Chapter Seventeen: Transition and Stalemate, 1980-1990

1979 came as a profound shock to the people of the Middle East. The transformative events of that pivotal year, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s (r. 1979-2003) consolidation of power, the sudden emergence of jihadi groups, and the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, shook the region to its very foundations and led many observers to predict new and trying times ahead. They were not wrong. During the next decade, the Middle East experienced a brutal, eight-year-long war between Islamic Iran and Baʿathist Iraq, a wave of Islamist insurgencies, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and a popular uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was, in sum, a critical decade of important transitions and bitter stalemates.

The Islamist Challenge

In many ways, the most fundamental change that occurred in the region after 1979 was the rapid growth of Islamism. As we saw in Chapter Sixteen, Islamism had emerged in the 1970s thanks to the support of the Saudi government and, especially, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (r. 1970-1981). By the early 1980s, however, it had transformed into a decidedly grassroots movement that was neither beholden to, nor controlled by, its former patrons. Indeed, by that point, it had grown so strong that it had not only begun to supplant Arab nationalism as the most powerful insurgent ideology in the Middle East but had also, in both its mainstream and jihadi variants, become the primary challenge to pan-Arabist and conservative regimes alike.

Arab Presidents for Life

That Islamism had displaced secular Arab nationalism as the primary revolutionary ideology in the Middle East is hardly surprising in light of the changes that had gradually occurred in the pan-Arabist states since the Six-Day War. By the early 1980s, regimes such as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq that had once promoted sweeping political change in the region and that had fought to drastically reduce inequality at home had lost much of their radical drive. They continued to justify their rule by claiming that they were seeking to advance the general will of the people and they still reliably mouthed revolutionary platitudes, but the increasingly bloated and rigid pan-Arabist regimes no longer invested those slogans with any real meaning. On the contrary, the leaders of those states had long since abandoned their earlier commitment to revolutionary change in favor of a more practical and cynical goal: retaining their grip on power.

The particulars differed in important ways, but the transformation of those regimes largely followed the same pattern. First, their rulers constructed intricate administrative structures designed to collect power in their hands and to prevent lower-ranking members of the ruling class from challenging them. For instance, Hafez al- Assad (r. 1970-2000) carefully fostered tension among the governing elite in Damascus and required all high-ranking officials to report only to him, a tactic that prevented his subordinates from creating a unified front powerful enough to insinuate itself into the decision-making process. Second, while leaders like Assad continued to rule through nominally autonomous political parties, they increasingly manipulated and controlled those organizations through traditional patronage networks that were often based on clan and ethnoreligious ties. As we saw in Chapter Sixteen, for example, Saddam Hussein ran Iraq and its ostensibly independent Baʿath Party through a small, reliable group of Sunni Arabs linked together not through shared ideological convictions but instead through their common membership in the al-Bu Nasir clan to which he belonged. Similarly, Assad controlled Syria through a patronage network based in the Alawite community from which he came.

Finally, with the partial exception of oil-rich Iraq, each of the pan-Arabist states abandoned Arab-socialist economic policies when it became clear that those approaches could no longer generate the tax revenue required to provide the subsidized goods that kept the masses satisfied or to fund the security services that held them in check when they were not. However, this shift did not represent an ideological change of heart or an endorsement of a free-enterprise system. Instead, it amounted to a cynical, calculated embrace of crony capitalism for the purpose of buttressing the regime. Compelled to auction off state assets as part of a debt settlement deal, for instance, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak (r. 1981-2011) arranged for a group of well-connected capitalists to purchase state monopolies at prices that were well-below market value, thereby ensuring that his regime continued to have access to the wealth that those assets generated.

No subject was more emblematic of the radical regimes’ shift from being agents of revolution to defenders of the kleptocratic status quo than the issue of the succession. All of the pan-Arabist governments had originally established succession procedures that, while undemocratic, reserved to high-ranking party officials the power to select the next ruler. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the reigning leaders of the Arab-nationalist states were dismantling those systems in favor of an informal new arrangement wherein the incumbent rulers anointed their sons as their successors.

Thus, Hafez al-Assad first groomed his son Bassel as heir apparent, and following his death in a car accident in 1994, shifted his attentions to his younger son Bashir (r.2000-2024). Likewise Saddam Hussein designated his son, Qusay (1966-2003), as heir apparent in 2001, and Hosni Mubarak began preparing his son, Gamal (1963- ), for the presidency during the last years of his tenure. It is true that of the three only Bashir al-Assad went on to succeed his father, but that was only because exigent circumstances, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab Spring in 2011, prevented Qusay and Gamal from following suit. Thus, the radical republics that had once challenged the imperial order abroad, attacked privilege at home, and claimed to represent the general will had, by the late-twentieth century, been transformed into de facto dynastic monarchies headed by “presidents for life” dedicated above all else to keeping power in the hands of the ruling family.

People might have tolerated the ruling classes’ corruption and even the autocratic nature of their regimes had those governments proven able to deliver the material improvements that they had promised. They could not. Instead, as the passage of time had so painfully revealed, the pan-Arabist regimes had proven to be as incompetent as they were corrupt. This reality was particularly obvious in Egypt. Neither Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (r. 1952-1970) much ballyhooed Arab Socialism nor Sadat’s program of economic liberalization, the Infitah, had succeeded in generating anything even remotely close to the living standards that the regime had assured would be forthcoming.

For many, the pan-Arabist regimes’ inability to achieve the economic growth that they had promised was the last straw. Coupled with the undemocratic nature of the Arab-nationalist states and their endemic corruption, the failure to produce a rising standard of living resulted in a precipitous decline in enthusiasm beginning in the late 1970s for the once radical regimes and, more broadly, for the ideology of pan-Arabism that they claimed to champion. As a result, more and more people in the Arab world began to search for a political alternative. Increasingly, they found it in Islamism.

Mainstream Islamists

Moderate Islamist groups that sought to reform society from within were the prime beneficiaries of the ideology’s growing appeal. This was certainly the case in Egypt. There, the revived, and now peaceful, Muslim Brotherhood experienced a surge in membership over the course of the 1980s as people who had lost faith in the secular state flocked to its banner. The organization worked tirelessly and successfully to translate its growing popularity into political power, winning an impressive thirty-six seats in the Egyptian parliament in 1987. It also moved to increase its social influence by gaining control of important civic bodies including the professional societies for doctors, lawyers, and scientists. By the late 1980s, as a result, the Muslim Brotherhood had not merely reestablished itself but had become a major social and political force.

A shift in values and mores in Egypt over the course of the 1980s and 1990s reflected Islamism’s surging popularity. Led by Egyptians who had absorbed Wahhabist ideas while working in Saudi Arabia, a steadily rising share of the population began to embrace traditional Islamic practices. Qurʾanic recitations replaced music on the radio, alcohol consumption fell, and family photographs came down from their perches on walls and atop dressers. This change was most evidenced in a return to longstanding Islamic gender norms. Men took to wearing traditional clothing and to sporting beards, while rising numbers of women embraced practices that had fallen out of favor among middle-class Egyptians during the mid-twentieth century such as gender segregation and, especially, veiling. This last change was impossible to miss. While only 30 percent of Egyptian women had covered their heads in the 1970s, fully 65 percent did so by the 1990s.

Egypt was hardly alone in experiencing the Islamist revolution. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, a growing share of people in other Arab countries followed suit in abandoning secular mores in favor of Islamic practices and values. As had happened in Egypt, Islamic books grew in popularity, women who once favored Western modes of dress began to wear traditional Muslim attire, and, thanks to lavish Saudi funding, the number of mosques and the rate of mosque attendance rose steadily. Meanwhile, everywhere they were legal, Islamist political parties began to make big gains. Even Türkiye, with its long secular tradition, witnessed the emergence of a potent Islamist political movement, the Islamist Welfare Party, in the 1980s and 1990s. Its growth was so rapid, in fact, that the party managed to briefly win control of Türkiye’s government in 1996. It was a taste of things to come.

