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1898: The French writer Emile Zola publishes “J’accuse,” an investigation in the form of an open letter revealing the Dreyfus Affair for what it is—the false imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer on trumped up charges driven by anti-Semitism and paranoia against Germany. Dreyfus had been arrested on Oct. 15, 1894 arrested on charges of treason. He was found guilty and sentenced to exile on Devil’s Island.
He was exonerated after a long campaign on his behalf by friends and the likes of Zola. The affair is notable in Middle Eastern history because it illustrates where the Middle East stood at the time regarding Jews. As historian Bernard Lewis wrote in What Went Wrong, “Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors.” Where anti-Semitism was evident in the Middle East, it usually revealed itself among Christian communities.
1958: The Saharan Army of Liberation, also known as the Moroccan Liberation Army, launches an attack on Spanish forces in the disputed territory of Spanish Sahara (currently the Western Sahara). The Spanish war ministry claims two days later that the attack, at Edchera, near El Aiun, has been repulsed. Spain claims 241 members of the Saharan Army were killed in the battle while the Spanish Foreign Legion suffered 51 dead and wounded.
1959: Two American students studying agriculture in Israel are seized while hiking on the northern tip of Lake Galilee, across the border from Israel, by Syrian troops.
Samuel Coplald and Yoram Fisher, both 18, are questioned, searched and turned over to United Nations observer.
1959: In Lebanon, Saeb Salam, who led a leftist-Muslim attempted to overthrow Lebanese president Camille Chamoun in the summer of 1958, returns to a hero’s welcome in Beirut after a month in Egypt. The attempted coup led Chamoun to request the Eisenhower administration to send troops. U.S. Marines landed in Beirut, ostensibly to restore calm and prevent an Arab-nationalist takeover of Lebanon, stayed a few weeks, then left.
- Beirut 1958: When the Marines Landed (from the Cold War Museum)
- U.S. Marines Remember the 1958 US “Intervention” In Lebanon
1967: Yemeni royalists Foreign Affairs Minister Mohammed Al-Qazir charges and an American advisers in Beirut who visited the scene claim that nine United Arab Republic air force jets dropped chemical-gas bombs on the village of Kitaf, 25 miles south of the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border, on Jan. 5, killing some 200 villagers by asphyxiation.
1986: Heavy fighting erupts in Beirut and its northern and eastern suburbs between rival Christian militias. The fighting pits Phalangist forces loyal to President Amin Gemayel against fighters of the 6,000-strong Lebanese Forces led by Elie Hobeika, which broke away from the Phalangists in March 1985. The battles presage a chronic internecine war between Christian factions in Lebanon that would last until the end of the civil war in 1990.
1986: Streert battles explode all over Aden, capital of Southern Yemen, after an attempted coup against the Marxist government of Ali Nasser Muhammad al Hassani by followers of Abdul Fattah Ismail, a former president and a more doctrinaire Marxist who has just returned from five years in Moscow. Al Hassani had been trying to restore relations with neighboring Saudi Arabia and Oman.
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