One common bond between the Arab nations
was hostility to Israel. Beyond this the rivalries
between the Arab rulers, the old and the new, led
to bewildering diplomatic manoeuvres, coups and
changes of sides, some even secretly securing
Israeli assistance. The outside powers and the
Cold War further complicated what were rapidly
changing alignments in the Middle East after
1956. There, international, regional and internal
struggles for predominance have created continuing
war and conflict.
The Anglo-French debacle at Suez raised
Nasser’s prestige enormously. But he was handicapped
by Egypt’s poverty and lack of valuable
resources such as oil; indebted more and more to
the Soviet Union to pay for new weapons, Egypt
had to pledge its only important cash crop,
cotton, in return. The rapid growth of the population
meant that increased production hardly
improved the lot of the peasants and the urban
poor. Nor did the Aswan High Dam deliver the
promised transformation of the Egyptian peasantry.
But externally Egypt looked as if it might
assume a powerful place in the Middle East. The
pan-Arab cause appeared to be in the ascendant
when Syria in 1958 initiated steps to unite with
Egypt to form the United Arab Republic. Other
Arab nations were invited to join. But Syria was
as poor as Egypt and the union was largely one
of paper only. The only other state to join was
the poorest of all the Arab states, Yemen. There
was no geographical contiguity between these
three nations. The union did not last long: in
September 1961 the pro-Nasserites were overthrown
in a military coup in Syria, which thereupon
left the United Arab Republic. It was no
serious loss, but the Yemen connection proved
very costly for Egypt.
In 1963 civil war broke out in the Yemen Arab
Republic. The hereditary rulers were backed by
Saudi Arabia, and the officers who had rebelled
looked to Moscow and Egypt for support. Egypt
despatched some 70,000 troops eventually and
the fighting dragged on, a costly drain on the
Egyptian treasury. The other Yemen, which
comprised what had from 1956 to 1967 been
Britain’s Aden and hinterland, turned itself into
the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Republic of
Yemen. (Unification of the two Yemens was eventually
proclaimed in May 1990. The new state was
named the Republic of Yemen.) To complicate
matters further, while Egypt and Saudi Arabia
were sworn enemies and at war by proxy in the
Yemen, Saudi Arabia supported Egypt in its conflict
with Israel. But, until rearmed, Nasser could
not contemplate another war with Israel. For ten
years raids into Israel from Egyptian territory
ceased. It was an armed peace. Nor was there any
attempt to stop Israeli commerce from using the
seaport of Eilat and passing down the Gulf of
Aqaba through the Straits of Tiran. The passage
was guaranteed by France, Britain and the US.
The Sinai had been handed back to Egypt after
1956; a United Nations force policed the border
and was stationed in the Sinai Desert on the
Egyptian side of the Egyptian–Israeli border.
In reality, Nasser’s position after Suez was a
weak one. There was no hiding the fact of his
defeat by Israel. No one realised this more clearly
than the astute King Hussein of Jordan. Before
Suez he had been forced by powerful groups in his
country to denounce the West and to embrace
Egypt. After Nasser’s defeat by Israel, Egypt was in
no condition to interfere. In April 1957 Hussein
foiled a coup and declared martial law, assuming
personal power with the support of the army.
With Egypt and Syria already relying on Soviet
support, the US stepped into the vacuum left by
the British after Suez. The so-called Eisenhower
Doctrine, approved by Congress and signed by
the president in March 1957, involved the US
more deeply in the Middle East. The US offered
economic and military aid and empowered the
president to use armed force to assist any nation
in the Middle East requesting such help against
armed aggression ‘from any country controlled by
international communism’. Since the Cold War
was not the root cause of instability and conflict
in the Middle East, the Doctrine did not contribute
a great deal to peace.
For Arab leaders to embrace the US openly as
friend and protector in the 1960s and 1970s was
made virtually impossible by American support
for Israel. Only Lebanon, with a Christian non-
Arab president, responded positively to Eisenhower.
To counter the Soviet alignment with
Egypt and Syria, Eisenhower ordered the US
Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean and
sent financial aid to Jordan. The US also tried to
destabilise the regime in Syria. This attempt
failed. Worse still, the West’s most reliable ally,
Iraq, changed regimes and left the Baghdad Pact.
In July 1958 a bloody revolution broke out in
Iraq, and the king and his chief pro-Western minister
were brutally killed. General Abdel Kassem,
with local communist help, seized power. In
Jordan, King Hussein was greatly alarmed and,
fearing for his throne, asked for British help.
Britain sent troops and Hussein held shakily on
to power. For a time too, in response to a call
for assistance from the Lebanese president, US
marines were landed from the Sixth Fleet. As it
turned out, it was not these applications of the
Eisenhower Doctrine that constrained the Soviets
in the Middle East, but the rivalry of the Arab
nations among themselves. Fundamental to inter-
Arab conflict was the hostility between Iraq and
Egypt. Nasser interpreted communist support for
Iraq’s General Kassem as an unfriendly act towards
Egypt. By the spring of 1959 Kassem denounced
Nasser, and Nasser denounced Kassem.