Jihadis

Meanwhile, inspired by the ideas of the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) and, after 1979, by the success of the Iranian Revolution, a small minority eschewed moderate groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and instead swelled the ranks of the militant Islamist organizations that had begun to emerge in the 1970s. The jihadis shared many of the same goals as the moderates but differed sharply with them over the best way to secure those ends. While mainstream Islamists hoped to achieve an Islamic government peacefully from within the constituted political system, the jihadis instead sought to impose Islamic rule through violence. In fact, these groups believed that individual Muslims were not merely permitted but were in fact obligated to overthrow the secular state, which the Egyptian theorist of radical Islam Muhammad Faraj (1954-1982) had dubbed the “near enemy,” as the first step toward establishing an Islamic polity governed by the shariʿa law code. Only then, Faraj maintained, could the Muslim Middle East end its subordination to the “far enemy,” meaning the West, and regain its rightful place as the globe’s leading civilization.

Egypt once more led the way. Long the center of jihadism, the country already had a number of well-established extremist organizations at the start of the 1980s including Islamic Jihad and the “blind shaykh” Omar Abdel Rahman’s (1938-2017) Jama’a al-Islamiyya. Dedicated to establishing an Islamist state through force, these groups had become bitterly disillusioned with Sadat’s government for its unwillingness to impose Islamism on the country. They seethed as his failure to implement the shariʿa law code as he had promised and derided him as a hypocrite whose claim to be the pious president reflected little more than a cynical ploy to win popular support. They even railed at his willingness to permit his wife, Jihan (1933-2021), to engage in “immoral conduct” such as her televised dance with President Jimmy Carter (r. 1977-1981) at a White House function.

The peace treaty with Israel was the final straw. Furious that Sadat had abandoned the Palestinians and accepted Israeli rule of Jerusalem, Islamic Jihad began plotting his assassination shortly after he had signed the deal. It did not take the organization long to succeed. During a televised military parade in 1981 celebrating the anniversary of the successful assault across the Suez Canal during the 1973 war, four soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad leapt from a troop transport and poured a hail of gunfire into the presidential reviewing stand. Riddled with bullets, Sadat died at the scene. Lightly injured in the attack, his vice president, Husni Mubarak, succeeded him as Egypt’s president.

The strength of the Egyptian jihadi organizations waxed and waned over the next few years. In the immediate aftermath of Sadat’s assassination, the regime arrested so many jihadis that their organizations nearly collapsed. Thanks to the government’s inexplicable decision to release most of them from prison in the mid 1980s, however, both Jama’a al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad, now under the leadership of Ayman

Zawahiri (1951-2022), were able to reconstitute themselves in the late 1980s. They followed by initiating a brutal terror campaign in 1992 that targeted security personnel and foreign tourists, whom they blamed for bringing Western corruption to their country. To the shock of many Egyptians, they also attacked intellectuals including the prominent defender of secularism, Farag Foda (1946-1992), whom they killed in 1992, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), who survived a stabbing in 1994. All told, more than 1,300 people died in the jihadis’ wave of terror.

Meanwhile, in Syria, the violence between the Assad regime and the jihadist Syrian Muslim Brotherhood that had begun in the late 1970s escalated dramatically in the early part of the 1980s. The new round of violence began in June 1980 when the jihadis, who were utterly opposed to the idea of an Alawite-dominated secular government, set off a retaliatory cycle of violence by attempting to assassinate Assad. The regime’s reaction was as swift as it was savage. Shortly after the attack, state security forces entered a prison in Palmyra and ruthlessly executed hundreds of Islamists detained there. Dramatically upping the ante, the jihadis responded to that action by seizing the city of Hama in February 1982 in a bid to precipitate a broad revolt against Assad. Though well executed, the plan ultimately failed. Thanks to the quick mobilization of the army, the regime was able to prevent the nationwide uprising that the brotherhood hoped to provoke. Under the command of Assad’s brother, Rifaat al-Assad (1937- ), its forces mercilessly bombarded Hama with tanks, artillery, and missiles. To Hafiz al-Assad’s satisfaction, the siege not only succeeded in retaking the city but also in breaking the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and, thus, in ending the Islamist challenge to the government. The cost was enormous, however: the fighting flattened most of Hama and resulted in the deaths of between 5,000 and 25,000 people.

Saudi Arabia

While the relationship between the jihadis and the government was clear in Syria, it was considerably more complex in Saudi Arabia and reflected the contradictions inherent in the Kingdom. On the one hand, the ruling house had long rooted its legitimacy in its embrace of the austere, Wahhabi version of Islam that had emerged in central Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century. The people of Arabia thus lived under an Islamist system well before it would become fashionable in the rest of the Middle East. On the other, the thousands of members of the royal family had come to view the state as a vast ATM machine that they could use to fund a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that frequently included haram activities such as gambling, drinking, and the intermixing of the genders. In other words, the often very public behavior of the dynasty directly contradicted the Islamic values on which it claimed to base its rule. To obscure this inconsistency, the Saudi family had emphasized its role as the protector of the Holy Places. More importantly, it had made a point of courting the Wahhabi religious scholars and their supporters. It did so by providing patronage to the ulema in the form of salaries, by using the state’s enormous oil wealth to underwrite the spread of Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world, and by permitting the mutawa, the religious police from the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, to enforce public morality. For decades, this arrangement had seemed to work. By promoting the Saudi family as the champion of Islam and by providing patronage to the ulema, it had ensured domestic stability and upheld the legitimacy of the royal family.

The events of 1979 thus came as a great shock to the ruling house. The seizure of the Grand Mosque by extremist Muslims not only indicated that the Saudi dynasty’s control of the kingdom was far less secure than previously assumed, but worse, it also undermined its legitimacy by suggesting that it could not fulfill its role as the protector of the Holy Cities. Smelling blood, the regime’s opponents were quick to pounce. At home, conservative ulema and the mutawa began to openly criticize the government and to demand greater autonomy and increased authority over morality and social laws. Internationally, the kingdom faced biting criticism from the newly empowered Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989). Publicly castigating the Saudis for their questionable morality, he inspired a wave of civil unrest among the Shiʿa minority that lived in the kingdom’s strategic, oil-rich Eastern Province. Worse, he mounted a frontal assault on the Saudi family’s legitimacy by arguing that the protection of Mecca and Medina should henceforth become the collective responsibility of a consortium of Muslim states including Iran.

The Saudi royal family was in trouble, and they knew it. Faced with what they perceived to be an existential challenge, they responded with a vigorous three-pronged campaign aimed at blunting the regime’s internal and external threats and at restoring its legitimacy. First, they moved to end domestic criticism by ceding to the ulema and the mutawa greater control over social life. Newly empowered, the religious scholars promptly banned music, censored art, drove women from employment, and compelled the closure of the small number of cinemas that existed in the kingdom. Meanwhile, the now-unrestrained mutawa made liberal use of their swagger sticks to tighten enforcement of dress codes for women and to compel people to go to mosques at prayer times. As a result, by the early 1990s the Wahhabi religious scholars and their allies enjoyed near-unchecked power over social life in the kingdom.

Second, the Saudis sought to counter Iranian criticism among Sunnis who lived outside the kingdom by doubling down on their support for the spread of Wahhabi ideas. They did so both by paying for thousands of religious students to study in the kingdom under Wahhabi clerics and by devoting a substantial share of oil revenue to the construction of a vast network of Wahhabi-run mosques, madrasas, and seminaries throughout the Muslim world. This exercise in soft power would have enormous consequences. In conjunction with Iran’s efforts to promote Khomeini’s extreme construction of Shiʿism internationally, it helped to precipitate a bitter religious cold war in which Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and Shiʿa Iran competed for the hearts and minds of the globe’s Muslim population.

