Chapter Sixteen: The Middle East After Nasser, 1967-1979

As we saw in Chapter Fourteen, the Six-Day War was one of the seminal events in the making of the modern Middle East. Its impact was pervasive but uneven. In the Arab states, it produced an ideological sea change, inspired a series of coups, and created pressure for another war with Israel that could restore Arab honor and resolve the Arab- Israeli conflict once and for all. The changes were equally significant in Israel and the Occupied Territories. For a growing number of Israelis, the seizure of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip created a tempting opportunity to expand their country. For the Palestinians, in contrast, the war produced a new, shared experience of oppression that would quickly reinvigorate their sense of national identity. More broadly, the Six-Day War fundamentally transformed the tenor of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Effecting changes that would result in the establishment of peace between Israel and Egypt and in the emergence of an organized Palestinian resistance movement, it set in motion a process that would transform the struggle between Israelis and Arabs from a state-to-state dispute back into what it had been before 1948, a contest between two peoples for control of the land of Palestine.

However, not every major trend in the decade following the Six-Day War was directly related to the conflict. Nurtured by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (r. 1954-1970) successor, Anwar Sadat (r. 1970-1981), and supported financially by the Arab oil states, a new movement, Islamism, emerged as a force in the Arab world. Focused initially on recruiting members and on building institutional structures, the Islamists and their Jihadi offshoots would burst forth at the end of the 1970s to mount a powerful and persistent challenge to Arab states across the political spectrum that would, in conjunction with a series of dramatic events in 1979, once more reshape the region.

The Legacy of 1967

As we shall see, few would have predicted Islamism’s imminent rise to prominence in the years that immediately followed the Six-Day War. What was obvious at the time, however, was the fact that the conflict had thoroughly delegitimized Nasserism, the pan-Arabist ideology that had so thoroughly dominated the Arab world during the prior decade. The deficiencies of Egypt’s military leadership, the rash decision to engage in brinksmanship with Israel at a time when the cream of the Egyptian army was bogged down more than 600 miles away in Yemen, and the sheer totality of Israel’s victory combined to thoroughly discredit Nasserism in both Egypt and the broader Arab world.

Egypt’s defeat was so total and crushing, in fact, that, for a time, Nasser himself appeared to be in danger of losing power. Shortly before the war had ended, a group of generals blamed him for the defeat and demanded that he step down immediately. Chastened, Nasser announced his resignation in a televised speech to the stunned Egyptian people on the evening of June 9, 1967. His retirement ultimately proved to be temporary. The regime and the ideology of Nasserism may have suffered black eyes as a result of the war, but its leader continued to retain the affection of the masses. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians reacted to his address by pouring into the streets of Cairo and demanding that he remain Egypt’s leader. The impact of these demonstrations was immediate. Nasser stayed in power while the officers who had so recently tried to remove him instead found themselves purged from the ranks of the military or, in some cases, killed.

Defeat may have discredited Nasserism, but it did not weaken support for the radical economic policies or Arab nationalist views that lay at its core. Despite the enormous scale of the Arab states’ failure against Israel, in fact, popular support for the core ideas of Nasserism, pan-Arabism, secular nationalism, and socialism, remained strong. As a result, rather than shifting to the right in response to Israel’s triumph, the political center of gravity in much of the Arab world lurched sharply leftward in the years immediately following the Six-Day War. Indeed, both civic groups such as Egypt’s heretofore-Nasserist Organization of Socialist Youth and states such as the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen (PDRY) either outwardly embraced more radical Marxist-Leninist forms of Arab nationalism following the Six-Day War or adopted policies and methods consistent with them. Thus, ironically, while the defeat in 1967 destroyed Nasserism’s credibility in the Arab world, it produced not a repudiation of the ideology’s underlying ideas but instead an embrace of more extreme versions of them.

Political Changes

The changes in government that occurred in the wake of the war reflected this paradox. Just as had happened after 1948, the Arab states experienced a series of coups following their defeat by Israel. This time, however, the new regimes did not turn against the prevailing ideology of the day as their predecessors had but instead doubled down on it. Libya’s youthful Lieutenant Muammar Gaddafi (r. 1969- 2011) and Sudan’s Colonel Gaafar al-Nimeiry (r. 1969-1985) launched successful coups following the Six-Day War that replaced moderate governments with openly radical ones. Meanwhile, in Iraq, a loose alliance of army officers and Ba’athists led by Ahmed al-Bakr (r. 1968-1979) overthrew President Abd al-Rahman Arif (r. 1966-1968) and his Nasserist prime minister, Tahir Yahya (1916-1986) and established a radical Ba’athist government. Finally, in Damascus, Defense Minister Hafez al-Assad (r. 1970-2000) pushed President Salah Jadid (r. 1966-1970) from power in a bloodless coup in 1970. In every case but Syria, which retained the same Ba’athist regime under new leadership, the change of government marked a substantial shift to the left.

Israel, the Palestinians, and the Occupied Territories

While the Arabs grappled with the implications of defeat, the Israelis instead dealt with the challenges of victory. The Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) staggering success in 1967 presented the young country with a dilemma. On the one hand, the war had given it valuable strategic depth and had ended with it holding territories, particularly the West Bank, that growing numbers of Israelis argued should for historical and religious reasons be incorporated into Israel. On the other, retention of the captured land raised several thorny problems beyond the obvious one that seizing territory through conquest was illegal in the eyes of the UN and the international community. First, while the Labor Party coalition that ruled Israel intended from the start to retain the symbolically vital city of Jerusalem and the strategically important Jordan River valley, it had endorsed Resolution 242 and had thus committed Israel to swap most of the land it had captured in the war in exchange for peace and diplomatic recognition. Second, more than one million Palestinians lived in the territories that advocates of annexation most coveted, the Gaza Strip and, especially, the West Bank. Annexing that land would thus confront the government with the unpalatable choice of either imposing a costly military occupation on the territories or granting citizenship to the Palestinians who resided in them, a move that would risk the Jewish demographic dominance of Israel that was intrinsic to the Zionist project.

While the cabinet wrestled with these issues, popular pressure for annexation and the construction of settlements in the Occupied Territories increased rapidly. Leading the charge was a new movement, Greater Land of Israel, that formed shortly after the war ended. Drawing support from adherents of Revisionist Zionism but also from a growing number of Laborites, it loudly demanded that the cabinet move quickly to annex the conquered territories. Moreover, Greater Land of Israel did not merely lobby. Instead, it also took direct action to ensure permanent control of the land that Israel had conquered. Most notably, in parallel with the government’s establishment of strategic military settlements, its members began constructing illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights in an effort to, by simply being there, prevent future Israeli cabinets from ever yielding those territories. Those unsanctioned settlements posed a serious challenge for Eshkol’s government. Caught between its commitment to Resolution 242 and the popularity of Greater Land of Israel, his cabinet equivocated before ultimately agreeing to retroactively approve the illegal settlements, a move that served only to encourage the annexationists to begin planning further unlawful settlements.

At the same time, much as it had altered political views in Israel, so had the conquest of the territories profoundly reshaped the outlook and expectations of the Palestinians. Since 1949, they had, with some notable exceptions, patiently and passively waited for Arab leaders such as Nasser to put their bellicose rhetoric into action and crush Israel. The Arab defeat in 1967 had made a mockery of those expectations. Rather than gaining self-rule as a result of the war, the one million Palestinians who resided in the West Bank and Gaza Strip instead found themselves under an oppressive occupation regime in which the despised Zionists, who exercised total control of key resources such as water, strove to prevent the emergence of any kind of organized opposition or nationalist movement. It was a dispiriting turn of events to say the least. However, the Israeli conquest of the territories did not end the Palestinians’ aspirations for political independence. Instead, Tel Aviv’s harsh rule and seeming desire to once again displace them from their land renewed the Palestinians’ sense of shared identity and rekindled their nationalist hopes, just as the Zionist movement had sparked the emergence of Palestinian nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Moving forward though, the Palestinians knew they would have to take matters into their own hands, rather than wait for the aid of external Arabs forces.

Egypt after the Six Day War

In the meantime, having solidified his political position in the aftermath of Egypt’s defeat in June 1967, Nasser moved to force a resolution of the conflict with Israel through a limited-war strategy. Begun with high hopes, that effort would ultimately fail to achieve that goal. Worse, coming at a time when the state-centered economic policies that Nasser had championed were beginning to create real problems for Egypt, the drive to force a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict would reveal that the Egyptian president’s expansive foreign and domestic policy goals were not merely in conflict but had caught his regime in a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma.

The War of Attrition

The imbalance in power between the IDF and the militaries of the Arab states made the task of resolving the conflict peculiarly difficult. As we have seen, Israel’s military preponderance was so total that it felt no pressure to make concessions, while the Arab states were so weak that they had nothing with which to bargain. Faced with this situation, Nasser devised a plan to end the impasse by waging a limited conflict in the canal zone. With it, he aimed to achieve two goals. First, he hoped to make clear to Tel Aviv that its continued occupation of the Sinai would come at an unacceptable cost. Second, he sought to create a crisis that would impel the international community to force Israel to withdraw from the land it had taken in 1967.

In preparation for this campaign, Nasser first took steps to buttress Egypt’s military, diplomatic, and fiscal positions. Toward that end, he pursued a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies shortly after the end of the Six-Day War. The two sides quickly reached a deal. In exchange for Nasser withdrawing his troops from Yemen, the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments agreed to provide Egypt with an annual subsidy of $266 million. Nasser next moved to reequip his devastated army. With Moscow embarrassed by the poor performance of its proxies’ Soviet-equipped militaries, he was able to persuade the Kremlin to quickly replace the arms that Egypt had lost in 1967 with more advanced weapons including powerful surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). In exchange he agreed to grant the USSR substantial additional basing rights.

With his fiscal situation stabilized and his military reequipped, Nasser followed by announcing in March 1969 the start of the War of Attrition: an intense but limited campaign in which Egyptian artillery bombarded the Bar-Lev Line, a defensive complex consisting of a massive sand berm and a series of heavily fortified strongpoints that the Israelis had constructed along the east bank of the canal.

Nasser’s effort to compel negotiations in 1969 through a limited-war strategy got off to a poor start. The international community did not intervene, and Israel responded with a retaliatory air offensive that not only mauled Egypt’s antiaircraft defenses but also, to Nasser’s great embarrassment, struck targets deep inside the country. However, the Egyptian leader refused to back down. Desperate to restore the military balance, he asked the Kremlin in January 1970 to provide yet more weapons that would give Egypt the strength to end Israel’s dominance of the air. After initially balking, Moscow agreed to supply Egypt with squadrons of MiG-21 fighters and large numbers of advanced SAM missiles. More importantly, it also quietly sent 200 pilots to fly the jets and thousands of Soviet technicians to operate and support the anti-aircraft batteries. Reinforced in this way, the Egyptian military was able to extend its SAM umbrella slowly and at great cost eastward into the Canal Zone over the spring and summer of 1970. At that point Washington intervened. Fearing further escalation and the possibility of a superpower conflict, it succeeded in compelling both sides to accept a ceasefire under the auspices of an otherwise still-born peace initiative.

The War of Attrition was at best a mixed success for Egypt. It is true that the fighting had succeeded in compelling the international community to pay attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict and had allowed Egypt to extend its now much more powerful SAM network into the Canal Zone, putting Nasser’s armed forces in a significantly better strategic position than they had been at the start of the conflict. At the same time, the improvement in the military balance hardly justified the destruction of canal-side cities such as Ismailia in the fighting or, more importantly, the deaths of an estimated 10,000 Egyptian soldiers and civilians.

Economic Problems

The cost of the War of Attrition also contributed substantially to a troubling economic slowdown in Egypt. The stagnation marked a significant turnabout from the early part of the decade. As we saw in Chapter Fourteen, the adoption of Arab Socialism had helped to produce an impressive economic expansion in the early 1960s that had not only produced a 30 percent increase in per-capita income but that had also helped to fund expanded welfare benefits for industrial workers and to underwrite a new and more aggressive program of land reform for the country’s peasants. To the delight of the middle class, Nasser had even guaranteed government employment for all college graduates who could not otherwise find work.

By 1965, however, serious cracks had begun to appear. The reliance on foreign borrowing and imported commodities had created significant balance-of-payments issues that left Egypt struggling to service its debt. As a consequence, economic growth had stalled and the poverty rate had begun to climb. Unsurprisingly the Six-Day War exacerbated these problems. The conflict itself had not only imposed a substantial fiscal drain on Egypt but had also deprived it of its three main sources of foreign currency, exports from its Sinai oil fields, toll revenue from the now-closed Suez Canal, and tourism. Meanwhile, though Nasser had long since learned that the state did not have anywhere close to enough jobs to meet the employment guarantee that he had rashly given to college graduates in 1962, he had neither modified nor abandoned his promise. Instead, he had responded by having the government provide unemployed degree holders with make work jobs. By 1970, as a result, his employment pledge had left Egypt saddled with a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that further dragged on its economy.