Ultimately neither the Soviet Union nor the
US could enlist the Middle Eastern nations in the
Cold War. The leaders of these nations were primarily
concerned with their internal and regional
conflicts; they made use of Cold War antagonisms
to further their own interests. The naval-base facilities
that the Soviet navy acquired over the years in
Egypt, Syria, Libya and the People’s Democratic
Republic of Yemen as well as on the Red Sea
entailed great costs directly and indirectly. Foreign
naval bases, moreover, are dependent on the
changing attitudes and policies of the leaders in
power in these unstable countries. The Soviet
Union’s expensive policy was singularly unsuccessful.
In one respect, though, it was a major player
in the Middle East and that was in its role of supplying
arms to Israel’s principal enemies, Egypt,
Syria and Iraq. This, in turn, stimulated the US
and other Western nations to try to replace the
Soviet Union as the provider of arms. Inevitably
the Middle East became a danger to world peace.
Israel, despite its historic roots, is a new country
whose development in the post-war world has
been astonishing. The great majority of the people
who built the nation had left a Europe whose soil
had been soaked with Jewish blood. The young
fighters and pioneers who had reached what was
Palestine before 1947 had lost their families in
Hitler’s Holocaust and in Poland, even after the
war had come to an end. The diverse European
Jews speaking no common language were forced
into a nation sharing one purpose above all others:
they would never again be defenceless. They are
bound together by the common memory of the
Holocaust when no nation cared enough to try to
save Jewish men, women and children.
The immigrants to Palestine did not come to
empty lands. The Jews settled in towns which
then flourished and prospered. There was enough
room for Arabs and Jews in Palestine. There were
many who believed they could live well together,
but instead the Jewish immigration ended in conflict
and a struggle for predominance. The Arabs,
displaced from their land, were filled with resentment
and hatred for the new settlers from other
parts of the world. There were many Jews who
claimed the land as theirs by historical right,
looking back to the kingdom of David and its
capital city, Jerusalem, established a thousand
years before Christ. But there had been no Jewish
state for 2,000 years since its extinction in Roman
times. Jews had been dispersed (the diaspora) to
live in the Christian and Islamic world. Their religion
and culture survived and with them the
belief that there would one day be a return to the
Holy Land. An orthodox Jewish community had
constituted the largest single religious group in
Jerusalem since 1840. (The others were the
Christians and Muslims.) It was persecution in the
Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century and
Nazi persecution and Soviet discrimination in the
twentieth that created a mass migration of Jews
from central and Eastern Europe. Until then
Zionism had attracted only a small minority of
European Jews; the majority were proud to be
Germans, Poles and Hungarians. (The Jews of
Britain, France and the US are still proud citizens
of their countries, even if they materially support
Israel at the same time.)
The early pioneers from central and Eastern
Europe have provided the great majority of
Israel’s political leaders up to the present day.
Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel,
and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister
and dominant political leader until 1963, were
both born in Russian Poland. Golda Meir was
born in Kiev, and after she and her parents had
emigrated to the US in 1906, she settled in 1921
at the age of eighteen in a kibbutz; prominent in
politics and diplomacy she became prime minister
in 1969 on the death of Levi Eshkol.
Menachem Begin’s family perished in Poland; he
had headed the Irgun and uncompromisingly
claimed the whole biblical land of Israel. The
strong political influence of central and Eastern
European Jews is not surprising. They formed
the largest group of immigrants from 1903 to
1939, some 200,000. In the 1930s a new wave
of immigrants from Germany, about 50,000,
entered Palestine. The majority were professionals,
doctors, lawyers, teachers, traders or the children
of middle-class parents, whereas the majority
of Eastern and central European Jews were skilled
workers or farmers. It is perhaps surprising that
the German-descended Israelis have not played a
larger political role so far. After 1945 the survivors
of the death camps who came to Palestine
were again mainly Jews from Eastern Europe and
the Balkans. The next large-scale migration after
the war for independence came from the Middle
East, the oriental Jews, of Morocco, Tunisia,
Syria, Egypt and the Yemen. They were the least
educated and as a group are economically and
socially the least privileged. After three generations
the gap between the European and oriental
Jews remains wide and is only slowly narrowing,
despite common service in the army, which is a
great leveller. The Jews of the former Soviet
Union provided the largest group of immigrants
in the 1970s and 1980s.
The population of Israel, excluding the territories
conquered in the 1967 war, grew almost six
times from 750,000 in 1948 to 2.8 million by
1968 and to 6.4 million in 2001. Not all are Jews.
In 1948–9 some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs fled to
neighbouring Arab countries and became refugees
in camps, but 150,000 remained in their homes in
Israel; by 2001 they had grown to over 1 million
of whom 966,000 were Muslims mainly Sunni and
134,000 were Christians. In the West Bank
and Gaza there are about 200,000 Jewish settlers
and more than 3 million Arab Palestinians. In
Israel, the Arab Muslims were clinging to their
land as peasant farmers and poor villagers, economically
the great majority remained disadvantaged
and from 1949 until the 1960s, their loyalty
suspected, they were placed under many restrictions,
curfews and military rule. Yet outwardly they
were accorded the civic rights of all Israeli citizens,
including the right to vote for the Israeli parliament,
the Knesset. Then in the 1960s a policy to
integrate them was followed with some success.
