On this second week of June, Arab and global history witnessed articulated events that changed the path of peoples and political systems, and left deep imprints in collective memory.
The program “In this week” – through the Al -Jazeera platform 360 – reviewed the most prominent historical stations that were printed this week with unforgettable events, from the most famous rhetoric in Arab history to the beginning of the era of equality in wages.
On June 9, 1967, the Egyptian people were on a date with a fateful speech by the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, which came 5 days after the June defeat, when Egypt was hit by an Israeli air strike that destroyed 85% of its military aircraft.
At that difficult moment, Abdel Nasser thought of leaving his position and asked Mohamed Hassanein Heikal to write the letter of step.
But Heikal wrote a letter that historians considered one of the most important things he wrote in his life, as he avoided using the word “defeat” and used the word “setback” instead of it, and the goal was to reduce the shock to the people and avoid demanding accountability that might be mentioned in the defeat of 1948 and the fall of the monarchy.
Instead of the expected anger, the people descended millions to the streets after the speech, not to demonstrate against Abdel Nasser, but to demand that he retreat from the decision to step down, and the writer Sharif Younis in his book “The Bible” was these demonstrations spontaneous and not fabricated.
The popular reaction came as a direct result of the 15 -year media mobilization situation before the war, as the regime succeeded in building a strong ideology that made people solidify automatically, and the citizens came out without realizing the truth of the losses and chaos of withdrawal.
Abdel Nasser took advantage of this popular support to regain his control over the army, and the weakest authority of Abdel Hakim Amer, the second man in the state, before his dismissal and placed under house arrest until his death suicide, according to the official account.
The Law of Equality in America
On June 10, 1963, the women’s struggle in America achieved a historic achievement, when President John Kennedy adopted a law that obliges equality between men and women in the wage when the work is equal, and the law came as a culmination of a long journey that spanned more than 93 years.
The claims to achieve equality in wages began during the 19th century, but without sufficient social pressure to push them towards legislation, and women were not considered part of the basic workforce, and their work was seen as a secondary role or complementary to the primary breadwinner.
The Second World War was a turning point, when large numbers of men went to the battlefields and left a huge void in civil jobs, and women filled this void, their percentage increased in the workforce during the 1940s, and more of them joined the work unions.
In the 1960s, there were about 25 million working women, but women were paid only 59 cents for every dollar that men earn, and the legal battle continued by Esther Peterson after appointing a head of the Women’s Affairs Office at the Ministry of Labor.
Despite the approval of the law, it was not without gaps, as he left the door open to discrimination in the name of seniority, efficiency and quality of production. Even today, official figures indicate that the average weekly income for women is still 83% of the average men’s income.
The death of Assad Hafez
On the tenth of June 2000, Syrian President Hafez al -Assad died, ending a 3 -year ruling, and his death sparked great feelings greatly. While sadness was immersed in his supporters, the opponents felt very comfortable with the departure of those who considered him a symbol of repression and tyranny.
But the death of the father, the father, was not the end, but rather a station in the rule of the Al -Assad family for Syria, and Abdel Halim Khaddam, Vice President, began arranging the process of transferring power to the heir of the late president (his son Bashar) by issuing two decrees to raise him to the rank of a team and appoint him as the commander -in -chief of the army.
The Syrian People’s Assembly held an extraordinary session to amend Article 83 of the Constitution, as it reduced the age of candidacy from 40 to 34 years, which is the age of Bashar at the time, and the decision quickly passed and unanimously in amending the legal and popular level.
The international community received this unprecedented inheritance in a surprisingly welcome system, as then US Secretary of State Madeleine Ulbright expressed her satisfaction that Bashar pledged to continue his father’s approach, and considered it an indication of stability instead of opening the door for an open conflict of power.
Bashar invested in his different form from his father to build a new legitimacy, providing himself as a civilized young doctor alongside his European features, and promised to reform and political freedom, which sparked the optimism of the Syrians and the emergence of the “Spring of Damascus Spring” movement.
However, Bashar soon retracted his promises on the pretext that there are unjustified foundations in Syrian politics, to return to the administration of the country according to his father’s approach. In the end, Ibn al -Assad also left, but in a different way from the departure of his father, because the ends are not always similar.