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 communiquйs 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.

CHAPTER 14

After the Cold War

After nearly a half-century of superpower rivalry, the Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1989. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of greater openness (glasnost) and internal reform (perestroika) wrought permanent change to the political culture of the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s. By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached in November 1989, the Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe already lay in tatters. Starting with the defeat of the Communist Party in the Polish elections in June 1989, the governments of the Soviet bloc fell one by one: in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. The once all-powerful dictator of East Germany, Erich Honecker, tendered his resignation that autumn, and Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ruled Romania with an iron fist for over twenty-two years, was summarily executed by revolutionaries on Christmas Day 1989. The international system was transformed as the balance-of-power politics of the two superpowers gave way to a unipolar age of American dominance. Gorbachev and U.S. president George H. W. Bush captured the sense of hope engendered by the end of the Soviet-American antagonism, promising a “new world order.” For the Arab world, one of the central theatres of the Cold War, the new era of American ascendancy held great uncertainties. Once again, Arab leaders were forced to come to terms with new rules in the international arena. The conservative Arab monarchies were disconcerted by the specter of popular movements overturning long-standing governments, but they did not mourn the collapse of communism: Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states had placed their trust in the West, and, fortunately for them, the West had emerged victorious from the Cold War. Not so the left-leaning Arab republics like Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Algeria, which had more in common with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe: single-party states, they were all headed by long-term dictators with large armies and centrally planned economies. The video images of Ceausescu?s corpse broadcast around the world provoked deep disquiet in some Arab capitals. If it could happen in Romania, what was to prevent similar events in Baghdad or Damascus? Clearly, the Soviet Union could no longer be counted on to stand up for its Arab allies. For the past four decades, Arab republics had turned to the Soviet Union for military hardware, development assistance, and diplomatic support to counterbalance the forces of Western domination. Those days were finished. In autumn 1989 Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, pressed Gorbachev for more advanced weapons to help Syria achieve strategic parity with Israel. The Soviet president rebuffed him, saying: “Your problems are not going to be solved through any such strategic points—and anyway, we’re no longer in that game.” Al-Asad returned to Damascus devastated. The factions of the PLO were also worried. George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, criticized Gorbachev’s policies on a visit to Moscow in October 1989. “If you go on like this you are going to hurt us all,” he warned. Veteran analyst Mohamed Heikal witnessed the confusion among the Arab leadership. “Everyone sensed that a shift from one phase of international relations to another was taking place, but they still clung to the old familiar rules. On all sides there was a failure to anticipate the new ones correctly.”¹ The old Arab conflicts of the Cold War-era burst to the fore in the new unipolar age of American dominance. Iraq, weakened economically by its eight-year war with Iran (1980–1988), still had sufficient military resources to assert its bid for regional ascendance. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait proved the first crisis of the post–Cold War world. The invasion of one Arab state by another polarized the entire Arab world, with some countries opposing foreign intervention and others participating in an American-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule. The Kuwait crisis also divided citizens from their governments, as Iraqi president Saddam Hussein emerged as a popular hero across the Arab world for standing up to America and for his cynical promises to liberate Palestine from Israeli rule. It was not enough to drive Iraq from Kuwait to restore order in the Arab region. Saddam Hussein had linked Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait to Syria’s position in Lebanon and Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestinian territory. In the aftermath of the war to liberate Kuwait, the Arab world was forced to address the Lebanese Civil War, then in its fifteenth year. The United States for its part convened in Madrid the first meeting of Arabs and Israelis to address their differences since the 1973 Geneva Peace Conference. It was unclear to contemporary observers if Iraq’s invasion and subsequent expulsion from Kuwait was the harbinger of a new age of conflict resolution, or just an escalation in a long history of regional disputes.