Following the 1956 Tripartite Aggression on Egypt (a.k.a. The Suez Crisis) in which Israel invaded Sinai and threatened the Suez Canal with the assistance of the British and the French, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was determined to establish a military deterrent. Especially after losing the entire air force in this war, Egypt was determined to launch a missile project that would act as a deterrent against possible future attacks. For that purpose, the Egyptian Air Force intelligence services sent agents to Europe to recruit German scientists to help build the project. But as soon as Israel got wind of the project, it considered it an existential threat and became determined to abort it by any means possible, including diplomatic pressure, sabotage, and even assassination. This presentation tells the story of this chapter of the Middle Eastern missile age. It studies steps taken by Egypt to build a missile project, Israeli measures to abort this project, and Egyptian countermeasures that aimed to neutralize Israeli efforts. By following the technical, military and intelligence aspects of the Egyptian missile project, the paper asks a wider question about the nature of the Nasser state and its ability to confront the existential threat that Israel posed.
Khaled Fahmy is Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. Educated at the American University in Cairo and the University of Oxford, and with previous teaching position at Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, he is an historian of the modern Middle East with specifical emphasis on nineteenth century Egypt. His books and articles deal with the history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the history of medicine, law and urban planning. Over the past few years, he has been using his social media platforms to share ideas about his new academic project: a military, social and cultural history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict.
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. For her PhD she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. As a EUME Fellow 2017-21 of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation she worked on her book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. Her follow-up project at EUME (2021-24), “Tracing Emancipation Under Rubbles of War”, retrieves the physical and political journeys of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoires that recount their struggles. Some of her research-based articles, essays and short-stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, the Freie Universität in Berlin, and continuing to teach at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts. In 2024 she works at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as a research associate within the project SONIC RESOCIALIZATION and remains an associated EUME Fellow in 2024-25.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.