The country’s worsening economic situation created a serious dilemma for Nasser. Since 1956, his regime had based its legitimacy on a combination of a rising standard of living and the international prestige that it had enjoyed as a result of his role as the leading anti-Zionist and Arab nationalist figure. By 1970, these competing agendas had trapped him in a variation of the classic guns-versus-butter quandary. If he moved to ease his country’s economic problems by abandoning his role as the leader of the pan-Arab struggle against Israel, he risked losing the support of those Egyptians who demanded justice for the Palestinians. If he instead pressed on with the struggle against Israel, he would impose new burdens on Egypt’s already faltering socialist economy that would lower living standards and thus alienate the masses.

Anwar Sadat and the “Corrective Revolution”

However, it was not Nasser who would resolve this predicament. Instead, due to the Egyptian leader’s sudden death from a heart attack in September 1970, the task of finding a way out of the trap into which Nasser had led Egypt fell to his vice president and successor, Anwar Sadat. The son of a minor bureaucrat, Sadat was a longtime Arab nationalist and leading member of the Free Officers who, like Nasser, had joined the army after the Wafd Party had opened the military academy to members of the lower-middle class. Considered a political lightweight, he appeared to be an unlikely candidate to resolve the dilemma that Nasser’s policies had created. In fact, he had managed to secure the influential Arab Socialist Union’s (ASU) pivotal endorsement of his succession to the presidency only by promising the entrenched and powerful political figures who dominated it that he would continue his predecessor’s policies and, critically, that he would oversee a collective system of rule in which he would be no more than a first among equals. Due to this Sadat was often derogatorily referred to as Nasser’s poodle, a man who would do little more than subserviently uphold the legacy of his predecessor.

It soon became clear, however, that Sadat’s political rivals had badly underestimated him. A shrewd operator, the new president deftly maneuvered them out of power in late 1970 and early 1971 by rallying to his side lower-ranking officers, mid-tier bureaucrats, leftists, the police, and others who loathed the ASU leadership for its part in the debacle in June 1967. He followed with what he called the “corrective revolution”: a thorough restructuring of the government and the ruling party. Vast in scope, it included the extension of limited civil liberties, new elections for the ASU and the National Assembly designed to purge those bodies of extreme Nasserites, and in acknowledgement of the reality that Arab unification schemes were dead, a change in the country’s name from the United Arab Republic to the Arab Republic of Egypt. Thus, dismissed by many in 1970 as little more than a functionary, Sadat had succeeded in eliminating all of his challengers and had consolidated power in his hands by mid-1971.

Despite his success, Sadat was in no position to simply enjoy his political victory. Instead, facing the same dilemma that had trapped his predecessor during his final years in power, he appeared to be caught between two equally ruinous options. On the one hand, he could seek to revive the economy by ending the expensive mobilization of the Egyptian army. This was a move that would effectively cede permanent control of the Occupied Territories and the Sinai to Israel and thus turn Egyptian nationalists against him. On the other, he could continue Nasser’s aggressive military posturing in hopes that it would force Israel to yield the lands it had acquired in 1967. However, this was an approach that would further contribute to the country’s declining economic prospects and therefore alienate the masses. It was a daunting and dangerous situation for Sadat, one that would almost assuredly cost him his position as Egypt’s president if he failed to quickly find a favorable resolution of it.

Transforming the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Yom Kippur War Year of Decision, 1971

An astute statesman, Sadat opted for an innovative solution that he hoped would, by compelling Tel Aviv to engage in productive talks, free him from the binary choice of either saving the Egyptian economy or contesting Israel. It centered on improving relations with the United States. Grasping that Washington held the key to resolving both his country’s domestic and foreign-policy problems, he would first, with American assistance, bring the costly contest with Israel to an end through a negotiated peace settlement that would return the Sinai and, hopefully, the Occupied Territories to Arab rule in exchange for peace and recognition. Freed from the expense of the conflict with Israel and now receiving American foreign aid thanks to its improved ties with Washington, Cairo would follow by restructuring and reviving Egypt’s moribund economy through a liberalization program designed to restore growth and prosperity.

Sadat launched his initiative in February 1971. It called for Israel to withdraw its troops about twenty-five miles east of the Suez Canal. In exchange, Cairo would extend the existing ceasefire with Tel Aviv, grant Israeli ships the right to transit the Suez Canal, and accept the return of peacekeepers to the Sinai. US-mediated peace talks aimed at arriving at a final settlement on the basis of Resolution 242 would follow. It was a remarkable proposal that constituted a dramatic break with the “three nos” of the Khartoum Resolution. Nonetheless, it went nowhere. Golda Meier was unwilling to cede any territory without a full peace treaty, while US President Richard Nixon (r. 1969- 1974) was leery of applying pressure to Israel lest he alienate the Jewish vote just before the upcoming presidential election. As a result, Tel Aviv was able to fend off Sadat’s proposal by insisting on unacceptable conditions such as Israel’s retention of Sharm al-Shaykh.

Frustrated, Sadat followed with what seemed to be an uncharacteristically amateurish move. Declaring 1971 the “year of decision,” he insisted that Egypt was no longer willing to tolerate the “no war, no peace” situation that had prevailed since the end of the War of Attrition and would return to fighting if no progress was made toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was an obvious bluff and a poorly executed one at that. Golda Meir’s government knew that Egypt was not prepared for war and left Sadat in the lurch by refusing to respond. Embarrassed, the Egyptian leader was only able to extricate himself by lamely claiming that the Indo-Pakistani War that had broken out in December 1971 had created too much international uncertainty for Egypt to resume fighting. The episode did little to dispel doubts about Sadat’s abilities. Internationally, the Israelis and Americans concluded that he was a weak and impetuous ruler and no longer took his pronouncements seriously. Domestically, his failure to back his words with actions had resulted in widespread demonstrations against his regime by frustrated nationalists. As a result, the pressure on Sadat had ratcheted up considerably. If he wanted to remain Egypt’s leader, he needed to produce tangible results, and he needed to do so quickly.

The Road to War

Some scholars have postulated that Sadat’s declaration of the “year of decision” was not a blunder, but in fact a calculated move to make himself look week. To support this idea, they point to how Sadat demonstrated far greater skill in managing his next attempt to break the impasse. Having failed to lure Tel Aviv to the negotiating table through a peace proposal, he shifted gears and began preparing to go to war. However, the conflict he sought was an unusual one. Sadat did not hope to destroy Israel or even to achieve a decisive victory. Instead, he intended to wage a limited conflict aimed only at securing a modest amount of territory on the east bank of the canal. Doing so, he believed, was all that was needed to set the stage for genuine peace discussions. It would shake Israeli confidence, compel Washington to help him negotiate with Tel Aviv, and end the psychological and military imbalance that had heretofore prevented the two sides from engaging in productive talks. As National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger (1923- ) later wrote, “Sadat aimed not so much for territorial gain but for a crisis that would alter the attitudes into which the parties were frozen—and thereby open the way for negotiations.”

He first moved to prepare Egypt for the war by breaking with the USSR. Expressing anger about the gratingly imperious attitude of Soviet troops in Egypt and about the Kremlin’s foot dragging on arms deliveries, he abruptly ordered the expulsion of 15,000 Soviet advisors in July 1972. Most observers at the time viewed this move as a rash action. In fact, it was a shrewd maneuver that paid manifold dividends to the Egyptian leader. First, by suggesting that Cairo was seeking to end its close relationship with the USSR, it led the Nixon administration to reconsider its relationship with Egypt and thus set the stage for Washington to adopt a more even-handed approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Second, Sadat’s move had the ironic effect of compelling Moscow to change course regarding the provision of weapons to Egypt. Fearing that it might lose access to the valuable Egyptian bases from which its ships and aircraft tracked American missile submarines operating in the Mediterranean, Moscow quickly agreed to provide Sadat with sophisticated new weapons. Accordingly, during late 1972 and early 1973, the Egyptian military received a huge infusion of new arms including MiG-23 jet fighters, SU-20 attack aircraft, advanced SAM batteries, late-model tanks, and powerful wire- guided Sagger antitank missiles. Finally, the eviction of Soviet advisors helped create a sense of complacency in Tel Aviv. Coming so soon after Sadat’s failure to follow through with his threat during the “year of decision,” the rupture between Cairo and Moscow led Israeli intelligence officials to conclude that Egypt was in no position to go to war in 1973.

After both acquiring new weaponry and positioning Egypt for closer ties with Washington, Sadat moved to cultivate alliances across the Arab world. He initially opened contacts with the Libyans and Palestinians but decided they were either too radical or couldn’t be trusted. He then turned to Syria. Knowing that Assad was as determined to regain control of the Golan Heights as he was to retake the Sinai, Sadat struck an agreement with the Syrian leader in April 1973 to launch a coordinated, two-front attack on Israel designed to apply maximum pressure on the IDF. He followed by securing Saudi support. Meeting with King Faisal bin Abdulaziz al Saud (r. 1964-1975) in August 1973, he asked that Saudi Arabia support his military assault with a coordinated economic campaign designed to pressure Israel’s Western backers, above all the US, by cutting the export of Saudi petroleum to those countries after the war had begun. As we have seen, the oil weapon had proven ineffective in 1967. By 1973, however, the balance between consumer and producer states had swung drastically in favor of the latter. Most significantly, Saudi Arabia had supplanted the US as the world’s swing producer and, as such, was in a position to unleash the oil weapon with devastating effect against the suddenly vulnerable West. Well aware that the balance of power had shifted in favor of the producer states, Faisal, assured Sadat of Saudi support and promised not only to deploy the oil weapon once the war began, but, in the meantime, to provide Egypt with the enormous sum of $500 million to help it prepare for the conflict.

With Riyadh now on board, the Egyptians and Syrians hurried to complete their planning. In September of 1973 a mini-Cairo Summit was held that included Jordan. It was decided that at the same time that Egypt crossed the Suez Canal the Syrians would concurrently attack the Golan Heights. They also agreed that Jordan would remain neutral due to the weakness of its military but would move troops towards its border with Israel so as to distract the Israelis. They further decided to launch the attack on Saturday, October 6, 1973, the same date as Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. They chose the holiday for two reasons. First, since there would be no moonlight after midnight on that date, Egyptian engineers would be able to bring equipment up to the canal undetected. Second, since radio and television stations in Israel were closed on High Holy Days, the IDF would have difficulty mobilizing reservists. As a result, Egypt would be in a position to deploy substantial forces across the canal before they faced the inevitable counterattack. The timing of the attack offered an additional strategic advantage, as it coincided with the holy month of Ramadan. Israeli planners were unlikely to anticipate that Egypt and Syria would initiate hostilities during this sacred period, further enhancing the element of surprise.

Despite close coordination in the run up to the war, however, Egypt and Syria had in fact adopted very different strategies aimed at achieving decidedly different objectives. From the start, Sadat had intended to wage a cautious, limited campaign designed to break the impasse that had obtained since the end of the Six-Day War. His generals had consequently developed a plan in which Egyptian troops would cross the canal and take up defensive positions six miles to the east, an approach that would achieve Sadat’s goal of shattering the status quo but that would also keep Egyptian ground forces safely under the cover of their powerful-but-immobile SAM umbrella. This strategy was a sound one. It was not, however, likely to entice Damascus to join Egypt in attacking Israel. As Sadat knew, Assad wanted to retake the entire Golan Heights, an objective that the Syrian army could only achieve if Egypt was committed to an all-out offensive. The Egyptian president consequently kept quiet about his true intentions, and instead told his Syrian counterpart in April 1973 that he intended to retake all of Egypt’s lost territory and that his army would continue its offensive deep into the Sinai. Believing, as a result, that he was on the same page as Sadat, Assad ordered his generals to devise a strategy that called for the Syrian army to push forward aggressively based on the erroneous assumption that Egypt’s drive into the Sinai would tie down a large portion of the Israeli army. This difference in strategy was critical, and it would have an enormous effect on the war and its outcome.