The Palestinian Arab Israelis have remained a
separate community, sympathetic to the Pale-
stinians denied self-determination in the occupied
lands of the West Bank and Gaza (after the 1967
war), but they remain Israelis striving for equality,
their economic well-being far higher now than that
of the Palestinian Arabs outside the State of Israel,
with a sizeable middle class.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle
East, with a multiplicity of parties already well
established in Palestine before independence. The
dominant party forming the core of all coalitions
until 1977 was the Labour Party (Mapai), the
leftist Mapam never enjoying anywhere near the
same support. The Herut belonged to the rightwing
group of parties. The third minority group
was composed of the religious parties, who
wished to expand religious law in the Jewish state;
their influence was often greater than their
numbers in the Knesset would have justified
because they could demand a price for agreeing
to join the coalition governments formed after
elections. The bargaining that preceded the coalition
agreements – especially in the 1980s when
the adherence of minor parties became crucial –
added cynicism and disillusionment to the democratic
process of Israeli politics.
The biggest challenge facing Israeli governments
at home has been and remains how to
absorb thousands of destitute immigrants. Israel
is open to all Jews who wish to settle there. The
costs are huge and, when added to the immense
burdens of defence, present difficulties of budgetary
management unique among the developed
countries. The Labour Party, a pragmatic party
quite willing to compromise socialist principles,
followed policies encouraging capitalist investment.
Economic growth has been one of the
most rapid in the developed world, financed by
loans, grants, gifts (especially from the US) and
German reparations payments. This has, however,
burdened the economy with a large external debt.
It has also created an Israeli dependence on the
goodwill of the US, a relationship reinforced by
a dependence on weapons from the West, with
first France and then the US supplying the tanks
and the aircraft essential for Israel’s security.
The brilliant military commanders of Israel’s
victories in war play an influential role in Israeli
politics, readily exchanging active army service
with Cabinet posts in government. Moshe Dayan
was a successful leader in war and a hawk in peace
from the creation of Israel to the Yom Kippur
War in 1973; General Yitzhak Rabin took over as
prime minister from Golda Meir after serving as
chief of staff in the Six-Day War of 1967; General
Yigal Allon, Dayan’s rival as a military hero,
served as foreign minister in the 1970s and
General Ariel Sharon, the military hero of the
1973 war when his tanks crossed the Suez Canal
and trapped the Egyptian Third Army in the
Sinai, became a dominant member of Menachem
Begin’s Cabinet and masterminded the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and later served as
a hardline prime minister.
Israel enjoyed a breathing space of ten years
after the Suez–Sinai War of 1956. Neither Nasser
nor Hussein wished to plunge his country into
another war with Israel for the sake of the
Palestinians. Indeed, the establishment of a
Palestinian Arab state was not part of the programme
of any of the Arab national leaders. But
when Nasser’s bid for Arab leadership and his
efforts to export his revolution met with resolute
opposition from the royal leaders of Jordan and
Saudi Arabia, and with hostility in Syria and Iraq,
the only pan-Arab appeal left to him was to
emphasise the common enemy – Israel. Radio
Cairo broadcast hate campaigns against the
Jewish state, and President Nasser himself proclaimed
in a speech in Alexandria on 26 July
1959, ‘I announce from here, on behalf of the
United Arab Republic people, that this time we
will exterminate Israel.’ On 27 May 1967, nine
days before the start of the Six-Day War, he
declared, ‘Our basic objective will be the destruction
of Israel.’ No less extreme was the president
of Iraq on 31 May 1967: ‘The existence of Israel
is an error which must be rectified. This is our
opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has
been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear – to
wipe Israel off the map.’ These bloodcurdling
speeches can be dismissed as public rhetoric, since
they are belied by the much more cautious attitudes
otherwise displayed by Arab leaders. But for
Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem it was clear that
their very survival would be threatened if ever
they should prove the weaker in the continuing
conflict, for the Arab nations refused to make
peace or to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Israel’s response to Arab enmity is to place the
whole nation in arms. A professional nucleus of
officers and NCOs is supplemented by conscripts:
every man and woman has to serve for two to three
years; then follows a long period in the reserve (for
men to the age of forty-nine) with annual battle
training. The standing army of some 80,000 can in
time of emergency be quickly mobilised into a
force of 300,000. The army, the air force and the
small navy, in a constant state of readiness for war,
have always proved effective when put to the test.
Arab Israelis are not conscripted but a minority
have fought in the Israeli army.
While Nasser rebuilt and re-equipped the
Egyptian army with Soviet help, Israel continued
to strengthen its relations with France, a source of
some of the best weapons and aircraft. The French
also helped Israel to build up a nuclear potential
with the construction of the Dimona reactor. The
unsigned alliance with the US, however, remained
the sheet anchor of Israel’s international security.
After seven relatively peaceful years, in 1964
Israeli–Arab tensions once more began to grow.
The Israelis completed a project to divert some of
the waters of the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee,
which sparked a belligerent Syrian response.
Nasser felt obliged to fulfil the role of pan-Arab
leader and summoned a conference in Cairo in
1964. The Arab nations were not ready for war,
but 1964 was notable for the endorsement given
later in the year to Yasser Arafat and for the formation
of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Coupled with Arab non-recognition of Israel this
was an ominous development. But Nasser had too
many problems at home – attempting to advance
the economy, fighting in the Yemen and losing
US economic aid – to be thinking of any immediate
resumption of war. The most extreme Arab
regime was the Syrian.
