In early 1961, when the waters of the Aswan High Dam were threatening to flood the great stone pharaohs at Abu Simbel, US President John F Kennedy offered Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser 10 million USD to preserve Egypt’s ancient history. It was the first move by an American president to acknowledge and support the nationalistic goals of the new state and the wave of Arab nationalism. “For too long the United States had dealt with the Arab world almost exclusively in the context of the East-West struggle,” Kennedy once stated in a 1959 speech, “but if we learn from the lessons of the past – if we can refrain from pressing our case so hard that the Arabs feel their neutrality and nationalism are threatened, the Middle East can become an area of strength and hope.” Despite of Kennedy’s dreams of a Jewish state in Palestine, which has always been a major source of strife between American and Arab leaders, he still preferred and stressed on the use of diplomacy to ensure that these differences would be solved effectively – a strategy that current American and Arab leaders should…
