CHAPTER 13
Each year the Egyptian armed forces hold a parade on the sixth of October, a national holiday marking the anniversary of the 1973 War. The Cairo parade ground is set against the dramatic backdrop of a modern pyramid commissioned by President Anwar Sadat to honor the fallen of the October War. This monument also serves as the tomb of Egypt’s unknown soldier.
The Armed Forces Day parade celebrates the high point of Sadat’s presidency, when he became the “Hero of the Crossing” of the Suez Canal. The parade commemorates Egypt’s military leadership of the Arab world against Israel in 1973, before Egypt’s separate peace with the Jewish state severely compromised its standing.
Sadat did his utmost to focus public attention on the Armed Forces Day parade, which he attended in person in the full glare of the Egyptian and international press. At least for a day, he could ignore the fact of Egypt’s isolation: in response to the Camp David Accords, the other Arab states had severed their ties to Egypt, and the Arab League had relocated its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. These measures only stiffened the Egyptian government’s resolve to celebrate the accomplishments of the 1973 War as a matter of national honor.
On October 6, 1981, Sadat took his seat in the review stand with full state pomp, dressed in his ceremonial uniform, surrounded by his cabinet, clerics, foreign dignitaries, and the military’s top brass. Row upon row of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and missile launchers filed between the pyramid-shaped cenotaph and the review stand. A tight formation of air force fighters screamed overhead, trailing colored smoke. “Now comes the artillery,” the commentator announced, as the dull tan-colored trucks pulling howitzers approached the review stand.
One of the trucks swerved violently and came to a sudden halt. A soldier leaped from the cab and lobbed a number of stun grenades into the review stand, while his three accomplices opened fire on the assembled dignitaries from the back of the flatbed truck. They had achieved total surprise, and the renegade soldiers enjoyed thirty seconds of unimpeded carnage. They probably killed Sadat with their opening shots.
The leader of the band ran to the front of the reviewing stand and fired point blank at the prone body of President Sadat until finally one of the presidential guards shot and wounded him. “I am Khalid al-Islambuli,” the assassin shouted to the chaos in the review stand. “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”1
The assassination of Sadat, broadcast live on television, sent shock waves around the world. A minor Islamist, acting almost entirely on his own, had assassinated the president of Egypt, the most powerful Arab state. The prospect of an Islamic revolution could no longer be confined to Iran, as Islamist movements cropped up across the Arab world to challenge secular governments.
When Khalid al-Islambuli shouted, “I have killed Pharoah,” he was condemning Sadat for being a secular ruler who placed man’s law before religion. The Islamists were united by their belief that Muslim societies had to be ruled in accordance with “God’s law,” the body of Islamic law derived from the Qur’an, the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, and the jurisprudence of Islamic theologians collectively known as sharia. They saw their own secular governments as the enemy and referred to their rulers as “pharaohs.” The Qur’an, like the Hebrew Bible, is very critical of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, portraying them as despots who promoted man’s law over God’s commandments. There are no fewer than seventy-nine verses of the Qur’an condemning pharaohs. The more extreme Islamists advocate violence against the latter-day pharaohs ruling the Arab world as a necessary measure to overturn secular governments and build Islamic states in their place. Khalid al-Islambuli was one of their ranks, and he declared the assassination of Sadat legitimate by denouncing the fallen president as pharaoh.
The Islamists were not Sadat’s only critics. Anwar Sadat was laid to rest on October 10, 1981, in a state funeral attended by a number of international leaders but few representatives from the Arab states. Attendees included Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, the three American presidents with whom Sadat had worked closely. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat for the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, led a prominent Israeli delegation. Among Arab League members, only Sudan, Oman, and Somalia sent representatives to the funeral.
More striking, perhaps, was the paucity of prominent Egyptians at their president’s funeral. Mohamed Heikal, the veteran journalist and political analyst who nurtured his own grievances against Sadat (Heikal had been arrested and imprisoned in a roundup of opposition figures one month before the assassination), reflected on how “a man who was mourned as a heroic and far-seeing statesman in the West found hardly any mourners among his fellow-countrymen.”2
Yet both his critics and his admirers were satisfied with the choice of Sadat’s final resting place. To those who honored the “Hero of the Crossing” it was most appropriate that Sadat was buried in the grounds of the 1973 War memorial, facing the review stand where he had been gunned down. Sadat’s Islamist enemies took satisfaction in the fact that the pharaoh had been buried in the shadow of his pyramid.
The Islamists had managed to kill the president of Egypt, but they lacked the resources and planning to topple the government of Egypt. Vice President Husni Mubarak, who had been rushed from the parade grounds with minor wounds, was declared president shortly after the announcement of Sadat’s death. The Egyptian security forces rounded up hundreds of suspects and allegedly subjected many of them to torture.
Six months later, in April 1982, five of the defendants were sentenced to death for their role in the assassination of Sadat: Khalid al-Islambuli, his three accomplices, and their ideological guide, an electrician named ’Abd al-Salam Faraj who had written a tract advocating jihad against “un-Islamic” (i.e., secular) Arab rulers. Their executions made martyrs of Sadat’s assassins, and throughout the 1980s, Islamist groups continued to wage an often violent campaign against the Egyptian government in their ongoing bid to turn the secular nationalist Arab Republic of Egypt into the Islamic Republic of Egypt.
Given the prominence of Islam in public life across much of the Arab world today, it is easy to forget just how secular the Middle East was in 1981. In all but the most conservative Arab Gulf states, Western fashions were preferred over traditional dress. Many people drank alcohol openly, in disregard of Islamic prohibition. Men and women mixed freely both in public and in the work place, as more and more women were entering higher education and professional life. For some, the freedoms of the modern age marked a high point in Arab progress. Others viewed these developments with unease, fearing that the rapid pace of change was leading the Arab world to abandon its own culture and values.
The debates over Islam and modernity have deep roots in the Arab world. Hassan al-Banna had created the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to fight against Western influences and the erosion of Islamic values in Egypt. Over the decades the Muslim Brothers had faced increasing repression, banned by the Egyptian monarchy in December 1948, and then by Nasser’s regime in 1954. In the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Islamic politics were driven underground across the Arab world, and Islamic values were undermined by secular states that increasingly drew their inspiration from either Soviet socialism or Western free-market democracy. Yet repression only strengthened the will of the Muslim Brothers to fight secularism and promote their own vision of Islamic values.
A radical new trend emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, led by a charismatic Egyptian thinker named Sayyid Qutb. He was to prove one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the century. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Qutb moved to Cairo in the 1920s to study in the teacher’s college, Dar al-’Ulum. Upon graduation, he worked for the Ministry of Education as a teacher and an inspector. He was also active in the literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s as both an author and a critic.
In 1948 Qutb was sent on a two-year government scholarship to study in the United States. He took his masters in education from the University of Northern Colorado’s Teachers’ College, with periods of study in both Washington, D.C., and Stanford, California. Though he crossed the United States from east to west, Qutb came away with none of the typical exchange student’s affection for the country. In 1951 Qutb published his reflections, “The America I Have Seen,” in an Islamist magazine. Condemning the materialism and dearth of spiritual values he encountered in the United States, Qutb was appalled by what he saw as moral laxity and unbridled competitiveness in American society. He was particularly shocked to find these vices in American churches. “In most churches,” Qutb wrote, “there are clubs that join the two sexes, and every minister attempts to attract to his church as many people as possible, especially since there is a tremendous competition between churches of different denominations.” Qutb found such behavior, of trying to pack in the crowds, more appropriate for a theater manager than a spiritual leader.
In his essay Qutb told the story of how one night he had attended a church service followed by a dance. He was appalled to see the lengths to which the pastor went to make the church hall look “more romantic and passionate.” The pastor even chose a sultry record by Ray Charles to set the mood. Qutb’s description of the tune—“a famous American song called ‘But Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’” captures the gulf that separated him from American popular culture. “[The song] is composed of a dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late, and her mother was waiting but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with this line: but baby, it’s cold outside!”3 Qutb clearly found the song distasteful, but he was even more shocked that a man of religion would choose such an inappropriate tune for his young parishioners to dance to. Nothing could be further from the social role of mosques, in which the sexes are separated and modesty is the rule in dress and behavior.
Qutb returned to Egypt determined to snap his fellow countrymen out of their complacent admiration for the modern values that America embodied. “I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people,” he argued. “And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.”4 Qutb did not want to change America; rather, he wanted to protect Egypt, and the Islamic world generally, from the moral degeneration he had witnessed in America.
Shortly after his return from the United States, in 1952 Sayyid Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of his background in publishing, he was placed in charge of the society’s press and publications office. The ardent Islamist had gained a wide readership through his provocative essays. Following Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Qutb enjoyed good relations with the Free Officers. Nasser reportedly invited Qutb to draft the constitution of the new official party, the Liberation Rally. Presumably, Nasser did so less out of admiration for the Islamist reformer himself than as a calculated bid to harness Qutb’s support for the new official organ into which all political parties—the Muslim Brotherhood included—were to be dissolved.
The new regime’s goodwill toward the Muslim Brotherhood proved short lived. Qutb was arrested in the general clampdown on the organization after a member of the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser in October 1954. Like many other Muslim Brothers, Qutb claimed he had been subjected to horrific torture and interrogation while under arrest. Convicted on charges of subversive activity, Qutb was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor.
From prison, Qutb continued to inspire fellow Islamists. Ill health often confined him to the hospital wing, where he wrote some of the most influential works of the twentieth century on Islam and politics, including a radical commentary on the Qur’an and his clarion call for the promotion of a genuine Islamic society, titled Milestones.
Milestones represents the culmination of Qutb’s views on both the bankruptcy of Western materialism and the authoritarianism of secular Arab nationalism. The social and political systems that defined the modern age, he argued, were man-made and had failed for that very reason. Instead of opening a new age of science and knowledge, they had resulted in ignorance of divine guidance, or jahiliyya. The word has particular resonance in Islam, as it refers to the pre-Islamic dark ages. Twentieth-century jahiliyya, Qutb argued, “takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behaviour, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed.” By implication, the remarkable advances in science and technology of the twentieth century had not led humanity into a modern age; rather, the abandonment of God’s eternal message had taken society back to the seventh century. This was as true for the non-Islamic West, Qutb believed, as it was for the Arab world. The result, he argued, was tyranny. Arab regimes did not bring their citizens freedom and human rights, but repression and torture—as Qutb knew from painful firsthand experience.
Qutb believed that Islam, as the perfect statement of God’s order for mankind, was the only route to human freedom, a true liberation theology. By extension, the only valid and legitimate laws were God’s laws, as enshrined in Islamic sharia. He believed that a Muslim vanguard was needed to restore Islam to “the role of the leader of mankind.” The vanguard would use “preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs” and would deploy “physical power and jihad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord.” Qutb wrote his book to guide the vanguard who would lead the revival of Islamic values, through which Muslims would once again achieve personal freedom and world leadership.5
The power of Qutb’s message lay in its simplicity and directness. He identified a problem—jahiliyya—and a clear Islamic solution that was grounded in the values that many Arab Muslims held dear. His critique applied equally to imperial powers and to autocratic Arab governments, and his response was a message of hope grounded in the assumption of Muslim superiority:
Conditions change, the Muslim loses his physical power and is conquered; yet the consciousness does not depart from him that he is the most superior. If he remains a Believer, he looks upon his conqueror from a superior position. He remains certain that this is a temporary condition which will pass away and that faith will turn the tide from which there is no escape. Even if death is his portion, he will never bow his head. Death comes to all, but for him there is martyrdom. He will proceed to the Garden [i.e., heaven], while his conquerors go to the Fire [i.e., hell].6
However much Qutb disapproved of Western imperial powers, his first target was always the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, and Nasser’s government in particular. In his exegesis of the Qur’anic verses on the “Makers of the Pit,” Qutb draws a thinly veiled allegory of the struggle between the Muslim Brothers and the Free Officers. In the Qur’anic story, a community of Believers was condemned for their faith and burned alive by tyrants who gathered to watch their righteous victims die. “Doomed were the makers of the pit,” the Qur’an relates (85:1–16). In Qutb’s commentary, the persecutors—“arrogant, mischievous, criminal and degraded people”—took sadistic pleasure in witnessing the pain of the martyrs. “And when some young man or woman, some child or old man from among these righteous Believers was thrown in to the fire,” Qutb wrote, “their diabolical pleasure would reach a new height, and shouts of mad joy would escape their lips at the sight of blood and pieces of flesh”—graphic scenes absent from the Qur’anic tale, but perhaps inspired by Qutb’s experiences, and those of his fellow Muslim Brothers, at the hands of their torturers in prison. “The struggle between the Believers and their enemies,” he concluded, was essentially “a struggle between beliefs—either unbelief or faith, either Jahiliyya or Islam.” Qutb’s message was clear: the government of Egypt was incompatible with his vision of an Islamic state. One would have to go.
