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Contemporary Review of the Middle East

1(3) 269–333 2014 SAGE Publications India

Private Limited SAGE Publications

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Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/2347798914542326

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The PLO at Fifty: A Historical Perspective

Avraham Sela

Abstract

The article offers an overview of the political history of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its birth to the present. It analyzes the social and politi-cal origins of the PLO, the impact on its politics of decades of regional upheavals in the scope and nature of the Arab–Israeli conflict and its ability to function as a national framework of resistance and civilian organizations despite geo-graphical and political obstacles. Given the PLO’s nature as a non-state regional actor, the article is particularly concerned with its political adjustment along with the decline of pan-Arab identity and the Arab states collective action for the Palestinian cause, the post-1973 peace process, and the shifting center of gravity of Palestinian national action from the Arab states neighboring Israel into the Occupied Territories. The article thus explains the PLO’s survival and repeated rises from the ashes following military debacles and internal crises and examines how the Oslo process and the advent of the self-governing Palestinian Authority have affected the PLO as an overall national leadership.

Keywords

PLO, PA, Fatah, Hamas, Yasser Arafat, Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Middle East peace

Introduction

The Palestinian National Movement has come a long way since the cataclysm which shook it in 1948. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recog-nized the right of the Arab-Palestinian community to a sovereign state of its own. That no Arab-Palestinian state was established following that decision could be attributed to a number of causes, namely deeply fragmented society and politics, institutional and material weakness of the Palestinian national leadership embod-ied by the Higher Arab Committee headed by the exiled Haj Amin al-Husseini, and its extreme dependence on the Arab states—incompetent and in conflict with each other. Above all, it was the result of the Palestinian leadership’s longstanding failure to translate its total rejection of the Zionist enterprise, especially at the

Avraham Sela is A. Ephraim and Shirley Diamond Chair in the Department of International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; a senior research fellow at the Truman Institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Email: [email protected]

Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 1, 3 (2014): 269–333

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crucial phase of the latter’s bid for sovereignty in part of historic Palestine, into a concrete and efficient counteraction.

The term ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) adopted across the Arab world to represent the far-reaching meanings of the defeat in the 1948 Palestine war was especially tragic for the Palestinians. The scope of the disaster was indeed far beyond the victims, the displacement of more than half of the Arab population from their homes, and the social and political disintegration, especially salient at the level of the social and political elites. Beyond the loss of land and other material assets, 1948 remained a defining event for the Palestinians of losing their homeland which came to be divided among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. The immense crisis that befell the Palestinian society brought to a halt its development as a fledgling political community which owed much of its emergence and distinct characteris-tics to the post-First World War struggle against both the British Mandate and the Zionist enterprise. Against this backdrop, the concept of a distinct ‘Palestinian identity’ was blurred and almost disappeared, at least for a decade after 1948 which, in retrospect, can be interpreted as a major catalyst for the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement. The reconstruction of Palestinian national identity and institutions and bringing the Palestinian cause back to a center stage of the Arab world and the international community were indeed the two main projects undertaken—and successfully attained—by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since it was established in 1964.

The advent of the PLO as a nucleus of organized national movement was pre-ceded by a discernible change in the Arab public attitude toward the concept of a distinct Palestinian identity which stemmed from the prolonged deadlock of the Palestinian refugee problem and the social and political radicalization undergone by the Arab and Palestinian societies alike, especially during the first two decades after the 1948 defeat. These processes ripened toward the mid-1960s bringing about a proliferation of voluntary Palestinian civil frameworks motivated by national activist ideology and practice and stressing the concept of ‘Palestinian Entity.’

Since its establishment, the PLO scored gradual progress in mobilizing and bringing under its banner the vast majority of the Palestinians, first outside historic Palestine and then increasingly inside it in a way reminiscent of Zionism’s emer-gence in the diaspora followed by incremental move into the homeland. The con-sequences of the 1967 war served well the PLO’s efforts to present its objectives in terms of national liberation from foreign domination. The war resulted in oblit-erating the ‘Green Line’ armistice borders that had divided the Arab-Palestinian population within historic Palestine—placing over half of the Palestinian people worldwide under Israel’s rule. Henceforth, the three main Palestinian communi-ties in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip experienced a rapid process of ‘Palestinization’ namely, a growing internalization of the concepts, symbols, and authority of the Palestinian national movement.

