20 - The Middle East

Summary

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the Middle East witnessed two major events—Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement and the rise of Islamism. From 1977 to 1979, Israel and Egypt negotiated a bilateral peace, which led neither to a region-wide peace nor to a Palestinian state. At the same time, the Islamist Revolution in Iran envisioned the creation of a Shia Persian-led new world system outside of the existing Cold War structures and in competition with Sunni-Arab Islam. In an attempt to seize leadership in the Arab world, Iraq launched war against Iran in 1980. Before, by late 1979, Sunni Islamists had challenged Saudi royal hegemony over the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan heated up the Iranian-Saudi competition for worldwide Muslim leadership. The Israeli intervention in the Lebanese civil war in 1982 triggered the growth of Iranian influence and pitted the PLO against its Syrian backer. An American-European military mission to oversee PLO retreat to Tunisia withdrew after several Islamist suicide bombings in 1983. By the mid-1980s, the Middle East had exited the structures of the global Cold War, but the superpowers failed to see it.