Qutb was released from prison in 1964, the year Milestones was published. His standing enhanced by his prison writings, he quickly reestablished contact with comrades from the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Qutb must have known that his every movement would be followed by Nasser’s secret police. The Islamist author had gained such prominence across the Muslim world for his radical new thoughts that he would be a danger to the Egyptian state at home and abroad.
Qutb’s followers faced the same surveillance and risks as the reformer himself. One of Qutb’s most influential disciples was Zaynab al-Ghazali (1917–2005), the pioneer of the Islamist women’s movement. When only twenty years old, al-Ghazali founded the Muslim Ladies’ Society. Her activities had brought her to the attention of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who tried to persuade her to join forces with the Muslim Sisterhood he had just launched. Though the two Islamist women’s movements followed their separate courses, al-Ghazali became a loyal follower of Hasan al-Banna.
In the 1950s al-Ghazali met the sisters of the imprisoned Sayyid Qutb, who gave her draft chapters of Milestones before the book had been published. Inspired by what she read, al-Ghazali devoted herself to the vanguard role envisaged by Qutb’s manifesto—preparing Egyptian society to embrace Islamic law. Just as the Prophet Muhammad spent thirteen years in Mecca before migrating to Medina to found the first Islamic community, so the followers of Qutb allowed thirteen years to transform Egyptian society as a whole into an ideal Islamic society. “It was decided,” she wrote, “that after thirteen years of Islamic training of our youth, elders, women and children, we would make an exhaustive survey of the state. If this survey revealed that at least 75% of the followers believed that Islam is a complete way of life and are convinced about establishing an Islamic state, then we would call for the establishment of such a state.” If the poll results suggested a lower level of support, al-Ghazali and her colleagues would work for another thirteen years to try to convert Egyptian society.7 In the long run, their aim was nothing less than the overthrow of the Free Officers’ regime and its replacement with a true Islamic state. Nasser and his government were determined to eliminate the Islamist threat before it gained ground. The Egyptian authorities released Sayyid Qutb from prison at the end of 1964, after a decade’s imprisonment. Zaynab al-Ghazali and his other supporters celebrated Qutb’s release and met frequently with him, under the watchful gaze of Egyptian police surveillance. Many believed that Qutb had been released only to lead the authorities to like-minded Islamists. In August 1965, after only eight months’ liberty, Qutb was rearrested, along with al-Ghazali and all their associates. They were charged with conspiracy to assassinate President Nasser and overthrow the Egyptian government. Although their long-term aim was certainly to replace the Egyptian government with an Islamic system, the defendants insisted they were innocent of any plot against the life of the president.
Al-Ghazali spent the next six years in prison and later wrote an account of her ordeal, capturing in graphic horror the tortures to which the Islamists, men and women alike, were subjected by the Nasserist state. She was confronted with the violence from her first day in prison. “Almost unable to believe my eyes and not wanting to accept such inhumanity, I silently watched as members of the Ikhwan [i.e., the Muslim Brothers] were suspended in the air and their naked bodies ferociously flogged. Some were left to the mercy of savage dogs which tore at their bodies. Others, with their face to the wall awaited their turn.”8
Al-Ghazali was not spared these atrocities; she faced whipping, beatings, attacks with dogs, isolation, sleep deprivation, and regular death threats, all in a vain attempt to secure a statement implicating Qutb and the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the alleged conspiracy. When two newly arrested young women were admitted to share al-Ghazali’s cell, after she had suffered eighteen days of abuse, she could not convey the horrors in her own words but read them the Qur’anic verses on “The Makers of the Pit” instead. Upon hearing these verses, one of the women began crying silently; the other asked, disbelievingly: “Does this really happen to ladies?”9
The trial against Sayyid Qutb and his followers opened in April 1966. In all, forty-three Islamists—Qutb and al-Ghazali among them—were formally charged with conspiring against the Egyptian state. The state prosecutors used Qutb’s writings as evidence against Qutb and charged him with promoting the violent overthrow of the Egyptian government. In August 1966, Qutb and two other defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Zaynab al-Ghazali was given twenty-five years with hard labor.
By executing Qutb, the Egyptian authorities not only made him a martyr of the Islamist cause but confirmed to many the truth of Qutb’s writings, which became yet more influential after his death than they had been during his own lifetime. His commentary on the Qur’an, and Milestones, his charter for political action, were reprinted and distributed across the Muslim world. A new generation, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, was electrified by Qutb’s message of Islamic regeneration and justice. Its members dedicated themselves to achieve his vision—by all possible means, peaceful and violent alike.
The Islamist challenge spread from Egypt to Syria in the 1960s. The influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb’s radical critique of secular government, combined to create a revolutionary Islamic movement bent on the overthrow of Syria’s praetorian republic. The conflict took Syria to the brink of civil war and claimed tens of thousands of lives before reaching its brutal climax in the Syrian town of Hama.
The founder of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustafa al-Siba‘i (1915–1964), was himself a native of Hama. He studied in Egypt in the 1930s, where he came under the influence of Hasan al-Banna. Upon his return to Syria, Siba’i brought together a network of Muslim youth associations to create the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Siba’i drew on the Muslim Brotherhood’s network to win a seat in the Syrian parliament in the 1943 elections. From that point onward, the Syrian Muslim Brothers were too strong to be ignored by the political elite, even if they were not powerful enough in their own right to exercise much influence on the increasingly secular and Arab nationalist political discourse in Syria in the 1940s and 1950s.
When the Ba‘th party seized power in Syria in 1963, the Muslim Brothers went on the offensive. The politics of the Ba’th were intensely secular, calling for a strict separation of religion and state. This was only natural, given the sectarian diversity of the party. Whereas the population of Syria was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim (about 70 percent of the total), the Ba‘th had also attracted many Christian members as well as secular Sunni Muslims. It had also had substantial support among the Alawites. An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Alawites were the largest of Syria’s minority groups, representing about 12 percent of the population. After years of marginalization by Syria’s Sunni majority, the Alawites had risen through the military and the Ba’th to new prominence in Syrian politics by the 1960s.
As the Ba’th tended toward secular, even atheist views, it provoked growing resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood, which claimed to be Syria’s “moral majority.” The Muslim Brotherhood saw the rise of the Alawites to political prominence as a distinct threat to the Sunni Muslim culture of Syria, and its members were determined to undermine their government through violent means if necessary.
In the mid-1960s, the Brotherhood formed an underground resistance movement in Hama and the northern city of Aleppo. The Islamist militants began to stockpile weapons and train young recruits drawn from high schools and universities across Syria. One of Hama’s most charismatic imams (mosque prayer leaders), Shaykh Marwan Hadid, was particularly successful in recruiting students to the Islamic underground movement. For many of the young Islamists, Hadid was an inspiration and a role model for Islamic activism.10
Confrontation between the Islamist underground and the Syrian government became inevitable when the Ba’thist commander of the Syrian air force, General Hafiz al-Asad, came to power in the coup of November 16, 1970. As a member of the Alawite minority community, al-Asad was Syria’s first non-Sunni Muslim leader. He made efforts to placate Sunni Muslim sensitivities in his early years in office, but to no avail. The introduction of a new constitution in 1973, which for the first time did not stipulate that the president of Syria would be a Muslim, revived questions of religion and state. The constitution sparked violent demonstrations in the Sunni Muslim heartland of Hama. Further Islamist violence followed al-Asad’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese civil war on the side of the Maronite Christians and against the progressive Muslim forces and the Palestinian movement in April 1976.
Al-Asad’s intervention in the Lebanon War raised grave concerns among Syria’s Muslim majority. Many disgruntled Sunnis, who had found themselves marginalized by the Alawite-dominated government since al-Asad came to power in 1970, suspected the new regime of promoting a “minority alliance” that bound Syria’s ruling Alawites with the Lebanese Maronites to subjugate the Muslim majority of Syria and Lebanon. With tensions growing between the government and the Sunni community, al-Asad ordered a crackdown on the Syrian Muslim Brothers. In 1976 the authorities arrested Hama’s radical imam, Shaykh Marwan Hadid. The Islamist recruiter immediately went on a hunger strike, and he died in June 1976. The authorities insisted that Hadid had taken his own life by starvation, but the Islamists accused the government of his murder and promised to avenge Marwan Hadid’s death.
It took three years for Syria’s Islamists to organize their retaliatory blow against the Asad regime. In June 1979, the Islamist guerrillas attacked a military academy in Aleppo, the majority of whose students—some 260 of the 320 cadets—were from the Alawite community. The terrorists killed 83 cadets, all of them from the Alawite minority.
The attack on the military academy was the opening volley in an all-out war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of Hafiz al-Asad that was to rage for the next two and one-half years, dragging Syria into a hellish daily back-and-forth of terrorism and counterterrorism.
The Muslim Brothers in Syria, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, refused to negotiate or compromise with the Asad regime. “We reject all forms of despotism, out of respect for the very principles of Islam, and do not seek the fall of the Pharaoh so that another might take his place,” they announced in a leaflet distributed across the towns and cities of Syria in mid-1979.11 Their language echoed the Islamist militants in Egypt, who were similarly bent on overthrowing the Sadat government by violence, and who gave moral support to their Brothers in Hama in their revolt against Syria’s pharaoh.
With no scope for reconciliation, the hard-liners in the Syrian government, headed by the president’s brother, Rifa’at al-Asad, were given a free hand to suppress the Islamic insurgency by force. In March 1980, Syrian commandos descended by helicopter on a rebel village between Aleppo and Latakia and placed the entire village under martial rule. According to official figures, more than two hundred villagers were killed in the operation.
Emboldened by its success in the countryside, the Syrian government sent 25,000 troops to invade the city of Aleppo, scene of the cadet massacre one year earlier. Soldiers searched every house in those quarters known to support the Islamist insurgency and arrested more than 8,000 suspects. Rifa’at al-Asad warned the townspeople from the turret of his tank that he was ready to execute 1,000 a day until the city was cleansed of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brothers struck back on June 26, 1980, with an assassination attempt against President al-Asad. Militants threw hand grenades and fired machine guns at the president while he received a visiting African dignitary. Al-Asad was shielded by his bodyguards and narrowly escaped death. The following day, Rifa’at al-Asad sent his commandos to the notorious Tadmur Prison, where Muslim Brother prisoners were detained, to exact a terrible revenge.
’Isa Ibrahim Fayyad, a young Alawite commando, would never forget his first mission, when he was ordered to massacre unarmed prisoners at Tadmur. The Syrian soldiers were flown by helicopter to the prison at 6:30 A.M. There were perhaps seventy commandos in all, divided into seven platoons, each dispatched to a different cell block. Fayyad and his men took up their positions and went to work. “They opened the gates of a cell block for us. Six or seven of us entered and killed all those we found inside, some 60 or 70 people in all. I must have gunned down fifteen myself.” The cells echoed with machine-gun fire and the screams of the dying shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Fayyad had no compassion for his victims. “Altogether some 550 of those Muslim Brother bastards must have been killed,” he reflected grimly. Other participants estimated as many as 700–1,100 Muslim Brothers were gunned down in their cells. The unarmed prisoners made desperate attacks on the commandos, killing one and wounding two others in the melee. When the commandos were finished, they had to wash the blood from their hands and feet.12
Having exterminated the Muslim Brothers in Tadmur Prison, al-Asad took the initiative to eliminate the Brotherhood from Syrian society. On July 7, 1980, the Syrian government passed a law that made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood an offense publishable by death. Undaunted, the Islamist opposition movement embarked on a series of assassinations against prominent Syrian officials, including some of President al-Asad’s personal friends.