At first, that contest simmered quietly in the background. However, it boiled over with great suddenness in 1987, when clashes between Saudi security forces and Iranian pilgrims visiting Mecca during the hajj resulted in the deaths of more than 400 people. Blaming Khomeini, Riyadh broke off diplomatic relations with Tehran, markedly increased its financial support for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War (a topic we shall explore presently), and stepped up its efforts to spread Wahhabism. Iran countered by calling on Muslims to go to war with Saudi Arabia and by threatening to attack the Arab states that were supporting Iraq.

Finally, the third component of the Saudi campaign centered on Afghanistan. Like Washington, Riyadh viewed Moscow’s action in that country in 1979 with alarm. Perceiving the invasion as the first step toward a potential move on the Strait of Hormuz, the Saudis were determined to prevent the USSR from solidifying its control of Afghanistan. Accordingly, in conjunction with the US, the dynasty provided billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to the mujahideen, the Afghan guerrillas who were fighting Soviet troops with growing efficacy. With this aid, particularly with the introduction of portable American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles in 1986, the mujahideen were able to grind the Red Army down until, in 1989, Moscow had become so exhausted that it pulled its troops out of Afghanistan.

While the Saudis financed the insurgency in Afghanistan primarily to achieve geostrategic goals, they were quick to grasp that doing so could also help them to secure their ideological objectives. Indeed, supporting the anti-Soviet cause in Afghanistan appeared to provide them with a golden opportunity not only to prove their Islamist bona fides and to restore their reputation as the protectors of the Holy Cities but also to divert jihadi rage away from the royal family and toward a new, external enemy. They moved to achieve this last end by providing financial backing to a new Islamist organization dedicated to fighting the Soviets called the Service Bureau. Operating out of Peshawar, Pakistan by the alim Abdullah Azzam (1941-1988) and his protégé, a young Saudi man named Osama bin Laden (1957-2011), it recruited and trained Arab Islamists to fight alongside the Afghans.

From a narrowly military perspective, the return on this investment was quite poor. Despite receiving substantial funds from both the Saudi government and the kingdom’s private citizens, the Service Bureau and its Arab Afghan recruits, as the fighters it trained were known, were of negligible consequence in the war with the Soviets. For the Saudi regime, however, the military efficacy of the Arab Afghans was beside the point. It had not lavished funds on the Service Bureau for the purpose of defeating the USSR, the tough, Afghan mujahideen fighters could take care of the Soviets, but had instead done so in order to divert the ire of militant Islamists away from the royal family and toward a new, external enemy. Judged according to that yardstick, support for Azzam and Bin Laden was a smashing success. It helped to restore the government’s Islamist reputation at an affordable cost, and it removed a substantial number of potentially dangerous people from the kingdom during a sensitive period. To the Saudi royal family, it had been money very well spent.

There was, however, a potential downside to Riyadh’s support for the Service Bureau. Diverting jihadis to Afghanistan via the organization had certainly redirected the focus of potential troublemakers away from criticizing the Saudi government and had thus served the dynasty’s immediate interests. At the same time, support for the Service Bureau had helped to create a cadre of well-organized, battle-hardened extremists who, having helped defeat the Soviets, might next turn their ire on Riyadh and the other governments of the Middle East. However, that was a problem for the future. In the meantime, the dynasty could celebrate the success of its Afghan policy.

The Lebanese Civil War, 1980-1985

Though the war in Afghanistan remained a major issue during the 1980s, renewed fighting in Lebanon overshadowed it during the early part of the decade. That period proved to be a peculiarly difficult one for the Lebanese people. Not only was the civil war still smoldering, but Israel would invade the country in 1982 as the centerpiece of an audacious and reckless plan to take advantage of the peace treaty with Egypt to permanently transform the strategic map of the Middle East in its favor. The brainchild of Prime Minister Menachem Begin (r. 1977-1983) and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon (1928-2014), the Israeli gambit appeared for a time to be a huge success. Ultimately, however, it would prove to be a spectacular failure, one that would dramatically, if unintentionally, alter the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By the end of the 1970s, the civil war in Lebanon had become enormously complex. Replete with ambushes, massacres, assassinations, and double dealing, it had devolved into a byzantine struggle in which rival confessional factions entered into and then abandoned alliances with dizzying regularity as each struggled to carve out an autonomous position within the country. Dominating the situation like a spider was Assad. Seeking to exploit the shifting balance in order to render Syria’s dominance of Lebanon permanent, he had skillfully manipulated events in the country to his advantage. Most notably, while he had intervened in 1976 to prevent a coalition of leftist Muslims and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from defeating the Christians, he had then, in Machiavellian fashion, promptly shifted sides when the balance of power had begun to tip back toward the Maronites. Now once more in danger of being overwhelmed, the leader of the Christian Phalange Party, Pierre Gemayel (1905-1984), responded by entering into a tacit alliance with Israel in which Tel Aviv provided his forces with a substantial infusion of much-needed arms.

Israel’s involvement in the Lebanese Civil War went considerably further than merely supplying weapons to the Phalange. As we saw in Chapter Sixteen, Tel Aviv had responded to the outbreak of the civil war by sponsoring a Lebanese proxy force called the South Lebanese Army (SLA). Equipped with arms provided by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), the SLA maintained a security zone along the border designed to buffer Israel from PLO infiltration and attacks. However, it was only partially successful in achieving that end. It could neither prevent all incursions nor inhibit bombardment by the Palestinians’ long-range weapons. Accordingly, in keeping with the ideology of the Iron Wall, the IDF periodically undertook operations inside Lebanon designed to weaken or destroy the PLO. Most notably, it used a deadly terrorist attack on a bus near Haifa in March 1978 as a pretext for a large-scale invasion aimed at eliminating the organization’s military infrastructure in southern Lebanon. To Tel Aviv’s frustration, however, the incursion failed to degrade PLO capabilities.

Even worse were the results of a new round of fighting between Israeli and PLO forces along the border with Lebanon in the summer of 1981. What began as a series of artillery duels quickly escalated into IDF air attacks on the PLO’s headquarters in Beirut and massive Palestinian retaliatory bombardments of Israeli settlements in the Galilee region. Eager to prevent the violence from spinning further out of control, Washington sent the veteran envoy Philip Habib (1920-1992) to the Middle East to broker a truce. Negotiating with the Palestinians through intermediaries, he secured an agreement in July 1981 that called for the two sides to refrain from further attacks across the Lebanese border. The ceasefire thus succeeded in ending the bombardment of Israeli settlements in the Galilee. To the frustration of Begin and his political allies, however, the deal also raised the PLO’s international standing and, worse, added fuel to Saudi and European peace initiatives that sought the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This situation was deeply troubling to Begin and Sharon. Like the rest of the Likud Party, the two men firmly backed a maximalist interpretation of Israel’s territory and insisted on retaining the Gaza Strip and, especially, the West Bank. Indeed, after the party’s electoral victory in 1981, Begin’s cabinet had, in contravention of Resolution 242 and a bevy of other agreements, formally annexed the Golan Heights and declared that the claim “of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel [is] an eternal unassailable right.” In other words, Israel had a divinely endorsed claim to the Occupied Territories. Unsurprisingly, given these sentiments, Begin and Sharon viewed the peace initiatives and the PLO’s adherence to the ceasefire with grave concern. So long as Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) complied with the truce, pressure for a settlement in which the Palestinians would secure a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would continue to build, while in inverse proportion, the prospects for permanent Israeli control of the Occupied Territories would diminish.

Operation Peace for Galilee, 1982

If Begin and Sharon saw danger in Lebanon, they also sensed opportunity. Indeed, by the fall of 1981, the two men had come to perceive that country as a venue for a bold military campaign that they believed had the potential to permanently remake the strategic and diplomatic landscape of the region in Israel’s favor. Grand in scope, their design would not only permanently end the PLO threat in Lebanon, but more importantly, would also permit them to achieve all of the Likud Party’s expansive territorial and security goals.