Syria’s politics consisted of unstable power
plays between rival groups. In 1966 the most
radical wing of the Ba’ath seized power and
sought to consolidate its grip by taking the lead
in fighting for the liberation of Palestine. Syrian
gunfire harassed Israeli settlements on the frontier,
armed Palestinians belonging to Fatah (the
PLO’s largest fedayeen guerrilla group) and supported
by Syria, infiltrated Israel during the
autumn and winter of 1966–7, raided settlements
and set off explosives. The Israelis sent retaliatory
raids into the territory of their Arab neighbours,
sometimes to attack Palestinian bases, sometimes
hitting innocent Arabs in Jordan and the Lebanon
and causing many deaths. Israel, Syria, Jordan and
Egypt were drifting into an all-out war. Nasser,
albeit hesitantly, escalated the crisis, unable as
self-styled leader of the Arab world to appear to
follow in Syria’s militant footsteps. The Israeli
government was also cautious, not believing that
it really faced an imminent war. The Soviets,
meanwhile, were stirring up the Egyptians with
intelligence reports that Israel was readying for an
all-out invasion of Syria, though the Israelis were
probably only preparing another punitive strike
against Syria for supporting Palestinian raids.
Nasser moved army units into the Sinai in mid-
May 1967, and terminated the right of UN
observer troops to remain on Egypt’s Sinai
frontier with Israel. But his most decisive hostile
challenge, on 22 May 1967, was to close the Gulf
of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Then, on 30 May,
King Hussein placed his troops under Egyptian
command. Washington tried to ease the tension,
but in Israel the Rubicon was crossed when on 1
June the moderate prime minister, Levi Eshkol,
appointed General Dayan, who had been chief of
staff in 1956, to be defence minister; Dayan
insisted that Israel had to defend itself by war.
On 4 June Iraq joined the Jordanian–Egyptian
military pact.
Early in the morning on 5 June 1967, the
Israelis struck. The Six-Day War astonished the
world by its demonstration of the immense superiority
of the Israeli armed forces. Within twentyfour
hours the air forces of Egypt and its allies
had been destroyed. The Egyptian pilots had not
been sufficiently trained and the Soviet pilots
stationed on their airbases stood aside. After six
days it was all over. Israeli divisions had reached
the Suez Canal and had raced down to the tip
of the Sinai Peninsula, once again occupying
Sharm al-Sheikh, which commanded the passage
through the Straits of Tiran. Israeli forces also
occupied the Gaza Strip, which was inhabited by
Palestinians and under Egyptian sovereignty.
Jordan joined in the war despite Israeli pleas to
stay out. Israeli troops then fought house-tohouse
battles against Jordanian forces, suffering
heavy casualties before capturing East Jerusalem
and the West Bank. In the north, the Israelis
broke through the Syrian defences and occupied
the Golan Heights, from which Syrian artillery
had shelled Israeli settlements. Israel’s victories
against Egypt, Syria and Jordan were complete
and overwhelming. Everything had gone according
to the Israeli military plan. A major portion
of the highly professional and efficient Israeli
force was composed of part-time soldiers who
spent eleven out of twelve months as civilians.
It was an astonishing achievement that left the
Israelis elated and, with hindsight, over-confident.
The 1967 victory changed Israel for a generation,
creating opportunities and problems not solved to
the present day.
King Hussein’s decision to join Egypt cost him
the territory of the West Bank, which Jordan had
captured in 1948–9; before then it had formed a
part of the British Palestine Mandate. Israel was
now faced with deciding what to do with the
845,000 hostile Palestinian Arabs living there.
When they had been Jordanian citizens they had
been Jordan’s problem. Under Israeli occupation
they demanded separate nationhood. The possibility
of a ‘Jordanian solution’ for the time
receded as Israel’s capture of the Old City of
Jerusalem and its determination to retain an undivided
Jerusalem as its capital blocked any peaceful
arrangement with Jordan despite the large
Palestinian population in post-war Jordan.
Adding the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip,
the Israelis had now assumed responsibility for
more than 1 million Arab Palestinians. Unlike
their predecessors in 1948–9, the Arabs had not
fled, but neither could they be reconciled to living
under foreign occupation. The Israelis at first
regarded the occupied territories as bargaining
counters to attain peace; security required that
they retain a relatively small part; the rest would
be returned in exchange for peace treaties. Then
Israel would enjoy secure borders and peace. It
did not work out that way, though. Years later, it
is true, peace was secured on this basis with
Egypt. But the longer Israel occupied Gaza, East
Jerusalem and the West Bank, the stronger grew
the voices of those who claimed the territories as
Israel’s historic land and the more Jewish settlements
expanded.
The famous UN Resolution 242 passed by the
Security Council on 22 November 1967, despite
its ambiguities and the different Arab and Israeli
interpretations, provided a framework for peace
negotiations. It promised Israel secure frontiers, it
required it to withdraw from the conquered territories
and stated the need for a just solution for
the Palestinian refugees. But it was only a framework.
There was no timetable for implementation;
and no enforcement provision. Nasser had already
in September 1967, at a conference of the Arab
heads of state in Khartoum, made an uncompromising
demand for complete withdrawal of the
Israelis and insisted that there could be no peace
with Israel or negotiations without recognition of
‘the rights of the Palestinian People in their own
country’. The Arab nations did not move from
this stand until Egypt broke ranks in 1977. The
Israelis in turn were not prepared to give up what
they had gained without something in return.
