In the West, the 1980s was a decade of economic
problems apparently overcome and one of rising
prosperity during the good years. Tensions lessened
between the East and West; the Cold War
came to an end. In the unstable Middle East the
1980s began a new decade of wars, with huge
casualties in the Gulf. The wider world wants
peace in the region.
The West cannot accept that any one nation,
rabidly hostile to the West, should be able to
dominate the whole of the Middle East by force
of arms. From the Western economic point of
view the region means oil, and oil is the lifeblood
of contemporary economic life. Yet this oil lies
in less developed countries, ruled feudally, as in
Saudi Arabia and the various sheikhdoms of the
Gulf, or dictatorially, as formerly in Iraq and Iran.
The masses can be aroused by nationalism in
inter-Arab conflicts, by hatred for the ‘imperialist’
West, which in the recent past had practically
colonised the region, by the arousal of anti-
Western Islamic fundamentalism, and by what is
regarded as the Western imperialist Zionist
outpost, Israel. Yet the bloodiest war of the
century in the Middle East was fought for eight
years by two Muslim Middle Eastern oil nations,
Iran and Iraq, one of them Persian, the other
Arab. When the decade came to its end, the Arab
nations were still pitted against each other:
Baathist socialist Iraq, violently nationalist and
ruled by Saddam Hussein, was confronted by
Baathist socialist Syria, dominated by Hafez Assad
and the military; secular Egypt’s relations with the
feudal and rich Saudi Arabia and the sheikhdoms
of the Gulf were hostile. Yet in different degrees
the Arab nations together faced Israel in enmity.
The factions of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation
and the Palestinian rising on the occupied
West Bank and Gaza added further destabilising
elements. In addition, for the greater part of
the 1980s West and East still sought to establish
regions of influence, a Cold War policy calculation
that did not make for peace.
Into this cauldron of instability the West and
the Soviet Union poured in the latest weapons of
war. The West supplied these nations with arms
to secure some leverage over the policies of
Middle Eastern nations and to protect Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms from their more
powerful neighbours, Iran and Iraq. The Soviet
Union also massively armed Iraq and Syria. To
deny arms, the West concluded, would only leave
the way open to Soviet supply and influence.
Thus the Cold War was partly responsible for the
fuelling of deadly conflicts. Not only ‘legitimate’
weapons were sent; ‘merchants of death’ in West
Germany and other countries have secretly helped
to set up poison-gas factories and the technology
for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Weapons
came from as far away as Brazil, and were used in
Middle Eastern wars to terrible effect. For the
majority of abject poor living and struggling in
this part of the world the wars further set back
any hopes of improvement.
Terrorism is also closely linked to the conflicts
of the Middle East. It is a phenomenon that is not
amenable to diplomacy and reason; it is difficult to
control; a few ruthless men and women can commit
spectacular acts of carnage and so capture the
world headlines. In this way, the numerically weak
draw attention to their causes in the expectation of
exercising influence out of proportion to the support
they enjoy. Television carries these crimes
graphically into millions of homes the world over.
Terrorism is not confined to the Middle East and
loose connections were forged between various
terrorist groups – German, Japanese, Irish and
Arab. A Czech factory supplied the most widely
used plastic explosive, Semtex. Colonel Gaddafi of
Libya and President Assad of Syria, among others,
provided funds and armaments to a number of terrorist
organisations fighting for what they regarded
as just causes. As a result, terrorism greatly
increased from the end of the 1960s. Among the
most continuous perpetrators were various Arab
groups hostile to Israel and the US, but also to
each other. Car bombs in the Lebanon’s capital,
Beirut, caused indiscriminate slaughter, planes
were hijacked, martyrs blew themselves up to kill
their enemies. The list of terrorist acts is too long
to be detailed here. Among the most horrifying
was the murder of the Israeli athletes at the
Munich Olympics in September 1972. But sometimes
the intended victims could be rescued.
In June 1976 the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France
plane with eighty-three Israelis on board; its final
landing place was Entebbe in Uganda, where the
Israelis were held as hostages. This set the scene
for one of the most dramatic and daring rescue
operations. Idi Amin, the crazed dictator of
Uganda, appointed himself a mediator – the
release of terrorists in the prisons of Israel and
other countries was demanded by the hijackers.
Instead, Israeli paratroopers landed and, camouflaging
their arrival at the airport in a fleet of cars
as might be used by Amin and his entourage,
broke undetected into the airport building, killed
the captors and rescued all but three of the
hostages, with the loss of one Israeli officer and
an elderly Israeli woman (formerly a hostage)
murdered in a Ugandan hospital.
Against suicide attacks defence is difficult. In
the Lebanon, sixty-three Americans were killed in
April 1983 by a fanatical Shia Muslim driving a car
full of explosives into the American Embassy in
Beirut; a few months later, in October, another
suicide bomber killed 241 US marines at their
base close to Beirut airport. An especial horror in
December 1988 was the explosion over Scotland
of a Pan American jumbo en route from London
to New York, causing the deaths of all its crew and
passengers. But Western lives lost were but a tiny
fraction of the number of people killed almost
daily in the Middle East. The Lebanon was in virtual
anarchy, from the mid-1970s to 1991, with
civilians caught up in the infighting of murderous
factions, though in 1992 the kidnapping of foreign
hostages ended. Western responses were limited
and largely ineffective. The organisers of
terror, the men behind the scenes, established
their shifting headquarters in Baghdad, Teheran,
Damascus and Tripoli, their various factions no
more than pawns in Arab struggles for predominance.
Only the Arab leaders themselves could control
them, and their hold was not absolute.
No country in the Middle East has suffered
more from brutal civil conflicts than the Lebanon.
The Christian Lebanese merchants and bankers
did not long enjoy the prosperity the oil-rich
Middle East brought them in the 1960s and
1970s. A power-sharing agreement, known as the
National Pact and in operation since the Second
World War, guaranteed the presidency to a
Maronite Christian, but it fell apart under the
pressure of Muslim–Christian and left–right rivalries,
resulting in civil war in 1958. Though fighting
ceased for a time, the central Lebanese
government was unable to overcome the problems
presented by the class conflicts, the family
loyalties and the various militias of Muslim and
Christian groups. In 1967, the Lebanon’s predicament
was further aggravated by the arrival
of uninvited Palestinian refugees following the
Arab–Israeli War. Arab enmity towards Israel
deepened the gulf between what had become a
Muslim majority, which included the poorer part
of the Lebanese population, and the wealthier
Maronite Christians. ‘National’ for the Muslims
now meant pro-Arab; for the Christians (except
the Greek Orthodox), ‘national’ meant perpetuation
of Christian and right-wing predominance in
an independent pro-Western Lebanon.
In 1970 the Palestinian militants failed in their
attempt to achieve domination over Jordan. Yasser
Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation
were forced out and with their militant followers
moved into the hapless Lebanon, where they proceeded
to build up their last territorial stronghold
in the areas controlled by the refugees. The term
‘refugee camps’ applied to these strongholds, is
really a misnomer, for the Palestinians created a
state within a state. From the Lebanon Palestinian
commandos raided Israel, attacking settlements
and provoking Israeli counter-strikes against
Palestinian targets in the Lebanon.