Involving four steps, their plan was a complex one. First, it called for the IDF to launch a fast-moving offensive into Lebanon that would maul Syrian forces in the strategic Beqaa Valley and, after surrounding the Lebanese capital, isolate the PLO’s leadership and the bulk of the organization’s fighters in Muslim West Beirut. Second, in exchange for the Phalangist militia destroying the now-trapped PLO, Israel would use its power and influence to ensure that the Lebanese parliament selected Pierre Gemayel’s son, Bashir (1947-1982), as the country’s new president during elections scheduled for August 1982. Third, beholden to Tel Aviv, Lebanon’s new president would sign a peace treaty that would establish normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. Finally, bolstered by the IDF, Bashir Gemayel would restore his government’s authority over the country and, in so doing, inflict a serious diplomatic defeat on Assad that would bring a permanent end to Syria’s dominance of Lebanon.

The result, Begin and Sharon hoped, would be a thoroughly reconfigured Middle East that would permit the Likud Party both to permanently ensure Israel’s security needs and to complete the Zionist project begun a century earlier. Coupled with the peace treaty with Egypt, Syria’s military and diplomatic defeat in Lebanon would mean that Israel would never again have to worry about its security. More importantly, the destruction of the PLO would so thoroughly demoralize the Palestinians as a people that it would permanently extinguish their sense of nationalism. As a result, Israel would be able to annex the West Bank, territory that the Likud Party viewed as an integral part of the Jewish state.

Breathtaking in scope, the plan faced several substantial obstacles. First, more moderate members of the cabinet had already made clear when Begin and Sharon had raised the idea of another invasion that they flatly opposed military operations that extended as far north as Beirut and would only consider authorizing an incursion in response to a major Palestinian attack. Second, though broadly supportive of Israel, the administration of President Ronald Reagan (r. 1981-1989) had shown itself to be squeamish about the kind of civilian casualties that would inevitably result from an operation along the lines that Sharon and Begin were proposing and had already indicated to Tel Aviv that it would tolerate an Israeli violation of the ceasefire only if it came in response to a serious PLO attack and only if it extended no further than twenty-five miles from the border.

Securing cabinet and American approval for an invasion of Lebanon thus depended on the PLO first launching an attack on Israel. Normally, Sharon and Begin could count on the organization obliging with a pretext in the form of sporadic shelling or a terrorist incursion. To their dismay, however, the PLO was pursuing a peace offensive at that time and was scrupulously adhering to the ceasefire. As a result, during the winter and spring of 1982, Begin and Sharon found themselves thoroughly boxed in.

To their relief, a Palestinian splinter group freed them to act by mounting a high-profile attack on Israeli interests in the spring of 1982. On June 3, the radical, Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal Group, a bitter opponent of Fatah, critically wounded the Israeli ambassador to Britain in a botched assassination attempt outside London’s posh Dorchester Hotel in what was likely an attempt to undermine Arafat by derailing the ceasefire. Seizing the opportunity that the incident presented, Sharon and Begin asked the cabinet to authorize a massive, 120,000-troop invasion that they disingenuously named Peace for Galilee. Their colleagues approved the operation. However, they did so only after securing promises from Begin and Sharon that the incursion would be a limited one.

This stipulation did not faze the two men. Instead, confident that they would be able to use military exigencies to manipulate the cabinet into expanding the war, they accepted the terms without complaint. They were correct in this assumption. Taking advantage of the inevitable clashes between IDF and Syrian troops, they had little difficulty over the next few days in persuading the cabinet to approve the steady widening of the conflict.

As a result, Begin and Sharon’s plan proceeded as intended. IDF forces smashed Assad’s divisions in the Beqaa Valley, brushed aside the PLO’s main-force battalions in the south and raced northward to seize the Beirut-Damascus Highway, an objective that lay well beyond the twenth-five mile limit they had discussed with the US. Furious with the Israelis for ignoring the conditions that he had set, Reagan sent Philip Habib back to the region. Quickly imposing a ceasefire, the American envoy soon brought the invasion to a halt. Before the truce could go into effect, however, the IDF’s lead elements were able to link up with Phalangist forces and complete the encirclement of Beirut. Thus, despite significant domestic and international obstacles, Begin and Sharon’s bid to remake the region was unfolding precisely as they had intended.

Evacuation of the PLO

It was at that point, however, that their plan ran into its first problem. Aware that an assault on PLO and Sunni militia positions in West Beirut would not only incur massive casualties but would also undermine the credibility of his presidency before it even began, Bashir Gemayel reneged on an earlier promise and informed the Israeli government that the Phalange militia would not lead the assault on the PLO. This decision put Sharon and Begin in a bind. Like Gemayel, they too understood that assaulting West Beirut would result in a politically unsustainable level of casualties. Accordingly, they shifted from seeking to destroy the PLO outright to attempting to force it out of Lebanon. To achieve that new goal, they ordered the IDF to impose a blockade on Muslim West Beirut and to periodically shell the city, a move that resulted in thousands of civilian casualties over the course of a siege that ended up lasting seven weeks.

The mounting death toll was too much for the Reagan administration. Keenly aware of the damage that the casualties were causing to Israel and the United States’s international reputation, the president once again sent Philip Habib back to the region, this time with instructions to broker a settlement that would safely relocate the PLO from West Beirut. The subsequent talks were characteristically fraught and drawn out, but, on August 12, Habib finally secured an agreement. It called for the PLO to leave Lebanon by ship under the protection of a Multinational Force (MNF) composed of US, French, and Italian troops.

The operation went off without a hitch. Beginning on August 21, 11,000 Palestinian officials and soldiers left Beirut for Tunisia aboard Greek and Italian ships escorted by the US Sixth Fleet. A few days after the last contingent of PLO fighters had departed, the soldiers of the MNF followed suit. Returning to their ships under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” they left Lebanese waters in early September.

Sharon and Begin were now ready to put the rest of their grand design in motion. The next step was to ensure that Bashir Gemayel became Lebanon’s new president. To do so, they let Lebanese members of parliament know that peace would return to their country only if it had a government that enjoyed Israel’s approval, and they instructed the IDF to help friendly deputies travel to Beirut to take part in the vote and to prevent hostile ones from making it to the capital. This assistance tipped the balance and allowed Bashir Gemayel to handily clear the two-thirds majority needed to become Lebanon’s next president. As a result, by early September 1982, Begin and Sharon’s plan appeared to be back on track. Lebanon was in friendly hands, the PLO was now incapable of attacking Israel thanks to its relocation to distant Tunisia, and Syria was isolated and weakened.

Sabra and Shatila

At that point, however, the wheels came off their plan to remake the region. Its demise began on September 14 with the assassination of Bashir Gemayel by a Syrian intelligence agent just a few days before he was to be sworn in as president. In his place, the Lebanese parliament elected his brother, Amin Gemayel (1942- ) as the country’s new head of state. To Begin and Sharon’s chagrin, Amin intended to follow a very different approach than had his brother. Most notably, despite Israel’s support for Amin’s candidacy, the new president made clear once he was sworn in that he was committed to a neutral, if not pro-Syrian line, and that he opposed closer ties with Tel Aviv. All at once the ground on which Begin and Sharon’s plans for Lebanon rested, a peace treaty, a tacit alliance, and diplomatic recognition, had collapsed.

Begin and Sharon took desperate action to recover the situation. Fearing that a force of 2,000 PLO fighters that he believed had secretly remained behind in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut might further destabilize Israel’s position in Lebanon, Sharon immediately ordered troops into the city. Rapidly occupying West Beirut, IDF units surrounded but did not occupy the camps. Instead, on September 16, they permitted a force of 150 Phalange militia members to enter the camps in order to clear out fighters alleged to have “gone civilian” when the PLO had evacuated the city. Once inside, the Phalangists made no effort whatsoever to uncover a clandestine military apparatus or to ferret out guerrillas. Instead, blaming the Palestinians for Bashir Gemayel’s death, they set about methodically massacring civilian residents of the camps. Over a roughly thirty-six-hour period, they raped countless Palestinian women and murdered between 700 and 2,000 residents of the camps. The vast majority of the victims were women and children.