Their interpretation of Resolution 242 is that it
assures Israel safe and secure frontiers and that
consequently the extent of its withdrawal has first
to be negotiated between Israel and the Arab
nations involved: such negotiations must precede
any withdrawal. The Israelis rejected withdrawal
prior to possible negotiations.
It would take another war before Egypt was
ready to negotiate and conclude a separate peace
with Israel. But in the intervening years the influence
of the right in Israel grew, the influence of
politicians like Begin who passionately argued
against giving up the territories of the West Bank,
biblical Israel (‘Judaea’ and ‘Samaria’). Nasser proclaimed
a war of attrition against Israel in 1968;
Palestinian guerrilla raids and sporadic Egyptian
attacks forced Israel to remain on constant alert;
the two sides also shelled each other across the
Suez Canal until a ceasefire was agreed in August
1970. This provided only a breathing space.
In September 1970, Nasser died. His death
was mourned by millions of Egyptians and Arabs
throughout the Middle East. He was not a
scheming dictator, the reincarnation of Hitler, as
he was seen at the time by some in Britain and
France. In contrast to leaders elsewhere in the
Middle East in his time and later, in Syria, Iran
and Iraq, he was not a tyrant, killing thousands
of opponents. Nor, unlike his royal predecessors,
was he corrupt. He genuinely wanted to raise the
standard of living of the Egyptian masses, but his
state socialism and police security brought only
order, without prosperity. He was defeated in his
aims by population growth and by the costly wars
he fought against Israel and in the Yemen. He
fought to restore Arab pride and, despite his
defeat, was paradoxically triumphant in achieving
this wider goal. In the West, the Egyptians and
other Arabs had been regarded as a lesser species
of humanity, servile and incompetent. All that
changed in 1956 when Nasser nationalised the
Suez Canal and humiliated Britain and France.
He served notice on the feudal royals left in the
Arab world that the time was coming to an end
when they could rule without the participation of
the people, but half a century later they are still
there. All of this boosted Arab self-esteem,
without which there can be no peace between
Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East.
Nasser’s attitude to the Cold War, too, can now
be judged in a new perspective. He manipulated
Moscow and Washington to supply him with
arms and aid but supported the neutrality of the
Third World, the poorer countries, which could
only lose and not gain by becoming involved in
the conflicts of the superpowers.
Egypt’s next president Anwar Sadat, after the failure
of the US to bring the two sides together,
believed he was faced either with accepting Israel’s
conditions of peace or with fighting once more.
He chose the latter. On 6 October 1973, the
Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, Syrian
and Egyptian forces attacked Israel. Until hours
before the attack was launched, the Israelis had
not expected an all-out war and the Cabinet had
rejected another pre-emptive strike. Mobilisation
of reserves was ordered too late. The initial attacks
broke through the much smaller Israeli forces, and
it was not until the civilians were mobilised that
the Syrians could be halted in the north. The
fighting against the Egyptians, whose tanks had
successfully crossed into the Sinai, proved far more
difficult. Only when General Sharon daringly
crossed to the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal
with Israel’s armour on 15 October and so cut off
the 100,000-strong Egyptian Third Army in the
Sinai were the Israelis able to take the offensive.
But the Israelis, after suffering early losses of their
fighters, brought down by Soviet-supplied missiles,
had succeeded in turning the tables on Syria
and Egypt only after receiving replacement fighters
and large quantities of arms flown in from the
US. The unwritten Israeli–French alliance had
ended after 1967, the French being now more
concerned to get on better terms with the Arab
states; and neither Britain nor West Germany was
prepared to supply the arms the Israelis desperately
needed. This reticence did not help the
Western Europeans much. The Arab oil states
expressed their solidarity with Egypt and Syria by
imposing an oil embargo on the US and on all the
other countries that did not support the Arab
cause. Western Europe was hit by an oil shortage
and large price rises.
Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, was
masterminding US policy. President Nixon was in
the grip of the Watergate crisis but he gave his
full backing to Kissinger’s policy of working for a
durable Arab–Israeli peace, ready to assist Israel
only to the extent of enabling it to defend itself
effectively but not so much as to produce an Israeli
victory as overwhelming as that in 1967. In that
respect the US and the Soviet Union held the same
views, and Brezhnev and Kissinger and Nixon
cooperated well during the first few days of the
Yom Kippur War to bring about a ceasefire. On 20
October, Kissinger flew to Moscow at Brezhnev’s
invitation. The two superpowers agreed to present
a ceasefire resolution to the Security Council on
the 22nd, which Syria, Egypt and Israel accepted
after some Soviet and US arm-twisting. Yet two
days later, during the night of 24–5 October, the
US placed its forces in readiness for war. After such
fruitful cooperation with the Kremlin, how had
events taken this turn? It seemed like the Cuban
missile crisis over again. Was the world on the
brink of the Third World War?
The Israelis were the culprits initially, in that
they failed to observe the truce completely; in an
attempt to improve their military position they
tightened the noose around the Egyptian Third
Army. Brezhnev responded with a proposal to the
US that a Soviet–American peacekeeping force be
sent. Kissinger did not wish to see Soviet troops in
the Middle East, but the forceful US reaction was
to the latter part of Brezhnev’s proposal, a threat
that if the US did not agree then ‘we should be
faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking
appropriate steps unilaterally. Israel cannot be
allowed to get away with the violations.’ US
intelligence at the same time detected evidence of
Soviet military preparations. Kissinger responded
with a tough rejection, and US forces around the
world were placed on intermediate war alert. But
on 25 October Kissinger sent an olive branch: if
Brezhnev abandoned the idea of unilateral action,
there would be no need for a confrontation at all.