The PLO’s ever-increasing international recognition and support as well as its ability to rally the vast majority of the Palestinians under its leadership resulted


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from the dialectic of a basic common consciousness among the Palestinian refu-gees as aliens in relation to the indigenous population and longing to the ‘lost paradise,’ self-devotion to armed struggle and especially favorable regional con-ditions for maintaining both military and political action. The cumulative effect of these elements accounted for keeping the Palestinian issue high on the inter-national agenda and generating increasing moral and political pressure on Israel to end the state of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The PLO’s impressive achievements in terms of international recognition were far from emanating directly from its military activities, save their ostensible suc-cess in entangling the Arab states surrounding Israel in the undesirable war of 1967. The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel in this war indeed seemed to have opened new opportunities for waging a successful guerilla war-fare along the Chinese or Algerian models. Despite occasional inflictions of casu-alties on Israel, however—albeit more on civilians than the military—the Palestinian resistance groups quite early on failed in implementing successful guerilla warfare within the Occupied Territories. Taking refuge in neighboring national Arab territories as staging grounds for launching raids on Israeli-held areas both in pre-1967 Israel or the West Bank and Gaza Strip brought on those Arab states painful Israeli retaliations resulting in violent collisions between the state and the Palestinian armed organizations. The inevitable contradiction between the ‘revolution’ and raison d’état inevitably resulted in repeated crises in this context culminating in the expulsions of the resistance groups from their main territorial bases in Jordan (1970–71) and Lebanon (1982–83).

What is striking indeed is that the PLO’s long travel occurred despite repeated challenges posed to it by ardent rivals, political failures and military defeats, ups and downs of its political stature, and the recurrent attempts by certain Arab actors to repress or co-opt its leadership, and by Israel’s interest in eliminating it alto-gether. A necessary condition explaining the PLO’s survivability and growing international recognition, despite repeated calamities and against all odds, was its resilience and ability to adjust its national objectives to the narrowing opportuni-ties, a process facilitated by the organization’s representative institutions.

Structurally, by 1968 the PLO had become a loose coalition of autonomous guerilla groups—some of whom ideologically saturated and identified with spe-cific Arab regimes—based on maximalist objectives and broadly shared princi-ples, with Fatah as its main component. Fatah’s pragmatism and focus on Palestinian national activism rather than all-Arab issues enabled it to ally with most Arab states at any given time and win their material and political support and preserve its position as the largest and better-represented faction in the PLO. With Fatah’s echelons at key positions in the PLO institutions and bureaucracy, the lat-ter’s policies largely reflected Fatah’s priorities to the extent of blurring the lines between them and occasionally producing rifts with its partners. Fatah’s ambiva-lent status had mixed impact on the PLO’s function as a supreme national author-ity: on the one hand, major political changes supported by Fatah seriously risked criticism or even cessation from the PLO by certain groups; on the other hand,


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it allowed a certain freedom of maneuver to the PLO/Fatah leadership in coping with new constraints by employing euphemism and multiple voices, a salient character trait of the PLO political behavior. The PLO/Fatah leadership was thus willing to adopt new concepts and strategies necessary for its survival even at the cost of cessation by other factions.

The necessity for adjustment in accordance with regional trends, especially in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, grew acute following the 1973 war when Egypt embarked on a diplomatic process under American auspices which culmi-nated in signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Egypt’s separate agreement with Israel, the eruption of Iraq–Iran war in 1980, and the expulsion of the armed Palestinian headquarters and personnel from Lebanon in 1982, all indicated that not only the prospects for an all-Arab offensive against Israel were non-existent but the Palestinian resistance itself had lost the military option. Politically, how-ever, these events underlined the growing significance of the Palestinian issue in the context of the Arab–Israeli conflict, which culminated in the Palestinian upris-ing (intifada) in the Occupied Territories.

Set off in late 1987, at the PLO’s lowest point ever, the Intifada abruptly shifted the center of gravity of the Palestinian national struggle for statehood from exile into the Occupied Territories, forcing the PLO to cross the Rubicon and officially adopt the concept of ‘two-state’ solution. The main challenge the Intifada posed for the PLO, however, was the rise of a newly established opposition within the Occupied Territories embodied by the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) which sought to appropriate, both morally and practically, the Palestinian national struggle and lead it according to its own doctrine. It was mainly this threat to its status as the exclusive Palestinian national authority that forced the PLO to join the post-Gulf War Middle East peace process and, under dire conditions, sign with Israel the imperfect Oslo accords.