The Syrian government responded in April 1981 by sending the army into the Muslim Brothers’ stronghold in Hama. The fourth-largest city in Syria, with a population at the time of about 180,000, Hama had been the center of Islamist opposition since the 1960s. When the troops arrived, the townspeople put up no resistance, assuming this would be a raid like those in the past, in which people were detained for questioning and intimidated by the commandos before being released. They were wrong.
The Syrian army decided to make an example of the civilians of Hama, killing children and adults indiscriminately. One eyewitness described the carnage to a Western journalist: “I walked a few steps before coming on a pile of bodies, then another. There must have been 10 or 15. I walked by them, one after the other. I looked at them a long time, without believing my eyes.... In each pile there were 15 bodies, 25, 30 bodies. The faces were totally unrecognizable.... There were bodies of all ages, 14 and up, in pyjamas,gelebiyehs [native robes], in sandals or barefoot.” 13 Estimates ranged from 150 to several hundred killed in the attack. The total death toll in two years of hostilities between government forces and Islamists already exceeded 2,500.
The Muslim Brothers responded to the army’s Hama atrocity in kind, initiating a terror campaign against innocent civilians in the major towns and cities of Syria. The Islamists shifted the battlefield from the northern towns of Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama to the capital city of Damascus. The Muslim Brothers planted a series of explosive devices that shook the Syrian capital between August and November of that year, culminating in a massive car bomb in the city center on November 29 that killed 200 and wounded up to 500—the largest casualty toll of any single bomb the Arab world had witnessed up to that point.
Anwar Sadat’s assassination in October 1981 coincided with President Asad’s fifty-first birthday; Syrian Islamists circulated leaflets threatening him with the same fate. Al-Asad authorized his brother Rifa’at to conduct an extermination campaign against the Muslim Brothers in their stronghold in Hama, to defeat the movement once and for all.
The Syrian government went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood in their stronghold of Hama in the early morning hours of February 2, 1982. Helicopter gunships ferried platoons of commandos to the hills outside the city. After the government’s murderous raid in April 1981, the townspeople were on high alert, and the vigilant Islamists were quick to react when they heard the incoming helicopters. Shouting “Allahu akbar,” the Muslim Brothers rose in armed revolt against the Syrian state. The call to jihad, or holy war, was made over the loudspeakers of the city’s mosques, normally used for the daily calls to prayer. The leader of the Muslim Brothers urged the townspeople to drive the “infidel” Asad regime from power once and for all.
By dawn, the first wave of soldiers was in retreat and the Islamist fighters went on the attack, killing government officials and Ba’th members in Hama. Early success gave the insurgents a false hope of victory. For behind the first wave of army commandos lay tens of thousands of soldiers, supported by tanks and aircraft. It was a battle the government could not afford to lose and that the insurgents lacked the means to win.
For the first week, the Muslim Brothers managed to fight off the Syrian army onslaught. Yet the government’s superior firepower took its toll, as tanks and artillery leveled whole city blocks, burying their defenders under the rubble. When the town finally fell, government agents exacted a bloody toll of the survivors, arresting, torturing, and arbitrarily killing the townspeople of Hama for the slightest suspicion of support for the Muslim Brothers. New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman, who entered Hama two months after the violence, found a city in which whole quarters had been destroyed and leveled by bulldozers and steamrollers. The human toll was far more terrible. “Virtually the entire Muslim leadership in Hama—from sheiks to teachers to mosque caretakers—who survived the battle for the city were liquidated afterward in one fashion or another; most anti-government union leaders suffered the same fate,” Friedman reported.14
To this day, no one knows how many people died in Hama in February 1982. Journalists and analysts have estimated a death toll ranging somewhere between 10,000–20,000, but Rifa’at al-Asad boasted of having killed as many as 38,000. The Asad brothers wanted the world to know they had crushed their adversaries and dealt the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria a blow from which it would never recover.
The stakes were now higher than ever in the conflict between Islamists and pharaohs. Whereas the Egyptian authorities had resorted to widespread torture and selective execution of its Islamist opponents, the Syrian regime engaged in mass extermination. A higher degree of training, planning, and discipline were required for the Islamists to topple such powerful adversaries.
The experiences of Islamists in Syria and Egypt had shown that Arab states were too strong to be toppled by assassination or subversion. Those Islamists who hoped to overturn secularism and establish Islamic states would have to look elsewhere. The conflict in civil war Lebanon provided one opportunity for Islamist parties to promote their ideal vision of an Islamic society. Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion presented a different option. In both cases, Islamist parties took their struggle to the international arena, broadening the scope of their battle to combat regional and global superpowers like Israel, the United States, and the Soviet Union. What had begun as a domestic security struggle for individual states was becoming a global security issue.
Two nearly simultaneous bombs shook the very foundations of Beirut on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983. Within seconds, over 300 people had perished: 241 U.S. servicemen, 58 French paratroopers, 6 Lebanese civilians, and 2 suicide bombers. The U.S. Marines faced the highest single-day death toll since Iwo Jima, the French had absorbed the greatest single day’s casualties since the Algerian war, and the suicide bombers had transformed the conflict in Lebanon.
The bombers approached their targets in trucks laden with tons of high explosives. One approached the U.S. Marines’ barracks, a concrete building in the Beirut International Airport compound, through a service entrance at 6:20 A.M. He gathered speed and smashed through the metal gates. The shocked sentries did not have time even to load their weapons to stop him. One survivor watched the truck speed by. All he could remember after the blast was that “the man was smiling as he drove past.”15 The driver was clearly delighted that he had penetrated the American compound, no doubt believing that his violent death would open the Gates of Paradise before him.
The blast was so strong that it severed the building from its foundation; the compound collapsed like a house of cards. The ruins were rocked by secondary explosions as the Marines’ ammunition stores in the basement were detonated by the heat.
Three miles to the north, another suicide bomber drove his truck into the underground parking garage of the high-rise building that served as headquarters to the French paratroopers. He detonated his bomb, leveling the building and killing fifty-eight French soldiers. Journalist Robert Fisk, who reached the ruins of the French compound moments after the explosion, could not grasp the enormity of the destruction. “I run up to a smoking crater, 20 feet deep and 40 wide. Piled beside it, like an obscene sandwich, are the nine floors of the building.... The bomb lifted the nine-storey building into the air and moved it 20 feet. The whole building became airborne. The crater is where the building was. How could this be done?”16
Even for war-shattered Beirut, the devastation wrought by the attacks of October 23, 1983, was shocking. The operations also revealed an unprecedented and deeply troubling degree of planning and discipline. Today we would say it bore the hallmark of an al-Qaida operation—a decade before that movement’s first attacks.
No one knows precisely who was responsible for the attacks on the U.S. Marines and the French paratroopers in Beirut, but the prime suspect was a shadowy new group that called itself Islamic Jihad. In one of its earliest operations, in July 1982, members of the Islamic Jihad kidnapped the acting president of the American University of Beirut, an American academic named David Dodge. They also claimed responsibility for the massive car bomb that sheared a wing off the United States Embassy in downtown Beirut in April 1983, killing 63 and wounding over one 100.
Radical new forces were at work in the Lebanese civil war. Islamic Jihad revealed itself to be a Lebanese Shiite organization collaborating with Iran. In an anonymous telephone call to a foreign press agency, Islamic Jihad claimed its July bombing of the U.S. Embassy was “part of the Iranian revolution’s campaign against the imperialist presence throughout the world.” Iran had dangerous friends in Lebanon, it seemed. “We will continue to strike at the imperialist presence in Lebanon,” the Islamic Jihad spokesman continued, “including the multi-national force.” Following the October bombings, Islamic Jihad once again claimed responsibility. “We are the soldiers of God and we are fond of death. We are neither Iranians nor Syrians nor Palestinians,” they insisted. “We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the principles of the Koran.”17
The conflict in Lebanon had grown infinitely more complex in the six years between the Syrian intervention in 1977 and the suicide bombings of 1983. Though it had started as an internal war between Lebanese factions with Palestinian involvement in 1975, the war was by 1983 a regional conflict that drew in Syria, Israel, Iran, Europe, and the United States directly—and many more countries indirectly, such as Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union, which bankrolled different militias and provided them with weaponry.
The war had also led to significant shifts in the balance of power among the different Lebanese communities. The Syrian army, which entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab League peacekeeping force, had first sided with the beleaguered Maronite Christians to prevent the victory of the Leftist Muslim factions headed by Kamal Jumblatt. Syria was jealous of its dominant position in Lebanon and acted quickly to prevent any one group from gaining a clear victory in that country’s civil war. This led Syria to change its alliances with some frequency. No sooner had Syria’s army defeated the leftist Muslim militias than it turned against the Maronites and sided with the rising new power of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim community.
Long marginalized by the political elites, the Shiites had emerged as a distinct political community in Lebanon only since the onset of the Lebanese civil war. By the 1970s the Shiites had become the largest Lebanese community in terms of numbers, though they remained the poorest and most politically disenfranchised of the country’s sects. The traditional centers of Lebanon’s Shiite communities were in the poorest parts of the country—South Lebanon and the northern Bekaa Valley. Increasingly, Shiites fled the relative deprivation of the countryside, moving to the southern slums of Beirut in search of jobs.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many Lebanese Shiites had been drawn to secular parties promising social reform, like the Ba’th, the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. It was only in the 1970s that a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese ancestry named Musa al-Sadr drew the Shiites together into a distinct communal party known as the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumin) and began to compete with the leftist parties for the loyalty of the Lebanese Shiites. Upon the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, the Movement of the Dispossessed created its own militia, known as Amal.
In the first stages of the Lebanese civil war, Amal sided with the leftist Muslim parties of the National Movement, headed by Kamal Jumblatt. But Musa al-Sadr soon grew disenchanted with Jumblatt’s leadership, accusing the Druze leader of using the Shiites as cannon-fodder—in al-Sadr’s words, “to combat the Christians to the last Shi’i.”18 Tensions had also emerged between Amal and the Palestinian movement, which since 1969 had used South Lebanon as a base for its operations against Israel. Not only did the Shiite community suffer great hardship from Israeli retaliatory strikes provoked by Palestinian operations from the south, but it grew to resent the control the Palestinians exercised over South Lebanon.
By 1976 Amal had broken with Jumblatt’s coalition and the Palestinian movement to side with the Syrians, whom its followers saw as the only counterweight to Palestinian influence in the south. It was the beginning of an enduring alliance between Syria and the Shiites of Lebanon that has survived until today.
The Iranian Revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 transformed Shiite politics in Lebanon. The Shiites of Lebanon were bound to Iran by common religious and cultural ties that spanned the centuries. Musa al-Sadr was himself an Iranian of Lebanese origins, and he promoted political activism very much in line with the thinking of the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran.
Al-Sadr never lived to see the Iranian Revolution. He disappeared on a trip to Libya in 1978 and is widely assumed to have been murdered there. The 1979 revolution galvanized the Shiites of South Lebanon by giving them a host of new leaders to rally behind at a crucial moment when they were still coming to terms with the recent disappearance of their leader. Portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini flanked those of Musa al-Sadr in the southern slums of Beirut and the Roman ruins of Baalbek. The Iranians did all they could to encourage the enthusiasm of Lebanese Shiites, as part of their early bid to export their revolution, and to extend their influence to the traditional centers of Shiite Arab culture in southern Iraq, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Through this network, Iran could put pressure on its rivals and enemies—particularly the United States, Israel, and Iraq.
