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Camp David Accords and Sadat's Assassination

Sadat had claimed victory at the end of the Yom Kipper War and had emerged from the war a hero in the eyes of his fellow Egyptians. With his apparent triumph, Sadat felt more secure politically, and he lightened up on repression. He granted amnesty to more political prisoners, lifted some censorship of the press and allowed political parties. War had again increased support for fervent Islamism, and Sadat made a show of his own religious devotion, putting him closer to the feelings of Egypt's traditionally religious middle class.

Sadat was struggling with Egypt's economy and wished to be rid of the military costs associated with Arab wars against Israel. He favored peace with Israel and wanted Israel to give back the Sinai - while Israel found the Sinai useful to its defense. Peace also served Sadat's desire for increased foreign investments. Sadat sought better relations with the United States. And investments began to flow into Egypt.

In 1976, Sadat sought to improve his standing with the Muslim Brotherhood and allowed the brotherhood to publish a monthly magazine, Al-Dawa. The brotherhood remained illegal but was the main body of Egyptian conservatism. It still favored Islamic laws over European influences. It was opposed to violence and had support of those with formal education and in the professions. Violence was the option of a group called Repentance and Flight from Sin, (Al Taqfir Wal Higrah), which made news in 1977 by  going on a rampage against nightclubs. Then they murdered someone they disliked: Mohammad al Dhahbi.

Sadat was no friend of terrorists. He ignored them and continued his effort of good relations and doing business with the West. In November, 1977, he visited Israel. Some Egyptians approved, and some did not. On May 26,1979, at Camp David, Sadat signed an accord with Israel - brokered by President Jimmy Carter. And Egypt gained the return of the Sinai from Israel.

Believing that Israel was an abomination in Islamic territory, the Muslim Brotherhood saw Sadat's agreement at Camp David as a sellout. Groups throughout the Arab world called for Sadat's overthrow or assassination, and, in Egypt, Sadat began making arrests. He ordered the closing of Al-Dawa, and he spoke of a "criminal use of religious power to misguide people." The Ayatollah Khomeini had recently risen to power in Iran, and Sadat told the press not to fear, that "we will have no Khomeini here."

On October 6, 1981, men from group called Islamic Jihad, disguised as soldiers, assassinated Sadat in Cairo as he was viewing a military parade. Hundreds of Islamic militants were rounded up. Among them was a 30-year-old medical doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for possessing an unlicensed pistol. He was from a wealthy family. From an early age, he had been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, and at the time of his arrest he had been a low ranking member of Islamic Jihad. He served three years in prison. He was recorded by television cameras shouting angrily in English from behind prison bars, saying ''We are Muslims who believe in our religion. We're trying our best to establish an Islamic state and Islamic society.'' Zawahiri would eventually to be the leader of a group called al-Qaeda, to be well known in late 2001.

Intensified Conflict between Israelis and Palestinians

In 1976, Israeli settlers (called colonists by Palestinians) in the West Bank (called Judea and Samaria by religious Jews) numbered 3,176. With the coming to power of the Likud Party and Menachem Begin in 1977, this number increased, reaching 20,600 in 1982. Settlement in the Gaza Strip was increasing also. Following the agreement between Sadat and Begin at Camp David in December, 1977, the Gaza Strip was no longer considered as part of Egypt. Begin had wanted Egypt to take responsibility for Gaza, but Sadat did not want it. And Begin was not about to turn the strip over to the Arabs who lived there.

In Gaza, the Israelis allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to organize - groups favored by the Israelis because they were hostile to the PLO. The PLO was for national self-determination and secular, and the Brotherhood was for an Islamic authority. The Israelis allowed the Brotherhood to receive funds from Saudi Arabia and Jordan, funding denied some other social and charitable groups.

With the expansion of settlements and an appearance of Israeli determination to remain in the territories indefinitely, Palestinian mayors, city councilmen and various civic, profession and labor organizations, on October 1, 1978, signed a declaration defying Israeli authority and affirming the unity of the Palestinian people under the leadership of the PLO. The Israelis warned the majors that they would be held responsible for disturbances in their district. The Israelis restricted public meetings and freedom of movement in the territories, including the movements of the mayors. They diminished the role of the mayors as providers of social and economic services, limiting funds that they could receive from abroad. And they and moved more strongly against hostile political organizing.

In the fall and spring of 1982, professionals in the Gaza Strip responded with civil disobedience to an Israeli increase in excise taxes. Doctors, dentists, pharmacists, lawyers and engineers and others went on strike. Israeli authorities welded shut the doors of 170 shops and 18 pharmacies, imposed heavy fines on doctors and arrested protesters.

The Israelis were applying control in the territories using the demolition of houses, as punishments and an attempted disincentive against the families of those deemed security offenders - a collective punishment accomplished prior to any legal proceedings. They were applying curfews to entire communities and closing universities, from one day to more than a month.

Economic Controls

In the late 1960s the Israelis decided to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, Moshe Dayan claiming that such an interaction and better knowledge of one another would reduce hostilities. Around 30 percent of the work force on the West Bank went to work for Israelis and 40 percent of the work force in the Gaza Strip, attracted by the higher wages.

Israelis were happy to hire Palestinian labor and to sell goods to the Palestinian consumers, but some Israelis did not want competition from the Palestinians and had lobbied their government for protection. Israeli officials were split between economic integrationists regarding the Palestinians and economic protectionists, and the protectionists won. A Palestinian shoe factory, for example, was not allowed to sell its shoes to the Israelis, and restrictions were placed on Palestinian growers selling their products to the Israelis. Palestinian entrepreneurs had to apply for licenses from the Israeli authorities for any economic activity they wished to initiate, while Israeli entrepreneurs had an open market to the Palestinians.

The Israelis did little to development an economic infrastructure in Palestinian areas. Under Israeli authority, banking among the Palestinians remained undeveloped. Israel did allow Palestinian growers to sell their products to Jordan, while trade between the Palestinians and the rest of the world was subject to Israeli permission and Israeli interests.

The Israelis were also exercising authority over use of water, to their advantage, with consequences for Palestinian agriculture. In 1967, the Israelis confiscated almost all West Bank water wells, and they began restricting well drilling and water pumping by Palestinians. The amount of water allocated to Palestinians was to be capped at 1967 levels. Israeli settlements grew in number, however, and settlements drew water from neighboring Palestinian areas, with Palestinians seeing Israeli swimming pools being filled while their communities had barely enough or too little water. Israeli settlements, according to experts, were using three to five times as much water per capita as their Palestinian neighbors. With Israeli settlements getting priority in access to water, nearby Palestinian agriculture was suffering, with fields drying and farmers being put out of work.

In 1965, before the Israeli occupation, the Palestinians were farming on 2,435 square kilometers of land. After 1980 that had been reduced to 1,707 square kilometers - a reduction of 30 percent.

As the Palestinians saw it, they had more grievances against the Israelis than did the American colonists against the British in 1776.

Syria, Lebanon and U.S. Intervention

In Syria, Islamic extremists opposed to the rule of President Hafex al-Assad assassinated several hundred government officials and security force troops, and they killed around two dozen advisors from the Soviet Union. Then, in February, 1982, in Hama, a city of 350,000, the Muslim Brotherhood attacked government forces searching for rebels. The Muslim Brotherhood insurgents took power in the city, drove out Baathist authorities and declared the city liberated. Against the city Assad sent several thousand Syrian troops, supported by armor and artillery. In two weeks of fighting, Assad's force killed between between 10,000 and 40,000. Support for the Brotherhood waned, and Assad had little trouble from them thereafter. Assad had allowed for himself a response to terrorism that he did not want to grant to the Israelis.

In Israel, the government of Menachem Begin, of Israel's conservative Likud Party, was growing impatient with tolerance directed toward Palestinian guerrillas. The Begin government laid plans to wipe out "nests of PLO terrorists" in southern Lebanon and requested U.S. approval. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told the Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, that he and President Reagan opposed any such move by Israel, and he cautioned Sharon against Israel making such a move without an "internationally recognized provocation." On June 3, 1982, a group identified as Black June, inspired by Abu Nidal, wounded Israel's ambassador in London. Rather than Nidal's group being the PLO, it was a rival to the PLO, with Libyan support. But Begin used the Nidal attack as pretext to move against the PLO, and, on June 6, Israel moved into Lebanon with its jets, helicopters and armored divisions.

Israeli forces engaged Syrian forces - which had been in Lebanon for six years. The Syrians suffered heavy losses and withdrew to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Within 72 hours after their move into Lebanon, Israeli troops were on the perimeter of the city of Beirut. The Israelis sent aircraft against the trapped PLO there, and they patrolled all roads in and out of the city.

The United Nations demanded a full and unconditional Israeli withdrawal. Israel, accustomed to hostility from the UN, refused. In exchange for withdrawing, Israel wanted a peace treaty with Lebanon. The U.S. diplomat, Philip Habib, negotiated an agreement between Lebanon, Israel and the PLO. Chairman Arafat of the PLO agreed to removed his forces from Lebanon. Assad of Syria also agreed to remove his forces from Lebanon. The agreement included the deployment of a three-nation peacekeeping force. French and Italian forces arrived to help establish peace. U.S. ships were anchored off Lebanon's coast, and, in August, U.S. Marines went ashore at Beirut to help oversee the departure of thousands of PLO fighters.

On August 23, a Christian, Bashir Gemayel was elected President of the Republic. He had been a member of the Christian Phalange party - a party founded by his father - and he looked forward to being president for all Lebanese. In early September, while Gemayel was waiting for his inauguration, the PLO left Lebanon for Damascus - Dr. Habash of the PFLP among them - and there they were disarmed. Arafat was bitter about Syria's failure to help his cause in Lebanon, and, rather than go to Damascus, he boarded a ship headed for Athens, Greece, taking 14,000 of his fighting men with him. Arafat sailed into the sunset satisfied that with their small arms his troops had killed several hundred Israelis. And on September 10 the U.S. Marines returned to their ships.

On September 14 - nine days before he was to be inaugurated - Gemayel and 25 others were killed by a powerful explosion. The next day, Israeli troops entered West Beirut, violating the Israeli promise to Philip Habib. In West Beirut were Palestinian refugee camps that had been protected by forces now withdrawn. Israel's General Sharon gave Phalange troops access to the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila. Their mission was said to be that of finding terrorists, but, upset over the assassination of Gemayel and the earlier assassination of many other Phalangists, they went on a rampage, killing between 700 and 2000 Palestinians.

The Syrians were furious with Habib over what they saw as his broken promise that Israel would stay away from Beirut, and Habib felt betrayed by the Israelis. A member of Israel's Labor Party, Shimon Peres, asked who were the fools that allowed the Phalangists into the camps.

Amin Gemayel, the brother of the assassinated Bashir Gemayel, became president of Lebanon, and he sought national reconciliation talks to settle differences among the various factions that divided Lebanon - Phalangist, Marionite, Druse, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and others. The United States was supporting Gemayel's government and its army, while bloody fighting reigned between hostile factions in Beirut. On September 22, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines back into Lebanon to support the Lebanese armed forces, and they were based at a reinforced concrete structure by the airport on the outskirts of Beirut.

On April 18, 1983, a truck drove up to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and exploded, killing 49 and injuring 120. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Early Sunday morning, on October 23, a truck with the equivalence of 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed against the Marine barracks near Beirut's airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen. A few moments later, a bomb exploded at the French barracks, killing 58.

President Reagan spoke of justice for those who had directed the bombing of the Marine barracks, but exactly who was responsible was not information that the CIA could provide him. Some suspected a new group that had entered Lebanon from Iran in 1982, the Hezbollah (Party of God) - a group suspected of receiving support from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Under pressure from Congress, President Reagan withdrew his forces from Lebanon, announcing that the Marines were coming home "because they did all that could be done." The Marines were redeployed to the safety aboard its ships offshore. And to some terrorists the United States appeared to be a "paper tiger."

Some Syrian troops were still in Lebanon, and in Beirut a pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli government assumed power, while rival factions continued to fight for control of the city, with car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. In Beirut, on March 16, 1984, members of Islamic Jihad kidnapped the CIA chief for Lebanon, William Buckley. The following year Buckley would be dead from what was believed to be torture. On September 20, 1984, a truck bomb exploded at the U.S. embassy annex in east Beirut. Twenty-three were killed and more than 60 injured, with "Islamic Jihad" claiming credit.

Islamic Jihad hijacked a Kuwaiti airliner on December 3. They killed two U.S. citizens, and the hijackers found asylum in Iran. Islamic Jihad kidnapped a U.S. journalist, Terry Anderson, on March 16, 1985. And on June 9 they kidnapped Thomas Sutherland, the Dean of Agriculture at the American University in Beirut.

On June 14, members of Hezbollah hijacked a TWA flight to Rome, diverted it to Beirut and beat and killed a U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stetham. On September 25, terrorists belonging to Force 17, a group associated with the PLO, murdered three Israeli citizens on their yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus. On October 1, Israel retaliated by sending military aircraft against the PLO headquarters in Tunis, killing 65 people and wounding bystanders.

Abdul Abbas, member of the POL Executive Committee, masterminded the hijacking of an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. The event began on October 7, and the hijackers killed an elderly Jewish-American in a wheel chair - Leon Klinghoffer.

On November 23, four members of Abu Nidal's group hijacked an Egyptian airliner flying from Athens to Cairo. They forced the plane to land in Malta. The Maltese refused to refuel the airliner, and the terrorists began shooting passengers one by one. Egyptian commandos recaptured the airplane, but many died - passengers and commandos.

On December 27, 1985, Abu Nidal terrorists attacked holiday travelers in the airports of Rome and Vienna. Eighteen vacationers died.

In Lebanon, a peacekeeping accord was created in 1986, but it soon fell apart, and that year ferocious battles were fought between Lebanon's Druse and Shiite militias in West Beirut. Then in February, 1987, Syrian forces came again in large number and quelled the turmoil.