Israel’s official recognition and acceptance of the PLO as its partner for nego-tiations over the future of the Occupied Territories and the establishment of a self-governing Palestinian Authority (PA) was indeed the zenith of the PLO’s long, albeit unfinished, struggle for Palestinian statehood. These accords, how-ever, also expedited processes of weakening commitment of the regional Arab actors toward the Palestinian cause leaving the Palestinians largely alone in their effort to realize their trimmed vision for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The 1993 Oslo process indeed began a new phase in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict toward an agreed solution, which proved to be long, arduous, and bloody for both sides. In hindsight, the stumbled process, especially since the al-Aqsa Intifada has triggered strong opposition forces on both sides of the divide render-ing an agreed settlement less and less realistic. The long stalemate in deciding the final status of the Palestinian Occupied Territories and continued Israeli occupa-tion of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, further aggravated the intra-Palestinian competition between Fatah, the dominant faction ruling the PA, and Hamas. The culmination of this internal struggle in the latter’s violent takeover of the Gaza



Strip further distanced the prospects for an agreed solution of the conflict but mainly questioned the future and role of the PLO in Palestinian politics.

This article offers a historical overview of the PLO’s trajectory from its birth to the present focusing on issues that still remain valid, including the social and political origins of the PLO, the impact on its politics of decades of regional upheavals and radical changes in the scope and nature of Israel’s conflict with its neighbors, its ability to function as a national resistance movement despite geo-graphical and political barriers, and the question of its survival and repeated rises from the ashes; and most of all, how has the Oslo process and the advent of the self-governing PA, its institutions and procedures, affected the PLO as an overall national leadership?

From Disaster to Restoration of Palestinian National Identity

Although about half of the post-1948 Palestinian world population resides out of the boundaries of historic Palestine, primarily in the Arab states adjacent to Israel, they remained a distinct identity group with particular social and political charac-teristics, which were underlined along the years of exile and alienation by the ‘host-ing’ Arab states. Within historic Palestine too, the two-decade long dissection of the Palestinian population between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt further deepened their traditional social, economic, and cultural cleavages in accordance with the condi-tions that dominated these areas. Even within these sectors, there still exist distinct lines separating permanent residents from refugees. These differences indeed sur-faced in various forms during the period under discussion parallel to increasingly shared values of a particular collective identity pivoted by the vision of national liberation and political sovereignty in an independent Palestinian state.

The birth of the PLO is largely explained by the dialectic of both exogenous and endogenous factors and thus should be seen as a fruition of a process combin-ing intra-Palestinian and regional Arab circumstances. In view of the disastrous results of the 1948 war for the Palestinians’ modest and short-lived experience of practicing distinct nationalism under the Mandate, the revival of a Palestinian national movement and rapid development of its institutions and capabilities were by no means inevitable. Rather, it was for the most part the consequence of the restrictive policies including economic, political, and legal discrimination con-ducted by the Arab states toward the Palestinian refugees and by the state of Israel toward its Arab minority, together with the difficulty of adjusting to the displace-ment and loss of land experienced by the vast majority of the refugees.

Although the surrounding Arab countries seemed as a natural haven for the Palestinian refugees given their identical culture and social traditions, with the exception of Jordan, they refused to integrate the newcomers into their societies, either by naturalization or by providing them permanent residential rights. This can be interpreted as a deliberate policy of preserving the refugee problem as a


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moral and political weapon in the conflict with Israel, as the latter has indeed maintained. Other factors, however, constrained the option of settling and inte-grating the refugees in the neighboring Arab countries. Given that the vast major-ity of the refugees came from a rural background in which land was not only a source of living but a way of life defining social and inter-personal relations; the displacement had a particularly destructive impact on their ability to be integrated in urban centers or join the rural population in the Arab states to whom the Palestinian refugees deemed strangers.

In addition, the Palestinians were often blamed by other Arabs for bringing the disaster on themselves due to their unpatriotic behavior during the Mandate and the 1948 war. More specifically, Lebanon perceived the refugees, mostly Muslims, as a serious threat to its precarious confessional balance and thus prevented them even from work permits. Egypt maintained the Gaza Strip under military rule and denied its inhabitants access to the labor market. Even in Jordan, the only state that granted citizenship to the Palestinians and saw to integrate them into its econ-omy and political life, the Palestinians remained a discernibly separate group from the East Jordanian population.

The alienation, suspicion, and concern demonstrated by the Arab societies and political authorities toward the Palestinian refugees, however, constituted one set of the external factors that motivated the Palestinians to opt for proactive strategy of self-help. Equally important were the frustrated hopes of the Palestinians for an all-Arab ‘second round’ of war that would liberate Palestine and the bitter conclu-sion that despite their rhetoric the Arab states were deliberately avoiding such a showdown out of concern for their particular interests.

