Terrorism is also closely linked to the conflicts
of the Middle East. It is a phenomenon that is not
amenable to diplomacy and reason; it is difficult to
control; a few ruthless men and women can com-
mit spectacular acts of carnage and so capture the
world headlines. In this way, the numerically weak
draw attention to their causes in the expectation of
exercising influence out of proportion to the sup-
port they enjoy. Television carries these crimes
graphically into millions of homes the world over.
Terrorism is not confined to the Middle East and
loose connections were forged between various
terrorist groups – German, Japanese, Irish and
Arab. A Czech factory supplied the most widely
used plastic explosive, Semtex. Colonel Gaddafi of
Libya and President Assad of Syria, among others,
provided funds and armaments to a number of ter-
rorist organisations fighting for what they regarded
as just causes. As a result, terrorism greatly
increased from the end of the 1960s. Among the
most continuous perpetrators were various Arab
groups hostile to Israel and the US, but also to
each other. Car bombs in the Lebanon’s capital,
Beirut, caused indiscriminate slaughter, planes
were hijacked, martyrs blew themselves up to kill
their enemies. The list of terrorist acts is too long
to be detailed here. Among the most horrifying
was the murder of the Israeli athletes at the
Munich Olympics in September 1972. But some-
times the intended victims could be rescued.
In June 1976 the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France
plane with eighty-three Israelis on board; its final
landing place was Entebbe in Uganda, where the
Israelis were held as hostages. This set the scene
for one of the most dramatic and daring rescue
operations. Idi Amin, the crazed dictator of
Uganda, appointed himself a mediator – the
release of terrorists in the prisons of Israel and
other countries was demanded by the hijackers.
Instead, Israeli paratroopers landed and, camou-
flaging their arrival at the airport in a fleet of cars
as might be used by Amin and his entourage,
broke undetected into the airport building, killed
the captors and rescued all but three of the
hostages, with the loss of one Israeli officer and
an elderly Israeli woman (formerly a hostage)
murdered in a Ugandan hospital.
Against suicide attacks defence is difficult. In
the Lebanon, sixty-three Americans were killed in
April 1983 by a fanatical Shia Muslim driving a car
full of explosives into the American Embassy in
Beirut; a few months later, in October, another
suicide bomber killed 241 US marines at their
base close to Beirut airport. An especial horror in
December 1988 was the explosion over Scotland
of a Pan American jumbo en route from London
to New York, causing the deaths of all its crew and
passengers. But Western lives lost were but a tiny
fraction of the number of people killed almost
daily in the Middle East. The Lebanon was in vir-
tual anarchy, from the mid-1970s to 1991, with
civilians caught up in the infighting of murderous
factions, though in 1992 the kidnapping of for-
eign hostages ended. Western responses were lim-
ited and largely ineffective. The organisers of
terror, the men behind the scenes, established
their shifting headquarters in Baghdad, Teheran,
Damascus and Tripoli, their various factions no
more than pawns in Arab struggles for predomin-
ance. Only the Arab leaders themselves could con-
trol them, and their hold was not absolute.
No country in the Middle East has suffered
more from brutal civil conflicts than the Lebanon.
The Christian Lebanese merchants and bankers
did not long enjoy the prosperity the oil-rich
Middle East brought them in the 1960s and
1970s. A power-sharing agreement, known as the
National Pact and in operation since the Second
World War, guaranteed the presidency to a
Maronite Christian, but it fell apart under the
pressure of Muslim–Christian and left–right rival-
ries, resulting in civil war in 1958. Though fight-
ing ceased for a time, the central Lebanese
government was unable to overcome the prob-
lems presented by the class conflicts, the family
loyalties and the various militias of Muslim and
Christian groups. In 1967, the Lebanon’s pre-
dicament was further aggravated by the arrival
of uninvited Palestinian refugees following the
Arab–Israeli War. Arab enmity towards Israel
deepened the gulf between what had become a
Muslim majority, which included the poorer part
of the Lebanese population, and the wealthier
Maronite Christians. ‘National’ for the Muslims
now meant pro-Arab; for the Christians (except904 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY