A little under a month before the anniversary of the devastating 5 June 1967 military occupation of Arab territories, a debate has started over a 1970 recording of a conversation between Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi over the management of the Arab-Israeli struggle.
The recorded conversation took place on 3 August 1970, only a few weeks after the end of the War of Attrition which started in 1967 and lasted until June 1970 when Nasser agreed to a US ceasefire proposed by US secretary of state William Rogers. In the conversation, Nasser explains his decision to accept the Rogers Plan to Gaddafi and, in the course of the conversation, shares his frustration with the position of some Arab capitals that were objecting to Egypt signing up to the ceasefire deal after three years of exhausting warfare with Israel.
In essence, Nasser told Gaddafi that Egypt cannot be blamed for accepting the Rogers Plan when it had been left to fight Israel on its own. Nor, he added, could it be blamed for accepting the political path offered by the plan which focused on the territories that Israel occupied in the 1967 War — Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank and Gaza — rather than the entirety of historic Palestine, which is what the propaganda promulgated in the Arab world before the 1967 defeat demanded.
In the 15-minute recording, Nasser told Gaddafi: “Let those who wish to fight, fight”, and impatiently demanded, “Let them get off our back.”
In the recording, Nasser sounds sceptical about the ability of Palestinian freedom fighters to liberate the West Bank through attacks they were hoping to launch against Israel from Jordan, where they were based after the 1967 War.
For anti-Nasser political camps, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, the recording is proof that Nasser was not planning to fight on until the liberation of Palestine and was drawing a clear line between liberating Sinai, which he talks about in the recording as a prime objective, and wider Arab aims.
Critics argue that Nasser was walking back from the propaganda line promising total defeat of Israel and bowing to political compromises that all but granted Israel the right to continue its occupation of historic Palestine.
The audio recording of the conversation was posted on the website of Nasser TV, a cooperative project between the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the family of Abdel-Nasser. It surfaced last week and went viral on social media.
The pro-Nasser camp were quick to claim that the recording is an AI production and that it is no coincidence that it was posted just as Israel is set to expand its genocidal war against Gaza.
Abdel-Hakim Abdel-Nasser, Nasser’s son, issued a statement confirming the authenticity of the tape. He said that the recording was less evidence of Nasser’s position vis-à-vis Israel, and more about the disappointment Nasser felt about Arab countries’ failure to offer Egypt sufficient support while pushing it to continue fighting Israel alone.
According to Abdel-Hakim, the recording does not show Nasser as a submissive leader but one who was highly rational, basing his decisions on the best interests of his people.
Abdel-Hakim made his statement after claims that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina had deliberately leaked the recording. Both the Bibliotheca and Abdel-Hakim confirmed that the controversial audio is part of a wider collection of recordings and documents that the family has shared with the Bibliotheca.
Khaled Azab, founder and manager of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Zakerat Masr programme (Egypt’s Memory programme), says the material given by the Gamal Abdel-Nasser Foundation, headed by Nasser’s daughter, political science professor Hoda Abdel-Nasser, was divided in two tranches. The first was designed to document affairs in Egypt in between July 1952, following the ouster of Egypt’s last monarch by the Free Officers, and September 1970, when Nasser passed away five weeks after the controversial conversation with Gaddafi, while the second is strictly about Nasser.
Azab, who has spent 10 years managing the Zakerat Masr programme, said the content of the recording that went viral on social media last week is compatible with other documents and recordings that the programme has collected, including those offered by the Nasser family.
The “rational and calculating approach that Nasser adopted at the time vis-à-vis the war with Israel is manifested in several other documents and recordings,” said Azab. He added that Nasser’s documents and those of his aides and diplomats who were managing Egypt’s foreign relations at the time showed that Nasser was keen on having good relations with the US before the Suez crisis and had condoned the attempts of some aides, including his eventual successor Anwar Al-Sadat, to open communication channels with Washington.
“There were communications between Nasser and [former US president John] Kennedy and there is evidence that if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated Egyptian-American relations and the progress of the Arab-Israeli struggle would have taken a very different path.” Azab added that more placatory aspects of Nasser’s character have been eradicated from the dominant narrative about him.
