rationale was that countries that claimed the Palestinian cause as the first national issue and saw the Zionist entity as the main source of the threat should find that Iran had become a strategic depth for them in the face of a common threat.
But what happened was the exact opposite of this logic. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who had been seeking to lead the "Resistance Front" after Sadat concluded a unilateral peace treaty with the entity, began to promote the argument that the danger posed by the Iranian "export of the revolution" had become the main threat to the entire Arab world.
He did not hesitate to wage a war against Iran that lasted for 8 years, to which the Gulf Arab states joined in, which were supporting him with money and weapons.
As soon as the war ended, these countries began to prepare to join the Camp David process.
What is more dangerous is that at this very moment, President Saddam occupied Kuwait and forcibly annexed it to Iraq, thus opening a path not only towards the penetration of the United States into the region, but also towards breaking the psychological barrier that stands in the way of normalizing relations with the entity.
This explains why all Arab countries agreed, after the "Kuwait Liberation War", to participate in the "Madrid Conference", which opened the way towards concluding the "Oslo" agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, followed by the "Wadi Araba" agreement with Jordan in 1994.
The door was then opened to the Abraham Accords, which other Arab countries were gradually involved in, suggesting that the Arab world was effectively abandoning the Palestinian cause. This was the regional context that prepared the start of the "Al-Aqsa Flood."
From the "Al-Aqsa Flood" to the War on Iran
Netanyahu thought that he could achieve the "Greater Israel" project by peaceful means, by liquidating the Palestinian issue and normalizing with the Arab states at the same time. But his sense of personal humiliation after the "flood" led him to insist on establishing this project by force of arms and as soon as possible.
Recognizing that this could not be achieved without toppling the Iranian regime, on the one hand, and direct U.S. involvement in military operations against Iran on the other, he decided to rely on the entity's own capabilities to eliminate Iran's "proxies in the region" first.
At this stage, he was content with US financial and armament support, confident that success would be enough to entice Trump to engage directly in the next phase.
This is what has already happened, and explains the U.S. involvement in the 2025 war, which aimed to destroy Iran's nuclear and missile programs, and then in the 2026 war, which aimed to topple the Iranian regime.
But the wind did not blow as Netanyahu or Trump's ships would have liked. The regime has not fallen, its nuclear and missile programs have not been destroyed, and it is still able to wage a protracted war of attrition against both the United States and the Zionist entity.
In the midst of this war, the balance of power in the region began to change completely, and the Arab world found itself sandwiched between its conflicting parties, even if they were allies, and began to receive blows from every direction.
Consequently, he has become unable not only to protect the Palestinian cause and save it from being lost, but also to protect itself and preserve its wealth and capabilities.
Huge investments without protection or partnership
Despite massive Gulf investments in the United States, amounting to $141 billion in direct investments, $1.2 trillion in securities, and investment pledges approaching $5 trillion, Trump did not bother to initiate prior consultation with the Gulf Arab states, before making the decision to ally with the Zionist entity to wage war on Iran.
This is despite the fact that it is aware of the fact that it is putting the capabilities of all the Gulf Arab states in grave danger and putting them in the wind, and despite Iran's clear warning that it is fighting an existential war that justifies its targeting of all military bases and American interests throughout the region.
Therefore, the entire Arab world seems to be in a state of complete loss and paralysis. It is unable to protect its "national cause" by establishing an independent Palestinian state on only 28% of the motherland, neither through a surrendered authority nor through resistance factions.
It is incapable of even moving Trump's plan to rebuild Gaza through a "peace council" that has turned into a "dying fantasy," even though Trump is leading it himself. He is even unable to protect an oil wealth that, despite all its semblance of insanity, is a major source of income for the millions of Arab citizens living there. Isn't that a great tragedy?
The Same Issues 74 Years Later
At the same time, Arab states that boast of their close alliance with the United States cannot claim to be able to provide any real support for the Palestinian cause, or to defend any measure, even a little, of the rights of the Palestinian people;
Nasser was not anti-American when he staged the July Revolution 74 years ago, but he discovered, over time, that he could never build an independent state if he continued to defend Palestinian rights or refused to swirl in the Zionist-American orbit.
This is the predicament that most Arab countries have been trapped in, and Iran refuses to slip into it, and has decided to confront and challenge it.
Isn't it strange that the issues for which Nasser struggled, namely national independence, Arab unity, and the liberation of Palestine, remain the same issues that all Arab states have been unable to achieve, even though he left our world 56 years ago?.