News of the massacres destroyed what little credibility the invasion of Lebanon had managed to retain. Domestically, IDF involvement in the killings sparked sustained opposition to a military operation for the first time in the country’s history. Most notably, a rally that the antiwar group Peace Now organized to protest both the massacre and the ongoing occupation of Lebanon drew 300,000 Israelis, equivalent to 10 percent of the country’s population, and succeeded in forcing the government to appoint a panel headed by the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan (1913-1985), to investigate the killings. Released in February 1983, the Kahan Commission report concluded that the IDF should have known that the Phalangists would seek revenge for Bashir Gemayel’s assassination and that it thus bore indirect responsibility for the killings. It assigned special responsibility to Ariel Sharon, who, though he remained minister without portfolio in the cabinet, was compelled to step down as defense minister.

American Intervention, 1982-1984

Meanwhile, the revelation of the massacre resulted in international calls for the MNF to return to Lebanon and to help restore order in the capital. In response, the recently departed MNF soldiers disembarked from their ships on September 29 and took up new positions around the airport and in West Beirut. Reagan was enthusiastic about the redeployment. Eager to bring peace to Lebanon, he was convinced that their presence would both return security to the city and help the Lebanese government restore its authority over the capital and the territory immediately surrounding it. However, many were dubious of his optimism. Indeed, critics both inside and outside the administration were skeptical that a force of only a few thousand soldiers could achieve such a broad objective and cautioned that involvement in the Lebanese Civil War would likely lead the combatants to begin targeting MNF soldiers. Unheeded, those warnings would prove prescient.

Reagan continued US involvement by pursuing a diplomatic settlement aimed at ending Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. Here, the administration abandoned any pretense of neutrality. Viewing the world through a Cold War lens, it tacitly took Israel’s side in the talks and worked to produce an agreement that centered primarily on curbing Syria’s position in Lebanon. While it did not include formal diplomatic recognition, the resulting treaty was nonetheless very favorable to Tel Aviv and seemed to salvage key parts of Begin and Sharon’s grand design. Signed in May 1983, it ended the technical state of war that had existed between the two countries since 1948 and required Lebanon to prevent attacks against Israel from its territory. It even permitted Tel Aviv to maintain its ties with the SLA and thus to retain its grip on south Lebanon. In exchange, Israel agreed to pull its troops out, though only after Syria had completely withdrawn its forces.

Predictably, the treaty met with an icy reception in both Lebanon and Syria. The Lebanese Druze, Shiʿa, and Sunni factions resented what they saw as an Israeli effort to impose a one-sided agreement and began to perceive the US not as a neutral party but instead as a hostile combatant. For his part, Assad interpreted the deal as an effort by Washington and Tel Aviv to isolate his country and to compel it to abandon the dominant position in Lebanon that he had so carefully constructed over the prior seven years. Determined to retain his gains, he responded by unleashing his Lebanese proxies against the IDF and the MNF. Accordingly, in the summer of 1983, insurgents began to step up their use of hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and roadside bombings against Israeli troops, and, ominously, began to harass the marines and soldiers of the MNF with sniper and artillery fire. The Reagan administration found these attacks intolerable and responded by ordering Sixth Fleet warships to bombard Druze emplacements and by deploying the intimidating World War II-era battleship USS New Jersey to Lebanese waters as a show of strength. To the delight of the president, the use of force appeared to work: shortly after the navy turned its five-inch guns on them, the Druze called for a ceasefire.

In reality, the bombardment had not cowed the Lebanese factions in the least. Instead, it merely caused them to shift tactics. The result was a pair of horrifying, near-simultaneous truck-bombing attacks by a shadowy new terrorist group on October 23: one that killed fifty-eight French paratroopers and destroyed the nine-story building that served as their headquarters and an even-bigger one that killed 241 marines and obliterated their four-story barracks in what remains the single deadliest day the Marine Corps has experienced since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Washington was in shock. Reagan initially favored keeping the marines in Lebanon and claimed that leaving would damage American credibility. Faced with staunch opposition from within his administration, however, he relented and agreed to pull US forces out in February 1984, though not before demonstrating American resolve by ordering the USS New Jersey to pummel Syrian and Druze positions with barrages of 1,900-pound, sixteen-inch shells.

Israel was not far behind in leaving. With IDF troops facing an average of more than one- hundred Shiʿa attacks per month by the middle of 1984, Lebanon had become a quagmire that was growing more challenging and dispiriting by the day. The situation had become so dangerous in early 1985 that infantry units had to have tanks accompany them when they went out on even routine patrol. The end finally came when the Labor Party’s Shimon Peres (r. 1977, 1984-1986, 1995-1996), became prime minister in 1984. Peres was determined to end Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, but as the head of a national unity government, was compelled to move slowly. As a result, it was only in early 1985 that he managed to win enough votes in his cabinet for a withdrawal to the security zone just north of the Israeli border. Completed in June 1985, the move formally ended the war that Begin and Sharon had started with such anticipation three years earlier.

Consequences

The war in Lebanon ultimately proved to be a costly disaster for Israel. Sharon and Begin had launched it in order to restructure the strategic and diplomatic landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favor and to set the stage for the annexation of the West Bank. It had failed to achieve either goal. Instead, their gambit had not only left their country less secure than it had been before the invasion but had also greatly complicated their efforts to annex the West Bank.

Ironies abounded. First, the Israeli invasion ended up solidifying Assad’s control over Lebanon, an outcome that would have beggared belief in the summer of 1982. As we have seen, Syria had suffered a humiliating military setback at the start of Operation Peace for Galilee that had made emphatically clear that its army could not compete with the mighty IDF. Its defeat had been so total, in fact, that most observers had concluded that its influence over Lebanese affairs was at an end. However, Assad was unfazed. Rather than abandoning his position in Lebanon in the face of superior Israeli power, he shifted to a new strategy that relied on Syria’s Lebanese proxies to achieve his ends. As we have seen, that approach proved to be wildly successful. Not only did it force the United States and Israel out of Lebanon, but it also compelled Amin Gemayel to abrogate the May 1983 agreement with Tel Aviv and to accept Syrian dominance of his country. Thus, ironically, a conflict designed in part to push Assad out of Lebanon had instead ended with him tightening his grip over it.

Second, the war ended with Israel confronting a new enemy in Lebanon: the Shiʿa Islamist group Hezbollah. Prior to 1982, the Shiʿa had resented the PLO’s domination of Lebanon’s south. As a result, they had viewed the IDF soldiers who arrived that June as liberators and even showered them with rose petals and rice, a traditional Lebanese greeting. However, that sentiment did not last. Instead, a combination of heavy-handed Israeli rule and the arrival of Iranian agents quickly turned the Lebanese Shiʿa against the occupying army. Tehran’s efforts were particularly important in sparking this shift. Determined to expand its influence, it built schools, subsidized goods such as gasoline, spread Khomeini’s Islamist ideology, and provided training in military and terrorist operations to a growing number of recruits eager to strike back at Israel.

The result was the establishment in mid-1982 of a new terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad. Despite the traditional Muslim ban on killing oneself, the group initially focused on using suicide attacks to combat Israeli and Western forces in Lebanon. It began in November 1982, when a suicide bomber, the first in the history of the modern Middle East, killed seventy-five IDF soldiers by driving a bomb-laden truck into their command post in Tyre. It followed with the bombing of the US embassy in April 1983 and the shocking attacks on the Multinational Force the following October. Islamic Jihad also kidnapped and killed a number of Westerners in Lebanon including the president of the American University in Beirut, Malcolm Kerr (1931-1984).

Later, under Iranian guidance, Islamic Jihad would evolve into Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” a political party with a powerful militant wing. Highly effective, its operations played a key part in impelling the IDF to retreat to the south in 1985. Moreover, Hezbollah fighters did not stop their attacks following the Israeli withdrawal to the security zone. Instead, dedicated to pushing Israel out of all of Lebanon, they continued to harass IDF forces in the south and periodically fired rockets at settlements in Galilee. Thus, in a bitter irony for Israel, the invasion that Begin and Sharon had designed in part to end PLO attacks across the Lebanese border had merely served to replace Arafat’s guerrillas with far-better disciplined and equipped Hezbollah fighters who were able to launch similar strikes with far-greater efficacy.

