Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

by Kim Ghattas

began in a spectacularly violent fashion, with plumes of smoke, twisted metal, and mangled bodies. In November 1982, the Israeli command post in Tyre was blown up, killing seventy-five Israeli military personnel. In April 1983, the American embassy in Beirut was bombed: sixty-three people were killed. The following October, the Marine Corps barracks and the French paratroopers’ headquarters were blown up. The Americans and the French had come to Lebanon as part of a multinational force for peace in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal. More than three hundred were killed, including 241 Americans, in the worst disaster for the United States since the Vietnam War and the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.