Broken Promises, Part II: The Vacuum and the Fire

By the end of the 1970s, something volatile had begun to swirl beneath the sand. The region was already burdened with the weight of betrayal — of lines drawn in European parlors, of promises forged in foreign chancelleries, far from the lands they carved. But now the ground began to tremble with something new. Not the slow, smoldering resentment of occupation — but ideological rupture. Revolution. In Tehran. In Kabul. In Beirut. And soon enough, in Gaza.

In one sense, it began with the fall of a man.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — the Shah of Iran, monarch of the peacock throne and a keystone of American power in the Gulf — was overthrown in 1979. He had ruled with oil money and secret police, presiding over a kingdom styled in the image of Western modernity. But the illusion wore thin. The wealth pooled at the top. The prisons filled. The mosques whispered.

When the revolution came, it wasn’t liberal. It wasn’t secular. It didn’t echo Western slogans of rights and reason. It came robed in theology — Islamic, furious, and popular. It rose from the ashes of colonial humiliation and burned with something older: memory. The Islamic Republic of Iran did not just reject the Shah. It rejected the entire scaffolding of American power in the region. And it did so with a vocabulary no Cold War playbook could decipher.

As Ayatollah Khomeini declared, “Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.”

To his followers, he was the voice of divine justice; to his enemies, a theocrat cloaked in absolutism. But even in exile — in the quiet French village of Neauphle-le-Château — he had watched the tapes of protests, listened to the cassette sermons smuggled into Iran, and wept. He believed history had bent toward him not through force, but through faith.

The Americans panicked — on camera, in Congress, across continents. The Soviets panicked too, though more quietly, with the colder fear of contagion. To their south, across old imperial lines, millions of Muslims were watching. Moscow had spent decades trying to bleach religion from Central Asia. But now, from Qom to Kabul, Islam wasn’t just alive. It was governing.

So in December 1979, Moscow did what empires do when the map begins to bleed: it invaded.

Afghanistan — mountainous, tribal, already wobbling under a Marxist regime collapsing beneath its own slogans — became the next arena for imperial overreach. Soviet tanks rolled in. A rebellion rose to meet them. What began as a power play became a decade-long hemorrhage.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan launched Operation Cyclone — a covert war so vast it would become the most expensive CIA operation of the Cold War. Over $3 billion in arms and aid funneled through Pakistan’s ISI. The Saudis matched U.S. funds, dollar for dollar. The mujahideen — an unruly alliance of Islamist fighters, tribal leaders, and foreign volunteers — fought the Red Army in the valleys and ridgelines.

Among them was a soft-spoken Saudi aristocrat named Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t a battlefield commander. He didn’t need to be. He was building something else: a transnational current of ideology and capital, sanctified by faith and unbound by borders.

The Soviets bled out slowly — into the mountains, and then into memory.

But while Afghanistan burned in the east, Lebanon cracked open in the west.

After Black September in 1970, when Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy crushed the PLO in a storm of blood and artillery, Arafat and his fighters fled to Beirut. There, they built a state-in-exile: issuing passports, running schools, negotiating with Moscow, launching raids. Arafat became the global face of Palestinian defiance — keffiyeh wrapped like a flag, sidearm on his hip, speaking in parables and warnings.

But beneath the symbolism was a man who barely slept, who paced the nights in exile with maps of return folded in his pocket. He spoke the language of liberation, but negotiated in the language of survival — always aware that to be the face of a people was also to carry their fractures.

In 1974, he stood before the UN General Assembly and declared: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

It was the first time a non-state actor addressed the Assembly. And for a moment, the world didn’t just see a problem. It saw a people.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Officially, it was to stop PLO rockets. But it escalated into a siege. West Beirut was bombed for weeks. American envoys brokered a ceasefire. Under U.S. supervision, Yasser Arafat and more than 11,000 PLO fighters were evacuated by sea to Tunis. The revolution went into exile — again. The PLO’s state-in-exile, once carved into the neighborhoods of West Beirut, was dismantled. And with its departure, a vacuum opened in Lebanon’s fractured south.

Then came Sabra and Shatila.

From September 16 to 18, 1982, Christian Phalangist militias, allied with Israel and furious over the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel, entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israeli forces surrounded the camps and fired flares into the night to illuminate the killing fields. Over three days, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of civilians were massacred. Women. Elderly. Children asleep on dirt floors.

The Kahan Commission in Israel later found Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for not acting to prevent the massacre. He resigned under pressure. But something had already taken root in the ashes.

In the southern suburbs of Beirut, in shattered Shia neighborhoods, Hezbollah was born.

It didn’t begin with manifestos or flags. It grew in silence — in ruined mosques, in martyrdom posters, in whispered prayers for revenge. Trained and funded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, it began to fight. First Israeli troops. Then rival militias. Then the idea that Lebanon could ever be whole again. By 1985, it had declared itself. But its roots had already dug deep.

In October 1983, that root bared its teeth. A suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen — the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces since World War II. Almost simultaneously, a second truck struck a French paratrooper base. The message was unmistakable: the ground had shifted. America had entered a new kind of battlefield, where armies were not met by armies, but by martyrdom.

And then, east of the Shatt al-Arab, war erupted again.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. He saw a revolution disoriented, leaderless, bleeding — and he struck. What followed was an eight-year trench war of medieval brutality. Chemical weapons. Teenage human waves. Missiles crashing into cities. Over a million dead.

The United States backed Saddam — with satellite intelligence, military supplies, and diplomatic cover. So did the Soviets. Iraq was the bulwark. Iran was the wildfire.

But Iran survived. And in revolutionary logic, survival is victory. It learned hard lessons: treaties don’t protect, allies vanish, and real power doesn’t lie in official recognition, but in reach — in networks, not armies. You don’t confront empires with matching strength. You destabilize, disrupt, outlast. That is the logic of asymmetry.

Israel, too, was learning.

In 1981, it launched Operation Opera — an airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The world condemned it. But inside Israel’s evolving security doctrine — what would become known as the Begin Doctrine — it became sacred: preempt. Strike early. Ask no one’s permission.

In the same period, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz warned: “We must reach a consensus … that our responses [to terrorism] should go beyond passive defense to consider means of active prevention, preemption, and retaliation.” A new era of American posture was emerging — less reactive, more anticipatory. Less diplomacy. More dominance.

All the while, beneath this storm of states and arsenals, the Palestinians remained: displaced, fragmented, occupied. In the camps. At checkpoints. In headlines, sometimes. In policy papers, rarely.

Until December 1987.

A traffic collision in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp — an Israeli truck hitting a group of Palestinian workers — sparked protests. The protests spread. Became riots. Became a movement. The First Intifada had begun.

It wasn’t orchestrated by the PLO. It wasn’t commanded from Tunis. It rose from the ground up: students, teachers, mothers organizing supply lines, boys throwing stones at tanks. Neighborhoods formed committees. Streets became frontlines. Graffiti became declaration. A new Palestinian politics was being written in spray paint and blood.

Arafat adapted. In 1988, he declared a Palestinian state. In Geneva, he recognized Israel, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and renounced terrorism. Washington responded. Diplomatic contact opened.

But peace, like power, has its enemies.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. The Cold War — the binary logic that had divided allies and enemies, justified coups, armed proxies — ended. The Arab world lost its second superpower. Iraq was isolated. Iran was sanctioned. The Palestinians were again pushed to the margins. And Israel stood ascendant — the lone regional power now backed by the only superpower left standing.

In August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. His army crossed the border in hours. The U.S. mobilized. Operation Desert Storm began in January 1991. Shock and awe. Tomahawks. CNN in night vision. The war lasted six weeks. Iraq’s army folded. Its ambitions cracked. Its cities burned under the glow of satellite imagery and the doctrine of total dominance. A new age had arrived — one where power didn’t just march; it broadcast.

But from that wreckage came a diplomatic ember.

In October 1991, the Madrid Conference opened — the first time Israelis and Palestinians sat, however indirectly, within the same diplomatic frame. The PLO wasn’t officially at the table. But the door had opened.

And behind that door, far from cameras, in a snow-covered guesthouse in Oslo, something unlikely took root.

In secret, unofficial talks, Israeli officials and PLO negotiators sketched outlines of a new future. They were unauthorized. Uncertain. But over months, they built a framework.

In September 1993, it went public.

On the White House lawn, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands. Bill Clinton stood between them — smiling, coaxing history forward with open palms. The Oslo Accords were not a peace treaty. They didn’t deliver a state. But they did this: the PLO recognized Israel. And Israel recognized the Palestinians as a people with legitimate political representation.

For a moment — brief as a held breath — the arc seemed to bend.

But beneath the white tents of diplomacy, the ground still trembled.

The clock was already ticking.

Next in Part III: Rabin is assassinated. The peace collapses. And the 21st century opens not with justice — but with smoke.