Brezhnev climbed down and that same day joined
with the US in sponsoring another United Nations
ceasefire resolution setting up a UN peacekeeping
force that would exclude both US and Soviet contingents.
In return the US ensured that this time
the Israelis would stop all hostilities. The Third
Egyptian Army was thus rescued, and Egypt and
Syria saved from further humiliation.
The 1973 war was no walk-over for Israel. This
time its losses in men and material were heavy:
5,500 dead and wounded and 800 tanks destroyed.
Egypt’s and Syria’s losses were greater in
absolute terms but not in proportion to their
larger populations. Yet out of the Yom Kippur
War developed positive consequences. Egypt and
Syria had to accept realistically that they could not
hope to inflict a total defeat on Israel, but their
early successes had restored Arab pride. For the
Israelis a state of no peace imposed harsh burdens
and grave risks. They were now more prepared to
return Arab territory if they could thereby obtain
peace. For the Americans, the Arab–Israeli conflict
seemed only to provide opportunities for
Soviet intrusion in the Middle East. From this
matrix of interests, US diplomacy succeeded –
with the signature of the Camp David Accords in
September 1978 – in bringing Egypt and Israel
together to agree a peace treaty. It is the cornerstone
on which a comprehensive peace still awaits
to be built a quarter of a century later.
Amid the turmoil of inter-Arab conflicts and the
Arab–Israeli tensions and wars, of Soviet interventions
in the Middle East and Iraq’s anti-Western
policies, the West had one powerful, oil-rich and
secure ally in Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
Until Islamic Iran forced itself into the news
in the 1980s, the peoples of the Western world
had only the haziest notions about the country
and its people. Iran lies between the Caspian Sea
and the Persian Gulf, and has borders with no less
than five countries: to the north the Soviet
Union, to the west Turkey and Iraq and to the
east Afghanistan and Pakistan. It occupies the
eastern shore of the Persian Gulf; on the northern
shore Iraq has an outlet along the estuary
Shatt al-Arab; from the north down the western
shore lies the oil-rich sheikhdom of Kuwait, the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the sheikhdoms of
Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and
Oman. It is oil that gives this region its significance,
supplying much of the needs of Western
Europe and Japan, with additional exports to the
US, the Middle East and Africa. A glance at a map
reveals Iran’s and Iraq’s key positions. Iran is a
vast country of 627,000 square miles, five times
the land area of Britain, though half of it is desert.
In the Middle East (not counting Pakistan or
Turkey) only Egypt has as large a population.
Given Iran’s size, its oil resources and population,
the heritage of an ancient civilisation and the
history of a once great Persian Empire, its rulers
might understandably dream of making their
country a great power once more. But Iran
(known as Persia until it was renamed in 1935)
had first to free itself from foreign domination.
The oil and Iran’s strategic position on the path
to India had encouraged Britain to dominate
southern Persia and the Gulf, agreeing to a division
of interests that left Russia dominant in the
north. Never genuinely independent, the country
was occupied once more in 1941 by British and
Russian troops for fear that the Shah would throw
in his lot with the Germans. He was forced to
abdicate and his son succeeded him.
During the post-war years the nationalist
movement led by Mossadeq tried to win true
independence and to loosen the control of the
British oil giants over the country’s main
resource. The British government resisted and
there was new turmoil, which was brought to an
end in 1953 with the help once more of foreign
intervention. The Americans and British helped
the Shah to oust Mossadeq and the nationalist
politicians and to stage a coup. In the eyes of the
nationalists the Shah now owed his authority to
foreign intervention, thus further diminishing
Iran’s sovereignty and independence. In 1955
Iran joined the Western alliance – the Baghdad
Pact (renamed the Central Treaty Organisation
after Iraq’s revolution in 1958 and its subsequent
departure), characterising the Shah still more
as a lackey of the Anglo-American ‘imperialists’.
Iranian nationalist fervour could never reconcile
itself to the ‘Western’ Shah.
Yet the Shah, though he owed his assumption
of real power to American and British assistance in
1953, had every intention of asserting Iran’s independence
and creating a military base for new
greatness. As his rule grew increasingly dictatorial,
he appointed Iran’s parliament and imprisoned
politicians if they showed any sign of opposition.
He established the National Information and
Security Organisation, known as SAVAK, a security
police that collected information on opponents,
often imprisoning, torturing and even
murdering them. American attempts to influence
the Shah and to persuade him to introduce democratic
reforms, using economic and military aid
as levers, had little effect. The Shah made token
gestures in response. Western diplomats were by
no means ignorant of the Shah’s misrule, or of the
corruption of the court and its dependants, but
in Washington and London no alternative policy
to supporting the Shah was acceptable. If a
revolution should topple the Shah’s regime, the
country’s mass poverty would, so it was thought,
lead to a seizure of power by radicals and communists.
The disturbed state of the Middle East
had already allowed the Soviet Union to establish
bases in Syria and Yemen; Iraq was uncertain and
Egypt unstable. So Iran was the bulwark protecting
the West’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf.
What the West did not foresee was the Islamic
revolution.