American-Iranian relations deteriorated rapidly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The new Iranian government mistrusted the American administration because of its past support for the shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlevi. When the U.S. government allowed the deposed shah into the United States for medical treatment (he was terminally ill with cancer), a group of Iranian students overran the American Embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American diplomats hostage on November 4, 1979. U.S. president Jimmy Carter froze Iranian assets, applied economic and political sanctions on the Islamic Republic, and even attempted an aborted military rescue mission to relieve the hostage crisis—to no avail. The American government was powerless and humiliated as its diplomats were held captive for 444 days. In a calculated swipe at Jimmy Carter, whose reelection campaign had been derailed by the hostage crisis, the American diplomats were released only after Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as president, in January 1981. The gesture did not endear the Iranian government to the Reagan administration, and the damage caused by the hostage crisis has troubled American-Iranian relations ever since. The new Iranian regime denounced the United States as the Great Satan and the enemy of all Muslims. The Reagan administration—and those that followed—branded the Islamic Republic a rogue state and sought all means to isolate Iran and bring down its government.
The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 exacerbated the antagonism between the Islamic Republic and the United States, with dire consequences for Lebanon. Headed since 1978 by President Saddam Hussein, Iraq invaded its northern neighbor without warning on September 22, 1980. Hussein attempted to take advantage of the political turmoil within revolutionary Iran and the country’s international isolation during the hostage crisis to seize disputed waterways and rich oil fields in Iranian territory. By far the most violent conflict in the history of the modern Middle East, the Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years (1980–1988) and claimed an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 lives amid tactics reminiscent of the World Wars—trench warfare, gas and chemical weapons, and aerial bombardment and rocket attacks on urban centers.
It took the Iranians two years to drive the Iraqis from their soil and go on the offensive. As the war turned to Iran’s advantage, the United States gave its open support to Iraq, in spite of that country’s close ties to the Soviet Union. Starting in 1982, the Reagan administration began to provide arms, intelligence, and economic assistance to Saddam Hussein for his war against Iran. This compounded Iranian hostility toward the United States, and the Iranians took every opportunity to strike at American interests in the region. Lebanon soon emerged as an arena for the Iranian-American confrontation.
Iran enjoyed two allies in Lebanon—the Shiite community, and Syria. The Iranian-Syrian alliance was in many ways counterintuitive. As an overtly Arab nationalist, secular state engaged in a violent struggle with its own Islamic movement, Syria was an unlikely ally for the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran. What bound the two countries together were pragmatic interests—primarily their mutual antagonism toward Iraq, Israel, and the United States.
In the 1970s Iraq and Syria had been engaged in an intense competition for leadership of the Arab world. Both countries were governed as single-party states under rival variants of the Arab nationalist Ba‘th party. As a result, Ba’thism actually served to undermine unity of action or common purpose between Iraq and Syria. So deep was the antagonism between the two Ba’thi states that Syria broke ranks with the other Arab countries to side with Iran in its war with Iraq. In return, Iran provided Syria with arms and economic aid, and reinforcements in Syria’s conflict with Israel. And the Syrian-Iranian alliance completed a triangle of relations binding Syria and Iran to the Lebanese Shiite community. The catalyst for activating this fateful triangle was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982.
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon opened a new phase in the conflict in Lebanon. Violence and destruction reached unprecedented levels. And, by invading Lebanon, Israel came to be drawn into the factional politics as an outright participant in the Lebanese conflict. The Israelis were to remain in Lebanon for over eighteen years, with enduring consequences for both countries.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was triggered by an attack on British soil. On June 3, 1982, the Abu Nidal terror group—the same organization that murdered the PLO’s London diplomat Said Hammami in 1978—attempted to assassinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov outside a London hotel. Though Abu Nidal was a renegade group violently opposed to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, and though the PLO had observed a year-long cease-fire with Israel, the Israeli government nonetheless took the assassination attempt as grounds for war against the PLO in Lebanon.
Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, and his militant defense minister, General Ariel Sharon, had ambitious plans to reshape the Middle East by driving the PLO and Syria out of Lebanon. Begin believed the Christians in Lebanon were a natural ally for the Jewish state, and, since coming to power in 1977, his Likud government had developed an increasingly open alliance with the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party (with predictably adverse consequences for Syrian-Maronite relations).19 Phalangist militiamen were brought to Israel for training, and the Israelis provided over $100 million in arms, ammunition, and uniforms to the Christian fighters.
Begin believed Israel could secure a full peace treaty with Lebanon if both the PLO and Syria were driven from the country and Bashir Gemayel, son of Pierre Gemayel, founder of the Phalangist Party, were to become president. Peace with Lebanon, following the peace with Egypt, would isolate Syria and leave Israel a free hand to annex the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, occupied by Israel in the June 1967 War. For both strategic and ideological reasons, the Likud government was determined to integrate the West Bank, which it consistently referred to by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria, into the modern state of Israel. However, although Israel’s government sought the territory of the West Bank, it did not want to absorb its Arab population. Sharon’s solution was to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank and to encourage them to fulfill their national aspirations by overthrowing King Hussein and taking over Jordan, a country whose population was already 60 percent Palestinian. This represented what Sharon liked to call the “Jordan option.”20
These were ambitious plans that could only be achieved by military means and—upon reflection—a callous indifference to human life. The first step would be to destroy the PLO presence in Lebanon, and the Likud used the assassination attempt in London as the grounds on which to initiate hostilities. The very next day, on June 4, 1982, Israeli aircraft and naval vessels began a murderous bombardment of South Lebanon and West Beirut. On June 6, Israeli ground forces swept across the Lebanese border in a campaign dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee.” Over the next ten weeks, UN figures reported more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians killed and 30,000 wounded by the Israeli invasion, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.
The Israelis unleashed the full force of their military on Lebanon. While Lebanese towns and cities were bombed from the air and sea, the Israeli army advanced rapidly through South Lebanon to lay siege to Beirut, where the PLO had its headquarters in the southern suburb of Fakhani. The residents of Beirut became the helpless victims of a conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Syrians. The Israelis targeted the leadership of the PLO in particular, hoping to decapitate the movement by killing Yasser Arafat and his top lieutenants. Arafat was forced to change residence daily to avoid assassination. The buildings in which he was reported to take shelter were quickly targeted by Israeli bombers.
Lina Tabbara, who assisted Arafat with his 1974 speech at the UN General Assembly, had survived the first phase of the Lebanese civil war with her family in Muslim West Beirut. Her marriage, however, did not, and she reverted to her maiden name, Lina Mikdadi. Living in West Beirut during the 1982 siege, Mikdadi witnessed the leveling of an apartment building that Arafat had left only minutes earlier. “I noticed a space where a building had been, right behind the public gardens.... I ran to the spot. An eight-story building had disappeared. People ran around half-crazed, women screamed their children’s names.”21 The destruction of that one building in which Arafat had been taking refuge claimed 250 civilian lives, according to Mikdadi. One of Arafat’s commanders said the raid had left Arafat distraught. “What crime has been committed by these children, now buried under the rubble?” Arafat asked. “All they are guilty of is having been in a building I visited a couple of times.” Thereafter, Arafat slept in his car, away from built-up areas.22
For ten weeks of unspeakable violence the siege continued. Survivors reported hundreds of raids conducted within a single day. There was no safe haven, no place to take refuge. As casualty figures spiraled into the tens of thousands, international pressure mounted on Israel to bring its siege of Beirut to a close. The violence reached its peak in August 1982. On August 12 the Israelis carried out eleven hours of nonstop air raids, dropping thousands of tons of ordinance on West Beirut. An estimated 800 homes were destroyed, with 500 casualties. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan placed a call to Prime Minister Begin in Israel and convinced him to stop the fighting. “President Reagan,” Mikdadi asked rhetorically, “why didn’t you make your phone call earlier?”23
Begin relented under U.S. pressure, and the Reagan administration brokered a complex cease-fire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The PLO combatants would withdraw from Beirut by sea, and a multinational force composed of U.S., French, and Italian troops would be deployed to take up positions vacated by the Israelis.
The first stage of the disengagement plan went very smoothly. French troops arrived on August 21 to take control of the Beirut International Airport. The next day, the first of the PLO forces began their withdrawal from Beirut’s sea port. There was a great deal of concern for the security of the departing Palestinians. Many Lebanese had grown hostile to the Palestinian movement, blaming the PLO for causing the civil war in the first place and for provoking the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982. Yet when Lina Mikdadi, herself half-Palestinian, went to the assembly point to bid the Palestinian men farewell, she found that many citizens of West Beirut had done the same. “Women lean out of windows that no longer have any panes to throw rice; they wave from half-destroyed balconies. Many cry as they watch the trucks go by. The Palestinians have already said goodbye to their children, wives and parents at the municipal stadium.”24
The departing Palestinian fighters were to be scattered among a number of Arab countries—Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, and Tunisia, where the PLO established its new headquarters. Their expulsion from Beirut marked the end of the PLO as a coherent fighting force. Yasser Arafat was the last to leave, on August 30, and with his departure the siege of Beirut was effectively over. The whole process had gone so smoothly that the international forces, originally deployed for thirty days, withdrew ten days early, believing their mission accomplished. The last French contingent left Lebanon on September 13.
The retreating Palestinian fighters left behind their parents, wives, and children. The Palestinian civilians that remained were left completely defenseless. One of the main tasks of the multinational forces was to ensure the security of the families of Palestinian combatants who were vulnerable in a hostile country. As those forces began to withdraw, no one was left to protect the Palestinian refugee camps from their many enemies.
At the same time the PLO was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Lebanese parliament was scheduled to meet on August 23 to elect a new president. Due to the civil war, there had not been a parliamentary election since 1972. The parliamentarians’ numbers had been reduced by mortality from 99 to 92, of which only 45 were actually in Lebanon. Only one candidate had declared his intention to run for office: Israel’s ally Bashir Gemayel of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party. To this Lebanon’s vaunted democracy had been reduced. Yet for the war-weary and pragmatic Lebanese, Gemayel was a consensus candidate. His connections to Israel and the West might just win the Lebanese some much-needed peace. There was genuine celebration across Lebanon when Gemayel’s election was confirmed.
Bashir Gemayel’s presidency proved short lived—as did Lebanon’s peace. On September 14, a bomb destroyed the Phalangist Party headquarters in East Beirut, killing Gemayel. There is no evidence of any Palestinian involvement in the assassination; in fact, a young Maronite named Habib Shartouni, a member of the pro-Damascus Syrian Socialist National Party, was arrested two days later and confessed to the crime, denouncing Gemayel as a traitor for his dealings with Israel. Yet the Phalangist militiamen harbored such deep hatred for the Palestinians, cultivated over seven years of civil war, that they sought revenge for the assassination of their leader in the Palestinian camps.
Had the American, French, and Italian troops of the multinational force seen out their full thirty-day mandate, they might have been able to provide the necessary protection for the unarmed Palestinian refugees. Instead, the Palestinian camps had come under the protection of the Israeli army, which reoccupied Beirut immediately after Gemayel’s assassination was announced. On the night of September 16, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and chief of staff Raphael Eitan authorized the deployment of Phalangist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps. What followed was a massacre of innocent, unarmed civilians—a crime against humanity.
Though the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were conducted by Maronite militiamen, they were given full access to the camps by the Israeli forces, which had secured all points of entry to the area. The Israelis knew their Maronite allies well enough to know the danger they posed to the Palestinians. Any doubts about Maronite intentions were dispelled when Israeli officers overheard the radio exchanges between the Phalangists shortly after they entered the Palestinian camps. One Israeli lieutenant followed an exchange between a Phalangist militiaman and Maronite commander Elie Hobeika. Hobeika had lost his fiancée and many family members in the Palestinian siege of the Christian stronghold of Damour in January 1976—his hatred of Palestinians was legendary. The militiaman reported to Hobeika in Arabic that he had found fifty women and children and asked what he should do with them. Hobeika’s reply over the radio, the Israeli lieutenant recounted, was: “This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do.” Raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist militiamen following the radio exchange. The Israeli lieutenant confirmed he “understood that what was involved was the murder of the women and children.”25 Because of their complicity in the massacre, the Israeli armed forces—and General Ariel Sharon in particular—were stained by the Maronite crimes against the Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila.
