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.