In 1975 civil war was renewed. The Muslim
groups forged an alliance with the Palestinians,
the army split and the central government lost
control over the country. It could regain it only
with outside help. The Lebanon was now divided
into warring factions; Christian family clans
fought each other for supreme power even as they
battled with the Muslim–Palestinian–left alliance.
The Israelis sent arms to the Maronite Christians,
and the Syrians, responding to pleas for help from
the Christian-dominated central Lebanese government,
intervened militarily in 1976, driving the
Muslim–Palestinian forces back. Yasser Arafat’s
independent PLO was as little loved in Syria as it
was in Jordan. In 1978, to stamp out Palestinian
commando raids, the Israelis occupied the southern
Lebanon, and before withdrawing installed a
‘friendly’ Maronite Christian militia under Major
Saad Haddad to keep order and prevent further
PLO attacks. The Lebanon had long since ceased
to be a unitary state and was becoming a quagmire
of internecine factions, none of which was sufficiently
powerful to control more than a particular
area, each with its own stronghold. As if these
internal rivalries were not enough, Syrian–Israeli
hostility, the Palestinian–Maronite Christian conflict
and, after the outbreak of the Gulf War in
1980, pro-Iraqi and pro-Iranian Muslim rivalry
accelerated the disintegration and destruction of
the Lebanon.
For the Israelis, the continued presence of the
PLO in the Lebanon, not to mention the Syrians,
represented a serious threat. So the civil strife
offered opportunities, but it led them into the illfated
invasion of the Lebanon in 1982, which was
intended to settle once and for all the Palestinian
question and to prove that continued Arab enmity
towards Israel was unrealistic in view of its military
superiority. The militant PLO would be driven
from their last land base in a neighbouring country.
Israeli prospects seemed favourable, because
Syria and the Palestinians were practically isolated
and their forces much inferior. Israel had already,
by concluding peace with Egypt, secured its southern
border against the only strong army that might
have threatened it. Its first war of aggression was
the consequence of a fundamental change in internal
politics during the previous five years.
In Israeli politics a major turning point occurred in
1977 with the victory of the right-wing Likud
Party over the broad labour grouping led by the
Labour Party (Mapai). Labour’s support had suffered
after the heavy casualties of the Yom Kippur
War in 1973, which had found Israel inadequately
prepared and had placed the country for a time in
real danger. Golda Meir fell from office and was
succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin, who had been chief
of staff in the Six-Day War of 1967. During
Rabin’s premiership, the US made great efforts to
mediate a peace between Israel and its neighbours.
This introduced the diplomatic world to the new
concept of ‘shuttle diplomacy’, as the American
secretary of state Henry Kissinger carried out
negotiations, tirelessly flying between Damascus,
Cairo and Jerusalem. Kissinger succeeded at least
partially – disengagement agreements were concluded
between Israel, Syria and Egypt. What
blocked a more comprehensive settlement was the
requirement of the Arab states that Israel should
withdraw from the territories it had conquered in
1967 – the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East
Jerusalem. This raised the possibility of a hostile
Palestinian presence or even state as Israel’s new
neighbour. Israeli militants were already creating
their own settlements, and there was broad support
from large sections of the electorate that the
West Bank, biblical Judaea and Samaria, must
remain a part of an enlarged Israel. With
Arab–Israeli talks deadlocked, only Nasser’s suc-
cessor, President Anwar Sadat, was ready to move
further, in order to regain the Sinai, lost in 1967.
During 1977, an election year, Labour’s chances
were harmed by government scandals and by the
damage inflicted on the economy by the high cost
of war and armaments. The oriental Jews in particular
regarded the Labour ministers as too ready to
compromise with Israel’s Arab neighbours. All this
contributed to the sea change in Israeli politics.
The May 1977 elections brought Menachem
Begin and Likud to power at the head of a coalition,
breaking three decades of uninterrupted
Labour predominance. Begin, at sixty-four years
of age, was no longer the terrorist he had been
during Israel’s struggle for independence, but he
was convinced that only armed strength, selfreliance
and rock-like firmness of purpose would
secure Israel’s future. On the question of the
West Bank and some possible accommodation
with the PLO, he was unyielding: for him the
right of the Jewish people to ‘Judaea and Samaria’
was not negotiable; for him this was not ‘occupied’
but ‘liberated’ territory, and so was East
Jerusalem, which had been captured from Jordan
in 1967. Nor did Begin in 1977 give any indication
that he contemplated handing back occupied
Sinai in return for peace with Egypt. Yet that was
to become the crowning achievement of his first
administration. Perhaps only an Israeli prime minister
with Begin’s uncompromising reputation
could have won virtually wholehearted Israeli
support for relinquishing the Sinai.
At home, free-enterprise policies soon led the
country into economic crisis. Given the realities
of Israeli expenditure and the huge foreign
indebtedness, Likud eventually had to return to
the mixed economic policies of previous governments.
Even so, for his supporters – the poor oriental
Jews – Begin provided help in housing, and
assisted the renewal of poor neighbourhoods by
twinning them with Jewish communities abroad;
extending free education was a further important
social reform.
Abroad the Begin government responded to
Sadat’s search for peace, with US mediation playing
a crucial role. Sadat wanted to modernise
Egypt, raise the standard of living of its rapidly
expanding population. He turned to Western
investment and away from a state-directed economy.
Success depended above all on securing a
lasting peace with Israel. The crossing by the
Egyptian army of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war
had removed one major obstacle to peace –
Egypt’s self-image, pride and self-confidence had
been restored; Israel had not won all the battles.
The illusion of military prowess in war was enough
to turn Sadat into a hero in Egyptian eyes, as
Nasser had become a hero after Suez. Sadat cut all
links with the Soviet Union and took to relying on
US support and US influence in Israel. In 1975 he
opened the Suez Canal to shipping again, and
allowed cargoes to Israel, though not Israeli ships,
to pass through. In 1977 it was because four men
occupied crucial positions in their countries that a
peace settlement was possible.
In Washington Jimmy Carter entered the White
House, like his predecessors, anxious to facilitate a
settlement in the Middle East. Begin’s priorities
were to secure ‘Judaea and Samaria’, and to defeat
the PLO. Peace with Egypt, even at the price of
returning most of the occupied Sinai, would isolate
Israel’s enemies and make its position militarily
unchallengeable. It was thus a price worth
paying, provided the existing Israeli settlements
and airbases were retained. General Moshe Dayan,
Begin’s new foreign minister, entirely shared this
view. Security for the West Bank was worth the loss
of most of the Sinai. Sadat was also eager for peace:
the cost of continued hostility was simply too high
for the sake of Arab solidarity or the Palestinian
cause. In 1977 he expelled the PLO from Cairo.
Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, president of Romania, later to
be discredited for his brutal suppressions at home,
was an unlikely mediator, having preserved good
relations with Israel. Another channel of communication
between Egypt and Israel was opened
through the good offices of the king of Morocco.
Begin also demonstrated goodwill by warning
Sadat of a Palestinian assassination plot.