The public in the West was given a positive
image of the Shah. The handsome ruler seated on
his aptly named Peacock throne in beautiful uniforms
looked every inch a royal and made it easy to
forget that his father, a dashing cavalry officer, had
seized power in 1921 to become the founder of
the Pahlavi ‘dynasty’. The lack of blue blood was
compensated for by pomp and circumstance,
which reached the height of folly when in 1971 the
Shah staged a sumptuous celebration attended by
international dignitaries to mark the anniversary of
‘two and a half millennia’ of the Persian Empire.
The pageant, staged to impress the visitors at
Persepolis, ancient capital of the Achaemenian
kings of Persia, cost tens of millions of dollars and
was televised worldwide. Nevertheless, he was
regarded as a firm friend of the West and as a
reformer who was dragging his people out of
the darkness of ignorance and prejudice into the
modern age.
As a reformer his record was flawed. Authoritarian
and careless of political and human rights,
the Shah resorted to brutal repression to preserve
his power. In the early 1960s when the Americans
were pressing for reforms, the economy was
running into trouble and the National Front
politicians were growing in strength, the Shah
responded by arresting the National Front leaders
and, in 1963, organised a national referendum on
a comprehensive reform package. It included land
reform, a new election law including women’s
suffrage, a national literacy corps, profit-sharing
and the sale of factories to private industry. The
reforms were supposed to establish the Shah as
a popular leader and were presented as the Shah–
People Revolution. The referendum was rigged.
The most formidable opposition now came
from religious leaders and their followers, and for
the first time the name of one of these, Ruhollah
Khomeini, was heard. Students were killed when
paratroopers attacked the religious school of Qom
where he taught and preached. His re-arrest in
June 1963 sparked off an insurrection in Teheran
and other towns. The Shah ordered troops and
tanks to shoot on the demonstrators and declared
martial law. The number killed has never been
accurately established: the Shah’s government
claimed less than a hundred, but other witnesses
speak of thousands. Thousands more were imprisoned.
Ayatollah Khomeini was released, but after
persisting with his opposition he was, in 1964 at
the age of sixty-two, forced to leave Iran. It turned
out to be the Shah’s worst mistake. From his exile
successively in Turkey, Iraq and Paris, Khomeini
was able to send a stream of clandestine propaganda
into Iran, uncompromisingly condemning
the Shah as an American lackey and his efforts to
modernise and Westernise the country as contrary
to Islamic law. By the end of his fifteen years of
exile Khomeini was recognised by the masses as
the spiritual and political leader who was most
effectively challenging the Shah’s fitness to rule.
In Iran, the Shah kept a tight grip on the country,
backed by the military forces on which he
lavished money and by SAVAK. He spent a quarter
of Iran’s income on purchasing the latest
weapons, tanks and planes from the US, though
the US administration and Congress were reluctant
to gratify all his wishes. The huge increase in
oil revenues, especially after the price rises of
1973, gave the Shah the dollars with which to
purchase whatever caught his fancy. The West,
meanwhile, was tempted to reduce the imbalance
of trade caused by the high cost of oil by selling all
it could to Iran and the Middle Eastern oil states
– who placed arms high on their shopping lists.
Successive development plans imposed reforms
from above. Land reform deprived absentee landlords
of most of their land and more than doubled
the number of peasant proprietors of smallholdings.
Large agricultural cooperatives were formed,
and tractors and fertilisers used. But, as in the
Soviet Union, it proved exceedingly difficult to
improve agricultural productivity, which continued
to rise more slowly than the increase in population.
The government official replaced the
landlord as the peasant’s boss. Industrial growth,
from a low base, was more impressive. New factories,
steel mills and assembly plants for motor
vehicles were constructed. Education and health
services also benefited from large investments,
and many Iranian students were sent abroad
to Western universities. The statistics reflect a
remarkable economic development; what they do
not reveal is the unevenness of the distribution of
wealth and the social dislocation that these rapid
changes produced. The gulf between the privileged
elites – higher army officers, administrators
and leading merchants – and the masses of urban
poor, farmers and labourers remained huge. In the
northern parts of Teheran, the shops, hotels and
offices catered to the rich and exuded wealth. To
the south lay a different world of slums where
most of the city’s 4.5 million lived in abject conditions.
Many peasants had migrated to Teheran
and to other towns, where they turned to the mullahs
and the mosques for spiritual guidance and
self-respect. In the countryside the income of
three-quarters of rural families was so low that
malnutrition was widespread. Nor was the small
but growing middle class reconciled to the Shah’s
authoritarian regime. For thousands of students
no worthwhile prospects awaited them on graduation.
All sections of society had reasons to resent
the Shah’s rule. Yet the speedy weakening of his
position, leading to his overthrow in January
1979, came as a surprise.
Despite criticisms of Iran’s violations of the
democratic process and of human rights, the US
still felt that the Shah’s regime was the best guarantor
of Western interests in the Persian Gulf.
After the British withdrawal as protecting power
of the Gulf sheikhdoms in 1971, the Shah with
his well-equipped army and air force of some
350,000 men came to be seen as the indispensable
policeman of a potentially turbulent region.
President Jimmy Carter, who entered the White
House in January 1977, shrank from criticising
the regime publicly, despite the prominence he
gave to human rights. In November 1977 when
the Shah visited Washington, with tear gas
wafting around the White House lawn from
protest demonstrations beyond the gate, Carter
fulsomely pledged US support. On his return visit
to Teheran in December he praised the Shah in
a New Year toast. ‘Iran’, he declared:
is an island of stability in one of the more troubled
areas in the world. . . . This is a great
tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership
and to the respect, admiration and love
which your people give to you.
