Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 117, 123

Vignette

The Middle West Meets the Middle East

By Andrew I. Killgore

“Mr. Killgore, when will the United States make Nasser get rid of his Nazi scientists?” The voice of a furious young man came from the front row of an audience I had been addressing at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1965.

Before I could think of how to reply, the whole background behind that angry question flashed before my mind’s eye. Since just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, a media campaign had been in full fury to poison U.S. relations with the Arabs, and particularly with President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt.

Nasser was a Castro-style dictator, the Israel-leaning U.S. newspapers charged. And Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had thwarted U.S. attempts to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1962, was a Nasser-style dictator.

Nazi engineers were in Egypt, the allegations went, designing rockets to rain on Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Israel. How this would be possible from the puny industrial base in Egypt was never explained. But the charges continued relentlessly in 1964 and 1965.

President Kennedy had made a good start with the Arabs. As a senator he had called for the independence of Algeria from a cruel French overlordship. As president his wheat shipments to Egypt achieved such a scale that bread became locally known as Khubis Amrikaani (American bread) in Egypt.

Some of us in the State Department’s office of Near East affairs, notably Egyptian desk officer Curtis Jones, Near East Affairs director (later Ambassador) Robert Strong, and Near East South Asia Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot feared that the wheat program would be killed, relations with the Arabs poisoned and the ground prepared for a new Middle East war between the Jews and the Arabs. Our fears turned out to be justified, but we could never gain the attention and support of Secretary of State Dean Rusk who, despite his brilliance and personal decency, believed in “let’s not do it.”

But back to the angry question at the end of my talk. An elegant British-accented voice from the back of the room said, “Mr. Killgore, let me answer that question. Nasser will get rid of his Nazi scientists when the United States gets rid of its Nazi scientists.”

This incisive answer, from brilliant Palestinian intellectual/professor Dr. Fayez Sayyegh, referred, of course, to the fact that Dr. Werner von Braun and other German rocket engineers captured by the United States at the end of World War II and who were working on the U.S. space program, were at least nominal Nazis.

And thus I met a great Palestinian, teaching that year at nearby Macalester College in St. Paul, MN on a sabbatical from the University of Beirut (AUB). At his request I made talks to three of his Macalester classes, and learned about his equally brilliant brother, Dr. Yusuf Sayyegh, who was also an AUB professor.

I learned a lot more from Dr. Sayyegh than he learned from me. We discussed, but couldn’t figure out why, such an extraordinarily large number of brainy people were appearing among the Palestinians.

Eventually I concluded that perhaps the answer is the same one suggested to me by an Irish journalist working some years ago in Palestine. I had addressed an inquiry to him along that line about Ireland and Irishmen. After a long pause he finally said, “Perhaps it’s the repression.”