The Yom Kippur War

To the Israelis’ shock, the Yom Kippur War, also known as the Ramadan War, began very differently than had any of the prior four Arab-Israeli conflicts. This time it was the Arabs rather than the Israelis who caught the enemy napping and who, at least at first, flawlessly executed a series of complex and well-planned military operations. In the north, the Syrians mounted a tactically sound offensive that scored significant gains and nearly unhinged Israel’s defensive line in the Golan Heights. Egyptian troops performed even more impressively in the south. After crossing the canal in dinghies and quickly erecting pontoon bridges, engineers used 450 water cannons to blast passages for troops and vehicles in the sand berm that the Israelis had erected. As a result, the Egyptian army was able to push its way through the purportedly impregnable Bar-Lev Line with little difficulty. Indeed, by the evening of October 7, 100,000 troops, 13,500 vehicles, and more than 1,000 tanks had taken up defensive positions six miles east of the canal. Tel Aviv bordered on panic. Already surprised by the ease with which Sadat’s troops had broken through the first line of defense, Israeli leaders were positively stunned when the Egyptians easily swatted away a concerted counterattack by two IDF armored divisions in an engagement that cost the Israelis eighty tanks, almost as many as they had lost over the course of the entire Six-Day War.

As the losses mounted, Tel Aviv became increasingly concerned that the Arab attack constituted an existential threat to Israel. Emblematic of this fear was the change in the demeanor of the country’s normally confident defense minister, Moshe Dayan (1915-1981). Expressing panic for Israel’s survival during the early days of the conflict, he at one point histrionically declared that “the third temple [meaning Israel] is going under.” Meanwhile, shocked to learn that the Arabs had knocked out 500 tanks in the first three days of fighting, Prime Minister Golda Meir begged Washington to send desperately needed equipment, supplies, and, especially, ammunition. Now serving as Secretary of State, Kissinger initially demurred. Assured by Sadat that Egypt’s goals were limited, he was leery of needlessly antagonizing the Arab oil states and believed that a stalemate or even a minor defeat would leave Israel more tractable and thus willing to make the concessions on which a durable peace depended.

However, the commencement of a huge Soviet effort to resupply Egypt and Syria on October 10 quickly changed his attitude. Symbolically turning the conflict into a superpower proxy war, the Soviet move impelled Nixon and Kissinger to take steps to ensure Israel’s victory. The most important of those began on October 14, when massive US Air Force C5-A Galaxy transport planes laden with supplies, tanks, and ammunition began landing in Israel. Nixon soon went even further. On October 19, he requested that Congress provide Israel with an additional $2.2 billion of military aid, an amount greater than the total sum Israel had spent on defense in 1972.

Bolstered by the aid, the now fully mobilized IDF soon began to turn the tide. Realizing after a few days that the Egyptians were not going to advance beyond their protective SAM umbrella, the Israelis concentrated their forces for a blistering counterattack against Assad’s overextended army. Driving the Syrians back nearly to Damascus, the attack not only effectively knocked Syria out of the war but, as important, also indirectly set the stage for Israeli success against Egypt. Key here was the intervention of the USSR. As the IDF counteroffensive in the Golan was unfolding, Moscow began frantically pushing Sadat to order a new advance into the Sinai that would relieve pressure on Assad’s forces. The Egyptian leader initially refused, but, facing insistent Soviet demands, soon relented. Accordingly, on October 14, Egyptian forces started advancing further into the Sinai, moving well beyond not just the canal but also, critically, the SAM umbrella that protected them from Israel’s powerful air force.

The offensive proved to be a disastrous mistake. Not only was the attack costly with the IDF knocking out 250 Egyptian tanks in just a few hours but it also completely disturbed the carefully constructed defensive position that Sadat’s soldiers had established near the canal. The Israelis were quick to take advantage. After breaking through to the east bank of the waterway on October 15, IDF troops stunned the Egyptians by securing a bridgehead on the west side of the canal. After briefly consolidating their position, they began pushing south in a drive designed to cut the Egyptian Third Army off from its supply lines.

It was at that juncture that the Arab states and Iran unleashed the oil weapon. Meeting in Kuwait City, representatives of Iran and five Arab oil-producing states agreed to raise the price of a barrel of petroleum by a jaw-dropping 70 percent. Ramping up the pressure, they announced the following day that they would immediately cut production by 5 percent and would continue to cut it by 5 percent each month until the total evacuation of Israeli forces from all Arab territory had occurred. They were not finished. After learning of Nixon’s request for $2.2 billion in military aid for Israel, Riyadh and the other Arab oil-producing states announced on October 20 that they were immediately embargoing the sale of petroleum to the US.

Thanks in part to the oil weapon, the war soon came to an end. On October 22, the United Nations (UN) Security Council moved to bring the fighting to a stop through the passage of Resolution 338. It called for a ceasefire, immediate implementation of Resolution 242, and talks “aimed at establishing a just and durable peace.” Nonetheless, military operations did not immediately cease. Instead, Israel’s effort to improve its negotiating position by completing the encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army extended the war for two more days. Indeed, it was only after the IDF’s maneuvers led the superpowers to engage in a brief bit of nuclear brinksmanship in support of their regional proxies that the fighting finally halted.

The Yom Kippur War was enormously consequential for the Middle East and greatly redressed the imbalance in power between Israel and the Arab states that had precluded productive negotiations after the Six-Day War. Militarily, it is true, Israel had bounced back from its early setbacks and was in a stronger position vis-à-vis Egypt and Syria than it had been on the morning of October 6. At the same time, however, its near defeat and its serious losses, Israel suffered 2,838 dead and 8,800 wounded, and it lost 840 tanks and 103 aircraft, had destroyed the hubris and sense of military invulnerability that had gripped the Jewish state since 1967 and had left a stunned Israeli government receptive to negotiations. The war was thus a major triumph for Sadat. Hailed thereafter as the “Hero of the Crossing,” he had succeeded in establishing a very different diplomatic climate in the region than had existed since the Six-Day War and, in so doing, had for the first time created the proper conditions for Israel and the Arab states to finally begin to negotiate a resolution of the region’s most bitter and enduring conflict.

Transforming the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The PLO

Meanwhile, at the same time that the Egyptian government was groping for a way out of the costly Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinians were moving to once more take charge of the struggle with Israel. That effort began almost before the Six-Day War had ended. Fed up with the Arab states’ inability to restore them to their land, Palestinian militant groups initiated a new campaign of terrorist and insurgent attacks beginning in 1967. Though their efforts failed to meaningfully harm Israel, they nonetheless had important consequences. They restored hope to the Palestinian people, put their national aspirations back on the front burner internationally, and won substantial diplomatic support for their cause. Above all, they proved pivotal in helping to turn what had been, since 1948, an interstate dispute back into a conflict between competing nationalisms.

The Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah

For the Palestinians, the years between 1949 and 1967 had been dark ones. Expelled from their homes in 1948, the majority lived during that period in crowded United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. As we saw in Chapter Fourteen, the Palestinians were not treated well by the governments of those states. Denied the right to citizenship or employment everywhere but Jordan, they led a meager existence as stateless refugees unable to meaningfully improve their circumstances, let alone recover their lost homes. Too weak to challenge Israel, they placed their hopes for redemption in the hands of pan-Arabist leaders such as Nasser who, knowing that tough talk toward Israel played well with the masses, launched frequent broadsides against the Jewish state and promised to destroy it when the time was right.

However, the Palestinians were not completely inert between 1949 and 1967. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they had established a number of competing organizations dedicated to liberating Palestine. The most important of these was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It originated out of a call Nasser had made in the early 1960s for a new body to coordinate the Palestinians’ resistance to Israel. At his urgings, the Palestine National Council (PNC), which functioned as a legislature in exile, met in May 1964 to establish the new organization and to draft its covenant, the Palestine National Charter. Uncompromising in tone and objectives, that document forthrightly called both for the destruction of Israel and for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the entirety of the former mandate.

Despite a great deal of sound and fury, however, the charter amounted at the time to little more than empty words. It was Nasser rather than the Palestinians who controlled the PLO, and he had proposed its establishment not to create an organization that could lead an armed insurgency against the Jewish state but merely to build the impression that he was actively supporting Palestinian efforts to liberate their homeland and, thus, to rebut intense criticism from his Arab rivals for his failure to back his anti-Israeli rhetoric with action. He certainly had no intention of inviting IDF reprisals by permitting the PLO to raid Israel from Egyptian territory. In fact, he deliberately arranged for a passive functionary, the Lebanese-born Palestinian diplomat Ahmad Shukeiri (1908-1980), to serve as the first chairperson of the organization, and he secured a pledge from Shukeiri that the PLO would under no circumstances whatsoever undertake an attack on Israel from Egyptian-controlled territory.

In contrast, a competing organization called Fatah was forthright in its commitment to armed struggle. Founded in Kuwait in 1959 by a group of Palestinians headed by Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), it eschewed a commitment to pan-Arabism or Marxism in favor of a non-ideological, albeit leftist, approach. As such, it did not concern itself in the early 1960s with the broader pan-Arabist effort to unify the Arab world and instead focused on liberating Palestine through the same violent guerrilla tactics that anticolonial organizations had successfully employed in places like Vietnam and Indonesia. Enjoying the support of the Syrian government, which at the time was seeking to displace Egypt as the leader of the anti-Zionist cause, Fatah’s guerilla soldiers, or fedayeen, began launching raids against Israel from Syrian and Jordanian-controlled territory in January 1965. Though those operations were almost universally unsuccessful, they compared favorably with the unwillingness of Arab leaders like Nasser to match their tough rhetoric toward Israel with action. As a result, the organization quickly won the support of many Palestinians.

Ultimately, however, it was the events that followed the Six-Day War rather than these ineffectual raids that vaulted Fatah to prominence. Initially, the organization responded to the Israeli seizure of the West Bank by undertaking insurgent operations against the occupying forces. Believing that it could spark a spontaneous popular rebellion among the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, it began with an interior campaign in the late summer and fall of 1967 in which fedayeen launched attacks from within the occupied West Bank. As poorly executed as it was organized, the operation soon collapsed in the face of Israel’s brutally efficient counterinsurgency tactics. Fatah was undeterred, however, and responded not by ceasing its attacks but instead by shifting to an exterior strategy in which guerrillas raided Israeli-controlled territory from bases in Jordan. In the immediate term, these attacks were only marginally more effective than the interior campaign and thus had little direct consequence for either Israelis or Palestinians. Leading as they did to an IDF retaliatory attack against the Jordanian village of Karameh on March 21, 1968, however, the cross-border raids would come to have a significant, long-term impact that would dramatically alter the nature and direction the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Karameh, March 1968

Launched in response to Fatah incursions, the attack on Karameh aimed to destroy the organization’s forward headquarters. The Israelis anticipated that the raid would follow the pattern of earlier punitive operations. IDF soldiers would seize control of the village, kill a few guerrillas, and demolish a large number of houses before leisurely returning to Israel. This time, however, the operation did not follow the usual pattern. Instead, knowing that they enjoyed the support of Jordanian artillery and tanks dug in on the heights overlooking the village, the fedayeen decided to stand their ground. As a result, the IDF troops that approached Karameh found themselves in an unexpectedly serious firefight with tough, disciplined Fatah militants. Though they did manage to push their way into the village, the Israelis incurred serious losses, thirty-three dead, 161 wounded, four tanks destroyed, and a fighter-bomber shot down, and ended up retreating in disarray back across the Jordan River.

The battle was a watershed moment for Fatah that benefitted the organization in a number of ways. First, thanks to its success against the IDF and to King Hussein’s (r. 1952-1999) willingness to let the organization take full credit for the victory, Fatah was able to establish itself as the leading organization in the broader Palestinian resistance movement. Recruits thereafter flocked to its banner, and it soon enjoyed the strength to impose its control over the refugee camps near the Jordanian capital of Amman. Second, Fatah was able to translate its military success into significant financial support from the increasingly wealthy Gulf principalities, funding that gave it a degree of independence from states like Egypt and Syria that had long sought to control the Palestinian militant groups. Finally, Karameh helped win the diplomatic backing of scores of newly independent states in the developing world that saw in the Palestinian struggle echoes of their own recent anticolonial efforts. As we shall see, their assistance would prove invaluable in the Fatah-led campaign to secure international recognition of the Palestinian cause in the 1970s.

Karameh also permitted Arafat to assume a dominant position within the PLO. By early 1968, that organization was in serious disarray. Espousing restraint at a time when Palestinians were pushing for direct action, it appeared to be out of touch and risked collapsing into irrelevance. Indeed, members of the PLO’s executive board gave serious consideration to dissolving the organization in the wake of the Six-Day War. Ultimately, however, they rejected that course of action. Instead, aware that the PLO’s founding under the auspices of the PNC lent it a degree of legitimacy that other resistance groups lacked, executive committee members moved to remake the PLO into a genuinely independent, Palestinian-controlled umbrella organization. In short order, they forced the ineffectual Shukeiri to resign, established the PLO’s autonomy from Nasser, and invited militant groups like Fatah to join. They also opted to assign seats on the revamped executive committee to the different Palestinian resistance groups on the basis of their size.