That a new era in Israeli–Egyptian relations had
begun became publicly known in a dramatic way.
Sadat liked springing surprises. On 9 November
1977 he announced in Cairo’s parliament that he
was ready in person to go to the Israeli parliament
in Jerusalem, the Knesset, to discuss the issues that
divided Israel from its Arab neighbours. Begin was
amazed, but he recovered quickly and the next day
invited Sadat to Jerusalem. The Arab world condemned
the visit. It was unprecedented and many
in Israel responded warmly and emotionally. A
score of the Egyptian national anthem had to be
rushed to the Israeli army band drawn up at Ben
Gurion airport to receive the Egyptian president
and his entourage. As he landed, on 19 November
1977, to a twenty-one gun salute, with Israeli and
Egyptian flags fluttering side by side, it was a
moving spectacle. Sadat had certainly seized the
initiative, catching the world’s imagination as
peacemaker, and millions of people watched his
arrival on television. Sadat spoke to the Knesset on
20 November. Many hard negotiating sessions
would be necessary, for Sadat spoke of peace with
all the Arabs, including the Palestinians, and of a
total Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands.
But he also spoke of accepting Israel in friendship
and peace, words no other Arab leader had
uttered, at least not publicly, since 1947. Begin’s
response was conciliatory in form but uncompromising
in reality on the issues of the Palestinians
and the continued Israeli possession of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem. Yet direct personal
contact had been made, the long road to Camp
David and peace was at least now open. Begin
offered to return the Sinai apart from existing
Israeli settlements. Although there and then there
could be no talk of formal peace, Sadat and Begin
agreed that only by negotiation and not by war
could divisive issues be resolved. Yet negotiations
between Cairo and Jerusalem dragged on fruitlessly
for almost a year, with Washington trying
in vain to find a way of resolving their differences.
The Palestinian issue, the West Bank, the Gaza
Strip and the Israeli settlements were blocking
progress. Carter tried again. Finally, Sadat and
Begin accepted an invitation to his presidential
retreat at Camp David to attempt to break the
deadlock. Sadat had been the more accommodating
so far; would Begin also compromise?
Sadat, Begin, Carter and their advisers laboured
for thirteen days at Camp David until the
agreement was signed on 17 September 1978.
Carter’s role was crucial, as he cajoled and pressurised
Sadat and (especially) Begin in turn. To
have reached agreement at all in the face of the
Israeli leader’s obduracy was a personal triumph
for the president. The two major issues were the
Sinai, and the West Bank and Gaza. Could Begin
be made to give up the whole of the Sinai, including
the oil wells the Israelis had developed at great
cost, and to pull back strategic settlements which
he had repeatedly pledged he would never abandon?
Second, would the Palestinians be allowed to
develop in the occupied territories some form of
self-government short of statehood, with the bulk
of Israelis withdrawing? And would the two issues
be linked, as Sadat was insisting: no peace with
Egypt without concrete steps towards a solution
of the Palestinian problem? Begin at first refused
to budge, and Sadat threatened to leave. Carter
promised to place the blame for a breakdown on
Begin when he came to report to Congress.
Reluctantly, Begin gave way – the whole of the
Sinai would be handed back in stages. But the
procedures leading to Palestinian autonomy, and
what that really meant, left practically everything
to Israel’s readiness and judgement; in practice,
there was no linkage. The various compromises
were wrapped up in two main agreements and a
number of agreed additional letters and documents.
At a subsequent news conference, which
was televised, Sadat and Begin embraced as a
beaming Carter looked on. Even then the road to
the definitive peace treaty signed in the White
House on 26 March 1979 was strewn with obstacles,
overcome only by determined American
mediation and financial help.
In Israel most people approved of the peace –
the hawks because it strengthened Israel against
the other Arab states by leaving it in firm occupation
of the West Bank, and the doves because
it showed that peace could be concluded with an
Arab state, formerly an implacable enemy. But the
Palestinian issue festered. The chance to make
genuine progress was lost. If Israel had acted
speedily to fulfil the spirit of the Camp David
Accords, ‘autonomy’ – a genuine degree of selfdetermination
– might have had a chance. The
Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza were
benefiting from a rapid rise in their standard of
living as a result of their close association with the
Israeli economy – but the military occupation
acted as a constant reminder that their status
was not that of a self-respecting free people.
Inevitably a younger, better-educated generation
of Palestinians was radicalised. The prospect of a
Palestinian–Israeli reconciliation was thrown
away, and the Israelis and Palestinians have been
paying the bitter price ever since.
How much better it would have been to have
followed Sadat’s advice. He secured the return of
the Sinai but was ostracised and condemned by
the rest of the Arab world. US financial help and
the resources of the Sinai did not fully compensate
Egypt for the loss of aid from the oil-rich Arab
states. Its economic problems, with a rapidly
increasing population, prevented a quick improvement
in living standards for the mass of the poor.
But no more young Egyptian lives would be lost
in war. Instead, the courageous and far-seeing
president paid for peace with his own life. At a
military parade on 6 October 1981 a small group
of Egyptians recruited by Muslim fundamentalists
assassinated Sadat as he took the salute. The vicepresident,
Hosni Mubarak, miraculously survived
the hail of bullets to become Egypt’s new head of
state. The peace prevailed, but the sincerity and
warmth of feeling, the desire for genuine reconciliation
between Egyptian and Israeli, were interred
with Sadat’s remains.
Begin’s first government from 1977 to 1981 had
seemed to promise a new peaceful beginning with
the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian peace
treaty. The soldiers in his Cabinet were cautious
men unwilling to be drawn into new confrontations.
Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Assad’s Syrian
regime, too, were aware of their own vulnerability
and were observing truce agreements. But
inside the Lebanon the factional struggles sucked
in the Syrians in support of the Christian
Maronites, who then also made constant appeals
to the Israelis. Meanwhile the PLO was strong
enough to dominate the southern Lebanon with
increasing effectiveness. Begin’s ministers continued
to urge caution in dealing with the mess in
the Lebanon; but they were split on whether a
preventive air strike against Iraq was advisable,
some arguing that there could be no justification
in international law for such an attack at a time
of peace. But Begin won out.
On 7 June 1981 eight Israeli F-16 jet fighters
took off and, together with an escort of six F-15s,
with surgical precision destroyed the Iraqi Osiraq
nuclear reactor. All the Israeli planes returned to
the bases safely. The reactor, built with French
help, was not yet capable of producing atomic
bombs, but given time the Iraqis would undoubtedly
have succeeded in acquiring all that was
necessary to make the weapons. There was international
condemnation of Israel, but at home the
Israelis rallied to Begin, which did his coalition no
harm in the general election that June. Despite the
economic setbacks, Likud strengthened its position,
but the new coalition Begin led depended
for its tiny majority on the religious parties. His
views had always been hard line on the Palestinian
and West Bank issues. Now instead of being moderated
by the exigencies of coalition government,
they were reinforced by the extremist religious
groups. The most aggressive of the hawks, Ariel
Sharon, the daring military commander who had
turned the tide for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, became minister of defence. The new government’s
external policies came to be overshadowed
by Sharon’s ‘grand design’, which turned out
disastrously for Begin personally and for Israel.