Over a thirty-six-hour period, the Phalangists systematically murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Maronite militiamen made their way through the fetid alleys of the camps, killing every man, woman, and child they found. Jamal, a twenty-eight-year-old member of Arafat’s Fatah movement, had remained in Beirut after the PLO’s withdrawal and was an eyewitness to the massacres. “On Thursday the flares over the camp began at 5.30 P.M. . . . There were aircraft dropping light bombs too. The night was like day. The next few hours were terrible. I saw people running in panic to the small mosque, Chatila Mosque. They were taking shelter there because apart from being a sanctuary it was also built with a strong steel structure. Inside were 26 women and children—some of them had horrible injuries.” These may well have been the refugees that Hobeika had condemned over the radio.
While the killing was going on, the Phalangists set to work leveling the refugee camp with bulldozers, often killing the people sheltering inside. “They killed everyone they found, but the point is the way they killed them,” Jamal recounted. The old were cut down, the young were raped and murdered, family members were forced to witness the murder of their loved ones. The Israelis estimated 800 were killed, but the Palestinian Red Cross reported that over 2,000 died. “They must have been crazed to do things like that,” Jamal concluded. He spoke of these events with some detachment and saw the massacre as part of a bigger plan. “Psychologically it is clear what they were trying to do to us. We were trapped like animals in that camp, and that is how they have always tried to show us to the world. They wanted us to believe it ourselves.”26
The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps provoked widespread condemnation across the world—not least in Israel, where opposition to the Lebanon War had grown increasingly vocal over the course of the summer. On September 25, some 300,000 Israelis, representing 10 percent of the total population of the country, gathered in a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv to protest Israel’s role in the atrocity. In response, the Likud government was forced to convene an official commission of inquiry—the Kahan Commission—that in 1983 would charge the most powerful Israeli officials involved—Prime Minister Begin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Chief of Staff General Eitan—with responsibility for the massacre. The commission also called for the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.
More immediately, the international outcry led to the return of the multinational forces and American engagement in resolving the crisis in Lebanon. U.S. Marines, French paratroopers, and Italian soldiers returned to Beirut on September 29, too late to provide the security they had promised the families of the deported PLO fighters. If at first they had been deployed to see out the Palestinian fighters, the multinational forces were now sent in as a buffer for the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut. The Israelis, for their part, did not want to move until they had concluded a political agreement with Lebanon. First a replacement president had to be elected. On September 23, the day Bashir Gemayel had been due to take up office, Lebanon’s parliament reconvened to elect his older brother Amin as president. Whereas Bashir had worked closely with the Israelis, Amin Gemayel had better relations with Damascus and showed none of his brother’s enthusiasm for close cooperation with Tel Aviv. However, with nearly half his country under Israeli occupation, the new President Gemayel had no choice but to enter into negotiations with Begin’s government. Talks opened on December 28, 1982, and shifted between Khalde, in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, and the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona. Thirty-five rounds of intense negotiations were conducted over the next five months, facilitated by American officials. U.S. secretary of state George Schultz spent ten days in shuttle diplomacy to help conclude the Israeli-Lebanese agreement on May 17, 1983.
The May 17 Agreement was condemned across the Arab world as a travesty of justice, in which the American superpower forced the powerless Lebanese to reward its Israeli ally for invading and destroying their country. Less than the full peace treaty the Israelis initially hoped for, the agreement nevertheless represented more normalization with the Israeli occupier than most Lebanese could accept. It terminated the state of war between Lebanon and Israel and placed the Lebanese government in the difficult position of ensuring the security of Israel’s northern border from the Jewish state’s many enemies. Lebanon’s army was to be deployed in the south to create a “security region” covering approximately one-third the territory of Lebanon, extending from the town of Sidon south to the Israeli border. The Lebanese government also agreed to integrate the South Lebanon army, an Israeli-funded Christian militia that had gained notoriety as collaborators, into the Lebanese army. It was, in the words of one Shiite official, a “humiliating accord” concluded “under the Israeli bayonet.”27
The Syrian government was particularly aggrieved by the terms of the May 17 Agreement, which would only isolate Syria and alter the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. In the course of the negotiations, the United States had deliberately bypassed Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, knowing he would obstruct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon. Nor did the May 17 Agreement include any concessions for the Syrians. Article 6 of the agreement would have required the withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon as a precondition for Israel’s withdrawal. Syria had invested too much political capital in Lebanon in the six years since it first intervened in the civil war to permit the country to pass into Israel’s sphere of influence under U.S. auspices.
Syria quickly mobilized its allies in Lebanon to reject the May 17 Agreement. Fighting resumed as the opposition forces began to shell Christian areas of Beirut, underlining the weakness of the Gemayel government. They also fired on the American troops of the multinational forces, whose role as disinterested peacekeepers had been fatally compromised by the regional politics of the United States. When American forces returned fire—often very heavy fire from the massive guns of U.S. warships—they went from being intermediaries above the fray to participants mired in the Lebanon conflict.
Though a superpower, the United States was at a disadvantage in Lebanon. Its local allies, the isolated government of Amin Gemayel and the Israeli occupation forces, were more vulnerable than its enemies: Soviet-backed Syria, Iran, and the Shiite Islamic resistance movements. Like the Israelis, the Americans believed they could achieve their objectives in Lebanon through use of overwhelming force. They were soon to discover how the deployment of their military to Lebanon left the superpower exposed and vulnerable to its many regional enemies.
More than any other event in the years of conflict, the Israeli invasion brought the Islamic movement to Lebanon. Islamist parties had faced isolation and condemnation for their actions against their own governments and societies in Egypt and Syria. However, the Lebanon conflict provided external enemies for the Islamist movement to fight. Any party that inflicted pain and humiliation on the United States and Israel would gain mass support in Lebanon and the broader Arab world. These were perfect conditions for the emergence of a new Shiite Islamist movement that would develop into the scourge of Israel and the United States—a militia that called itself the Party of God, or Hizbullah.
Hizbullah emerged from the training camps set up by the Iranian revolutionary guards in the largely Shiite town of Baalbek in the central Bekaa Valley in the early 1980s. Hundreds of young Lebanese Shiites flocked to Baalbek for religious and political education and advanced military training. They came to share the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and grew to hate Iran’s enemies as their own.
Ironically, Hizbullah owes its creation as much to Israel as to Iran. The Shiites of South Lebanon had not felt particularly hostile toward Israel in June 1982. PLO operations against Israel since 1969 had brought untold suffering to the inhabitants of the south, and by 1982 the Shiites of South Lebanon were glad to see the backs of the PLO fighters and initially received the invading Israeli forces as liberators. “As a reaction to the hostility towards Palestinians that had engulfed some inhabitants of South Lebanon,” Hizbullah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem recalled, “the [Israeli] invaders were welcomed with trilling cries of joy and the spraying of rice.”28
Shiite opposition to Israel intensified, however, in response to the siege of Beirut, the enormity of the casualty toll, and the arrogance of Israeli occupation troops in South Lebanon. Iranian propaganda exacerbated this emerging hostility, nurturing rage against Israel and the United States, and their common project in Lebanon, the May 17 Agreement.
From its very inception, Hizbullah was an organization distinguished by the courage of its convictions. Its members were united in their unswerving faith in the message of Islam and their willingness to make any sacrifice to achieve God’s will on earth. Their role model was Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, whose death in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala fighting the ruling Umayyad dynasty in A.D. 680 still stands for Shiite Muslims as the ultimate example of martyrdom against tyranny. The example of Imam Husayn gave rise to a culture of martyrdom within Hizbullah that it turned into a lethal weapon against its enemies. Hizbullah’s prolific use of suicide bombers have led many analysts to try to link Islamic Jihad, the shadowy organization that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the American and French barracks, to the embryonic Hizbullah movement that took shape between 1982 and 1985—though Hizbullah itself has always denied any involvement in those attacks.
The struggle against Israel and the United States were but the means to a greater end. Ultimately, Hizbullah’s goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. However, the party has always maintained its unwillingness to impose such a government against the will of the diverse population of Lebanon. “We do not want Islam to rule in Lebanon by force, as the political Maronism is ruling at present,” Hizbullah leaders asserted in the February 1985 Open Letter declaring the establishment of the party. “But we stress that we are convinced of Islam as a faith, system, thought, and rule and we urge all to recognize it and to resort to its law.”29 Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, Hizbullah hoped to replace man’s law with God’s law. The leaders of Hizbullah were convinced that the vast majority of the people of Lebanon—even the country’s large Christian communities—would willingly opt for the greater justice of God’s law once the Islamic system of government had proven its superiority to secular nationalism. The Hizbullah leadership believed that nothing could better demonstrate the superiority of Islamic government than a victory over Israel and the United States. Young Shiite men were willing to sacrifice their lives, like their role model the Imam Husayn, to achieve this goal.
The first Shiite suicide bombing in Lebanon was organized by the Islamic Resistance, a progenitor of Hizbullah, in November 1982. A young man named Ahmad Qasir conducted the first “martyrdom operation” when he drove a car laden with explosives into the Israeli army headquarters in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, killing seventy-five Israelis and wounding many others. Journalist Robert Fisk went to Tyre to investigate the bombing. He was shocked by the number of Israeli casualties pulled from the wreckage of the eight-story building, but it was the method of the bombing that he found hardest to accept. “A suicide bomber? The idea seemed inconceivable.”30 A number of attacks following the bombing of the Israeli headquarters confirmed suicide bombing as a dangerous new weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of America and Israel: the U.S. Embassy bombing in April 1983, the attacks on the American and French barracks in October 1983, and a second attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre in November 1983, killing sixty more Israelis.
Israeli intelligence was quick to identify the threat posed by the Islamic Resistance and struck back with targeted assassinations against Shiite clerics. Far from subduing the Shiite resistance, the assassinations only served to escalate the violence. “By 1984,” one analyst noted, “the pace of [Shiite] attacks was so intense that an Israeli soldier was dying every third day” in Lebanon.31 In the course of that year, the Shiite militias also diversified their tactics and began to kidnap Westerners in a bid to drive the foreigners out of Lebanon. By the time Hizbullah emerged on the scene in 1985, their enemies were already on the retreat.
The first defeat the Shiite insurgency dealt Israel was the destruction of the May 17 Agreement. The besieged government of Amin Gemayel had been unable to implement any part of the agreement and, within a year of its signing, the Lebanese Council of Ministers abrogated the treaty with Israel. The Islamic Resistance’s next victory was to drive the U.S. and European armies out of Lebanon. As American casualties in Lebanon mounted, President Reagan came under growing pressure to withdraw his troops. Italian and American troops evacuated Lebanon in February 1984, and the last French soldiers pulled out at the end of March. The Israelis also found their position in Lebanon increasingly untenable, and in January 1985 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s cabinet agreed to withdraw from the urban centers in South Lebanon to what they termed the South Lebanon Security Zone, a strip of land along the Israel-Lebanon border that ranged from 5–25 kilometers (3–15 miles) in depth.
The Security Zone was to prove the most enduring legacy of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The idea behind the South Lebanon Security Zone was to create a buffer to protect northern Israel from attack. Instead, it created a shooting gallery for Hizbullah and other Lebanese militias to carry on the fight against the Israeli occupier. For the next fifteen years, Hizbullah gained support from Lebanese of all religions, if not for an Islamic state, then at least as the national resistance movement against a much-hated occupation.
For Israel, the 1982 invasion ultimately replaced one enemy—the PLO—with a yet more determined adversary. Unlike the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Shiites of South Lebanon were fighting for their own land.
In Cold War terms, the Lebanon conflict had proved a major defeat for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets were in no position to celebrate. Their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had provoked a sustained insurgency, attracting a growing number of devout Muslims to join the ranks of the Afghan mujahidin fighting to expel the “atheist Communists.” If Lebanon was the Shiite school for jihad, Afghanistan became the training ground for a new generation of Sunni Muslim militants.