This last move was enormously beneficial to Fatah. Enjoying broad support among Palestinians thanks to its victory at Karameh, it assumed a controlling position in the PLO and secured Arafat’s election as the organization’s new chair, a post he would hold continuously from February 1969 until his death in 2004. Arafat and the other Fatah leaders wasted little time in bringing the PLO’s goals and methods in line with their more explicitly militaristic approach. Most notably, they successfully amended the Palestine National Charter so that it called for the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle and they declared the organization’s primary goal to be the establishment of a secular Palestinian state in the entirety of the former mandate.

Splinter Groups

Fatah was not the only Palestinian militant group to gain prominence following the Six-Day War. Beginning in 1968, a number of smaller, newly created splinter groups also won followings by launching guerrilla and terrorist attacks on Israel. Motivated by the same far-left ideologies that were sweeping through the Arab states following the decline of Nasserism, organizations such as the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), the Iraqi-dominated Arab Liberation Front (ALF), George Habash’s (1926-2008) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its offshoots, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC), took a far-more extreme and uncompromising line than did the more ideologically flexible Fatah. Those groups also adopted a more transnational outlook and strategy than did Arafat’s organization. Most notably, committed as they were to both Marxism and pan-Arabism, they believed that the radicalization and unification of the Arab states had to occur before the militants could defeat Israel and redeem Palestine.

Joining the PLO shortly after Fatah, these groups greatly complicated Arafat’s ability to direct the organization. In hopes of precluding internecine conflict, he had from the start adopted an inclusive approach wherein the constituent organizations would resolve their differences through consensus, compromise, and negotiation rather than through conflict. Unfortunately for Arafat, the PFLP and PDFLP, soon renamed the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were ideologically inflexible and thus disinclined to follow his consensual approach. Indeed, they not only engaged in factional infighting within the PLO, but, more importantly, used Arafat’s commitment to consensus and compromise to box him in. Insisting that the organization maintain a hardline approach, for example, they prevented the PLO chair from taking advantage of passing opportunities and they delayed vital policy changes such as a shift from the unobtainable goal of destroying Israel to a more-realistic willingness to accept a Palestinian state confined to the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Particularly problematic for Arafat were the radical groups’ terrorist operations. Too small to mount effective attacks across the heavily defended border between Jordan and the West Bank, the PFLP and DFLP instead focused on high-profile operations against soft targets abroad. The PFLP initiated this new approach in July 1968 when it hijacked an El Al airliner and successfully exchanged the hostages it had taken for fifteen Palestinian prisoners. Wildly successful in drawing world attention to the Palestinian cause, the operation spurred the organization to follow with further hijackings in 1969. Meanwhile, in February 1970, the smaller PFLP-GC joined the campaign in spectacular fashion by detonating a bomb on a Swissair flight that killed all forty-seven people on board.

Arafat had been unenthusiastic about such operations through that point but could accept them as a modest price to pay for unity within the PLO. However, the PFLP’s terror attacks in Jordan in 1970 were a different matter altogether. These operations emerged out of the splinter organizations’ ideological commitment to effecting radical political change in the Arab world as a first step in their campaign against Israel. Declaring “that the road to Jerusalem begins in Amman,” the PFLP and DPFLP maintained that they had to first replace King Hussein’s conservative government with a radical, Palestinian one before they could mount an effective challenge to the Jewish state. Accordingly, the splinter groups moved to spark a Palestinian revolution in Jordan by launching a series of terrorist attacks designed to embarrass and weaken Hussein’s government. These included two assassination attempts against the king, the seizure of thirty-three Western hostages at popular tourist hotels in June 1970, and, most spectacularly, the destruction of three hijacked Western airliners at a derelict RAF airfield just outside Amman in September 1970.

Black September, September 1970

The hijacking incident was the final straw for Hussein. Furious both that the militant groups were challenging his rule and that Arafat had established what amounted to an autonomous Palestinian state in Jordan replete with tax collectors, courts, and uniformed military personnel, he ordered his army to move against PLO forces in the camps shortly after the PFLP’s destruction of the three airliners. In a civil conflict known as Black September, Hussein’s troops handily crushed Arafat’s forces and seized control of the camps in and around Amman, killing an estimated 3,500 Palestinians in the process. A new offensive pushed the organization out of Jordan altogether the following year. Transiting through Syria, PLO guerrillas set up a new base of operations in Lebanon in the fall of 1971. Taking full advantage of an autonomy deal that Nasser had brokered in 1969 to ease a growing conflict between the PLO guerrillas and the Lebanese government, Arafat quickly established what amounted to a Palestinian state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon and began organizing attacks across the border with Israel.

The PLO’s Global Offensive

Shortly after its relocation to Lebanon, however, the PLO largely abandoned its efforts to bring the fight directly to Israel. Two factors produced this change. First, at a length of only 50 miles, Israel’s border with Lebanon is considerably shorter than the frontier that divides it and the occupied West Bank from Jordan and was thus much more difficult to cross undetected. Second, the PLO had never managed to devise a set of tactics for combating the overwhelmingly powerful IDF. As a result, while the organization continued to mount the occasional fedayeen raid across the border and to lob shells into Israel, it shifted in 1971 to a new approach in its effort to secure a state. Thereafter, it pursued what the historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin calls the global offensive, a strategy designed to draw international attention to the Palestinians’ situation and to build support for their cause across the world.

The PLO waged this campaign on two fronts: one ideological, the other operational. First, using the existing rhetoric of anti-colonial liberation and emphasizing that it was fighting a common imperial enemy, the organization waged a skilled public-relations campaign aimed at linking the Palestinian cause to other national liberation movements in the Global South such as the Front de libération nationale (FLN) in Algeria and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam, as well as to radical terrorist organizations like Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army. While the embrace of radicalism and anti-colonial ideas was more a matter of tactics than conviction for Fatah, it was central to the more ideologically rigid splinter groups. Indeed, those organizations were unflinching in their support for radical social and political change. Most notably, making clear its commitment to both national and women’s liberation, the PFLP unabashedly assigned women such as Leila Khaled (1944- ) and Amina Dahbour (1945- ) to lead many of the organization’s high- profile hijacking operations.

Such incidents were a core part of the global offensive’s other component: the operational front. Aimed at drawing attention to the Palestinian cause, PLO external operations included the assassination of Jordan’s Prime Minister Wasfi Tal (1919- 1971) in November 1971 by a shadowy new group affiliated with Fatah called the Black September Organization. More spectacular were two incidents in 1972: a brutal PFLP- affiliated Japanese Red Army operation in which gunmen killed twenty-six people at Israel’s Lod International Airport in May and, especially, the Black September terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics that September that resulted in the murder of eleven Israeli athletes.

The PLO’s global offensive effected a rapid shift in international public opinion regarding the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. The use of national-liberation rhetoric and the establishment of transnational linkages with other revolutionary, non-state actors raised the organization’s stature and won it the sympathy of people living in recently decolonized African and Asian states. Likewise, the terrorist attacks ensured that the issue of the Palestinians remained at the center of global affairs. The governments of newly independent states did express regret at the loss of life in those incidents, but, having themselves only recently and often forcefully thrown off imperial rule, they also vigorously defended the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and maintained that violence remained a legitimate tool in the pursuit of national liberation. The Global Offensive’s success in altering perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict is perhaps rendered clearest in the verbiage of a UN General Assembly Resolution on terrorism passed in December 1972. Though that resolution called for international efforts to control terrorism, it also upheld the right of colonized people to use violence to achieve national liberation and forthrightly condemned states that “den[ied] peoples their legitimate right to self-determination and independence.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the PLO’s global offensive proved especially fruitful in the Arab world. It not only raised the organization’s stature, but, more importantly, also helped it to gain official standing with the Arab League. That change occurred at the Arab League Summit held in Rabat, Morocco in October 1974. There, the member states formally rejected King Hussein of Jordan’s longstanding claim to represent the Palestinians. Instead, acknowledging that Arafat’s organization enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and noting both the extent of its global terrorist operations and the success of its diplomatic initiatives, it voted to recognize the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative organization for the Palestinian people in any Palestinian territory that is liberated.”

As its role in securing official standing for the PLO made clear, moreover, the global offensive also played a key part in accelerating the transformation of the Arab-Israeli conflict back into a contest between rival nationalisms. For years, as we have seen, the Palestinians had been passive observers in that struggle, a people who looked to leaders like Nasser to restore them to the land they had lost in 1948. Thanks to the failure of Arab armies in the Six-Day War and the success of the PLO’s global offensive, however, the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli contest had changed. Enjoying the recognition of nearly all Palestinians and a growing number of states, the PLO henceforth took the lead in the conflict with Israel. No longer, in other words, were the Palestinians wards of the Arab states or dependent upon them for their salvation. Instead, under the PLO, they enjoyed agency in their struggle for the first time since 1948.

Progress and Frustration: Peace Talks, 1973-1977

In the meantime, the shocking events of the Yom Kippur War thoroughly scrambled the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thanks to Egypt’s military success and to the Arab oil producers’ newfound global economic clout, the imbalance in power between Israel and the Arab states had been narrowed to such a degree that the two sides agreed to take part in peace talks for the first time. As a result, for a brief period after the 1973 War, hopes were high that a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict was at hand.

The Geneva Conference, December 1973

The peace talks began in December 1973 when the US and USSR cosponsored a meeting in Geneva under the aegis of the UN for the purpose of securing a settlement on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338. The conference was well attended. All of the relevant parties sent representatives save for Syria and the PLO, the former because Assad insisted that Israel had to pledge to withdraw from all of the Occupied Territories as a precondition for his country’s participation and the latter because Washington and Tel Aviv objected to the organization’s participation. The conference opened on December 21. After a series of speeches, the attendees ended the meeting’s first day by voting to put the conference on hold until the belligerent states had first negotiated a series of bilateral disengagement agreements designed to disentangle their military forces. It never restarted. Instead, thanks to Washington’s desire to exclude the USSR from the peace process, the negotiations ended up following a bilateral path rather than the multilateral approach envisioned at Geneva.

The PLO’s Diplomatic Push

Meanwhile, at the same time that the diplomats were preparing for the Geneva Conference, moderates in the PLO were beginning to promote a strategy oriented not on force but instead on diplomacy. They pursued this new approach for two reasons. First, they feared that the continued construction of settlements in the West Bank would eventually result in so many Jewish people living in the territory that future Israeli governments would be unable to cede it even if they wanted to. In other words, time was not on the Palestinians’ side. Second, Arafat and his advisors perceived that the Yom Kippur War had altered the diplomatic situation and had made possible a comprehensive peace agreement that could potentially include provisions for a Palestinian state.

As Arafat was well aware, however, participation in the peace talks would require the PLO to take two important steps. First, it would need to cease the operational side of the global offensive, meaning that it would need to end the military and terrorist attacks that had proven so effective at bringing attention to the Palestinian cause. Second, it would have to devise realistic negotiating positions that could serve as the basis for productive discussions. Accordingly, in late 1973, Arafat and his allies began to shut down the PLO’s military operations. As important, they also started to lay the groundwork for the abandonment of the organization’s longstanding support for a one-state solution, wherein the Palestinians would establish a state in the entire territory of the former mandate, in favor of a two-state solution, wherein they would have a state in the Occupied Territories that stood alongside an Israeli one that existed within its pre- 1967 borders.

However, shifting to a diplomatic approach did not promise to be easy. Arafat and the other moderates understood that the pursuit of a negotiated settlement and, especially, the promotion of a two-state solution would generate fierce opposition within the Palestinian community. To a degree, this was a problem of Fatah’s own making. Though its leadership had been well aware that the fedayeen lacked the power to defeat the IDF and conquer Israel, it had nonetheless publicly maintained that the Palestinians could, through revolutionary action, achieve a complete triumph that would result in them regaining control of all of their ancestral lands. Primed in this way to believe that a total victory was possible, most Palestinians would strongly oppose a compromise solution and would instead demand the unconditional success that Fatah had earlier promised.

Two important groups were particularly inclined to resist any settlement short of a total victory. Drawn largely from the Palestinians who had fled Israel in 1948 and who now lived in the refugee camps, the bulk of the PLO’s guerrillas were strongly against a resolution to the conflict that did not permit them to return to their homes in Israel proper. Meanwhile, the more radical splinter groups, particularly the PFLP-GC and George Habash’s PFLP, were opposed to any compromise settlement. In fact, those organizations had earlier declared that the peace process between Israel and the Arab states was an act of treachery and had demanded that Arafat promise to refrain from taking part in the talks. The PFLP-GC had even tried to torpedo negotiations by launching a bloody terrorist attack against the Israeli village of Kirva Shimona in April 1974.

