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So, which time period do we find ourselves? A US president, after months of implicit backing, has ultimately stepped in to stop an offensive by Israeli forces that has transformed extensive sections of a urban center in the region to debris, resulting in thousands dead and generating global outrage.

The offensive has come after a succession of strikes on Israel. Currently, facing demands from the White House, the prime minister of Israel, a right-leaning figure with a talent for popular speech and an intense sense of historic Zionist mission, has agreed to a halt in hostilities.

Historical Parallels

The era is not the current year, but 1982. The urban center is not Gaza City, but the Lebanese capital. The president is Ronald Reagan, not the current administration.

There are numerous variations between the situation in the Lebanese nation more than four in the past and recent developments in Palestinian territories in the past two years. The October attack of last year, which resulted in 1,200 and included two hundred fifty captured, bears little comparison with the comparatively limited efforts of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the year or so preceding the Israeli incursion of Lebanon.

Uncanny Similarities

Some are uncanny. The US leader eventually picked up the phone the counterpart, informing him that events in the city was "a holocaust" and indicating the relations between their states could be seriously harmed if the conflict persisted.

In 1982, comparable to present circumstances, the war developed in real time on millions of screens. Numerous reporters entered Beirut to cover for the first time an Arab–Israeli war without information control by the combatants.

Results and Outcomes

The events following the call from Reagan and the truce in the city is educational. The PLO, its groups and officials were scattered across vast distances and a various states.

American leadership then pulled out US-led peacekeepers – a breach of the understanding with Arafat. Bashir Gemayel, the nation's newly elected head of state and Israel's preferred proxy, was murdered by Syrian security services.

Regional Transformation

Comparable developments occurred across the rest of the region. By the end of the 1970s, the increasingly non-religious and forward-thinking concepts that had seemed to offer the hope of a new future in the Arab and Islamic worlds a decade or so earlier were undermined.

The results of this were quickly apparent, very quickly

Across the region, the Israeli state and the United States now faced opponents who were considerably more unyielding, lethal and capable than the progressive groups and independence advocates of previous times.

Global Approach

Internationally, the results of this were unexpected. During the 1970s, western analysts and government representatives had attempted to comprehend what caused violent extremism.

Then, in the start of the eighties, this stopped. Government officials in the America, the United Kingdom and additional countries were no longer interested in "fundamental sources" of violence.

Contemporary Echoes

Last week, sources suggest that today's officials told government representatives that the state could not fight all the world and recognized territorial ambitions for a independent nation.

This also was an repetition of that earlier period. In the aftermath of the military incursion of Lebanon, past government told the Israeli government that the power of its military alone could not "achieve just and lasting peace" and acknowledged "justified demands of the Palestinian population."

Yet a American-sponsored diplomatic initiative intended to resolve those grievances failed to progress. From exile, political figures looked on impotently.

Worldwide concern in the area waned. The state rejected accommodations. Subsequently, there was the initial uprising, and the founding of additional militant groups.

• The repetitions of the past present sobering perspectives for current diplomatic initiatives
• Enduring agreements require dealing with fundamental problems rather than short-term truces
• Local circumstances continue to develop in complex and often unpredictable ways