Presidents Of Egypt

"In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. This was a war of self-defence in the noblest sense of the term. The government of national unity then established decided unanimously: We will take the initiative and attack the enemy, drive him back, and thus assure the security of Israel and the future of the nation."

"Lyndon's gone and dragged Nasser away from the fireplace and onto the balcony again. Once you get him out there, it's a helluva job to get him back to the fireplace again."

"I believe that we now have a duty to remove the aggressor from our land and to regain the Arab territory occupied by the Israelis. We can then engage in a clandestine struggle to liberate the land of Palestine, to liberate Haifa and Jaffa."

"We must fight our way to victory on a sea of blood and a horizon of fire."

"We have to go along a road covered with blood. We have no other alternative. For us it is a matter of life or death, a matter of living or existing. We have to be ready to face the challenges that await us."

"We knew that by closing the Gulf of Aqaba it might mean war with Israel. [If war comes] it will be total and the objective will be to destroy Israel."

"My countrymen, my blood spills for you and for Egypt. I will live for your sake and die for the sake of your freedom and honor. Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Gamal Abdel Nasser should die, each of you shall be Gamal Abdel Nasser ... Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation."

"If anyone thinks we have become tired, let me say that we are a struggling nation, a fighting nation, a patient nation."

"No person, not even the most simple one, takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered [in the Holocaust]."

"If the Jews win this battle, then the Arabs had better go bury their faces in the mud!"

"Our path to Palestine will not be covered with a red carpet or with yellow sand. Our path to Palestine will be covered with blood… In order that we may liberate Palestine, the Arab nation must unite, the Arab armies must unite, and a unified plan of action must be established"

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."

"Now with our concentrations in Sinai, the chances of war are fifty-fifty. But if we close the Strait, war will be a one hundred percent certainty."

"Let them kill Nasser! What is Nasser but one among many? I am alive, and even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdul Nasser!"

"If the refugees return to Israel – Israel will cease to exist."

"What was taken by force can only be retrieved by force."

"We are awaiting aggression by Israel and any supporters of Israel. We will make it a decisive battle and get rid of Israel once and for all… This is the dream of every Arab."

"You are from Britain. Would you accept to give Manchester to some other people? And if you are American, I ask the same way, do you accept to give California to some other people? Or would you accept the 'status quo' of occupying Manchester by some other people, by the Chinese for instance? And then reach agreement after expelling the people of Manchester from their homes, depriving them of their property, of everything? This is the question of Palestine."

"The holy march on which the Arab nation insists, will carry us forward from one victory to another ... the flag of freedom which flies over Baghdad today will fly over Amman and Riyadh. Yes, the flag of freedom which flies over Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad today will fly over the rest of the Middle East."

"The spirit of Bandung got its first test in the Middle East in the summer of 1956. At the head of a new radical military government, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was frustrated by fruitless negotiations with the Americans over loans. He resented that Egypt, long under British domination, still was forced to accept substantial foreign influence. Nasser wanted the Suez Canal, bisecting his country, to revert from British and French to Egyptian control, not least so that Egypt could benefit more from the substantial income from the canal. The United States urged negotiations. When London and Paris both declined, Nasser seized control of the canal zone in a sudden military operation on 26 July 1956. The Egyptian code word for the immediate start of the operation, cleverly woven into a lengthy Nasser speech in Alexandria, was Lesseps—the name of the French engineer who had designed the canal in the 1860s. In his Suez speech, Nasser summed up the injustices imperialism had committed not only against Egypt, but against all Arabs. Arabs had been second-class citizens in their own countries; they had been divided, or evicted, like the Palestinians. But no longer. In a speech laden with references to Bandung and anticolonial solidarity, Nasser declared a new Arab unity, of which Egypt and Syria would form the initial parts, but which all Arab states could join."

"We did not think that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."

"My reading of Camus, and certainly of his later stories, starts with the fact that he, in the late 1950s, was very much opposed to independence for Algeria. He in fact compared the FLN to Abdel Nasser in Egypt, after Suez, after 1956."

"It is small surprise that among tyrannical regimes and their defenders, America and Israel are so often identified as the same enemy. This is not merely a consequence of America's standing along behind Israel; the United States has aided various Arab countries very generously, and it has on some critical occasions backed Arab regimes, such as Nasser's Egypt in 1956 and Saudi Arabia in 1981, against Israel. The hostility is aroused largely because America and Israel represent democracy, equal rights for women, a higher quality of life, and a willingness to confront despotism. That is why the two non-Muslim countries that have suffered the heaviest losses from Islamic suicide murderers are Israel and the United States."

"I have learned by experience that a tragic end awaits anyone who dares cross swords with me; Nasser is no more, John and Robert Kennedy died at the hands of assassins, their brother Edward has been disgraced, Krushchev was toppled, the list is endless."

"First it is a question of International Law. The UN was intended to have a means of enforcing the law. It has no such means. Egypt and Israel have been breaking the law for 9 years without correction. Secondly, the Nasser danger is much more serious than a local friction. The real danger is we should be faced by a coalition of Arab, Muslim and anti-Western states, led nominally by Egypt but really by Russia. ... Such a danger, the Prime Minister saw, must be stopped."

"One of history's ironies is that Kosovo, a Muslim territory, owes its survival to the assistance of the Americans, just as Nasser's pseudo-victory against France, England, and Israel was obtained through the intervention of the Americans and Russians."

"It is true, as I have already stated, that I have been influenced by Marxist thought. But this is also true of many of the leaders of the new independent States. Such widely different persons as Gandhi, Nehru, Nkrumah, and Nasser all acknowledge this fact. We all accept the need for some form of socialism to enable our people to catch up with the advanced countries of this world and to overcome their legacy of extreme poverty. But this does not mean we are Marxists."