The image of Nasser as a reckless leader who thought he could fight the world and win is not supported by the many documents that are in the public domain, Azab continued, concluding that the most pertinent questions about the recording do not concern its authenticity but who decided to give it this level of attention by posting it on social media, and whether or not the uploaded version was edited.
According to Abdallah Senawy, a prominent Egyptian commentator with Nasserist affiliations, the audio was “certainly edited” in a way that tampers with the content. In the original conversation, and the transcription thereof, Senawy said, Nasser was not adopting a submissive position or signing off on any settlement of the conflict with Israel, nor was he dropping the Palestinian issue from Egypt’s agenda. Rather, he was reflecting on two things: how to liberate land occupied by Israel in 1967, with an eye on what the Egyptian army he was then rebuilding could actually achieve, and the limited support but high level of pressure several Arab capitals were putting on Cairo vis-à-vis the military conflict with Israel.
“His angry words are a reflection of his frustration, not evidence of his giving up on the right of people, especially Palestinians, to fight for their rights. Egypt fought for three successive years in the War of Attrition. Nobody could claim that Nasser was prescribing submission.”
The transcript of the full, unedited conversation, says Senawy, shows Nasser was talking about a gradual and carefully calculated process to liberate Egyptian territories occupied by Israel. “He was not saying that he would settle for any peace deal, he was saying that he did not want to play in the hands of Israel by openly declining any possible settlement.” Nor did Nasser want to overstretch the capacity of the Egyptian army after its brave performance of the War of Attrition.
“Documents cannot be addressed in a void,” stressed Senawy. And the context of this audio is the end of the War of Attrition and preparations for a gradual process of liberation that take into consideration the balance of power, international relations, and the home front.
According to the transcript of the recording, Nasser told Gaddafi it was highly unlikely that Israel would sign up to a fair peace deal and there wasn’t enough international pressure on Israel, especially from the US, for it to accept what was necessary for a permanent end to hostilities with its Arab neighbours whose territories it had occupied.
Senawy agreed the most pertinent question about the tape is the timing of its posting on social media. Whoever chose to do this, he said, was not just trying to discredit Nasser’s principles but to undermine the concept of the right to fight against the Israeli occupation. “It is an attempt to promote despair and submission.”
Nasser was willing to revisit his political choices about regional and international developments, says Senawy. After the 1967 War, he actively critiqued his own performance and that of his aides, and openly talked about the mistakes that had been made.
Senawy, who has published titles on Nasser’s critical choices post 1967, including Akhil Garihan (Achilles Wounded) that was published by Al-Shorouk in 2019, is currently working on a new volume that examines Nasser’s take on the Arab-Israeli struggle and the role of Egypt. Set to be published by Al-Maraya this summer, it is based on Nasser’s handwritten documents during the 1948 War. It will, says Senawy, reveal two things: the consistency of Nasser’s core beliefs, and his willingness to revisit and reassess events as developments unfolded.
Khaled Mansour, editor of Tashrih Al-Naksa, (Anatomy of the Defeat), a volume of collective articles published by Al-Maraya in 2017, 50 years after the 1967 War, agrees that Nasser went through a process of self-criticism after the defeat.
“He removed Abdel-Hakim Amer,” his closest companion and the minister of defence at the time.
“The big question, of course, concerns the outcomes of the process of self-criticism that Nasser engaged in after 1967. It is not too difficult to argue that on the home front little was done in terms of redressing course,” says Mansour. He adds, however, that it is clear that Nasser confronted what could be and could not be done vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli struggle.
According to Mansour, anyone shocked by the recording of Nasser’s conversation with Gaddafi in August 1970 is shocked because they can’t square the recording with their preferred image of Nasser. This, he said, is the result of the lack of objective historical research. Much needs to be done, he added, to understand the full impact of the 1967 War on foreign relation choices and the home front.
He argues that the impact of the defeat on bureaucratic institutions, syndicates, and other national bodies requires study in order to understand Nasser’s embrace of realpolitik. “Only then will we be able to conclude whether or not Sadat’s plan for a war to be followed by negotiations with Israel was a total departure from the political parameters of the Nasser regime.”