Arafat and his allies thus had to walk a very fine line. They needed to make clear to Israel and its Western supporters that the organization would accept a two-state solution, and they needed to do so in such a way that did not alienate the many Palestinians who remained focused on securing a total victory. Their answer was to carefully characterize the organization’s willingness to accept a rump state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip not as the end product of a two-state solution, which was in fact the goal that they now sought, but instead as merely the first step in a larger effort aimed at eventually retaking all of Palestine.

The PLO leadership moved forward with this strategy in June 1974 at the twelfth PNC meeting when it formally endorsed a new statement of strategy: the Ten-Point Program. A formal expression of the organization’s position vis-à-vis the ongoing peace process, this document reaffirmed the PLO’s traditional commitment to armed struggle and to the reconquest of all of Palestine. Crucially, however, it also declared that the organization would “employ all means” toward the achievement of that goal including the establishment of a “national authority” in liberated territories as an interim step. To the untrained eye, this declaration may have appeared to be just a recapitulation of the PLO’s earlier hardline position, but it in fact marked a dramatic change. With it, the organization signaled, however elliptically, that it was open to negotiations and that henceforth it was willing to accept a ministate in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.

If the full import of the Ten-Point Program was not apparent to the casual observer, it was emphatically clear to those attuned to the subtleties of diplomatic language. US State Department officials immediately grasped that the document marked both the PLO’s implicit acceptance of Israel’s right to exist and its willingness to settle for a ministate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian hardliners in splinter groups like the PFLP and the ALF likewise understood the document’s thrust. They were not happy about it. Furious that Arafat was willing to consider anything less than a total victory, they moved to counter the Ten Point Program by organizing the Rejectionist Front. Under its banner, they issued propaganda broadsides against Arafat and the moderates and sought to rally Palestinians against any move toward a two- state solution. The existence of the front significantly constrained Arafat and his allies. They understood that if they publicly pursued a diplomatic settlement and then failed to attain one, the more militant groups would be able to exploit the resulting frustration among the Palestinian people to make substantial political inroads at their expense. Accordingly, Arafat and his supporters remained coy about their diplomatic goals and continued to disguise their support for negotiations and their acceptance of a two-state solution in extremist rhetoric.

Building on the success of the global offensive, the PLO’s turn to diplomacy produced some exciting achievements following the Yom Kippur War. Three stand out. First, the UN invited Arafat to address the world body in November 1974. His speech was enthusiastically received, and the UN General Assembly followed by granting official observer status to the PLO. Second, thanks to a combination of rising sympathy for the Palestinian people and fear of the oil weapon, states like France extended de facto recognition to the organization. Finally, the PLO’s successful lobbying and the growing power of the globe’s developing states resulted in the UN General Assembly issuing a resolution in 1975 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

These were important achievements, and they marked a dramatic improvement in the Palestinians’ position in a remarkably brief period. At the same time, however, the PLO was unable to build on them or even to use them to secure a seat at the peace talks. What accounted for this failure? Why had the PLO’s diplomatic initiative flopped? Two factors worked together to thwart the PLO’s diplomatic offensive. First, Washington and Tel Aviv remained unwilling to negotiate with the organization. Arguing that the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories “would be the beginning of the end of the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (r. 1974-1977, 1992-1995) steadfastly refused to take part in direct talks with the PLO or to countenance concessions that could lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories.Unwilling to apply pressure to its most important regional ally, Washington supported his stance. Second, the Palestinians’ internal political differences prevented Arafat from making concessions that might force Israel to negotiate. It is conceivable that he might have leveraged the PLO’s newfound international political strength to overcome Washington and Tel Aviv’s opposition to direct talks if he could have openly declared the organization’s willingness both to recognize Israel and to settle for a ministate in the Occupied Territories. However, the political threat posed by the splinter groups compelled Arafat to continue to call publicly for unconditional victory, a position that gave Washington and Tel Aviv the excuse they needed to refuse to negotiate. As a result, the PLO would remain outside the formal peace process during the 1970s.

Shuttle Diplomacy

In the meantime, the disengagement talks that had started in Geneva in December 1973 had begun to produce tangible progress. Taking charge of the diplomatic effort to disentangle the military forces of the combatants, Secretary of State Kissinger used shuttle diplomacy, so called because it involved him shuttling back and forth by plane between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Damascus, to lay the groundwork for a series of promising disengagement agreements based on Resolution 242. It was a grueling effort. Traveling nearly 24,000 miles on forty-one separate flights and dealing with obstinate rulers like Assad and Rabin, Kissinger won plaudits in the press for his apparently single-minded determination to end the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all.

Appearances, in this case, were deceiving. In reality, the Secretary of State was not seeking a comprehensive settlement based on Resolution 242. Instead, he was playing a very careful diplomatic gambit designed to achieve two related American objectives: weakening the USSR’s position in the Middle East and strengthening Israel by permitting it to retain much of the territory it had acquired in 1967. Grasping that Sadat was willing to break with the other Arab states to secure peace with Israel, Kissinger correctly perceived that he could achieve both of these ends by brokering a separate peace between Tel Aviv and Cairo. Such an agreement would end the possibility that Israel would have to fight a two-front war and would thus free it from needing to make substantial concessions regarding the remaining Occupied Territories. More importantly it would also shift Egypt from the Soviet camp to the American one and thus dramatically tip the superpower balance in the Middle East. Kissinger knew, however, that he could not openly pursue a bilateral agreement. A savvy diplomat, he understood all too well that Soviet and Arab pressure on Sadat would derail any open effort to secure a separate peace. He consequently opted for an incremental diplomatic strategy designed to disguise his pursuit of a narrowly bilateral agreement between Tel Aviv and Cairo.

Kissinger’s efforts quickly bore fruit. As a result of his shuttle diplomacy, Israel and Egypt signed the Disengagement of Forces agreement, popularly known as Sinai I, in January 1974. It secured the withdrawal of IDF forces from the canal zone, severely limited the number of soldiers that either side could station within nineteen miles of the waterway, and established a UN-controlled buffer area between Egyptian and Israeli troops. It was a robust agreement that involved meaningful concessions on the part of both Egypt and Israel. Indeed, it was significant enough to persuade the Arab oil states to end the embargo on the sale of petroleum to the US.

He next turned his attention to Syria. A deal between Tel Aviv and Damascus that resulted in Assad regaining all of the land Israel had taken in 1973 and a small part of the territory it had seized in 1967 was vital to his plan. By making it appear that he was securing agreements between Israel and all the Arab states from which it had taken territory, the Secretary of State could provide Sadat with the diplomatic cover he needed to pursue a de facto separate peace. However, persuading Assad to accept anything less than the return of the entire Golan Heights and overcoming Israeli doubts proved to be a serious challenge. Indeed, it was only after Kissinger had shuttled multiple times over a thirty-four-day period between Damascus and Tel Aviv that he was finally able to coax Israel and Syria to come to terms. Signed in May 1974, the resulting separation of forces agreement achieved Kissinger’s goals. It secured Israel’s withdrawal from all of the territory it had won in 1973 and, of great symbolic significance to Assad, required it to return the city of Quneitra that it had acquired in 1967.

However, Kissinger found the going much tougher after Israel and Syria signed this agreement. The problem was the Labor Alignment’s weakened domestic political situation. Punished by the electorate for failing to detect Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack in 1973, the party no longer dominated Israeli politics as it had in the past. Not only did Labor Prime Minister Rabin confront a new rightist challenge in the form of the Likud Party, which future Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon (r. 2001-2006) and Menachem Begin (r. 1977-1983) had created in 1973 by merging a number of small rightwing parties together, but he also had to make concessions to Labor’s traditional partner, the National Religious Party (NRP), which was deeply committed to retaining control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As a result, Rabin found himself so boxed in politically that he was unable to make the concessions that both Sadat and Kissinger sought. He did not get much sympathy from Gerald Ford (r. 1974-1976), who had become president when Nixon resigned in August 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandal. Furious about Tel Aviv’s intransigence, he signaled his displeasure by calling for a reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel and by holding up an existing arms agreement.

The threats appeared to work. Rabin’s government soon indicated that it was willing to compromise, though it also indicated that it expected the US to make concessions to Israel in return. With Tel Aviv now demonstrating flexibility, Kissinger returned to work and quickly secured a second disengagement accord between Israel and Egypt. Signed in September 1975, the Sinai Interim Agreement, commonly known as Sinai II, called for Israel to withdraw its forces in the Sinai east of the strategic Gidi and Mitla Passes. In exchange, Cairo pledged to allow ships traveling to Israeli ports to transit the Suez Canal and promised not to use force against the Jewish state.

Negotiated separately, the concessions that Rabin’s government had demanded of Washington were far reaching. At Tel Aviv’s insistence, the US agreed to provide Israel with substantial ongoing economic and military aid, promised to refrain from talking with or recognizing the PLO unless that organization first acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, and pledged not to initiate any diplomatic initiatives in the region without prior consultation. These terms were enormously beneficial for Israel. It not only received a staggering $4 billion worth of American arms over the next three years alone, twice the annual amount that the US had heretofore provided, but could now rest assured that the US would not enter into negotiations with the PLO that might compel it to cede territory to the Palestinians.

For Syria and, especially, the PLO, Sinai II and the promises Washington had made to Tel Aviv were a disaster. By ending the possibility of a two-front war, the agreement freed Israel from having to make any further concessions to Syria regarding the Golan Heights. Meanwhile, by giving Israel what amounted to a near veto over American policy toward the PLO, Washington’s pledge not to talk to the Palestinians derailed Arafat’s diplomatic offensive and prevented him from turning the organization’s international success into tangible gains in the struggle to establish a Palestinian state. Above all, the American concessions to Israel put the PLO in a cruel catch-22 situation that echoed the “Iron Cage” into which the British mandatory authorities had trapped the Palestinians in the 1920s. It could not talk with the US unless it first recognized Israel’s right to exist, but it simultaneously could not negotiate effectively with Israel if it yielded its only real diplomatic leverage, recognition, before discussions had even begun.

Israel’s Rightward Turn

Meanwhile, Israel’s rightward tilt accelerated in the late 1970s. Already under pressure from the NRP and Likud, the Labor government faced a new conservative challenge in the form of a populist movement composed of young religious people called Gush Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, that was dedicated to the permanent retention of the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank. Believing that God had promised the Occupied Territories to the Jewish people, the movement staged public protests and built illegal settlements as part of a sustained campaign to compel the government to annex the territories. The pressure on Rabin was enormous. In conjunction with the Labor Alignment’s worsening electoral position, it was enough to compel his cabinet to bend to public opinion and approve a substantial number of new settlements.

Demographic changes also played an important part in shifting Israel to the right. Thanks to their higher birthrates, the Mizrahim and Maghribian Jewish immigrants and their descendants had come to account for about half the country’s population by the mid 1970s. Known collectively as the Sephardic Jews within modern Israel, they had endured discrimination, high unemployment rates, and the Labor government’s failure to provide them with adequate housing in the 1950s and 1960s. This made them angry with both the party and the Ashkenazi establishment. Expelled from their former homes in the Middle East and North Africa, they also had a special animus for the Arab states and steadfastly opposed making concessions to them.

The new Likud Party was well positioned to take advantage of the demographic and ideological changes that Israel was experiencing in the 1970s. Its pledge to take a hard line with the Arab states was sufficient to win for the party the overwhelming support of the Sephardic Jewish population. Meanwhile, Likud’s declaration in its party platform that “[t]he right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable” was sufficient to secure it the backing of the settlement movement. The resulting electoral realignment proved decisive. Likud not only won a stunning electoral victory in 1977, but in the process, displaced the Labor Alignment as Israel’s dominant political party.

Likud’s success did not bode well for the peace process. Committed to retaining the Occupied Territories, the new prime minister, Menachem Begin, expressed little interest in continuing the talks begun under his predecessors. As a result, the already faltering negotiations between Egypt and Israel on which Sadat had staked so much, unceremoniously ground to a halt.

The Infitah

Begin’s victory was far from the only problem that Sadat confronted in 1977. Even more troubling for him was the failure of his economic liberalization program. Called the Infitah, or opening, he had introduced it with great fanfare during the heady days immediately following the Yom Kippur War. Designed to restore growth to the Egyptian economy by effecting a rapid transition from the state-centered, Nasserist system to a more-dynamic, profit-based, free-market one, it was far reaching in terms of both scope and depth. It included the relegalization of direct foreign investment, the reintegration of Egypt into the Western economic order, and the concomitant abandonment of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model of development that Nasser had championed. As such, it promised to thoroughly remake the Egyptian economy and to dramatically raise living standards.