Third, the PLO’s military defeat in Lebanon had failed to produce the collapse in morale among the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories that Begin and Sharon had anticipated. On the contrary, frustrated by the inability of the Arab states and the PLO to deliver them from the Israeli occupation, the people of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank had come to adopt a new resolve in the wake of the war in Lebanon that would soon set the stage for the most significant progress that the Palestinians had achieved since before the Nakba in 1948. Thus, ironically, Operation Peace for Galilee had rendered Begin and Sharon’s cherished goal of annexing the West Bank more rather than less difficult.

Finally, the invasion altered dramatically the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. It is true that Operation Peace for Galilee had succeeded in destroying the military infrastructure with which the PLO had threatened northern Israel. However, the organization had always been so feeble compared to the IDF that it could never have secured its objectives on the battlefield. In fact, as we have seen, nearly all the PLO’s success had come through diplomacy rather than force. Thus, by compelling the organization to relocate to distant Tunisia, Operation Peace for Galilee weakened the PLO hardliners who supported military operations while simultaneously strengthening the moderates who backed negotiations. In the process, ironically, setting the organization on a course that was far more likely to succeed.

The Palestinian Revival

Initially, Arafat’s efforts to pursue diplomacy following the PLO’s relocation to Tunisia proved unsuccessful. Two obstacles stood in his way. First, backed by strong US support, Israel remained implacably opposed not merely to making territorial or political concessions, but to the very idea of taking part in negotiations with the PLO at all. Second, Arafat’s diplomatic initiatives faced concerted hostility from the Palestinian splinter groups. Indeed, those organizations were so determined to regain all of the territory that had composed mandatory Palestine that they deliberately acted to poison the waters anytime Arafat’s diplomatic push seemed to be making headway. For example, when a joint Palestinian-Jordanian initiative appeared to show promise in 1985, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) moved to stop it by hijacking an Italian cruise ship, the MS Achille Lauro, and murdering one of its passengers, a disabled Jewish-American man named Leon Klinghoffer (1916-1985).

By 1986, even the Arab states were distancing themselves from Arafat. Egypt’s rehabilitation in the Arab world made this shift clear. Concluding that Saddam Hussein desperately needed Egypt’s material and diplomatic support in his war with Iran, the Arab League states renewed diplomatic relations with Mubarak in 1987 over vigorous PLO objections. Demoralizingly, when Arafat traveled to Jordan to object, King Hussein (r. 1952-1990) did not have the PLO chair greeted with the pomp and circumstance he had enjoyed in the past. Instead, in a calculated snub that reflected Arafat’s declining influence, the king sent a mere subcabinet-level official to pick him up at the airport.

The circumstances in which the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories found themselves paralleled the PLO’s waning fortunes. Initially, Israeli rule had been unwelcomed but tolerable and even, in some ways, beneficial for the residents of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Now free to work in Israel, for example, the Palestinians were able to access substantially higher-paying jobs than they had under Jordanian or Egyptian administration. Meanwhile, though the Israelis were building settlements, they were doing so at a low rate and had made a point of situating them well away from Arab towns.

However, life under Israeli rule changed dramatically with the Likud victory in 1977. With the goal of preventing future cabinets from ceding land or agreeing to a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories, the Begin government dramatically stepped up the pace of settlement construction. As a consequence, the 5,000 Israeli settlers who lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1977 ballooned to 60,000 by 1987. The Likud government also imposed increasingly obnoxious and humiliating regulations on the Palestinians. They effected travel, land use, and employment, and included water and agriculture policies so restrictive that they resulted in the Palestinians farming fewer acres in 1987 than they had in 1947. Meanwhile, the onset of a deep recession in the early 1980s produced soaring unemployment and a sharply declining standard of living in the territories that further impoverished the Palestinians. As a consequence, by 1987 the Occupied Territories were a place of barely contained frustration and fury, a tinderbox ready to burst into flames.

The Intifada

The match that ignited it came in the form of a traffic accident at a checkpoint between the Gaza Strip and Israel. On December 8, 1987, an IDF driver killed four Palestinians when his transport slammed into a line of cars carrying workers back from their jobs in Israel. With frustration already at a fever pitch, rumors that the crash was intentional led thousands of mostly young Palestinians to explode in a spontaneous uprising in the Gaza Strip immediately after the victims’ funerals. Despite their anger, the protestors neither engaged in deadly attacks nor targeted settlements. Instead, seeking to put maximum moral pressure on Israel, they agreed to confine themselves to non-lethal acts including demonstrations, rock throwing, and a refusal to pay the taxes that supported the occupation. Coming at a time of enormous anger in the territories, the uprising, soon known as the Intifada or “shaking off,” rapidly spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As a result, within just a few short weeks, the entirety of the Occupied Territories was in open revolt against Israel.

Sensing that the Intifada could produce tangible gains, the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories quickly moved to organize themselves to ensure its effectiveness. This effort involved a division of labor by age. While the huge number of young people in the Occupied Territories threw rocks and baited Israeli security forces, more moderate, middle-aged community leaders established a new body called the Unified National Leadership (UNL) to coordinate the uprising. Convinced that the Palestinians would enjoy greater success if they avoided causing bloodshed, the UNL took steps to ensure that the protestors continued to eschew outright violence. It also drafted and released a manifesto called the Fourteen Points that formally articulated the Intifada’s political goals. Moderate in tone and realistic in objective, it called for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state under PLO administration in the Gaza Strip and West Bank that would live in peace alongside Israel.

The Israelis badly mishandled the protests. The unity government headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (r. 1986-1992) believed that Israel needed not merely to restore order in the territories but more importantly, to crush any hope among the Palestinians that the Intifada might produce a favorable political settlement for them. In keeping with this approach, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) instructed Israeli security forces to employ “might, force, and beatings” and even to break the arms of children who threw rocks. Accordingly, the IDF enforced curfews, arrested thousands, and fired rubber bullets at unarmed teenagers. It also closed schools and universities in the territories and demolished the homes of those suspected of throwing stones. It was an over-the-top response, and it imposed enormous costs on the Palestinians. Indeed, during its first year alone, Israeli security forces killed 626 Palestinians, wounded 37,000, and jailed 35,000 more.

Despite the arrests and the loss of life, the Israeli response failed to cow the Palestinians. Instead, the use of overwhelming force backfired badly during the Intifada’s early years both inside and outside the territories. In the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the policy of massive repression and reliance on collective punishment not only failed to break the resistance but also served to create a strong sense of solidarity that inspired less-committed Palestinians to join the protests. Internationally, televised footage of IDF troops firing on and beating unarmed Palestinian teenagers rapidly transformed Israel’s image from that of a plucky David into that of an overbearing Goliath. The violent response even went over poorly within the Jewish state. The use of overwhelming force against unarmed Palestinians reinvigorated opposition groups such as Peace Now and demoralized soldiers who had joined the IDF under the expectation that they would be protecting Israel from foreign attack rather than violently policing civilians. In fact, during the Intifada’s first seven months alone, over 600 soldiers claimed conscientious objector status in order to avoid serving in the Occupied Territories.

The Palestinian Declaration of Independence

At the same time that the Intifada was posing serious challenges to the Israeli government, it was throwing a lifeline to the beleaguered PLO. Arafat was quick to take advantage. He first used the UNL’s call for a Palestinian state in the territories as a way to marginalize the inflexible militants in the splinter groups. With the extremists safely contained, he followed by orchestrating a pair of bold moves designed to advance the prospects of a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would have a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that stood alongside a Zionist one within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. First, in November 1988, he arranged for the Palestine National Council (PNC) to issue the Palestinian Declaration of Independence and to express its willingness to negotiate on the basis of United Nations (UN) Resolutions 242 and 338. Second, at American urgings, he formally and publicly renounced terrorism in December 1988. These announcements marked the culmination of the diplomatic approach that he had cautiously initiated in the 1970s, and they quickly bore fruit. Eighty-four countries including the People’s Republic of China and the USSR promptly extended diplomatic recognition to the new Palestinian state. Meanwhile, with Arafat having satisfied the conditions Washington had set for direct contact, PLO and US representatives began holding regular discussions. It was a heady moment, a time when the prospects for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had never been brighter.