On the occupied West Bank new Israeli settlements
had sprung up, and more were planned.
They clearly indicated Israel’s intention of staying.
Sharon wanted to go further – a knock-out blow
against the Palestinians and Syrians that would
once and for all settle the issue of what should constitute
the secure land of Israel. Begin’s Cabinet
was persuaded to back what was innocuously called
Operation Peace for the Galilee. In alliance with
the Christian Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel,
Sharon planned an invasion of the Lebanon as far
as Beirut to clear out the Syrians, the PLO and
their allies. A Maronite-led Lebanon would then
become a friendly non-Arab neighbour. Israel’s
hold over the West Bank and its denial of
Palestinian rights would then be unchallengeable.
The decision to launch the attack came as a consequence
of a murderous attack on an Israeli diplomat
far away from the Middle East. As Ambassador
Shlomo Argov was leaving the Dorchester Hotel
in London on the evening of 3 June 1982, a
renegade Palestinian group bitterly hostile to
Arafat and acting on Iraqi instructions fired a bullet
into Argov’s head, inflicting critical wounds
that left him paralysed. On 4 June, Israeli planes
struck at PLO targets in the Lebanon. The PLO
responded by shelling Israeli kibbutzim in Galilee.
The truce was broken. On the 6th, the Israeli
Defence Force began its operation in Lebanon.
But instead of confining themselves to the southern
Lebanon, as the watching world expected, they
knocked out the Syrian Soviet missiles in the Bekaa
Valley on 9 June and advanced four days later all
the way to the outskirts of West Beirut, where the
PLO had established their strongholds.
In the eyes of the world – and in the face of
growing opposition at home, as the Labour Party
strongly condemned the extension of the war to
Beirut – the Israelis were now playing an entirely
new role. No longer heroically defending their
homeland, the Israeli army and air force seemed to
be indiscriminately (though this was actually not
so) shelling the districts of West Beirut; half of the
city remained under siege for more than a month.
This was Sharon’s war, the culmination of his
grand design, though neither Begin nor the Israeli
Cabinet were fully aware of his plans. On 21
August the PLO’s fighting force, loyal to Yasser
Arafat, began leaving Beirut by sea under the
protection of a multinational force, having accepted
Israel’s terms of surrender. Nearly 15,000
Palestinians and Syrians were evacuated during the
next few days by sea and land. But neither the
Syrians nor the PLO were crushed or even cowed;
they would fight back another day. Sharon’s grand
design had not succeeded; rather, it had severely
damaged Israel’s international reputation and its
people’s confidence in democratic government.
Nor could a stable Christian Maronite Lebanon
be reconstructed as a friendly neighbour. In mid-
September the Lebanon’s president-elect, the
Christian Maronite Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated
on the orders of Syrian intelligence. The
Lebanon was lapsing into chaos as warring factions
fought each other once again.
The evacuation agreement reached with the
PLO contained an important clause stipulating
that law-abiding, non-combatant Palestinians
who had remained in West Beirut and the southern
Lebanon would be guaranteed protection. In
the massacre that ensued in two Palestinian
refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, Israel’s reputation
suffered the most ignominious blow. The
sadistic killings were a savage revenge for Bashir’s
assassination, but the Phalangist Christians who
committed the atrocity and who hated the
Palestinians, had determined on a massacre long
before. The Israeli commanders had sent them
into the camps to clear out any remaining terrorists,
little imagining they would also turn on
whole families, including defenceless women and
children. They should have known better. The
bodies, bloated by the sun, were shown to the
world on television. Israel was blamed for the
hundreds of dead. At a subsequent inquiry in
Israel in 1983, Sharon was judged primarily
responsible and his dismissal as minister of
defence was urged. It is to Begin’s discredit that
though Sharon had to quit the defence post he
remained a minister in Begin’s and successive
governments. Massive ‘Peace Now’ rallies in
Israel and mounting Israeli casualties among the
forces occupying parts of the Lebanon finally persuaded
the government to order their withdrawal.
The Lebanon war had been a disaster for Israel.
It achieved fundamentally nothing. The Lebanon
remained torn between rival Muslim Iranian and
Iraqi factions, the Druse and right-wing Phalangist
Christians. Central government was nearly powerless
and was dominated by Syria. Killings continued
daily in the city, divided between Muslim West
Beirut and Christian East Beirut by the so-called
Green Line, until the Christian Forces agreed to
withdraw in November 1990. The West learnt that
it can achieve nothing, by force or by diplomacy,
to bring peace to the Lebanon, even though rival
Muslim groups held Western hostages. And the
Syrians, still controlling parts of the country, were
stuck in the quagmire of conflict. The Syrians did
not withdraw as promised, but after 1990, under
Asad’s watchful gaze, Lebanon rediscovered a
fragile peace.
Begin accepted the consequences of his failure and,
haunted by the many Israeli casualties, resigned in
September 1983, to be replaced by another Likud
hardliner, Yitzhak Shamir. The election of 1984
ended in a stalemate, with the religious parties
holding the balance. Instead of giving in to their
demands, Labour and Likud agreed on a ‘National
Unity’ government, shared between Shamir and
the Labour leader Shimon Peres. Such a divided
Cabinet could follow no decisive policies. The
paralysing division of the Israeli electorate continued,
with Likud supporters favouring hardline
policies on the West Bank and the Palestinian
question, and Labour supporters more ready to
find a compromise solution. The result, as a new
generation of Palestinians on the West Bank and in
Gaza grew to manhood, was a violent challenge to
the continued Israeli occupation – the uprising, the
intifada, that began in December 1987. Israel’s
young conscripts were ordered in to re-establish
control. Civil conflict is brutalising. Inexperienced
Israeli soldiers were unequal to the task of dealing
with stone-throwing young men and children; in
frustration bullets were fired, unarmed Palestinians
killed. A military curfew was imposed, which alienated
the Palestinians still further.
Yasser Arafat was one of the great political survivors,
a familiar figure on the world’s stage until
his death in November 2004; he had dedicated
his life to creating a Palestinian state. Through
terrorism the Palestinians succeeded in drawing
global attention to their cause when neither
their Arab brethren nor the rest of the world
cared. For the Arab nations the Palestinians were
pawns to be supported or rejected as their own
interests dictated, and the PLO fighters were
fractious and rebellious ‘guests’ of their host
nations. Thus the PLO were successively expelled
from Jordan, Egypt and the Lebanon. But Arafat
had succeeded in dominating the mainstream of
Palestinians in 1969 as chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation. During the 1970s he
supported terrorism as the only effective weapon
the Palestinians had. In 1974 at the Arab summit
in Rabat the Arab nations accepted the PLO as
the authentic voice of the Palestinians, a step
forward that implied independence not only from
Israel but from Jordan’s King Hussein. Arafat
came to recognise that continued terrorism would
now harm his cause, which needed world support.
Bitter enmities developed between him and those
Palestinian factions that continued their campaign
of terrorism. But he would not condemn individual
terrorist attacks against Israel either, for
fear of losing support among the Palestinians who
regarded these fighters as martyrs. So he spoke in
two contradictory voices: to the West he gave
assurances, which he promptly denied giving
when speaking to his own people.