The Infitah succeeded in doing away with the worst excesses of Arab Socialism, but it failed to produce the promised economic growth. Instead, it brought corruption, crony capitalism, economic stagnation, and punishing inflation. The worst came in early 1977. In January of that year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had compelled Egypt to severely reduce subsidies on common consumer goods including flour, cooking oil, and sugar in order to qualify for a desperately needed stabilization loan. Coming on top of the recent inflation, the cutbacks hit peasants and working-class Egyptians with peculiar savagery. The result was civil insurrection. Bitter that Sadat’s economic liberalization program had not only failed to live up to its promise but had rendered them even poorer, lower-class Egyptian’s rose up in a series of massive, spontaneous riots. Security forces managed to reestablish order in a few days, killing 150 people in the process, and the state soon placated the lower classes by restoring the subsidies on consumer goods. However, the incident had made emphatically clear that popular enthusiasm for the Egyptian president had faded precipitously since the war. For someone as politically attuned as Sadat, the lesson was clear: he needed a substantial political success if he wished to ensure his continued authority, and he needed it soon.

Sadat’s Breakthrough, November 1977

Sadat manufactured one in the fall of 1977 with a bold gesture that jump started the faltering peace talks. As we have seen, the peace process had slowed after the signing of the Sinai II Accord before grinding to a halt with the Likud victory in the spring of 1977. It began to pick up speed in the summer of that year thanks to the efforts of the new American president, Jimmy Carter (r. 1977-1981). Committed to achieving a genuine, comprehensive peace settlement, he moved quickly to breathe life into the faltering peace process during his first year in office. However, his efforts quickly foundered over the question of whether the Arab states would negotiate with Israel bilaterally, as Begin demanded, or as a unified delegation, as the Arabs insisted. As a result, Carter’s bid to restart the talks went nowhere, and the peace process remained moribund.

It was at that point that Sadat made his move. Speaking before the Egyptian National Assembly on November 9, he restated his commitment to a negotiated settlement before declaring that he was ‘prepared to go to the ends of the earth for peace, even to the Knesset [Israel’s parliament].” It was an audacious statement that not only tacitly recognized the Jewish state but also made clear that Sadat was willing to break with longstanding Arab positions to achieve peace. Begin was receptive to Sadat’s overture. He may have been unalterably opposed to yielding the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and West Bank, but he was willing to cede territory in the Sinai Peninsula if doing so would end hostility between Israel and its most dangerous neighbor. Accordingly, on November 20, just eleven days after he had made his electrifying announcement, Sadat spoke before the Knesset at Begin’s invitation. In his address, he reiterated the Arabs’ long-held position that any peace would have to be a comprehensive one that accorded the Palestinians self-determination. At the same time, however, he also broke with longstanding Arab League policy by calling on the other Arab governments to recognize Israel’s right to enjoy peace and normalized relations.

It was a bold move on Sadat’s part, one that would break the psychological impasse and set the stage for productive bilateral negotiations. In the short run, however, it produced more smoke than fire. Indeed, when the two sides met for substantive discussions at Sadat’s winter residence in Ismailia on December 25, 1977, the talks quickly deadlocked. Poor chemistry was part of the problem; Begin and Sadat never managed to establish the personal rapport that can often see difficult negotiations through to a successful conclusion. More fundamentally, the discussions failed to produce progress because the two sides were far apart on the objectives that they sought. Cairo pursued two goals: a narrow Israeli-Egyptian agreement that would secure the return of the Sinai and a broader settlement that would achieve a just resolution of the Palestinian situation. Tel Aviv, in contrast, remained unwilling to discuss anything beyond a bilateral deal with Egypt.

The Ba’athist States

Sadat’s aggressive pursuit of peace with Israel and his effort to liberalize Egypt’s economy put him decidedly out of step with the radicalism that many Arab states and movements had embraced following the Six-Day War. This was particularly true with regard to the Ba’athist regimes in Syria and Iraq. Though they remained bitter rivals, the two states continued to pursue the Ba’ath Party’s radical agenda. They promoted a dramatic restructuring of society, sought to implement Arab socialist economic policies, and worked to promote pan-Arabism, albeit in a watered-down form. Ironically, however, neither regime maintained control as a result of its adherence to the Ba’athist ideology that had propelled them to power. Instead, in both states, the ruling party’s position ultimately rested on traditional structures such as patronage networks and the clan and religious ties that bound the ruling class together.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

The reliance on kinship networks proved especially critical in the Ba’athist leaderships’ gradual consolidation of power in Iraq in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sharing control of the government with a group of army officers, the tiny Ba’ath Party initially had only a tenuous grip on the Iraqi state. However, under the duo of al-Bakr and his relative and second-in-command, Saddam Hussein (r. 1979-2003), it quickly solidified its control of the government. The two men complemented each other well. A former prime minister, President al-Bakr lent a veneer of legitimacy and stability to the regime. Ruthless and driven, meanwhile, Saddam Hussein did the dirty work needed to undermine rival power centers in the party. He proved peculiarly adept at this task. Using a series of imaginary coup plots and conspiracies, he purged Western businesspeople, Nasserites, independent-minded Ba’athists, and others perceived as threats to his and al-Bakr’s rule. He balanced that ruthlessness with political savvy. Most notably, at the same time that he was removing potential enemies, he was also making skillful use of patronage and traditional kinship relationships to put reliable members of his Tikrit-based al-Bu Nasir clan in key positions of power. This move proved critical in his and al-Bakr’s effort to consolidate power. With their help, he was able to force out the few remaining military leaders from the inner circle in 1970, thus securing the Ba’ath Party’s dominance of the government.

As his reliance on people from the al-Bu Nasir clan makes clear, Saddam Hussein had not institutionalized Ba’athist rule out of deeply held convictions. Largely non-ideological and uninterested in Ba’athist beliefs, he instead strengthened the party, and his control of it, because he saw it as a powerful instrument he could use to position himself as al-Bakr’s successor. He was successful in this effort. Deftly exploiting the patronage that his position as party secretary afforded him, he gradually assumed control of the party by placing loyal Ba’athists in key decision-making positions in the bureaucracy. As a result, by the mid-1970s he had emerged as the power behind the throne.

He followed by moving to extend his control over the rest of the country. He achieved this end by transforming the once-tiny Ba’ath Party into a huge organization that extended its reach into local-level politics. Finally, to ferret out any challenges to the regime before they could establish roots, he built up a vast, interlocking web of competing security services loyal to him that kept watch on the Iraqi people and each other. Periodic show trials, purges of unreliable people, and public executions further ensured compliance.

If the security services constituted the stick that Saddam Hussein used to control the Iraqi people, then the patronage and social-welfare benefits derived from the revenue Iraq earned on the sale of oil constituted the carrot. Having already won popular acclaim by nationalizing the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in 1972, he took advantage of the growth in oil revenues from $1 billion in 1973 to a staggering $26 billion in 1980 to expand social-welfare benefits and to develop a modern, Arab-socialist economy. Economic development was unquestionably impressive. Under his direction, the regime constructed desperately needed infrastructure such as electrical generation plants and highways and established collective farms and state-run industrial facilities like iron works and petrochemical plants. Social reforms and welfare benefits were equally remarkable. The regime expanded educational opportunities, provided free health care, and, in a move that delighted the country’s rural population, paired the revocation of the hated Law Governing the Rights and Duties of Cultivators with an aggressive land-reform program. Extending to nearly every Iraqi, the substantial welfare benefits that the state provided quickly succeeded in building popular support for the regime. As important, they drew the entire population into the patronage system that Hussein had constructed and thus rendered nearly all Iraqis beholden to the state, and by extension, to Hussein himself.

Despite the remarkable economic growth and the expansion of social-welfare benefits, however, many Iraqis remained unhappy with Ba’athist rule. Dissatisfaction was particularly prominent among the country’s Shiʿa Arab minority. They disliked their second-class status, opposed the Ba’athist promotion of secular rule, and resented the ban on religious processions that the regime had imposed. They voiced their discontent by periodically rioting and by backing the cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s (1935-1980) Islamic Dawa Party, which called for the establishment of a government based on Shiʿa religious principles. Still, the Shiʿa were a manageable problem for Hussein that his government could address through a mix of rewards and threats.

The Kurds were a different matter. Having long sought greater autonomy, they had viewed the Ba’athist coup in 1968 as an opportunity to extract concessions from the government. Accordingly, under Mustafa Barzani (1903-1979), the powerful head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and leader of the powerful peshmerga militia, the Kurds issued a series of sweeping demands shortly after al-Bakr and Hussein took power. They included recognition of Kurdish as an official language, Kurdish control of a share of the revenue generated from the Kirkuk oil fields in northern Iraq, and, most importantly, immediate autonomy. For a time, the regime was able to mollify the Kurds by indicating that it would meet their key demands. By 1974, however, it was no longer able to disguise the fact that it had no intention of ceding oil revenue or giving the Kurds any control over finances. In response, Barzani once again ordered the peshmerga to rise up in revolt. This time, the Kurds enjoyed foreign support. Seeking to pressure Baghdad into agreeing to move the border between Iran and Iraq from the Iranian shore of the strategic Shatt al-Arab Waterway to the thalweg, the midpoint of its deepest channel, Shah Mohammad Reza’s (r. 1941-1979) government began to provide heavy weapons, supplies, and ammunition to Barzani’s forces. The new arms proved decisive. With them, the peshmerga fighters had little difficulty in defeating the Iraqi army and assuming control of most of the country’s mountainous north. The Kurdish uprising was an embarrassing setback for Saddam Hussein that threatened to damage his political standing if he were unable to quickly bring it to heel.

Accordingly, he moved with haste to find a way to end the insurgency. Concluding that the military could not defeat the Kurds so long as they were receiving arms from Iran, he swallowed his pride and pursued a diplomatic settlement, the Algiers Agreement, with the Shah. Signed in March 1975, it secured an Iranian promise to immediately end its support of the Kurds in exchange for Iraq assenting to the border adjustment along the Shatt al-Arab Waterway that the Shah had been seeking. While it was an unpopular agreement in Iraq, it did tip the balance in the war with the Kurdish insurgents in the regime’s favor. Stripped of the supplies that had sustained their campaign, the peshmerga were no longer able to stand up to the Iraqi army and were quickly defeated. In the aftermath, the already faction-ridden Kurds split between the KDP, led by Barzani’s sons after his death in 1979, and a new, leftist party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by future Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (1933-2017). The Algiers Accord was thus a mixed bag for Hussein. While it had certainly tarnished his reputation, by making the victory over the Kurds possible, the agreement had also permitted him to restore his standing within the regime.

Assad’s Syria

Hafiz al-Assad’s rule in Syria in the 1970s bore more than a superficial resemblance to Hussein’s regime in contemporary Iraq. Like his counterpart and rival, Assad lacked a deep commitment to Ba’athism and established control of the party and the state far more in pursuit of his personal ambitions than in service to any larger ideological agenda. Similarly, much as Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq, Assad maintained his grip on power through traditional patronage arrangements and a reliance on kinship networks, in his case, among Syria’s Alawite minority. Finally, Assad shared Hussein’s reliance on internal security services to maintain order. Ruthless and corrupt, the Syrian mukhabarat used fear and intimidation to ensure loyalty and to find and eradicate challenges to the regime.

However, Assad did not secure acquiescence to his rule strictly through repression. As in Iraq, the regime also used patronage, economic development, and social welfare benefits to win the backing of the people. Here, he made effective use of Ba’athist ideology and its socialist economic program. He substantially expanded the state-run component of the economy and strengthened its links with the traditional, capitalist sector in order to increase the state’s share of economic activity and to insinuate the regime’s patronage network deep into the private sphere, a move that gave him the power to reward those loyal to him and to punish those who sought to disobey his wishes. He also followed through with the Ba’athist Party’s promise to build a significant amount of desperately needed modern infrastructure including the expansion of Syria’s network of railways and hard-surface roads and the construction of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River. Improving living standards, these projects secured the support of many poor, rural Syrians. Finally, in keeping with Ba’athism’s emphasis on radical social change, he raised literacy rates and ended the landlord class’s tradition of lending money to peasants at usurious rates. These moves won him the backing of those most committed to the Ba’athist call for an equitable society.

Ultimately, though, the economic development and social-welfare programs that Assad pursued in the 1970s were far-less successful than were Hussein’s. The reason was simple: oil, or to be more precise, the lack thereof. Absent the enormous revenue that Iraq enjoyed thanks to its vast petroleum production, Syria did not have the same easy access that Iraq did to the imported goods and capital equipment on which rapid economic development depended. The results were predictable. Without the windfall that oil revenue provided to Iraq, the Syrian economy could not overcome the corruption and the extensive use of patronage for political purposes that Assad had pursued. As a result, the country endured a grim combination of weak growth and high inflation over the course of the 1970s.