Hamas

However, Arafat’s bold initiative did not enjoy universal support among the Palestinians. In addition to the now-marginalized splinter groups, a new and dynamic Islamist organization called Hamas expressed unbending opposition to his diplomatic program. The group’s origins were intimately tied to the Intifada. Just five days after the rebellion began, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood established Hamas in the Gaza Strip to help coordinate the uprising. Influential from the start, the organization began laying out its goals in a formal charter that it issued in August 1988. Taking direct aim at both the PLO’s secular nationalism and the two-state solution, it announced that Palestine was a divinely provided “Islamic trust” that no ruler or people could alienate or divide. Accordingly, the charter declared forthrightly that the organization’s twin goals were the destruction of Israel through jihad and the establishment of a shari’a-based Palestinian state that would occupy the entirety of the former mandate. It was a strident program that ran directly counter to the UNL’s more conciliatory vision. It was also one that was working fertile ground. Thanks to Saudi Arabia’s generous funding of Wahhabi- influenced charities and mosques in the Occupied Territories, many Palestinians were predisposed to the group’s explicitly religious message. As a result, Hamas soon won a substantial following, particularly in the Gaza Strip.

Impasse

The failure of Arafat’s diplomatic push to produce results accelerated Hamas’s growth in 1989 and 1990. At first, the PLO’s bold initiative appeared to be successful. Thanks to Arafat’s willingness to formally embrace the two-state solution, the administration of President George H. W. Bush (r. 1989-1993) had begun pressuring Tel Aviv to respond to the PLO’s peace initiative. Unable to stonewall its American patron, Shamir’s government issued an Israeli plan for the territories in May 1989. Thin on details, it proposed elections in the Occupied Territories that would lead to a vaguely defined form of autonomy for the Palestinians under an arrangement in which Israel would continue to oversee key issues such as security, the distribution of land, and the construction of settlements.

While Shamir’s proposal may have amounted to something of a step forward on the part of the Israeli government, it was not, at the end of the day, a substantive plan aimed at achieving peace. On the contrary, as Arafat and his allies well understood, it was an effort to delay genuine talks while Shamir’s government constructed further settlements in the Occupied Territories, partly to house a sudden influx of Jewish immigrants from the USSR but, more broadly, to create further “facts on the ground” that could ensure Israel’s perpetual control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, an addendum to the plan made explicit the limits of Shamir’s proposal. It declared unequivocally that Israel would neither negotiate with the PLO nor permit the Palestinians to create a state in the occupied territories.

Shamir’s response put the PLO chair and his moderate allies in a difficult spot. Arafat’s inability to secure any meaningful gains in exchange for his renunciation of terrorism had, in zero-sum fashion, weakened the PLO and the UNL to the benefit of Hamas. In fact, Hamas felt strong enough in early 1990 to begin mounting a serious challenge to the PLO-aligned UNL for control of the Intifada and, thus, for a dominant position in the Occupied Territories. Arafat did not take the Islamists’ threat lightly. He understood that he faced a dangerous threat and that he would need to find a way to induce Israel to make concessions if he wished to avoid seeing the PLO eclipsed by Hamas. Accordingly, in the spring of 1990, he moved to restore his control over the Palestinian movement and to breathe life into his diplomatic effort by developing closer ties with the only Arab leader who possessed the military power to threaten Israel and thus to compel it to negotiate: Saddam Hussein.

The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988

At that point, Saddam Hussein’s country was less than two years removed from a devastating, near-decade long conflict: the Iran-Iraq War. By far the deadliest military contest in the post-World War II Middle East, the struggle between Baʿathist Iraq and Shiʿa Iran proved to be ruinously expensive for both states, an outcome that would have surprised Saddam Hussein at the time it began. Indeed, as we shall explore in more detail in a moment, he had started the conflict believing that postrevolutionary Iran’s already substantial divisions would widen considerably in the face of an Iraqi attack and thereby render Tehran incapable of mounting an effective defense. He was thus blithely confident both that the war would be no more than a brief, limited contest and that it would quickly compel Iran to make concessions favorable to Iraq.

The Early War

The war began in September 1980. Unilaterally declaring the revocation of the Algiers Accord, Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi army across the Shatt al-Arab Waterway in a limited offensive aimed at securing territory that Iraq could then trade for concessions from Tehran. Despite ominously heavy resistance, his troops quickly seized control of 20,000 square miles of Iranian territory including the strategic city of Khorramshahr. Having taken what he believed was sufficient land to achieve his diplomatic ends, Hussein then ordered his army to assume defensive positions and awaited Tehran’s appeal for a negotiated settlement.

It did not come. Saddam Hussein had been correct about Iran’s internal divisions, but he had badly miscalculated the impact of his attack on its domestic political situation. Rather than undermining the revolutionary government by stoking further discord, the Iraqi invasion had instead presented Iranians with a common enemy that they could unify against. Khomeini was quick to take advantage. Exploiting the surge in nationalist and Shiʿa sentiment that the invasion had engendered, he rallied support for his regime and recruited huge numbers of new soldiers for his armies. As a result, his government was able to quickly expand the Revolutionary Guard into a 120,000-strong military force and to secure hundreds of thousands of volunteers for the Basej-e Mostazefan, or the “Mobilization of the Oppressed”: a militia composed of ideologically motivated but militarily untrained youth who were prepared to sacrifice their lives in defense of the revolution.

Many of them did. In a series of huge, human-wave attacks in early 1982, Revolutionary Guard, Basej-e Mostazefan, and regular army forces furiously struck Iraqi positions. These assaults resulted in huge numbers of Iranian casualties, but they also succeeded in forcing the invaders to retreat back across the Shatt-al-Arab Waterway in June 1982. It was an impressive victory for the Iranian military. However, Khomeini refused to let his generals rest. Determined to finish off Saddam Hussein and his Baʿathist regime, he instead instructed them to press forward and to continue the offensive across the border.

War of Attrition

The next few years were trying ones for Iraq. To a substantial degree, its problems were fiscal in nature. The war had quickly become incredibly expensive, compelling Hussein’s government to spend a staggering $1 billion per month on its direct costs alone. Worse, thanks to the destruction of much of Iraq’s port infrastructure in the fighting and to Iranian ally Hafez al-Assad’s closure of the trans-Syrian pipeline, oil revenue had collapsed from $26 billion in 1979 to a paltry $11 billion in 1987, an amount that was insufficient to pay for the war let alone the substantial social-welfare benefits that Saddam Hussein had introduced in the 1970s.

However bleak Iraq’s fiscal position may have been, its military situation was even grimmer. Between 1983 and 1985, Iranian forces launched a new series of human-wave offensives against heavily fortified Iraqi defensive positions. Though unsuccessful, these assaults inflicted enormous casualties and left the Iraqi army demoralized and badly overstretched. The situation worsened dramatically in 1986 when Iranian-supported Kurdish guerrillas opened a second front in the north that diverted scarce Iraqi troops from the main theater. Taking advantage, Iranian forces launched a huge offensive in the south that captured the strategic al-Faw peninsula and imperiled Iraq’s only port: the city of Basra.

Ultimately, it was international concerns about an Iranian victory that rescued Saddam Hussein’s regime from defeat. Determined to avoid a situation in which Khomeini’s government dominated the Persian Gulf, Western countries and the Gulf States loaned Iraq the enormous sums needed to continue the war. Baghdad used those funds to procure billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment including Soviet T-72 tanks and Exocet-missile-equipped French Mirage jets as well as dual-use goods such as pesticides that could be converted into chemical weapons. The Iraqi government even received assistance from the US. Despite holding serious misgivings about Hussein, the Reagan administration gradually tilted toward Baghdad over the course of the mid-1980s. It took Iraq off the list of states that sponsor terrorism in 1982, extended it agricultural credits in 1983, and, most importantly, began providing it with vital satellite intelligence in 1984.