Associate professor of Arabic Studies at Duke University Walid Al-Khashab argues that the post-1967 moment has been insufficiently investigated. Al-Khashab is the author of two books that examine Egyptian comedy films in the second half of the 20th century. Mohandess Al-Bahga (Engineer of Joy) and Qahqaha Fawq Al-Nil (Chuckles over the Nile) both published by Al-Maraya in 2023 and 2025, examine cinema production in the Nasser years, especially after the 1967 War.
Al-Khashab argues that while there were shifts, including the production of much lighter films, “there is no evidence to support the assumption that the state wanted to divert people’s attention away from the 1967 defeat, or that the increase in the number of comedy films being produced was the result of instructions from the state.”
And while the parameters of film censorship moved after the 1967 defeat, with more nudity tolerated and non-heterosexual relations being portrayed in films, “again, there has been little research into whether or not these shifts were ordered or not.”
On 11 May, Al-Khashab is planning a public discussion about Engineer of Joy and Chuckles over the Nile. Ultimately, he argues, people found solace in the comedies released after the 1967 defeat.
While Al-Khashab says some of Naguib Mahfouz’s critical novels, and plays by Tawfik Al-Hakim, seem to indicate a decline in censorship, at least temporarily, he points out that “Tharthara fawq Al-Nil [A Drift on the Nile], which mocks the declining state of affairs in Egypt and warns against the impact of growing corruption and apathy, came out in 1966, before the June 1967 defeat, and is considered prophetic in a sense because it shows a defeated and misguided society.”
Al-Khashab says that while he is not particularly interested in demystifying Nasser, what is needed is to examine events from far more perspectives, and the aura that many still wish to associate with Nasser does not allow for a serious examination of his time in power. He argues that there is something universal about the wish to have an impressive political leader. “It happened with the French, who continued to support everything about Napoleon Bonaparte for decades. It was only after the dramatic failure and defeat of Napoleon III that people decided that it was time to accept the failure of the political project that Bonaparte and his nephew stood for.”
Several novels and plays produced after 1967, by writers like Mahfouz, Al-Hakim and others, started the process of a critical reading of the Nasser era — a process that continued in a more uninhibited fashion after Nasser passed away. Al-Khashab refers to the film Shayaa min Al-Khowf (A taste of fear), a metaphoric criticism of authoritarian rule and the need to stand up to it, produced in 1969, and to Mahfouz’s novel Al-Karnak, a more amplified criticism of the absence of political and personal rights which Mahfouz started in 1970 but which was only published in 1974. “But even before the death of Nasser, Mahfouz used intense symbolism in several works, including Al-Lass wal-Kelab [The Thief and the Dogs], originally published in 1961, to serve the purpose of political satire.”
Before the debate over the Nasser-Gaddafi recording hit social media, Nasser’s legacy was already in focus after the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was awarded to Egyptian novelist Mohamed Samir Nada for Salat Al-Kalak (Prayer of Anxiety), an outright satire of Nasser’s rule that led to the 1967 defeat and the attempt of the Nasser regime to offer a less disturbing account of the “setback”.
The novel is set in 1977, in the isolated and forgotten village of Nagea Al-Manassi in the heart of Upper Egypt, where the inhabitants believe that a minefield surrounds the village, which would be dangerous to attempt to cross, and little is known about the wider world except that a war between Egypt and Israel has been raging since 1967 and the Israeli enemy is trying to penetrate Egypt through the village, meaning that Nagea Al-Manassi is the first line of defence on the Egyptian border.
The book’s basic proposition, and the fact it was published in Tunisia rather than Egypt, prompted much criticism on social media. In remarks on the debate, Nada said he only resorted to a Tunisian publisher after three Egyptian publishers declined the text on the basis that it was too politically sensitive.
The coincidence of the debate over the IPAF-winning novel and the surfacing of the recording of the Nasser-Gaddafi conversation prompted some on social media to suggest that there is a conspiracy to undermine the role of Egypt in the Arab-Israeli struggle at a time when Cairo is trying to mediate a ceasefire in Gaza. Others argue that it is a deliberate attempt to undermine Nasser’s reputation.
According to Senawy, the issue is not about the history of the role of Egypt or the image of Nasser. “The issue is about the questions of today and tomorrow, about the unresolved Arab-Israeli struggle and about the role of Egypt in this struggle.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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