Ironically, relations between Syria and Iraq remained frosty following the Six-Day War despite both states having Ba’athist governments. The rival regimes fought over which of them was the real leader of the Ba’ath movement and worked to weaken each other through hostile propaganda. Here, too, Hussein enjoyed the upper hand. The gradual flow of prominent Syrian Ba’athists into exile in Iraq after Assad took power boosted his claims to leadership in the movement, particularly after one of the party’s founders, Michele Aflaq (1910-1989), fled to Baghdad in 1970. In addition, Damascus’s willingness to sign the disengagement accord with Tel Aviv bolstered Iraq’s claim that it was the more militantly anti-Israel Ba’athist state. Finally, Hussein scored points with Ba’athists throughout the Middle East at Assad’s expense by criticizing Syria’s intervention on the conservative side in the Lebanese civil war in 1975, an action, the Iraqi president argued, that made clear that the Syrian president lacked a sincere commitment to Ba’athist ideology.

The Lebanese Civil War

Despite coming dangerously close on a few occasions, Lebanon had largely managed to avoid the instability that had gripped nearby Arab states such as Iraq and Syria after 1948. That situation changed following the Six-Day War. Thereafter, it could no longer insulate itself from either the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the radical ideologies then coursing through the Arab states. As a result, Lebanon descended into a brutal civil war in 1975 that would last, with times of tense peace, until 1990.

Two issues set the stage for the conflict. First, the National Pact’s division of political power along confessional lines, recall that it had allocated seats in the parliament according to the 1932 census, had begun to produce growing frustration among non-Christian Lebanese who increasingly chafed under Maronite dominance. The disparity in political power was bad enough. What was worse was the Maronites’ steadfast resistance to conduct a new census that would alter the political balance. The Maronites knew that divergent birth rates had long since resulted in the country having a majority Muslim population and were unwilling to give up their place of prominence in national politics.

Influenced by the radical political ideas then sweeping through the Arab World, the leftist Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt (1917-1977) responded to continued Maronite intransigence by founding the leftist Lebanese National Movement (LNM) in the early 1970s. It demanded the replacement of the National Pact that had governed the country since 1943 with a new political structure based on majority rule, and it quickly gained a wide following among Shiʿa, Druze, and even some Christians. Unsurprisingly, Jumblatt’s campaign and the enthusiastic response it received worried the country’s establishment. Concerned that they would lose power under his proposal, most Maronite politicians, and even some Sunni leaders, started to organize against the LNM. Ominously, as part of this effort, they began to form religiously defined militias.

Second, the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians had begun to spill over into Lebanon with disastrous consequences for the country’s internal cohesion. The presence of 350,000 dispossessed Palestinians had already weakened the bonds that held the country together even before the PLO relocated to Lebanon in 1971 and started using it as a base from which to attack Israel. Thereafter, fedayeen raids and cross-border shelling invited destabilizing IDF reprisals, while Arafat’s establishment of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon deepened the country’s division. The results were stark. No longer able to contain either the conflict over the internal distribution of political power or the destabilizing impact of the PLO’s presence, Lebanon in the mid-1970s had become a tinderbox ready to go up in flames.

It finally ignited in early 1975. That March, a bloody government crackdown on a Muslim protest over fishing rights led to a series of skirmishes in Sidon between the Lebanese army and leftist militias. The violence gradually spread until, on April 13, the powerful Maronite Phalange militia, the military arm of the Kataeb Party, killed twenty-eight Palestinians on a bus in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt on their founder, Pierre Gemayel (1905-1984). By then, Lebanon had reached the point of no return. The country thereafter steadily fractured along confessional lines, devolving into a complex civil war marked by sporadic firefights, brutal massacres, savage bombardments, and vicious terrorist attacks.

Inevitably, the fighting drew the PLO into the civil war. While the organization had tried to carefully navigate Lebanon’s internal conflict up to that point, rightist attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in the winter of 1975-1976 finally compelled Arafat to join the conflict on the side of the LNM. Coupled with the sudden dissolution of the army in March 1976, the entry of the PLO into the civil war tipped the balance decisively in favor of the leftists. Indeed, by the spring of that year, the PLO and the LNM stood on the cusp of a decisive victory.

It was at that point that Hafiz al-Assad intervened in the civil war. Ironically, he did not do so to help his ideological allies in the LNP and PLO, whose commitment to Arab nationalism and radicalism he ostensibly shared. Instead, fearing that a leftist victory would draw Israel into Lebanon with disastrous consequences for Syria in terms of both prestige and strategic position, he opted to promote a negotiated settlement known as the Constitutional Document. It proposed the retention of the confessional system albeit with a slight increase in Muslim political representation, and it called for the Lebanese government to exercise limited authority over the heretofore autonomous Palestinian refugee camps. Unsurprisingly, while the Maronites were enthusiastic about Assad’s plan, neither Jumblatt nor Arafat agreed to its terms. On the contrary, close to defeating their enemies, they rejected the Constitutional Document in favor of a final offensive designed to secure a total victory over the Maronites. Furious that his ideological allies would not follow his lead, Assad deployed a substantial military force into Lebanon with instructions to rescue the Maronites from defeat and to restore order to the war-torn country.

Making allies out of longtime rivals and enemies out of previous friends, Assad’s invasion thoroughly scrambled the region’s fault lines. Not only was radical Syria supporting conservative forces in Lebanon, but more remarkably, Tel Aviv and Damascus found themselves in the odd position of backing the same faction. The two sworn enemies even came to an arrangement in which Israel accepted Assad’s military deployment based on the assumption that the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon would curtail PLO attacks. While Tel Aviv was happy to have the Syrian army impose order in northern and central Lebanon, however, it had no intention of permitting Assad to deploy troops to the south. Instead, the Israelis moved to control that area with a proxy force called the South Lebanese Army (SLA). Unsurprisingly, the marriage of convenience between Israel and Syria left many seasoned observers bemused. It may have been strange, but it also managed to bring to a conclusion the first phase of the Lebanese Civil War that had already claimed more than 30,000 lives.

The Rise of Islamism

As the popularity of the LNP’s progressive agenda made clear in the run up to the civil war, radical pan-Arabism continued to define the Arab world in the decade following the Six-Day War. Arab nationalism retained its position as the prevailing political ideology, Arab socialism continued to dominate economic thinking, and radical ideas and imagery remained commonplace. Leading states and organizations reflected the continued dominance of radical pan-Arabism. The PLO was not merely staunchly secular, for instance, but deliberately used the iconography of the upraised AK-47 assault rifle as a way of symbolizing its connection to similar far-left revolutionary movements across the globe. Likewise, despite Hussein and Assad’s personal lack of ideological conviction, Ba’athist propaganda continued to stress radical themes of social equality and pan-Arab unity.

As powerful as it may have been immediately following the Six-Day War, however, the dominance of radical Arab nationalism proved to be remarkably short lived. At the very moment of its ascendency in the 1970s, a dramatically different ideological vision, Islamism, was quietly reemerging in the Arab world. With roots stretching back to Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) and to the Saudi al-ikhwan, it held that the problems of the Muslim world stemmed not from its technological or scientific inferiority to the West, but instead from the fact that Muslims had adopted secular governments that separated religion and state. Fortunately, the Islamists argued, there was a straightforward solution. By replacing its Western-style governments with Islamic ones that enforced shariʿa law, the Muslim world would again enjoy God’s grace and thus once more assume its rightful place as the globe’s dominant civilization.

Moderate Islamism

Most Islamists adhered to a moderate version of the ideology. First taking root in the 1970s among younger, educated Egyptians, moderate Islamism emphasized social justice and called for Muslims to abandon Western consumerism and social mores in favor of a return to traditional Islamist values and practices. The movement had its first tangible success in Egypt’s universities. Over the course of the decade, Islamist students wrested control of the politically important student unions from Nasserists and demanded, with some success, that the country restructure higher education along Islamic lines through curricular changes and the adoption of gender-segregated classrooms. Later, many joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which, having sworn off violence, grew rapidly after Sadat released its members from prison.

Sayyid Qutb and the Emergence of Extreme Islamism

While most Islamists were moderates who hoped to persuade people to adopt their views, a small subset known as jihadis instead sought to effect change through violence. They drew inspiration from the works of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Egyptian intellectual whose writings constituted the ideological foundation of the movement. Though always a religious man, he came to embrace Islamist ideas as a result of an extended trip he took to the United States in the late 1940s to study educational administration. Shocked by American materialism and by what he perceived to be the country’s spiritual emptiness, he concluded that only Islamic laws and values could serve as the foundation for a just society. Accordingly, shortly after returning to Egypt in 1950, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Respected as an intellectual, he soon became the movement’s ideological guide, a role he would retain even after his death in 1966.

Despite his rapid rise in the organization, Qutb’s time in the Muslim Brotherhood was anything but easy. Arrested in the roundup that followed the failed assassination attempt on Nasser in 1954, he languished in prison until the Egyptian president, having assumed incorrectly that the organization had been completely dismantled, amnestied Qutb and his associates in 1964. The movement’s shockingly quick revival soon led Nasser to conclude that his decision to release the brothers had been a dangerous mistake. Accordingly, he soon had Qutb and the rest of the organization’s leadership rearrested and tried for treason. Qutb’s trial was more an exercise in government public relations than a legitimate judicial proceeding. Using torture to extract incriminating testimony from his associates, the prosecution secured a pro forma guilty verdict in July 1966. The following month, the regime had him executed.

If Nasser had hoped that death would end Qutb’s influence, he was sadly mistaken. On the contrary, thanks to the books he had written while in prison, Qutb would enjoy a vastly greater influence in death than he ever had in life. By far the most important of those works was a slim volume called Ma’alim fi’l-tareeq, or Milestones, that he had written specifically for the most committed jihadis. Composed in small snippets that his associates smuggled out of jail, it reflected the radicalization he had experienced while confined to Nasser’s brutal prison system. He argued in the book that the secular, materialistic states that predominated in the Muslim world were based on human- derived ideas rather than on God’s laws. As such, they had produced not progress or enlightenment but only ignorance or jahiliyya, the same term Muhammad had used to describe pre-Islamic Arabia. To free themselves from jahiliyya, true Muslims needed to bring about governments that were rooted in the divinely-inspired shariʿa law code. But how were they to do so? That is, how could they replace the existing jahili regimes with Islamist ones?

It was in answering this question that Qutb provided the justification for terrorism and an Islamic revolution. Drawing on the ideas of the fourteenth-century legal scholar ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), he argued that rulers who had failed to establish shariʿa law in their states were kafirs, or apostates, and thus subject to takfir (excommunication) and death. As such, the Islamist vanguard was not merely justified in using “physical power and jihad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the jahili system” but in fact were enjoined to do so. In other words, he maintained that violence, even against rulers and others who claimed to be Muslims, was an appropriate tool that the vanguard would need to use to return society to the justice and peace that he believed were inherent to a shariʿa-based state.

Milestones had an enormous influence on subsequent generations of jihadis. Its call for a dedicated vanguard to lead a revolution aimed at replacing the existing secular Arab states with new, shariʿa-based Islamic ones captivated a growing number of younger Muslims and resulted in the emergence of new, underground militant organizations in the 1970s. As important, his promotion of jihad and call for takfir ensured that those groups would make violence a central component of their revolutionary effort.

Qutb’s vanguard began to take shape in Egypt in the 1970s. In a hint of things to come, a jihadi group called the Youth of Muhammad tried unsuccessfully to storm the armory at the Military Technical College in Cairo in 1974 in a failed effort to seize weapons with which it planned to overthrow the government. While the organization collapsed following the execution of its leader, other jihadi groups soon emerged to replace it. By the middle of the decade, for example, the cells that would later combine to form Jamaat al-Jihad, or Egyptian Islamic Jihad, had taken shape, including one led by Osama bin Laden’s (1957-2011) successor as head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri (1951-2022). Likewise, a second organization, Jama’a Islamiya, or the Islamic

Group, grew rapidly in the mid-to-late 1970s, particularly among university students.

Qutb-inspired groups did not remain confined to Egypt. Instead, influenced by Milestones, jihadi organizations began to quietly take shape throughout the Arab world over the course of the 1970s, most notably in Syria. There, the heretofore peaceful Syrian Muslim Brotherhood began to organize against the Alawite-dominated Ba’ath Party and its secular agenda. The Syrian jihadis first made their presence known in 1973 when they led demonstrations in Hama to express their opposition to the regime’s promulgation of a new constitution that did not require the president to be a Muslim. Later, in 1976, they used violence for the first time when they responded to Assad’s intervention on the Maronite side in the Lebanese Civil War with a campaign of terror bombings that ended only after a sharp government crackdown.