In 1983, a twenty-four-year-old Algerian named Abdullah Anas took the bus from his native village of Ben Badis to the market town of Sidi Bel Abbès, where there was a newsstand, so that he could catch up on world events.32 Anas had been one of the founders of the Islamist movement in western Algeria, and he continued to follow political developments in the Islamic world with great interest.
On that day, Anas remembered buying a copy of a Kuwaiti magazine that had captured his attention with a fatwa (legal opinion by Islamic scholars) signed by a number of religious scholars. It declared that support for the jihad in Afghanistan was a personal duty for all Muslims. Anas went to a nearby coffee house and settled down to read the fatwa in detail. He was impressed by the long list of famous clerics who had signed the declaration, including leading muftis from the Arab Gulf states and Egypt. One name in particular stood out: Shaykh Abdullah ’Azzam, whose publications and tape-recorded sermons circulated widely in Islamist circles.
Born to a conservative religious family in a village near the Palestinian town of Jenin in 1941, Abdullah ‘Azzam had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager in the mid-1950s.33 After completing his high school studies, he went on to study Islamic law at the University of Damascus. Following the June 1967 War, ’Azzam spent a year and a half fighting against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank in what he called his “Palestinian jihad.” He then moved to Cairo, where he took his masters and doctorate from al-Azhar University. While in Egypt, ’Azzam came to know Muhammad and Amina Qutb, the brother and sister of the late Sayyid Qutb, who had been executed by Nasser’s government in 1966. ’Azzam was profoundly influenced by the writings of Qutb.
With his academic credentials, ’Azzam joined the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Jordan in Amman, where he taught for seven years before his inflammatory publications and sermons landed him in trouble with the Jordanian authorities. He left Jordan for Saudi Arabia in 1980, taking a post at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah.
Just before ‘Azzam moved to Jeddah, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Communist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally had proven their hostility to Islam, and the Afghans were fighting “in the path of God.” ’Azzam gave their cause his full support, confident that victory in Afghanistan would revive the spirit of jihad in Islam.
As his later writings attest, ’Azzam saw victory in Afghanistan as a way to mobilize Muslims to action in other conflict zones. A native of Palestine, he saw Afghanistan as the training ground for future action against Israel. “Do not think we forget Palestine,” he wrote:
Liberating Palestine is an integral part of our religion. It is in our blood. We never forget Palestine. But I am certain that working in Afghanistan constitutes a revival of the spirit of jihad and a renewal of allegiance to God, no matter how great the sacrifices are. We have been deprived from waging jihad in Palestine because of the borders, restraints and prisons. But this doesn’t mean that we abandon jihad. It does not mean either that we have forgotten our country. We must prepare for jihad in any spot of the earth we can.34
’Azzam’s message of jihad and sacrifice gained wide circulation both through his writings and recordings of his fiery sermons. He awakened the spirit of jihad in Muslim men across the world, reaching even remote market towns like Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria.
The more Anas read the text of the fatwa ’Azzam had signed, and weighed its arguments, the more he was convinced that Afghanistan’s fight against Soviet occupation was the responsibility of all Muslims. “If a stretch of Muslim territory is attacked, jihad is an individual duty for those who inhabit that territory and those who are neighbours,” the fatwa asserted. “If there are too few of them, or if they are incapable or reticent, then this duty is incumbent upon those who are nearby, and so on until it spreads throughout the world.”35 Given the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan, Anas felt that the duty of jihad had reached him in rural Algeria. This was all the more remarkable for, as Anas confessed, he didn’t know a thing about Afghanistan at the time—he couldn’t even place it on the map.
As Anas would soon learn, Afghanistan is a country of rich cultural diversity and a tragic modern history. Its population is composed of seven main ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Pashtun (roughly 40 percent of the population) and the Tajiks (30 percent), with a Sunni Muslim majority, a large Shiite minority, and two official languages (Persian and Pashto). The country’s diversity reflects its geographic location, situated between Iran in the west, Pakistan to the south and east, and China and the (then Soviet) Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north. Diversity and geography have not afforded much stability to land-locked Afghanistan, and since 1973 the country has been wracked with political turmoil and wars.
The origins of the Soviet-Afghan war date to the 1973 military coup that toppled the monarchy of King Zahir Shah and brought a left-leaning government to power. The republican regime of President Mohammed Daoud Khan was in turn toppled by a violent Communist coup in April 1978. The Communists declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a single-party state allied to the Soviet Union, bent on rapid social and economic reforms. The new Afghan government was openly hostile to Islam and promoted state atheism, provoking widespread opposition within the largely religious Afghan population.
With Soviet backing, the Communist regime instigated a reign of terror against all opponents, arresting and executing thousands of political prisoners. However, the ruling Communists were themselves split by factionalism and succumbed to in-fighting. After a spate of assassinations, the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, sending an invasion force of 25,000 men to secure the capital city of Kabul and to install its Afghan ally Babrak Karmal as president.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provoked international condemnation, but no country was in a position to intervene directly to force a Soviet withdrawal. It fell to the Afghan resistance movements to repel the Red Army, and the Islamist parties led the fight. They received extensive covert assistance from the United States, which saw the conflict strictly in Cold War terms, in which the anticommunism of the Islamist fighters made them natural allies against the Soviets. The United States provided the Afghan resistance with military supplies and sophisticated hand-fired antiaircraft missiles through Pakistan. During the Carter administration, the United States gave some $200 million in aid to the Afghan resistance. Ronald Reagan stepped up American support, providing $250 million in assistance in 1985 alone.36
The government of Pakistan served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Afghan resistance and aided with intelligence and training facilities for the Afghan mujahidin (literally, “holy warriors,” Islamic guerrillas). The Islamic world provided significant financial assistance and, starting in 1983, began to recruit volunteers to fight in the Afghan jihad.
Abdullah ‘Azzam led the call to recruit Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan, and Abdullah Anas was one of the first to respond. The two men met by chance while on pilgrimage in Mecca in 1983. Among the millions who gathered for the rituals of the pilgrimage, Anas recognized the distinctive face of Abdullah ’Azzam, with his long beard and broad face, and went up to introduce himself.
“I read the fatwa that you and a group of clerics published on the duty of jihad in Afghanistan, and I am convinced by it, but I don’t know how to get to Afghanistan,” Anas said.
“It is very simple,” ’Azzam replied. “This is my telephone number in Islamabad. I will return to Pakistan at the end of the Hajj. If you get there, call me and I will take you to our Afghan colleagues in Peshawar.”37
Within two weeks, Anas was on a plane to Islamabad. Never having been outside the Arab world, the young Algerian was disoriented in Pakistan. He went straight to a public telephone and was relieved when ‘Azzam answered and invited him over for dinner. “He received me with a human warmth that touched me,” Anas recalled. Welcoming Anas into his home, ’Azzam introduced him to his other dinner guests. “His house was full of the students he taught in the International Islamic University in Islamabad. He asked me to stay with him until he went to Peshawar because I would not be able to meet with the Afghan colleagues if I went to Peshawar on my own.”
Anas spent three days as a guest in ‘Azzam’s home. It was the beginning of a profound friendship and political partnership, sealed when Anas later married ’Azzam’s daughter. While at ‘Azzam’s home, Anas got to meet the first of the Arab men to respond to ’Azzam’s call to volunteer for the Afghan jihad. There were no more than a dozen Arab volunteers in the Afghan jihad when Anas arrived in 1983. Before their departure for Peshawar, ’Azzam introduce Anas to another Arab volunteer.
“I present you Brother Osama bin Ladin,” ’Azzam said by way of introduction. “He is one of the Saudi youths who love the Afghan jihad.”
“He struck me as very shy, a man of few words,” Anas recollected. “Shaykh Abdullah explained that Osama visited him from time to time in Islamabad.” Anas did not get to know bin Ladin well, as they served in different parts of Afghanistan. But he never forgot that first encounter.38
While still in Pakistan, Anas was sent with two other Arab volunteers to a training camp. Having done his national service in Algeria, he was already proficient with a Kalashnikov submachine gun. After two months, the volunteers were given their first opportunity to enter Afghanistan.
Before they set off from their camp in Pakistan to join the Afghan mujahidin, ‘Azzam explained to his Arab protégés that the Afghan resistance was divided into seven factions. The largest were the Pashtun-dominated Hezb-e Islami (the Islamic Party) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Jamiat-e Islami (the Islamic Society) headed by the Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani. ’Azzam warned the Arab volunteers to avoid taking sides in Afghan factionalism and to see themselves as “guests of the entire Afghan people.”
Yet as the Arabs volunteered for service in the different Afghan provinces, they came under the command of specific parties and inevitably gave their loyalty to the men with whom they served. Anas volunteered to serve in the northern province of Mazar-e Sharif, under the command of Rabbani’s men of the Jamiat-e Islami. The handful of Arab volunteers set off with their Afghan commanders in the depth of winter, crossing territory under Soviet control, in a caravan of 300 armed men, all on foot. The perilous journey took forty days.
Once he reached Mazar-e Sharif, Anas was discouraged by his first experiences of the Afghan jihad. The local commander in Mazar had just died in a suicide operation against the Soviets, and three of his subordinates were vying with one another to control the resistance forces in the strategic town. Anas recognized he was out of his depth. “We were young men with no information, training or money,” Anas wrote of himself and the two other Arabs who were with him on the journey. “I realized that participation in the jihad required a much higher standard [of preparation] than we had reached.”
Within a month of his arrival in Mazar, Anas decided to leave the “explosive situation” and return to Peshawar as soon as possible. His first impression of Afghanistan was that its problems were too big to be solved by a handful of well-intentioned volunteers. “Inevitably the Islamic world would have to be called upon to assume its responsibility. The Afghan problem is bigger than five Arab men, or twenty-five Arabs or fifty Arabs.” He believed it was essential to brief Abdullah ’Azzam of the political situation inside Afghanistan “so that he could present the situation to the Arab and Islamic worlds, and request more assistance for the Afghan problem.”39
The frontier town of Peshawar had undergone significant changes over the months Anas had spent in Afghanistan. There were now many more Arab volunteers, their numbers swelling from a dozen, when Anas first arrived, to seventy or eighty by the beginning of 1985. Abdullah ‘Azzam had created a reception facility for the growing number of Arabs who were responding to his call. “While you were away,” ’Azzam explained to Anas, “Osama bin Ladin and I established the Services Office [Maktab al-khadamat] with a group of brothers. We established the Office to organize Arab participation in the Afghan Jihad.”40 ’Azzam saw the Services Office as an independent center where Arab volunteers could meet and train without the risk of getting caught up in the political divisions of the Afghans. The Services Office had three objectives: to provide aid, to assist in reform, and to promote Islam. The office began to open schools and institutes inside Afghanistan, as well as among the swelling Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It provided aid to orphans and widows of the conflict. At the same time, it engaged in active propaganda to attract new recruits to the Afghan jihad.
As part of its propaganda effort, the Services Office published a popular magazine, distributed across the Arab world, called al-Jihad. The pages of al-Jihad were replete with stories of heroism and sacrifice intended to inspire Muslims young and old. Leading Islamist thinkers contributed articles. Zaynab al-Ghazali, who had been imprisoned by Nasser for her Islamist activities in the 1960s, gave an interview to al-Jihad while on a visit to Pakistan. Now in her seventies, al-Ghazali had lost none of her zeal for the Islamist cause. “The time I spent in prison is not equal to one moment in the field of jihad in Afghanistan,” she told her interviewer. “I wish I could live with the women fighters in Afghanistan, and I ask God to give victory to the mujahidin and to forgive us [i.e., the international community of Islam] our shortcomings in bringing justice to Afghanistan.”41 Al-Ghazali idealized the Afghan jihad as “a return to the age of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, a return to the era of the rightly guided Caliphs.”