During the 1980s Arafat worked out a ‘legitimate’
strategy for creating a Palestinian state. It
would have been unrealistic to have as its objective
the destruction of Israel and the retaking of the
whole of Palestine. Instead, a mini-state solution
emerged. The Palestinian state would comprise
the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. To gain
the support of the US, Arafat in December 1988
publicly renounced terrorism and accepted Israel’s
right to exist. Talks between the US representatives
and the PLO were held sporadically, but
ended when Arafat once more appeared to condone
terrorism in practice. Meanwhile, in Israel,
Shamir resisted all US pressure to consider some
form of genuine Palestinian autonomy, exchanging
Gaza, the West Bank (or most of it) and East
Jerusalem for peace. The Israeli right also rejected
any direct negotiations with the PLO. Israeli opinion,
however, was deeply divided and the rest of
the world was losing patience with what appeared
to be Israeli intransigence. The continued killing
of Palestinians, and the indiscriminate shooting
on the Temple Mount in October 1990, after
Palestinians had hurled stones at praying Jews,
further alienated world opinion.
Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition with Labour had collapsed
the previous March in bitter disagreement
over the peace process. With the help of extreme
right-wing religious groups, he was able to form a
new government in June, offering no hope of concession
to the Palestinians. The government would
neither negotiate with the PLO nor allow a
Palestinian state to be created.
Yasser Arafat’s cause was seriously hurt when
he sided with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War
after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and he
lost his Arab friends in the Gulf who had supported
the PLO with money. The Israelis, moreover,
could declare that the fears for their own
security were not exaggerated, as Scud missiles
from Iraq fell on Tel Aviv to the cheers of the
Palestinians. In August 1992 the Labour leader
Rabin, promising to seek peace, replaced the
‘hardline’ Shamir. Rabin turned out to be as
tough as Shamir in dealing with Palestinian fundamentalist
terrorists belonging to Hamas. The
‘peace process’, begun under the Americans’ aegis
in Madrid in October 1991, made little progress
despite round after round of talks between
Palestinian and Israeli representatives. Rabin, in
total secrecy, now authorised Foreign Minister
Peres to negotiate directly with the PLO in
Norway. It would create new hopes for peace
only to be frustrated later.
The longest and bloodiest war in the Middle East
in the 1980s was the Gulf War between Iran and
Iraq, which in the course of eight years devastated
large areas of both countries and left at least half
a million dead and many more crippled. On 22
September 1980, Iraq attacked Iran, counting on
a swift victory. It was just twenty months after
Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Teheran in
triumph on 1 February 1979. Khomeini had
rapidly disposed of the politicians and generals
still loyal to the Shah’s regime, having them summarily
executed by secret revolutionary courts.
That conflict between the royalists and revolutionaries
had cost thousands of lives and left the
economy in ruins, though Khomeini continued to
be revered by the mass of the people.
The mosques with their local revolutionary
komitehs played a vital role during and after the
revolution. Once more, to the outside world Iran
appeared to be going through months of turmoil
and near anarchy, with radical Muslim groups,
Marxist and more moderate opposition politicians
struggling for control of the country, with the
ulema, or clergy, acting independently as a rival
faction. Khomeini, the acknowledged leader, at
first kept in the background. For a time the state
was confusingly divided between a prime minister
and a formal government and the Islamic
Revolutionary Council. But between 1979 and
1982, the Council gradually took over real power,
first by creating its own political party, the Islamic
Revolutionary Party, then by setting up an Islamic
militia of Revolutionary Guards. During the
summer of 1979 the Islamic Revolutionary Party
dominated the Assembly, which produced a constitution
for the Islamic Republic. This laid down
that religious leadership would guide the country.
There could be no other leader than the ‘Grand
Ayatollah Iman Khomeini’, who was also the
commander-in-chief and head of the Supreme
Defence Council. He could declare war and
peace; he was empowered to approve and appoint
the president on his election by the Assembly; he
was the chief justice. The ordinances of Islam
were supreme, but the believers of Islam would
be free to debate their differences.
Khomeini invariably sided with the radicals.
Soon revolutionary Iran was enmeshed in fighting
the Kurds, the most nationalistic ethnic
minority in the country. The Kurds’ success in
October 1979 forced Teheran to accept a compromise
ceasefire. A new enemy was branded just
a short while after – the American ‘Satan’.
Khomeini, fearing a US-backed attempt to overthrow
the Islamic Revolution and restore the
Shah to power, demanded the Shah’s extradition
to stand trial. The Carter administration, which
had allowed the Shah to enter a New York hospital,
refused. Directly encouraged by Khomeini,
militant students thereupon seized the American
Embassy on 4 November 1979 in a well-planned
operation to capture secret US documents, in a
bid to compromise the US as well as internal
opponents. Fifty-two Embassy staff were held
hostage for fifteen months until 21 January 1981,
the day of Reagan’s inauguration. In the meantime,
rivalries among clerics and politicians in
Iran appeared to present a picture of complete
disarray. This is what tempted the Iraqis to invade
Iran: the conditions seemed ideal for the defeat
of an old rival for predominance in the Gulf.
The immediate cause of conflict was the Shatt
al-Arab, the waterway between Iraq and Iran leading
out to the Gulf. Should the frontier run in midchannel
or were both banks Iraqi territory? If the
latter, Iranian shipping would have to pay tolls to
the Iraqis and Iraq would control the waterway
through which oil tankers passed. The dispute goes
back to the nineteenth century, and a settlement of
1937 favouring Iraq was torn up in 1969 by the
Shah, who imposed the median line by a show of
force. Relations between Iran and Iraq deteriorated,
with each country encouraging national dissident
movements in the other – especially of
Kurds, who straddled both countries. But between
1975 and 1978 peaceful relations were restored.
The Islamic revolution in Iran, however,
alarmed Saddam Hussein’s socialist Baathist
regime, not least because it was condemned by
Khomeini as hostile to Islamic rule. Saddam ruthlessly
crushed the internal opposition, executing
militant sympathisers of the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries.
Khomeini meanwhile called on the
Iraqi army to overthrow Saddam.
Full-scale fighting began on 22 September
1980 with an Iraqi invasion. The Iranian air force
did well in response. Each side attacked the
other’s oil centres, but despite advancing rapidly
the Iraqi army failed to capture the great refinery
at Abadan. Iranian artillery continued throughout
the war to deny Iraqi warships passage of Shatt
al-Arab, while the Iranian army and the new
Revolutionary Guards defended fanatically,
inflicting heavy casualties on the Iraqi forces and
preventing them from extending their early gains.
The conflict became a war of attrition – though
one which strengthened the hold of the Iranian
clergy. Khomeini declared a holy war which, he
said, would end only when Saddam Hussein, the
aggressor against the Islamic Republic, had been
overthrown. From the spring of 1982, the
Iranians, with their much greater reserves of manpower,
began to gain the initiative, gradually
pushing the Iraqis out of the territories they had
captured in the first month of the war. Mediation
attempts and offers of a ceasefire were rejected by
the Ayatollah because Saddam Hussein remained
in power unpunished.