Carter’s support was to cost him dear when the
Shah’s opponents came to power.
In the West few in authority could imagine
how the Shah, at the head of armed forces which
owed him everything, could fail to crush any
popular protests likely to arise. The Shah could
also count on an upper echelon of society who
derived their wealth from his economic development
and his favours. Ignorance of the dynamics
of Iranian society led Western analysts to underestimate
the hold of the mullahs over the people
and the unrelenting sense of mission of an
exiled ayatollah in a Parisian suburb. When the
television cameras paid attention to Ayatollah
Khomeini, all they showed was an old man in
his seventies sitting cross-legged on a carpet. He
commanded no army, no government in exile, yet
he proved more powerful than the Shah.
How did the revolution come about? From the
mid-1970s, the Iranian economy did not prosper,
despite the large oil income. The oil-price rise of
1973–4 was causing recession in the West and a
drop in demand. The consequence was inflation,
of food prices particularly; these price rises were
most severe for the poor, whose rents in Teheran
soared at the same time. Carter had hardly left
Teheran early in January 1978 before demonstrations
on behalf of Khomeini began in the holy
city of Qom. The Shah responded fiercely; police
opened fire on the students, some of whom were
killed, the first martyrs of the revolution. From
then on protests escalated in other cities and in
Teheran in March, May and August 1978.
Moderates and radicals, the National Front politicians,
clerics and merchants were coming
together to bring the Shah’s personal rule to an
end. In September a large demonstration converged
on Jaleh Square in Teheran. The Shah
imposed martial law. When the crowds would not
disperse, the army started firing indiscriminately.
Estimates of the ensuing casualties varied between
several hundreds and 2,000. It was a turning
point. Strikes spread throughout the country.
The revolution was an example of people
power, the first of several, to be followed later in
the 1980s in South Korea, in the Philippines and
in Eastern Europe, where the mass of people prevailed
over the firepower of the military and
police. The majority of the Shah’s soldiers were
conscripts, sickened by the orders to shoot
defenceless civilians; some joined the protesters.
Rallying around posters of Khomeini, the accepted
leader of the masses, the people engaged in a
righteous struggle against their oppressive ruler.
The Shah, uncertain whether to send in more
troops or to try to negotiate with the moderates,
lost control.
By December 1978, when the US administration
was urging the Shah to accept a constitutional
monarchy, it was too late. On 16 January
1979 the Shah left the country without formally
abdicating, and his departure released an outpouring
of joy on the streets of Teheran. In the
aftermath, no matter who managed temporarily
to gain power in Iran’s government, there was
only one leader who really counted and that was
the Ayatollah Khomeini. On 1 February 1979
television screens around the world showed him
slowly descending from an Air France plane to a
delirious reception from the crowds.
The first few months of the revolution were
grim. Khomeini, the undisputed leader, chose a
layman, Mehdi Bazargan, to head the provisional
Islamic government. Bazargan was an Islamic
scholar and had been an opponent of the Shah’s
authoritarian rule. Power was divided. Revolutionary
courts sentenced and executed generals of
the Shah’s army responsible for the repression. By
mid-March sixty-eight leading supporters of the
Shah had been executed. On 1 April Khomeini
declared the establishment of the Islamic Republic,
which had been endorsed by a referendum. Real
power lay with the Islamic Revolutionary Council,
which took its orders from Khomeini. To ‘protect
the revolution’ Khomeini sanctioned the formation
of a militia, the Islamic Republican Party. The
army and civil service were purged of those who
had supported the Shah’s regime, and attempts by
Kurdish and Arab minorities to take advantage of
the turmoil in order to set out on their own path
to independence were put down. Thus was the revolution
made secure.
Khomeini blamed the Americans for all Iran’s
ills and for their support of the Shah’s corrupt
regime, and he aroused the masses to see in the
US the main danger to the revolution’s success
and Iran’s independence. Washington’s efforts to
establish normal relations were rejected. Bowing
to humanitarian pressures, President Carter permitted
the mortally sick Shah to receive medical
treatment in New York. The Iranian government
demanded his extradition to face charges in Iran.
Khomeini supported these demands, urging the
Teheran students to widen their attacks against
America and Israel. There followed in November
1979 the seizure of the American Embassy by a
revolutionary student group and the taking of the
American diplomats and secretaries as hostages.
Prime Minister Bazargan resigned and the Islamic
Revolutionary Council took charge of the government.
The US became the Great Satan. The revolution
was radicalised and for fourteen months the
hostages remained imprisoned. Carter’s attempt
in April 1980 to rescue them by sending a special
task force secretly to Teheran misfired when three
of the eight helicopters developed malfunctions;
the raid was aborted but unfortunately two of the
rescuing planes crashed on making ready to
return, killing eight men; the mission could not
any longer be kept secret. The impact on Carter’s
electoral chances was devastating. Khomeini had
demonstrated that Iran could safely defy the US.
Not until the day Carter left the White House
were the hostages released to fly home. By then
Iran had already been at war for four months with
its neighbour Iraq. It was the beginning of the
devastating Gulf War that lasted for almost seven
years and led to the death of a million young men
on both sides, the bloodiest conflict of the Middle
East in modern times.
World History