The magazine al-Jihad reinforced this heroic narrative of the Afghan war against the Soviets, publishing accounts of miracles reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad’s times. Among them were articles describing a group of mujahidin that killed 700 Soviets, losing only seven of their own men to martyrdom; a young man who single-handedly shot down five Soviet aircraft; even flocks of heavenly birds that created an avian curtain shielding mujahidin from the enemy. The magazine sought to convince readers of divine intervention, in which God rewarded faith with victory against impossible odds.
Abdullah Anas was a pragmatist, however, and he’d been on the ground in Afghanistan. There were no miracles in his own dry-eyed account of the war. He returned to Mazar-e Sharif in 1985, where he served under the commander of Jamiat-e Islami forces in the northern Panjshir Valley region, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was a born leader, a charismatic guerrilla commander in the mold of Che Guevara. He regularly withdrew with his forces to the forbidding terrain of the Hindu Kush, creating bases in the deep mountain caves where he could withstand weeks of punishing bombardment, only to emerge from the rubble to inflict heavy casualties on Soviet forces. Yet his men suffered too. On one occasion, Massoud was retreating through a narrow valley with one of his units when they were surprised by Soviet rocket fire. “In less than five minutes, more than ten of our men fell as martyrs,” Anas recalled. “It was an unimaginable sight.”42 Anas described another battle, in which Massoud led 300 of his men (including fifteen Arab volunteers) to victory over the Soviets. The engagement lasted a full day and night, and Massoud suffered eighteen dead (including four Arabs) and many more wounded.43
The Afghan mujahidin and their Arab supporters fought a desperate and ultimately successful battle against superior forces. A decade of occupation had proven very costly to the Soviet Union in men and materiel. At least 15,000 Red Army soldiers died in Afghanistan, and 50,000 were wounded in action. The Afghan resistance managed to shoot down over 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters with antiaircraft missiles provided by the United States. By the end of 1988, the Soviets came to recognize that they could not impose their will on Afghanistan with an invasion army of 100,000 men. The Kremlin decided to cut its losses and withdraw. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet units withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet this great victory of Muslim arms over a nuclear superpower was ultimately a disappointment for the men who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan.
The Afghan resistance’s victory over the Soviets did not lead to the ultimate Islamist objective—the creation of an Islamic state. Once the Soviet enemy was outside their frontiers, the Afghan factions turned against each other in a power struggle that quickly degenerated into civil war. Despite Abdullah ’Azzam’s best efforts, many Arab volunteers divided along Afghan factional lines, taking sides with the party they knew. Others chose to leave Afghanistan. The violent turf battles between rival warlords did not constitute jihad, and they had no wish to fight fellow Muslims.
The Arab volunteers did not make much of an impact in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. In retrospect, Abdullah Anas declared that the Arab contribution to the Afghan war amounted to no more than “a drop in the ocean.” The group of volunteers who came to be known as the “Afghan Arabs” probably never exceeded a maximum of two thousand men, and of those, “only a very small proportion entered Afghanistan and took part in the fighting with the mujahidin,” Anas claimed. The remainder stayed in Peshawar and volunteered their services “as doctors and drivers, cooks and accountants and engineers.”44
Yet the Afghan jihad had an enduring influence over the Arab world. Many of those who answered the call to jihad returned to their native lands intent on realizing the ideal Islamic order that had eluded them in Afghanistan. Anas estimated some 300 Algerian volunteers served in Afghanistan; many of them would return home to play an active part in a new Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (more commonly known by the French acronym, the FIS). Others gathered around Osama bin Ladin, who established a rival institution to Abdullah ’Azzam’s Services Office. Bin Ladin called his new organization “the Base,” but it has come to be better known by its Arabic name, al-Qaida. Some of the Arabs who served with Anas in the Panjshir Valley chose to remain in Pakistan and became founding members of al-Qaida.
The man who inspired the Arab Afghans was himself laid to rest in Pakistan. Abdullah ‘Azzam was killed on November 24, 1989, with two of his sons when a car bomb detonated as they approached a mosque in Peshawar for Friday prayers. There have been many theories, none conclusive, about who might have ordered the killing of Abdullah ’Azzam: rival Afghan factions; the circle of Osama bin Ladin; even the Israelis, who saw ’Azzam as the spiritual leader of a new Palestinian Islamist movement called Hamas.
By December 1987, the people of Gaza had spent twenty years under Israeli occupation. The Gaza Strip is a narrow finger of coastland 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, then populated by about 625,000 Palestinians. The residents of Gaza, three-quarters of whom were refugees from those parts of Palestine conquered by the new state of Israel in 1948, had suffered great isolation between 1948 and 1967. Gazans were confined to their enclave by the Egyptian authorities and cut off from their lost homeland by the hostile frontier with Israel.
With the Israeli occupation of 1967 came new opportunities for Gazans to cross into the rest of historic Palestine and meet the other Palestinians who had remained on the land—in the towns and cities of Israel and the occupied West Bank. Gaza also enjoyed something of an economic boom after 1967. Under the occupation, Gazans were able to secure jobs in Israel and moved back and forth across the border with relative ease. Israelis shopped in Gaza to take advantage of tax-free prices. In many ways, life for the residents of Gaza had improved under Israeli rule.
Yet no people is happy under occupation, and the Palestinians aspired to independence in their own land. But their hopes for deliverance by the other Arab states were dashed when Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and their hopes for liberation at the hands of the PLO collapsed after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon dispersed Palestinian fighting units across the Arab world.
Increasingly, over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinians within Gaza and the West Bank began to confront the occupation themselves. The Israeli government recorded an escalation of “illegal acts” in the West Bank alone, rising from 656 “disturbances” in 1977 to 1,556 in 1981 and 2,663 in 1984.45
Resistance within the occupied territory provoked heavy Israeli reprisals: mass arrests, intimidation, torture, humiliation. A proud people, the Palestinians found the humiliation hardest to bear. The loss of dignity and self-respect was compounded by the knowledge that their occupier saw them, in the words of the Islamist intellectual Azzam Tamimi, as “sub-human and not worthy of respect.”46
Worse yet, Palestinians felt complicit in their own subjugation through their cooperation with the Israeli occupation. The fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were taking jobs in Israel and attracting Israeli customers to their shops implicated them in the occupation. Given that the Israelis were engaged in land confiscation and settlement building on occupied Palestinian land, cooperation with the Israelis felt more like collaboration. As the Palestinian scholar and activist Sari Nusseibeh explained, “The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble our anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable.”47
The explosion finally came in December 1987, sparked by a traffic accident near the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza. On December 8 an Israeli army truck drove into two minivans carrying Palestinian workers home from Israel, killing four and wounding seven. Rumors spread throughout the Palestinian community that the killing was deliberate, raising tension in the territories. The funerals were held the next day and were followed by major demonstrations, which Israel troops dispersed with live fire, killing demonstrators.
The killings on December 9 sparked riots that spread like wildfire across Gaza and into the West Bank, rapidly transforming into a popular uprising against twenty years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians called their movement the “Intifada,” an Arabic word that means both an uprising and a dusting off, as though the Palestinians were shaking off the decades of accumulated humiliation through direct confrontation with the occupation.
The Intifada began as an uncoordinated series of confrontations with the Israeli authorities. The demonstrators ruled out the use of weapons and declared their movement nonviolent, stone-throwing notwithstanding. The Israeli authorities responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Israeli forces killed twenty-two demonstrators before the end of December 1987. Instead of quelling the violence, Israeli repression only served to accelerate the cycle of ad hoc protests and confrontations.
In the opening weeks of the Intifada, there was no central leadership. Instead, the movement developed through a series of spontaneous demonstrations across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Sari Nusseibeh recalled, it was a grass-roots movement in which “every demonstrator did what he thought best, and the more established leaders raced to catch up with him.”48
Two underground organizations emerged to give direction to the Intifada. In the West Bank, the local branches of the PLO factions, including Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, the Popular and the Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Communists, combined to create an underground leadership that called itself the United National Command (UNC). In Gaza, Islamists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood created the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. The strength of Israeli repression made it impossible for these underground leaderships to meet or exercise their authority in open. Instead, they each published periodic leaflets—one series of leaflets by Hamas, and a totally independent series of communiqués by the UNC—to set out their objectives and to guide public action. The leaflets of the United National Command and Hamas were calls to action and news sheets. They also captured the increasingly bitter struggle between the secular nationalist forces of the PLO and the rising Islamist movement for control of the Palestinian national movement within the Occupied Territories.
The Muslim Brotherhood was the best-organized political movement in the Gaza Strip and was the first to respond to the popular uprising. Its leader was a paraplegic activist in his mid-fifties named Shaykh Ahmad Yassin. Like so many of its residents, Yassin had come to Gaza as a refugee in 1948. Paralyzed in a work accident as a teenager, he had continued his education to become a school teacher and religious leader. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, becoming a great admirer of Sayyid Qutb, whose works he reprinted and circulated to reach the widest possible readership in Gaza. In the mid-1970s he established a charitable organization named the Islamic Center, through which he funded new mosques, schools, and clinics across Gaza that provided a network for the spread of Islamist values.
On December 9, 1987, the night the troubles broke out, Yassin convened a meeting of the leaders of the Brotherhood to coordinate action. They decided to transform the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza into a resistance movement, and Hamas was launched with their first leaflet on December 14.
The novelty of Hamas was to articulate Palestinian aspirations in strictly Islamist terms. From its first communiqué, Hamas set out an intransigent message that combined confrontation with the Jewish state and a rejection of secular Arab nationalism. “Only Islam can break the Jews and destroy their dream,” Hamas insisted. Following the arguments of Abdullah ’Azzam, who made the case for jihad in both Afghanistan and Palestine, the Palestinian Islamists declared their resistance against the foreign occupier on Islamic land rather than against authoritarian Arab leaders, as Sayyid Qutb advocated. “When an enemy occupies some of the Muslim lands,” Hamas asserted in its 1988 charter, “Jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim. In the struggle against the Jewish occupation of Palestine, the banner of Jihad must be raised.”49
Though they were secular nationalists as had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s, there was something new about the Unified National Command as well. For the first time, local activists in the West Bank were putting forward their own views without consulting Arafat and the leadership in exile. In the West Bank, the UNC issued its first communiqué shortly after the Hamas leaflet was released. Sari Nusseibeh recalled that the first UNC leaflet was authored by “two local PLO activists” who “were already in jail by the time their flyers hit the streets,” arrested by the Israeli authorities in a massive clampdown. The leaflet called for a three-day general strike—a total economic close-down of the Occupied Territories—and warned against attempts to break the strike or cooperate with the Israelis.
The UNC continued to issue newsletters every couple of weeks (it issued thirty-one in the first year of the Intifada alone) in which the group began to articulate a series of demands: an end to land expropriation and to the creation of Israeli settlements on occupied land, the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons, and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Palestinian towns and villages. The leaflets encouraged people to fly the Palestinian flag, which the Israelis had long forbidden, and to chant “Down with the occupation!” and “Long live free Arab Palestine!” The UNC’s ultimate objective was an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.50 The Intifada was quickly turning into an independence movement.
The outbreak of the Intifada caught the PLO leadership in Tunis completely by surprise. Recognized by all Palestinians as their “sole legitimate representative,” the PLO had long monopolized the Palestinian national movement. Now the initiative had passed from the “outside” leadership in Tunis to “inside” PLO activists working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders” put the PLO leadership at a distinct disadvantage. Suddenly, Arafat and his lieutenants looked redundant as the residents of Gaza and the West Bank launched their own bid for an independent Palestinian state.
In January 1988 Arafat moved to bring the Intifada under the PLO’s authority. He dispatched one of Fatah’s highest-ranking commanders, Khalil al-Wazir (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad), to coordinate action between Tunis and the West Bank. The UNC’s third leaflet of January 18, 1988, was the first to be authorized by the Fatah leadership in Tunis. Within a matter of hours, over 100,000 copies of the leaflet were distributed across Gaza and the West Bank. The residents of the Occupied Territories responded to the authoritative voice of Arafat’s political machine with alacrity. As Sari Nusseibeh observed, “it was like watching musicians take cues from a conductor.”51 Henceforth the Intifada would be managed by Arafat and his officials.