Young Iranians, many barely out of childhood,
enlisted in the Revolutionary Guards in response
to Khomeini’s call to fight evil. To die for the
faith brought glorious martyrdom and would
ensure a welcome in heaven. In the martyrs’
cemetery in Teheran, ‘the fountain of blood’
graphically symbolised the sacrifice of life. Prayer
meetings, attended by thousands in villages and
cities, strengthened resolve. Tens of thousands of
young volunteers hurled themselves in humanwave
attacks against the Iraqi defences.
Saddam Hussein was equally successful in
maintaining the war spirit but less so in representing
himself as the pan-Arab champion against
the old Persian foe. Syria, Iraq’s rival, backed Iran
and in 1982 blocked Iraq’s oil pipeline to the
Mediterranean; even Israel, though Zionism was
denounced by the revolutionaries in Iran, appears
to have provided some secret technical assistance
to the Iranian army and air force. For most of the
war the Soviet Union and the US were anxious
to contain Iran and to counter the ‘export’ of
Iranian-style Muslim fundamentalism to the
USSR’s Central Asian republics or to America’s
allies in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
The leaders of the Gulf states, which were in the
direct firing line, feared Iran the most and so supplied
money to Iraq. But fears that Iranian-style
revolutions would destabilise the Gulf states
proved unfounded.
Iran suffered huge losses in driving the Iraqis
out. Its forces had no hope of defeating the wellentrenched
Iraqi army, whose military supplies
were purchased with Saudi Arabian, Kuwaiti and
US help. The US arms embargo, and the international
fleet from the West, which protected the
tankers of the Gulf states from Iranian retaliation
after the Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil installations,
underlined Teheran’s diplomatic isolation.
Weapons did reach Iran, despite embargoes –
indeed, the bizarre Iran–Contra affair belongs to
this chapter of secret arms deals. They were not
enough to turn the war in Iran’s favour, but they
were sufficient to prolong the military stalemate.
Iran’s war effort was being worn down by the
end of 1987. Long-range Iraqi missile attacks
sapped morale in Teheran, and the enthusiasm of
recruits was waning as Iran’s offensives failed to
make much further progress. Iraq’s use of poison
gas added to the horrors of the war. Once more
the Iranian poor suffered the most, while the
rich could indulge in imported luxury goods.
Nonetheless, Iranians, unlike Iraqis, were allowed
a considerable degree of freedom to debate and
discuss. The shooting down in July 1988 of an
Iranian airliner, mistaken by a US warship as a
fighter coming in to attack, helped to convince the
Iranian leadership that the American ‘imperialists’
would stop at nothing. After Khomeini, the most
powerful man in Iran was Hojatoleslam Rafsanjani,
the adroit speaker of the Assembly, a cleric and
faithful follower of Khomeini. Rafsanjani, a pragmatist,
concluded that the war had to be brought
to an end. All depended on Khomeini, who had
never compromised or given way on a matter of
right and wrong. But the sorry state of Iran and the
inability of the military to mount any more offensives
persuaded him with great reluctance and feelings
of bitterness to side with Rafsanjani and with
those who wished to end the war. Accordingly Iran
accepted the ceasefire resolution of the United
Nations. On 18 July 1988, Khomeini’s message
that after eight years the war had ended without
the defeat of Iraq stunned the Iranian masses.
The death of Khomeini a year later, in June
1989, tilted power more to the moderates, and
Rafsanjani took over the leading role in the
country, though the radicals remained a powerful
group. Rafsanjani’s efforts to improve relations
with the West were obstructed by a bizarre affair,
the earlier publication by Salman Rushdie, a
British author, of The Satanic Verses, which
Muslims condemned as blasphemous. Violent
protest erupted in many Muslim countries, and
Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, a religious
sentence of death on Rushdie, who had to go
into hiding. Even after the Ayatollah’s death,
Rafsanjani was not able to undo the sentence. But
Iran’s relations with the West were improving,
buttressed by its cooperative behaviour during the
Kuwaiti Gulf War. It remained an important
factor in any Middle Eastern peace order.
Iraq interpreted Iran’s change of heart as a victory.
In the aftermath of the war, Iraq decided to
crush the dissident Kurds in the north by killing
them with poison gas in their villages; 100,000
refugees escaped into Turkey. It was a crime
against humanity, but the world did no more than
express regret. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein strengthened
his regime’s hold killing tens of thousands
and fostered his personality cult. In 1990 a subservient
Assembly appointed him president for life.
The growing power and pretensions of Iraq now
began to cause alarm in the West and Israel. Its
invasion on 2 August 1990 of its neighbour,
Kuwait, over which Saddam had angrily claimed
sovereignty, marked the start of a new world crisis.
That Saddam Hussein should start another war so
soon after the conclusion of the devastating and
fruitless conflict with Iran took the West by surprise.
Kuwait had assisted Iraq and now became
its victim. The quarrel between the small emirate
and its powerful neighbour arose out of a disputed
frontier and the oil field that straddled it.
Iraq also accused Kuwait of lowering the price of
oil by over-production. Iraq was desperately short
of funds, so the oil-rich emirate was a tempting
prize to seize. Even the Arab states believed that
the dispute could be mediated with their help and
accepted Saddam’s assurances that he would not
attack Kuwait. When he did so, he caught Kuwait,
Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia entirely off-guard.
It was a gamble, but with the most powerful
army in the region Saddam believed he was
safe. Kuwait was annexed as Iraq’s ‘nineteenth
province’, though the plundering by the invading
soldiers did not diminish. Iraq’s claim to the
emirate was in fact historically spurious. Kuwait
had existed as an entity (a British protectorate in
1899 and granted independence in 1971) before
Iraq was created from the ashes of the Ottoman
Empire after the First World War.
The West acted promptly, the lead given by
the Bush administration in Washington. On 6
August 1990 the Security Council passed a resolution
that required all member states to cut off
trade with Iraq. Iraq’s main export earner, oil, was
paralysed. In all, twelve resolutions, of increasing
severity, were passed at the UN. They required
Iraq to quit Kuwait unconditionally, and on the
initiative of the US a deadline was set for 15
January 1991, after which date, if Iraq had not
by then left Kuwait, ‘all necessary means’ to drive
Iraqi forces out of Kuwait were authorised.
The Security Council was in rare unanimity. The
Chinese wished to show their respect for the
international rule of law after the world’s condemnation
of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Gorbachev, who had met George Bush in
Helsinki on 9 September, was looking for Western
assistance to help meet the economic crisis at
home and joined the American president in condemning
Iraq’s invasion. As the deadline drew
near, the mediating efforts of the UN secretarygeneral
Javier Perez de Cuéllar failed, as did a
last-minute attempt by Gorbachev.