War in Afghanistan and the Mujahideen

Between 1953 and '63, Afghanistan's prime minister, Prince Mohammad Daoud, introduced reforms and closer ties with the Soviet Union. In 1973, after having been out of office for ten years, he returned in a coup that overthrew the monarchy and established a republic. Then, in 1978, military officers overthrew him, leaving Daoud and eighteen of his and his brother's family dead.

The new president of Afghanistan was Nur Mohammad Taraki. He claimed that its policies were based on Afghan nationalism, Islamic principles, socioeconomic justice and nonalignment with foreign powers. The new regime announced its reform programs: elimination of usury, equal rights for women, land reforms, and administrative decrees. Many in Afghanistan felt threatened by the reforms. Tensions rose. The Taraki regime began arresting opponents, and it signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Uncoordinated rebellions arose across Afghanistan. An Afghan guerrilla movement, the Mujahideen, was born. In 1979, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union sent 80,000 military personnel into Afghanistan, telling the administration of President Jimmy Carter that he was doing so at the request of Afghanistan's government.

The Saudis, with their abundance of petro-dollars, began aiding the Mujahideen - the Saudis spending from 20 to 25 million dollars a month.  Maybe as many as 2,000 Arab volunteers went to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Mujahideen - some of them released from prisons in Egypt, the Egyptian government happy to be rid of them. Some Wahhabi fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia also joined with the Mujahideen. One of them was a 25-year-old idealist named Osama bin Laden. Rather than pursue pleasure that inherited wealth had made possible for him, bin Laden was interested in advancing the cause of Islam, and, in 1982, while fighting for the Mujahideen, he was wounded in the foot.

In October 1984, the head of the CIA, William Casey, flew to Pakistan to plan strategy for helping in the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched Mujahideen rebels fire heavy weapons and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and detonators. During his visit, he proposed to his Pakistani hosts that propaganda materials be sent through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied them with thousands of Korans, books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan, and works extolling the heroes of Uzbek nationalism. Casey wanted to strike at what he saw as an overextended and potentially vulnerable Soviet empire. And, in March, 1985, the Reagan administration, acting on its National Security Directive 166, decided to escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan and to supply the Afghan rebels with an array of military technology and expertise.

Saudi money, meanwhile, was funding support for Muslim widows created by the war in Afghanistan. Saudi money was spent on the building of orphanages and a field hospital. One who was released from an Egyptian prison in 1984 and left Egypt in 1986 was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. On the Afghan-Pakistani border he joined the Red Crescent Organization, funded by the Saudis, and he treated the anti-Soviet Muslim wounded. He became an associate of bin Laden, who was there also doing charity work, donating his wealth and labor to the cause of those suffering from the war.

Among those who wished to blame everything on the United States a myth was in the making, to appear full blown among this minority after September 11, 2001. Ignoring the mindset that was a part of what went into the making of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization, and ignoring events in the Middle East outside the policies of the United States, they would claim that bin Laden and others, such as al-Zawahiri, were basically the product of the CIA and the United States.

The First Palestinian Intifada

In December, 1987, an Israeli truck had struck and injured some Palestinian laborers, and rather than treating it as a traffic accident, the Palestinians had reacted with great emotion, and youths took to throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians were fed-up with Israeli occupation, and a campaign of children throwing stones at occupying soldiers continued for months and advertised Palestinian grievances. The PLO was stunned by the greater success of kids arousing support for the Palestinians. Arab states were concerned about the popularization and spread of rebellion and in January, 1988, an Arab summit meeting took place in Tunisia. Hoping to apply control on the rising they recognized Arafat as the leader of the Intifada, despite Arafat not having organized it, and they provided him with money required to assert his leadership.

Within Israel itself a move for peace and giving the Palestinians some justice grew, especially among Israel's Labor Party and those who were not religious. Shimon Peres and Abba Eban, of Israel's Labor Party, were among those seeking a settlement with the Palestinians. But the violence continued.

On April 16, 1988, Israeli agents killed Abu Jihad (Khalil all-Wazir), a close aid of Arafat and second in command of the PLO's militant Fatah faction. The Israelis had held Abu Jihad responsible for the deaths of dozens of Israelis, but, like other retaliations, the assassination did nothing to advance disincentive against continuing Palestinian assaults. On July 11, three gunmen, reported to be Palestinian terrorists, attacked and killed nine tourists and injured 100 on a Greek ship, the City of Poros, as it was sailing toward a marina in suburban Athens.

In July, 1988, King Hussein of Jordan announced that he no longer considered the West Bank a part of his kingdom. In another matter not involving Israel,

On December 21, 1988,  a U.S. Pan American airliner, Flight 103, from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Evidence was to point to an explosion in the baggage department. It was not a matter that involved Israel, but people did believe it was about terrorism in the Middle East. The bomb is believed to be revenge for the accidental shooting down of the Iranian airliner by the U.S. Navy in July.

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