"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."