Bush acted without hesitation, strongly supported
by Margaret Thatcher. Saddam Hussein
could not be allowed to get away with his forcible
annexation. After Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf emirates would be at his mercy. As controller
of the Gulf’s oil, he could hold the industrial
world to ransom. Syria and Egypt were not prepared
to allow Saddam’s Iraq such a huge increase
of power either. Thus from the beginning the US
and Britain could count on regional Arab allies,
including of course the Gulf emirates and Saudi
Arabia, whose vast financial reserves were at the
disposal of the alliance. A war against Iraq would
thus not be another Western ‘colonial’ drubbing of
an Arab nation. The US mounted a tremendous
military effort, the largest since Vietnam, and the
speediest build-up of military might since the
Second World War. By the time the land war
began, half the forces were not American, though
the US had made by far the largest contribution to
the fighting forces on land, on the sea and in the
air. The command of the allied armies, more than
600,000 strong, was assumed by the US general
H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who soon became a
swashbuckling television personality. Never before
had almost every minute of a war been televised as
a worldwide spectacle. War was never formally
declared, and media correspondents remained in
Baghdad even through the weeks of air attacks
which preceded the land war.
Bush was the acknowledged leader of the
international effort, which comprised more than
thirty nations contributing forces, munitions or
cash. Principal among them were Britain, Egypt,
Syria, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
emirates, with further troops made up of exiled
Kuwaitis. Financial aid was provided by Germany
and Japan. Most of the twenty-eight allies had a
non-combatant role: for example, just over 200
men were sent from Czechoslovakia, all of them
medical and chemical-warfare specialists, while
310 Muslim mujahideen guarded shrines. Bush
was careful to keep within the limits set by the
UN resolutions. Six months were needed to build
up a force considered sufficient to deal with what
was said to be the fourth-largest army in the
world. Meanwhile diplomacy and increasing pressure
failed to move Saddam out of Kuwait. As a
gesture of goodwill early in December 1990, he
released the 20,000 foreigners working in Iraq,
3,000 of them Americans, whom he had held as
hostages, as ‘human shields’. He indicated a
readiness to withdraw from Kuwait if a Middle
Eastern conference were called to discuss not only
Kuwait but also Israel’s occupation of Arab territories
and the Palestinian question, a ploy
designed to split the Arab nations aligned against
him. At worst he would emerge a hero in Arab
eyes for having forced a settlement of the
Palestinian demands. But Bush would permit no
direct linkage of the Palestine issue and Kuwait.
Saddam could not be seen to have profited from
aggression. The Iraqi leader now threatened ‘the
mother of battles’ for Kuwait and the use of
chemical weapons if attacked.
Early in the morning of 17 January 1991 the
shooting war, Desert Storm, began with air strikes
on strategic targets in Baghdad. For six weeks
thousands of air sorties were mounted against
Iraqi military targets, roads, bridges and essential
services. New high-technology weapons worked
with awesome accuracy. Inevitably there were also
innocent civilian casualties, most tragically when
an air-raid shelter in Baghdad received a direct
hit. Iraqi counter-strikes with Russian Scud
missiles were militarily ineffective but the devastating
allied air strikes were beginning to create a
popular Arab reaction in North Africa, Jordan and
other Muslim countries. It was overkill. By the
end of the onslaught, Iraq’s fighting morale had
been sapped. When the land war opened on 24
February, the high-tech armour sliced through
and completely outflanked the Iraqi troops. Their
number and fighting readiness had been overestimated
– many of those dug in in Kuwait were half
starved and only too happy to be taken prisoner.
In just 100 hours the whole Iraqi army had been
routed. No accurate figures for Iraqi casualties
killed has been established; they were probably
between 30,000 and 90,000; the US suffered 389
killed, the British 44 killed, and the total for
the allies was about 466 dead and in all about
1,187 wounded. The only real danger to the
Arab–Western coalition, the involvement of Israel
in the war in retaliation for the Iraqi Scud missile
attacks, was averted by US diplomacy and the stationing
of US Patriot defensive missile batteries
in Israel. On 26 February Saddam announced
withdrawal from Kuwait and on the following day
Iraq accepted all the UN resolutions. That same
day, 27 February 1991 Bush ordered the suspension
of fighting. He saw grave disadvantages to
future Arab–Western relations if the defenceless
Iraqis continued to be slaughtered as they fled
from Kuwait and from the areas in Iraq occupied
by allied troops. Bush also concluded that
Saddam could no longer resist whatever demands
were made and was unlikely to stay in power.
Saddam, however, signalled his defiance by
setting alight Kuwait’s oil wells as his routed
troops pulled back. It was a disaster months of
fire-fighting only partially overcame.
An uprising by the people of Iraq was
expected, but not the forms it took. The Shia
Muslims rebelled in the south of the country,
seizing Basra, and the Kurds in the north saw
their opportunity for gaining at least autonomy,
if not independence. The Kurdish rebels rapidly
occupied the principal northern towns, as well as
the oil-rich Kirkuk district. Iraq was falling to
pieces. The Soviet Union, Syria and Turkey, with
restless Kurdish minorities of their own, were all
greatly concerned by the Kurdish rebellion. For
the US, the possibility of an extension of Shi’ite
Iranian influence in southern Iraq was equally
unacceptable. And so the Kurds and Shi’ites were
left to their fate as the rump of Saddam’s forces
with tanks and aircraft brutally crushed the
risings. A ‘just’ war ended unjustly, and the
Western world and the Iraqi people became
victims of Realpolitik. For those members of the
Security Council with internal repressions of their
own on their conscience, China and the Soviet
Union, the principle that the UN could not interfere
in the ‘internal’ affairs of a country was sacrosanct.
For the US, striving for peace and stability,
the raising of the Kurdish national question in
1991 seemed likely to add another explosive issue
to others already detonated in the Middle East,
foremost among them the Israeli–Palestine and
Arab conflict.
In the face of the human catastrophe that
threatened the Kurdish people as they fled into
the inhospitable mountains of northern Iraq the
civilised world felt some sense of responsibility.
Britain and the US declared the region a ‘safe
haven’ and, with air bases in Turkey and UN
backing, enforced their decision to stop any
further Iraqi military action. The UN also orchestrated
humanitarian aid though there was much
criticism at the lack of competence revealed that
winter. During the course of 1992 the Kurds
established quasi-independence, with their own
guerrilla army, government and elected parliament
while declaring their aim to be only a
federal, democratic Iraq. The Kurds were especially
dependent on the toleration of Turkey, their
most powerful neighbour, and therefore avoided
going as far as stating that their aim was an independent
Kurd nation. Iran, Syria and Turkey all
have their own Kurdish minorities and had a
common interest in crushing any such ambitions.
To reassure the Turks, the Iraqi Kurds even made
common cause with them, fighting against their
own ethnic kin, the Kurdish Marxist guerrillas in
Turkey. But even Kurdish autonomy remained
precarious and was regarded with suspicion by its
neighbours. They wanted a unified Iraq, led by a
strongman other than Saddam Hussein.
The fate of the Shias in the south of Iraq initially
attracted less attention. But Saddam’s brutal
repression, when it extended to the ethnic Arab
families living primitively in the marshes in the
south of the country who made their simple living
from fishing, eventually aroused the West. A second
‘no fly zone’ was declared to cover the south
to provide some, far from complete, protection.