What led Iraq and the US to cooperate? Why did two countries so hostile to one another that they had not had formal diplomatic relations since 1967 put aside their differences? They did so for reasons of realpolitik. That is, while their specific concerns were very different, they collaborated because each feared the prospects of an Iranian victory more than they opposed each other. Indeed, their shared concern about Iran was enough that they were able to look past not just older differences but new ones as well in pursuit of their mutual goal. Thus, Iraq did not dwell on the administration’s amateurish, Iran-Contra efforts to secure the release of Western hostages in Lebanon by selling antitank missiles and spare parts to Tehran, while the US chose to look the other way when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against Iranian troops.

Buttressed by Western and Gulf State aid, Iraq’s reequipped army began to turn the tide in 1987. In brutal fighting early that year, it managed to decisively defeat a huge Iranian drive aimed at taking control of the city of Basra. Building on this success, the Iraqis followed by returning to the offensive for the first time since 1980. In the north, Ali Hasan al-Majid (1941-2010), better known as Chemical Ali, subdued the rebellious Kurds through the savage al-Anfal, “spoils of war,” campaign that began in the spring of 1988. It was a ruthless effort even by the standards of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Frequently employing chemical weapons, most notably in an attack on the town of Halabja that killed between 3,500 and 5,000 people, Iraqi soldiers destroyed five hundred villages, executed countless men, and confined women and children to prison- like camps. All told an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds perished in the al-Anfal campaign. Meanwhile, in the south, the massively expanded Iraqi army made liberal use of chemical weapons in an offensive that regained control of the al-Faw peninsula and thus ended the Iranian threat to Basra. In support of that push, Iraq fired hundreds of long-range SCUD surface-to-surface missiles at Iranian cities.

Tanker Wars

The Iraqi offensive also benefited from the outbreak in 1987 of an undeclared naval conflict between Iran and the US known as the Tanker War. Its origins stretched back to a campaign that Saddam Hussein had launched in 1984 to pressure Iran by firing on ships bound for its ports. Taking advantage of the fact that Iraq was equally vulnerable to such operations, Khomeini had countered by striking tankers bound for Iraq and its Gulf State backers. The impact of these attacks was substantial. Between 1984 and 1986, Iranian mines and other weapons damaged sixty-seven ships including eight Kuwaiti-registered tankers in a series of attacks that raised doubts about whether the Gulf States could continue to export oil. By 1987, such worries pushed an increasingly nervous Kuwaiti government to ask Washington to reflag eleven of its supertankers so that they would enjoy US naval protection as they made the long and vulnerable transit of the Persian Gulf. Despite congressional concern that complying might draw the US into a war with Iran, a fear made all-too real by an accidental Iraqi attack on the frigate USS Stark in May 1987 that killed thirty-seven sailors, the Reagan administration agreed to the request. Two months later, US Navy ships began escorting reflagged tankers to and from Kuwait.

As critics had predicted, it was not long before the operation turned into a shooting war. In a series of clashes that took place between September 1987 and April 1988, US forces sank most of Iran’s navy and destroyed many of the offshore oil platforms from which Revolutionary Guard speedboats had mounted hit-and-run attacks. The operation was thus successful in ensuring the free flow of petroleum from the Gulf. However, it ended in tragedy. On July 3, 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Flight 655, an Iranian Airbus 300 jetliner, it misidentified as an attacking F-14 fighter jet, killing all 290 people on board.

The incident played a small-but-significant part in spurring Tehran to agree to a proposed UN ceasefire in the summer of 1988. By that point, Iran was in dire straits. It was not only suffering serious battlefield defeats, but, more importantly, was witnessing the slow implosion of its economy. In response, an overwhelming consensus of Iranian officials had come to conclude that the fighting needed to come to an end and that it needed to do so as soon as possible. Khomeini was not one of them. Still firmly committed to the war, he adamantly rejected his advisors’ insistent claims that Iran desperately needed to accept the ceasefire. As a result, despite its increasingly grim circumstances, Iran continued to fight on.

It was the muted response to the downing of Flight 655 that finally changed his mind. The Ayatollah could ignore the bleak economic and military situation that Iran confronted, but he could no longer disregard either the growing war weariness at home or, especially, the country’s worsening diplomatic isolation abroad that the subdued reaction to the downing of the airliner had revealed. As a result, though he derided it as a “poisoned chalice,” Khomeini finally relented and agreed to accept the UN ceasefire proposal in July 1988.

Where Historians Disagree: The Iran-Iraq War’s Origins

Since 1980, a lively debate has taken place regarding the origins of the Iran-Iraq War. Scholars largely agree that the Iranian Revolution set the stage for the conflict and that Iraq fired the first shot. However, they continue to argue about Saddam Hussein’s motivations. Some maintain that he was behaving opportunistically. Historians like Charles Tripp contend that the Iraqi dictator had acted in hopes of taking advantage of Iran’s postrevolutionary divisions and isolation to compel it to abrogate the Algiers Accord that the Iraqi dictator had signed with Iran in 1975, an outcome that would both reverse the damage that the agreement had done to his reputation and enhance his standing as a champion of Arab nationalism.

Others instead argue that defensive considerations predominated in motivating the Iraqi dictator to go to war. While not denying Hussein’s opportunism, for example, the writer Phebe Marr maintains that aggressive Iranian actions played a critical role in his decision making. As she notes, Khomeini had begun inciting a Shiʿa uprising in Iraq almost from the moment he had returned to Tehran in 1979. Deeply concerned about this threat, Hussein sought to exploit the disarray in Iran to launch a limited invasion that would compel Khomeini to halt his call for a Shiʿa revolt in Iraq and, in so doing, end what was perceived as a serious threat to his regime. Interestingly, in the end, nationalism won out. During the course of the war, Shi’a Arabs in Iraq primarily supported that state while Sunni Arabs on the Iranian side of the border supported Iranian war efforts.

Consequences

Regardless of the war’s causes, the end of the fighting could not have come soon enough for Iran. The conflict had been a draining and devastating one for a country fresh from a cataclysmic revolution. More than 16,000 Iranian civilians and over 190,000 soldiers had died in the fighting, and the Iraqi attacks on its cities had left thousands more homeless. The war had also greatly weakened the economy. Per capita income was a shocking 40 percent lower at the end of the conflict than it had been a decade earlier, and vast amounts of vital infrastructure and industry had been destroyed or heavily damaged in the fighting. Reconstruction was projected to take many years, moreover, meaning that depressed economic conditions would likely endure long after the fighting had stopped.

As bad as the war had been for Iran, it was even more disastrous for Iraq. The drawn-out fighting had devastated the country’s cities, killed over 250,000 Iraqis, and caused the economy to contract sharply. Equally bad was the conflict’s fiscal impact. The war had saddled Iraq with a staggering $50 billion in foreign debt while wartime damage to oil facilities and a sharp decline in the price of petroleum in the late 1980s had left nominal oil revenue 58 percent lower than it had been a decade earlier. As a result, Baghdad lacked the funds either to service its international debt or to rebuild its economy, a predicament that raised doubts about Hussein’s ability to retain his grip on power.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the Iraqi dictator’s efforts to resolve this dilemma would plunge the region into a new conflict: the Gulf War. Ending in a decisive victory by an American-led coalition, that conflict seemed for a time to have set the stage for a new dawn in the Middle East. Indeed, in its immediate wake, the region appeared to be moving toward a resolution of the many conflicts, new and old, that had marked the region during the 1980s and, thus, toward a new era of peace and stability. It is to the crisis that precipitated the Gulf War and to the apparent easing of tension that followed its conclusion that we shall now turn.