The Israeli government was determined to prevent the PLO from taking advantage of the Intifada to make political gains at Israel’s expense. Abu Jihad’s mission was cut short by Israeli assassins, who gunned down the PLO official at his home in Tunisia on April 16, 1988. Yet once the link between the UNC and PLO had been forged, Tunis was able to preserve its control over the secular forces of the Intifada.
The cycle of strikes and demonstrations, called in response to leaflets issued by the UNC and Hamas, continued unabated. The Israeli authorities had expected the movement to run out of steam. Instead, it seemed to be gaining in strength and posed a genuine challenge to Israeli control in the Occupied Territories. As the Intifada entered its third month, the Israeli authorities turned to extra-legal means to quell the uprising. Drawing on the Emergency Regulations drafted by British mandate officials long before the Geneva Conventions established international legal standards for the treatment of civilians under occupation, the Israeli army resorted to collective punishments such as mass arrests, detention without charge, and house demolitions.
International public opinion was appalled by the image of heavily armed soldiers responding to stone-throwing demonstrators with live fire, prompting Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s defense minister, to order the use of “might, force and beatings” instead of lethal fire. The brutality of this seemingly benign policy was exposed when the CBS television network in the United States broadcast images of Israeli soldiers meting out horrific beatings to Palestinian youths near Nablus in February 1988. In one particularly graphic segment, a soldier was seen to extend a prisoner’s arm and pound it repeatedly from above with a large rock to break the bone.52 Israel’s attorney general admonished Rabin to warn his soldiers of the illegality of such acts, but the Israeli army continued to subject Palestinian demonstrators to violent beatings. Over thirty Palestinians were beaten to death in the first year of the Intifada.53
Against this background of Israeli violence, it is remarkable that the Palestinians preserved the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Palestinian claims to nonviolence were challenged by Israeli authorities, who noted that protestors threw iron bars and Molotov cocktails as well as stones—missiles capable of inflicting serious injury or death. Yet the Palestinians never resorted to firearms in their confrontations with the Israelis, which did much to reverse decades of Western public opinion that had portrayed the Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as a beleaguered David figure. Israel found itself in the unaccustomed position of dispelling a distinct Goliath image in the international press.
Nonviolence made the Intifada the most inclusive of Palestinian movements. Rather than privileging young men with military training, the demonstrations and civil disobedience of the Intifada mobilized the whole of the population of the Occupied Territories—men and women, young and old—in a common liberation struggle. The underground leaflets of Hamas and the UNC provided a wide range of resistance strategies—strikes, boycotts of Israeli products, home teaching to subvert school closures, garden plots to increase food self-reliance—that empowered Palestinians under occupation and instilled a deep sense of common purpose that kept the Intifada going in spite of heavy Israeli repression.
Tensions emerged between the secular United National Command and Hamas as the Intifada ran through the spring and into the summer of 1988. Both organizations claimed to represent the Palestinian resistance. In its leaflets, Hamas referred to itself as “your movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas,” and the UNC claimed leadership of the Palestinian masses, “this people that heeded the call of the PLO and of the United National Command of the Uprising.”54 The secular and Islamist rivals read each other’s leaflets and vied for control over popular actions in the streets. When Hamas called for a national strike in its leaflet of August 18—a prerogative the PLO claimed for itself in the Occupied Territories—the UNC issued its first direct criticism of the Islamist organization, claiming “every blow to the unity of ranks is tantamount to doing the enemy a significant service and harms the uprising.”
Such jostling for ascendancy masked the fundamental differences that divided Hamas from the PLO: whereas Hamas sought the destruction of the Jewish state, the PLO and the UNC wanted to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas viewed the whole of Palestine as inalienable Muslim land that needed to be liberated from non-Muslim rule through jihad. Its confrontation with Israel would be long-term, for its ultimate objective was the creation of an Islamic state in the whole of Palestine. The PLO, in comparison, had been moving toward a two-state solution since 1974. Yasser Arafat seized on the Intifada as a vehicle to achieve independent statehood for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem—even if this meant conferring recognition on Israel and conceding the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948 to the Jewish state. The positions of the two resistance movements could not be reconciled, and so the PLO proceeded down the path of the two-state solution without consideration for the views of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Palestinian resistance and Israeli repression had placed the Intifada squarely on the front pages of the international press—and nowhere more so than in the Arab world. In June 1988, the Arab League convened an emergency summit in Algiers to address the Intifada. The PLO took the opportunity to present a position paper that called for mutual recognition of the right of the Palestinians and the Israelis to live in peace and security. Hamas rejected the PLO’s position outright and reasserted its claim for Muslim rights to the whole of Palestine. Its leaders made their views known in Hamas’s leaflet of August 18, in which the Islamic Resistance insisted that “the Muslims have had a full—not partial—right to Palestine for generations, in the past, present and future.”
Undeterred by Islamist opposition, the PLO proceeded to use the Intifada to legitimize its call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In September 1988 the PLO announced plans to convene a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile, to consolidate the gains of the Intifada and secure the Palestinian people’s “national rights of return, self-determination, and the establishment of an independent state on our national soil under the leadership of the PLO.”55 Again Hamas rejected and condemned the PLO position. Its leaflet of October 5 read, in part: “We are against conceding so much as an inch of our land which is steeped in the blood of the Companions of the Prophet and their followers.” Hamas insisted that “we shall continue the uprising on the road to the liberation of our whole land from the contamination of the Jews (with the help of God).” The lines of confrontation between the PLO and the Islamic Resistance could not have been clearer.
Arafat’s agenda for the meeting of the PNC, which had been set for November 1988, was nothing less than a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the Occupied Territories. For many in Gaza and the West Bank, worn down by eleven months of the Intifada and violent Israeli reprisals, statehood held the promise of independence and an end to the occupation, which seemed sufficient gains for their sacrifices, and they looked forward to the November meeting of the PNC with growing anticipation.
Though Sari Nusseibeh had some reservations about the PLO’s policies, he saw the impending declaration of independence as “an important milestone, and like everyone else, I looked forward to its unveiling.” Nusseibeh, who had received an advance copy of Arafat’s text, wanted the Palestinian declaration of independence to be a moment that people would remember, and he hoped to read the text to “tens of thousands of people” in the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex atop the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “I wanted a people under occupation, the people of the intifada, to congregate at the center of our universe, and to celebrate our independence.”
It was not to be. On November 15, 1988, the day Arafat addressed the PNC, Israel imposed a draconian curfew over the territories and East Jerusalem, banning cars and civilians from the streets. Nusseibeh chose to disregard the curfew and made his way through the backstreets to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where a handful of political activists had gathered, milling about with religious clerics. “Together, we all walked into Al-Aqsa mosque. At the appointed hour, as the bells from the [church of the] Holy Sepulchre swung, and calls wailed out from the minarets, we all solemnly read our declaration of independence.”56
The declaration, which Arafat read to the nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, represented a radical departure from past PLO policies. The declaration endorsed the UN partition plan of 1947 that provided for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, and it approved UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, drafted after the 1967 and 1973 Wars, that established the principle of the return of occupied land for peace. The declaration committed the PLO to peaceful coexistence with Israel.
The PLO had come a very long way since its London diplomat Said Hammami’s first attempts to broach the two-state solution in 1974. No longer a guerrilla organization—Arafat now categorically renounced “all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism”—the PLO presented itself to the international community as the provisional government of a state in waiting.
International recognition was quick to follow. Eighty-four countries extended full recognition to the new state of Palestine, including most Arab states, a number of European, African, and Asian countries, and such traditional supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement as China and the Soviet Union. Most West European states granted a diplomatic status to Palestine that fell short of full recognition, but the United States and Canada withheld recognition altogether. In mid-January 1989 the PLO scored another symbolic victory by gaining the right to address the UN Security Council on equal footing with member states.57
The PNC declaration did not meet with the Israeli government’s approval. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir responded in a written statement on November 15 to denounce the declaration as “a deceptive propaganda exercise, intended to create an impression of moderation and of achievements for those carrying out violent acts in the territories of Judea and Samaria,” and the Israeli cabinet dismissed it as “disinformation meant to mislead world public opinion.”58
Hamas too was unimpressed by the statement. The Islamic resistance issued a communiqué in which it stressed “the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state on all the soil of Palestine,” not just in the Occupied Territories: “Do not heed the U.N. resolutions which try to accord the Zionist entity legitimacy over any part of the soil of Palestine . . . for it is the property of the Islamic nation and not of the U.N.”59
For all the excitement surrounding the PNC declaration of independence, the initiative brought no tangible benefits to the residents of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel showed no more willingness to relinquish the Occupied Territories after November 15, 1988, than it had before the PNC declaration. After a year of excitement and high expectations, nothing seemed to change. And yet the Palestinians had paid an enormous price for such small results. By the first anniversary of the Intifada, in December 1988, an estimated 626 Palestinians had been killed, 37,000 Palestinians had been injured, and over 35,000 Palestinians had been arrested in the course of the year—many of them still behind bars at the start of the second year of the uprising.60
By 1989 the early idealism of the Intifada had given way to cynicism, and the unity of purpose to factionalism. Hamas supporters broke out in open fights with Fatah members. Vigilantes within Palestinian society began to intimidate, beat, and even murder fellow Palestinians suspected of collaboration with the Israeli authorities. And still the communiqués were issued, the demonstrations held, the rocks thrown, and the casualties mounted as the Intifada continued toward no discernable end, the latest phase of a decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict for which the international community seemed to have no solution.
Over the course of the 1980s, a number of Islamic movements launched armed struggles to overthrow secular rulers or to repel foreign invaders. The Islamists hoped to establish an Islamic state ruled in accordance with sharia law, which they firmly believed to be God’s law. They took their inspiration from the success of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Egypt a splinter movement managed to assassinate President Anwar Sadat. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood mounted a civil war against the Ba’thist government of Hafiz al-Asad. The Lebanese Shiite militant movement Hizbullah, heavily influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran, viewed the United States and Israel as two sides of the same coin and sought to deal both a massive defeat in Lebanon. Jihad in Afghanistan was directed against both internal and external enemies, targeting the Soviet occupation forces and the Communist government in Afghanistan that was openly hostile to Islam. Islamists in Gaza and the West Bank called for a long-term jihad against the Jewish state to restore Palestine to the Islamic world under an Islamic government. The military successes enjoyed by Hizbullah in forcing a total U.S. withdrawal and an Israeli redeployment, and by the Afghan mujahidin by forcing the Soviets to evacuate their country in 1989, did not lead to the ideal Islamic states that their ideologues had hoped for. Both Lebanon and Afghanistan remained mired in civil wars long after their external enemies had been forced into retreat.
Islamists across the Arab world adopted a long-term approach to the ultimate goal of an Islamic state. The Egyptian Islamist Zaynab al-Ghazali spoke in terms of a thirteen-year cycle of preparation, to be repeated until a significant majority of the Egyptians supported an Islamic government. Hamas vowed to struggle for the liberation of all of Palestine “however long it takes.” The ultimate triumph of the Islamic state was a protracted project and required patience.
If the Islamists had lost some battles in the “struggle in the path of God,” they remained confident that they would ultimately prevail. In the meantime, Islamist groups chalked up a number of successes in reshaping Arab society. Islamist organizations emerged across the Arab world, attracting growing numbers of adherents in the 1980s and 1990s. Islamist values were spreading in Arab society, as more young men began to grow beards and women increasingly took to head scarves and modest body-covering fashions. Islamic publications dominated bookshops. Secular culture was driven into retreat before an Islamic resurgence that continues ever stronger down to the present day.
The Islamists took courage from major changes in world politics at the end of 1989. The certainties of the Cold War were crumbling as quickly as the Berlin Wall, which fell on November 9, marking the end of U.S.-Soviet rivalry and ushering in a new world order. Many Islamists interpreted the collapse of Soviet power as proof of the bankruptcy of atheist communism and a harbinger of a new Islamic age. Instead, they found themselves faced with a unipolar world dominated by the last surviving superpower, the United States of America.