Historical Disagreements: Islamism and the Six-Day War

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, historians and other observers have drawn a direct connection between the emergence of Islamism in the 1970s and the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War in 1967. According to the standard account, Israel’s triumph over the secular Arab states had so totally discredited those regimes that it produced a sudden, populist ideological sea change in the Middle East in which the masses rapidly abandoned radical Arab nationalism in favor of Islamism. Gaining broad currency after 1979, this interpretation remains to the present day the conventional wisdom regarding the growth of Islamism.

In recent years, however, the scholar Fawaz Gerges has persuasively challenged this interpretation. He raises two important objections. First, he contends that contemporary Islamism did not originate as a populist movement but was instead a top-down phenomenon that benefited from substantial active state assistance. Sadat was the key figure here. Seeking support against the Nasserists who continued to dominate the government during the early part of his tenure, the Egyptian leader presented himself as a great champion of Islam and its values. Referring to himself as “the believer president,” he altered the constitution in 1971 to assert that “the principles of Shari’a are the main sources of legislation.” More importantly, he provided direct state assistance to Egypt’s Islamist groups. Most notably, he freed those members of the Muslim Brotherhood who remained in prison and supplied arms to Jama’a Islamiyya in support of its effort to displace the Nasserists in the influential student unions. Sadat was not alone in nurturing Islamism. The government of Saudi Arabia, with which the Egyptian president had become close, also began to back the Islamists in the 1970s, most notably by providing huge amounts of petrodollars to finance the spread of Wahhabi religious ideas throughout the Muslim world. Thus, Gerges concludes, Islamism was not a bottom-up phenomenon, but instead a top-down one that depended heavily during its early years on state support.

Second and more importantly, he takes issue with the idea that Islamism swiftly gained in popularity at radical Arab nationalism’s expense in the wake of the Six-Day War. In his view, the conventional interpretation has it backwards. That is, rather than losing popularity, Arab nationalism instead gained in influence in the decade following the war even as Islamism remained little more than a fringe movement. As he notes, all of the regime changes that occurred in the Arab world in the aftermath of the conflict put Arab-nationalists rather than Islamists in power. Likewise, the splinter groups that rose to prominence in the PLO after the Six-Day War were secular adherents of Marxism and not disciples of Qutb. Even Egypt, the home of the Muslim Brotherhood, was not immune to the shift to radical Arab nationalism. When members of the state-affiliated Organization for Socialist Youth found themselves disillusioned with Nasser following the war, for example, they did not abandon Nasserism for Islamism. Instead, they embraced Marxism. Thus, as Gerges demonstrates, Islamism remained an underground movement during the 1970s while radical pan-Arabism retained its position as the dominant ideology in the Arab world.

1979

Indeed, Islamism would only be in a position to begin flexing its muscles during another of the twentieth-century Middle East’s watershed years: 1979. It was a long and enormously consequential year for the region. Bracketed by the Shah’s departure from Iran and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the events of those fateful twelve months would reflect the trends, movements, and conflicts of the post-1967 Middle East and would, collectively, restructure the region socially, politically, and diplomatically.

The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

The signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in March 1979 certainly reshaped the Arab-Israeli conflict. That Sadat and Begin were able to find common ground at that time was remarkable in light of the fraught state of bilateral talks in the early summer of 1978. As we have seen, the two sides had been unable to build on the disengagement agreements and Sadat’s dramatic speech before the Knesset. Instead, the subsequent negotiations had revealed that Sadat and Begin held sharply divergent positions on key issues such as the disposition of the Occupied Territories. As a result, by the summer of 1978, the talks were at an impasse.

It was at that point that President Carter stepped in. Summoning the two leaders to the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland in September 1978, he oversaw thirteen days of difficult negotiations in an effort to bring the two sides together so that they could conclude an agreement. The differences between them were significant. Sadat offered Israel full recognition and peace in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula but insisted that the agreement also include a general statement of principle that bound Israel both to return all the land it had taken in 1967 and to recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Begin countered by expressing his willingness to return much of the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt; however, he adamantly refused to discuss yielding the West Bank and Gaza Strip or to consider giving the Palestinians any more than limited, local autonomy under Israeli rule.

Carter eventually arrived at a way of bridging the differences that was acceptable to both sides. Aware that the main stumbling block was the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the president devised an agreement regarding those territories that was sufficiently vague that each party could accept it. He also secured an oral commitment from Begin to impose a moratorium on the construction of settlements for five years. Thanks to this approach, the negotiations were able to produce two unlinked, interim agreements collectively known as the Camp David Accords. The first, “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” called for the establishment of a Palestinian self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip followed by a five-year transitional period that would conclude with final status”negotiations. The second, “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel,” outlined a bilateral agreement based on Resolution 242’s call for an exchange of land for peace and recognition. Sadat and Begin signed the accords on September 17, 1978.

After further negotiations to refine the Camp David Accords, the two leaders signed the formal Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty on the White House lawn on March 26, 1979. The agreement committed Egypt to end the state of war that existed between it and Israel, to establish full, normalized relations with Tel Aviv, to acknowledge the right of Israeli ships to freely transit the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran, and to accept the stationing of a permanent UN peacekeeping force on its side of the two countries’ common border. In exchange, Israel promised to complete a staged withdrawal from the Sinai.

Despite intense criticism in the Arab world, the treaty’s provisions regarding the Sinai went into effect as scheduled. The two countries established normalized relations in 1980, and Tel Aviv gradually withdrew its forces from the Sinai culminating in the evacuation of the remaining Israeli-controlled territory in 1982. Thanks to Israeli stonewalling, however, the unlinked “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” that accompanied the bilateral agreement went nowhere. As early as the fall of 1978, Begin had indicated that he interpreted the agreement in the loosest possible terms and that he did not view its provisions as binding on his country. He went even further after signing the formal peace treaty. He bluntly refused to recognize that the Palestinians enjoyed any collective rights as a people and claimed that he had agreed at Camp David merely to grant autonomy to individual Palestinians, a position that rendered the possibility of negotiations with the PLO dead on arrival. Begin also embarrassed Carter by pausing the construction of settlements for a bare three months rather than the five years he had promised, and he demonstrated his determination to establish permanent control of the territories by expropriating private Palestinian land on the West Bank. Indeed, the Prime Minister could not have made his position on the territories any clearer. He had no intention of yielding them or of permitting the creation of a Palestinian state, and having secured the separate peace with Egypt that he had sought all along he faced no pressure whatsoever to do so.

Peace between Israel and Egypt had three enormous consequences. First, in the short run at least, the normalization of relations made Cairo a pariah in the Arab world. The Arab states immediately broke diplomatic relations with Egypt, imposed an economic boycott on it, and expelled it from the Arab League. Second, the peace agreement permanently tipped the balance in the Arab-Israeli conflict in Tel Aviv’s favor. By removing the most powerful Arab state from the equation, it restored Israel to a position of unquestioned military preponderance and ensured that it would take part in any future negotiations from a position of overwhelming strength. Third, the new relationship between Cairo and Tel Aviv marked the point at which the Arab-Israeli conflict completed the transformation from a state-to-state contest back into a struggle between Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms that had begun with the Six-Day War.

Thus, just as critics had predicted, peace between Israel and Egypt gave Tel Aviv the free hand it had sought in its relations with the other Arab states and the Palestinians. This is a situation, as we shall see in Chapter Seventeen, that all but guaranteed that Tel Aviv would take aggressive actions following the agreement’s full implementation.

Saddam Hussein’s Coup

Meanwhile, just a few months after the signing of the peace treaty, Saddam Hussein would formally assume control of Iraq. As we have seen, his rise to the top had been a long time coming. Nominally al-Bakr’s subordinate, he had long since established himself not only as the regime’s strongman but as Iraq’s de facto ruler. By 1979, however, he was no longer content to rule from behind the throne. Accordingly, in July, he mounted a bloodless coup that began with al-Bakr resigning and that ended with the Ba’ath Party naming Hussein as his successor.

Not content merely to assume the top post, the new president followed with a series of bold and brutal actions designed to permanently eliminate any independent power bases in the Ba’ath Party that could conceivably threaten his authority. He initiated this campaign at a carefully orchestrated, televised party meeting held on July 22. Addressing the assembled leaders, he announced the discovery of a plot against the state organized by top-ranking Ba’athists who, he claimed, were in league with Syria. Chillingly, he had the alleged conspirators, many of whom were in attendance, immediately arrested on trumped up charges. In the dubious judicial proceedings that followed, he arranged for twenty-two of them to be condemned to death and for thirty-three others to be sentenced to long prison terms. He followed by ordering the execution of another 500 high-ranking Ba’athists whose loyalty he doubted. Brutally effective, Hussein’s coup seamlessly transformed Iraq from a one- party state into a personal autocracy that no longer rested on a shared ideological vision but instead on clan ties, patronage, and, above all, personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein.

His seizure of power would have a decisive effect on the Middle East over the next twenty-five years. No longer bound by any internal checks or challenges, he was free to follow an aggressive foreign policy designed to achieve his dream of turning Iraq into the dominant power in the region and himself into its leading political figure. Ultimately, as we shall see in the next two chapters, Hussein was unable to realize his aspirations. Rather than making Iraq the region’s leading state, his aggressive approach to foreign relations would produce a series of disastrous conflicts that beggared his country, destabilized the Middle East, and drew the ire of the US.

The Islamist Onslaught

Meanwhile, the Sunni Islamist vanguard that Qutb had hoped to inspire announced its emergence in 1979 with a pair of spectacular terrorist attacks. The first occurred in Syria. Supported by wealthy families angry about the regime’s program of land reform, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood launched a bold assault on a military academy in Aleppo that resulted in the deaths of eighty-three Alawite cadets. The incident was the opening salvo in what would be a peculiarly savage war between the brothers and the government that would produce steadily rising casualties over the next few years. Occurring in Saudi Arabia, the second incident was far-more shocking. That November, more than 400 militant followers of Juhayman al- Otaybi (1936-1980), stunned the Muslim world by seizing control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and demanding the replacement of the Saudi regime with an Islamist state. It took two weeks of brutal fighting for the government to finally regain control of the mosque. Officially, 127 soldiers, a dozen hostages, and 117 jihadis died in the fighting, however, unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than 4,000.

The spectacular emergence of Sunni Islamism in 1979 helped to spread jihadi thought throughout the Middle East. Indeed, in conjunction with the Iranian Revolution, it was the attacks in Syria and, especially, Saudi Arabia, that gave the jihadi groups the legitimacy needed to rapidly win new recruits to the cause of overthrowing the secular jahili regimes. As we shall see, those organizations would ultimately be unsuccessful in their attempts to establish Islamic governments in the Arab countries. Nonetheless, their activities and especially, the efforts of states like Saudi Arabia to divert their zeal outward, would powerfully shape the region’s development in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

The final event that shook the region in 1979 occurred just before the end of the year. In December, the USSR invaded Afghanistan in an effort to prop up the government of an important satellite state that was attempting to put down a Sunni insurgency. While Moscow committed 80,000 well-equipped soldiers to assist the Afghan government, it soon found itself bogged down in a costly quagmire with the mujahideen, the Sunni guerrillas who operated in the country’s vast hinterlands. Almost from the start, the mujahideen benefited from substantial amounts of miliary aid from the US and Saudi governments. Somewhat later, they also began to receive funds and recruits from newly formed transnational jihadi groups operating in the Arab states.

While it occurred just outside of the boundaries of the Middle East, the invasion of Afghanistan was yet another event in 1979 that would have enormous consequences for the region. Two stand out. First, the invasion dramatically boosted the position and organizational capacity of the jihadi groups. While the militarily inexperienced Arabs they sent to Afghanistan had almost no impact on the course of the war, the process of recruiting, training, and supporting fighters gave the movement invaluable experience as well as the opportunity to expose sympathetic people to their ideas. Second, the Soviet invasion created fears in Washington that the move was the first step in a plan to seize the region’s oil fields. It thus led President Carter to enunciate the Carter Doctrine in January 1980. Committing the US to defend the Persian Gulf from Soviet attack, this critical statement of policy would set the stage for deeper American involvement in the region in the 1980s and 1990s.

Conclusion

The period from 1967 to 1979 was an enormously transformational one for the Middle East. Like the Ernest Hemingway character’s description of his fall into bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises, the change that the region experienced during this time happened “gradually and then suddenly,” with 1979 marking the pivotal before-and-after moment. The momentous events of that year, especially, the Iranian Revolution, would, collectively establish a new set of fault lines, conflicts, and issues that would shape the region’s history in ensuing decades. It is to this new, and very different Middle East that we will now turn.