Saddam Hussein meanwhile remained in power
in Baghdad, surviving an international economic
blockade and the humiliations inflicted by the
UN. Perhaps these were even proving counterproductive
as Iraqis rallied to their leader who
was presented as standing up to overwhelming
Western hostility. Saddam played a cat-and-mouse
game frustrating the fulfillment of UN demands
that he throw open his nuclear facilities for inspection
and destroy his missiles as long as he dared. It
remained in the interests of the nations in the
region and of the West to maintain Iraq as a unitary
state and that helped Saddam to survive for so
long after defeat. What appeared to be morally
right did not necessarily correspond to what were
regarded as the wider interests of peace in the
Middle East and the priorities of the world’s most
powerful nations. Bush’s decision to stop at Iraq’s
frontier was in part based on a miscalculation, that
Saddam could not survive such a defeat but that
his successor should be enabled to hold the country
together as a counterweight to Iran.
General peace in the volatile Middle East remained
a distant prospect. But on 13 September
1993 there was one totally unexpected and dramatic
turn for the better. On that day on the
White House lawn the Israeli prime minister,
Rabin, shook the hand of PLO chairman Arafat.
Their agreement had been secretly brokered by
the Norwegian foreign minister and became
known as the ‘Oslo Agreement’. Arafat signed a
letter recognising that Israel must exist in peace
and security and Rabin accepted the PLO as the
‘representative of the Palestinian people’. Gaza
and Jericho were to be handed over to Palestinian
self-rule when all the details had been worked out.
There was an outcry from opponents – from
Hamas and from among the fearful Jewish settlers
in 144 settlements on the West Bank and Gaza,
who constitute some 4 per cent of Israel’s population.
The detailed negotiations dragged on, and
the December date for the handover passed.
Three months later a fanatical Israeli settler
sprayed a mosque in Hebron, the Patriarchs’
Tomb, with bullets from the automatic weapon
many settlers carry, killing thirty Palestinians;
Hamas retaliated in kind. The Israeli army was
seen to maintain order one-sidedly – ready to
shoot at Palestinians, but not at Jews. It was a setback,
but there was no alternative but to try to
implement what had already been agreed in principle
in Washington. Meanwhile a resistant Hafez
Assad was cajoled by the Americans without success
to normalise relations with Israel. His prior
demand was that he recover the Golan Heights. In
Egypt, Mubarak came under increasing pressure
from groups of Muslim fundamentalist terrorists.
The fires of conflict thus continued to smoulder
under the surface.
Hopes of peace turned to ashes. Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, based in the West Bank and Gaza,
continued to launch suicide bombing attacks on
Israel and the peace accord reached between the
PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 was in tatters. Rabin
was attacked by the Likud opposition and its
leader Binyamin Netanyahu for ‘betraying’ Israel,
and was assassinated not by an Arab terrorist but
by a Jewish fanatic at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in
November 1995. Shimon Peres, who succeeded
him as prime minister, attempted to build on the
trust Rabin had established with Arafat. But elections
in May 1996 were preceded by bombs and
deaths in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv which created
divisions between those Israelis who supported
the peace process and those who thought it
would undermine security. Netanyahu won by
the narrowest of margins. His approach was far
more hard line. By the end of 1997 Gaza and
only a small part of the West Bank had come
totally under Palestinian control. By constructing
a new settlement on the southern edge of East
Jerusalem, Netanyahu brought negotiations with
the Palestinians to a halt. But his refusal to abide
by the Oslo timetable to leave the West Bank was
overshadowed by the behaviour of Arafat, who
failed to distance himself from Hamas and the
continuing suicide bombings. Islamic Jihad and
Hamas set off bombs in buses, busy markets and
shopping streets. The Clinton administration
managed to keep the peace process alive until
the election in May 1999 of Ehud Barak, who
replaced Netanyahu. Peace hopes revived.
The biggest obstacle to overcome is a legacy of
hatred and mistrust increased by the violence on
both sides. Cooperation between Palestinians and
Israelis besides banishing death and destruction
promises great benefits for both peoples. Can the
bridge that leads to peace be constructed? It can
certainly not be done without outside help. There
was some progress, in May 2000 Israel withdrew
from the Lebanon though this greatly encouraged
Palestinian terrorists who saw it as a victory.
Arafat and Barak with their advisers were
brought together by Clinton at Camp David. The
Camp David blueprint in July 2000 that followed,
to be sure, did not offer a final peace deal and
would have left thorny problems outstanding but
it was a historic advance that proved the courage
and political will of Israeli’s prime minister Ehud
Barak. The Camp David secret negotiations had
brought the two sides closer but with characteristic
misjudgement Arafat held out on the eve of
the Israeli elections and so the window of opportunity
closed. Instead of persevering with the
course of peace soon after he returned, he
believed that one more blow and shock would
secure more concessions from Israel on the issues
that had broken up negotiations in Camp David
– sovereignty over Haram-al-Sharif (the Muslim
Holy sites), Temple Mount its Jewish name, over
the legal right of return of Palestinian refugees
now increased to 3.5 million of whom over a
million were herded still in camps, and over a territorial
map of the new state that would be viable
and removed most of the more than 100 Jewish
settlements.
The US provides most aid and support for Israel
and could exert most pressure. Previous efforts to
mediate a peace had failed. The Arab world
accused the West of double standards ignoring
some UN resolutions and demanding enforcement
of others. Against Iraq, President George
W. Bush, the son of the president of the first Gulf
War, and Tony Blair later justified war in 2003
because Saddam Hussein did not fulfil the resolutions
of the Security Council. But what about
Israel which had also failed to carry out Security
Council Resolution 242 (1967). This had called
for a ‘just and lasting peace’, for the Israeli forces
to withdraw from territories occupied in the Six-
Day War, and for a ‘just settlement of the refugee
problem’. Fourteen other resolutions followed on
issues as diverse as Israel’s settlement policy, a
‘flagrant violation’, and the abuse of the human
rights of the Palestine people. Was this not indeed
an example of double standards? This argument
is persuasively presented and has moral force but
from a strictly legal point of view deserves close
scrutiny.
In the first place Resolution 242 was rejected
by the Arab nations who refused to accept the
existence of Israel within any borders and not
until 1993 did the PLO and Israel agree to negotiate
to implement the resolution. There is also a
crucial difference between the dozen resolutions
concerning Iraq passed after the first Gulf War
under the UN Charter’s Chapter Seven and the
Resolution on Israel and the Palestinians. On the
Iraqi resolutions the Security Council is empowered
under Chapter Seven to take all actions
including war to enforce its will.
The resolutions on the Israel–Palestine conflict
were passed under Chapter Six where the UN acts
as a mediator and makes recommendations that
are not binding on the countries in dispute
however strongly worded. From the point of view
purely of international law the distinction is
crucial.
The renewal of violence undermined Barak
who was obliged to counter with the strong arm
of the Israeli army ranged against stone-throwing
Palenstinian youths. The numbers of Palestinians
killed and wounded exceeded those of the Israelis
and inflamed passions. The casualty was the peace
process and Barak’s electoral chances. Barak was
defeated by Israeli’s ‘strongman’ Ariel Sharon in
2001. The future looked bleak.
World History