The cumulative effect of the above surrounding conditions of the Palestinians gave birth to an active national-revisionist Palestinian vision, upheld by middle-class educated and urban professionals of the first post-1948 generation of refu-gees. Best represented by the founding fathers of Fatah, these activists sought to rally the masses around their revolutionary concept of popular armed struggle along the lines of the Algerian and Vietnamese anti-colonial struggles. By the early-1960s, these Palestinian trends temporarily converged with, and took advan-tage of the highly disputed inter-Arab politics in which the Palestinian issue was extensively mobilized by the Arab states in their tireless effort to attain legitimacy on both domestic and regional levels.

One of the disastrous effects of the 1948 war was the harsh impact on the pres-ence in the Arab region of the Palestinians identity defining a particular Arab political community. The 1948 war not only ended with a disaster for the Arab-Palestinian society and the emergence of the State of Israel, the Palestinian national movement led by Haj Amin al-Husseini also lost the battle with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, its long lived arch-rival in the Arab world. The latter had long strove for incorporating western Palestine to its East Jordanian emirate which was implemented as soon as the conditions ripened for such meas-ure. The formal annexation of the West Bank to the Hashemite Kingdom sought to assimilate its 400,000 residents—in addition to a similar scope of Palestinian



refugees already in East Jordan—into a unitary political framework under the title of ‘Unity of the Two Banks’ while stamping out the Palestinian identity and mini-mizing the admini strative and religious status of Jerusalem.

In contrast, Egypt was salient in its efforts to uphold the Palestinian identity for reasons that had to do with its inter-Arab policies. Israel took similar measures by isolating the Arab population within its borders and defining it as an Arab minor-ity lacking any particular identity. The Arab population left in Israel was deci-sively rural, assuming traditional social structures which the strict control and restrictions imposed on it by the state preserved its distinct indigenous character traits. By the mid-1950s, Israel had managed to largely defy the international pressures to allow the return of a substantial number of Palestinians to their homes in Israel or even to pay retributions for their abandoned property. Nonetheless, the Arab collective policy on the Palestine problem up to the early-1960s was marked by defining the Palestinian problem as a refugee problem as demonstrated by the Arab states consequent efforts in the UN sessions and the repeated decisions they espoused stressing the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or receive financial compensation. This perception was partly represented by the wording of Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which remained the corner stone of all international peace efforts in the Arab–Israeli conflict. The resolution called for the resolution of the ‘refugee problem’ without specifically referring to the Palestinians in this context.

A prominent scholar of the Arab–Israeli conflict claimed that during the 1950s the Palestinians were in a state of ‘hibernation’ before the renewal of Palestinian national activity by Fatah at the end of that decade (Harkabi 1979). This would indeed be the case if one seeks a historical continuity from the Mandate to the movement restored in the late 1950s and especially the following decade. The transformation from ‘hibernation to awakening’ rightly describes only the state of the Palestinian refugees. The social, psychological, and material shock of dis-placement, dispersion, and livelihood difficulties, all contributed to displaying passivity and even apathy concerning political matters. This was not the case, however, with the permanent residents of the West Bank under Jordan’s rule who demonstrated active political involvement, mostly in opposition to the Hashemite regime. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the young educated population in the West Bank, passionately identified with pan-Arab and pan-Islamic ideologies and led the opposition to the Jordanian army’s British command and its alleged contri-bution to the 1948 disaster. Thousands of them joined parties with Arab-nationalist and Islamic visions (the Ba’ath Party, the Arab Nationalists Movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic Liberation Party) and the Communist Party.

Representing a strong quest for a ‘second round’ of war for the liberation of Palestine, these Palestinian activist groups openly challenged the Hashemite regime’s alliance with the West and called for adopting a militant policy toward Israel in cooperation with the nationalist Arab states. The parties and movements operating in Jordan, however, refrained from expressing a particular Palestinian identity, apparently to avoid head-on collision with the Jordanian establishment.


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The tendency toward political militancy and the pan-Arab vision grew stronger along with the rising prestige of Gamal Abd al-Nasser, especially in the wake of the joint British–French–Israeli offensive against Egypt in 1956 and the Egypt–Syria unification of 1958. Yet, despite efforts at mass mobilization and clandes-tine activity, these activist groups—with the exception of the Communist Party—suffered from organizational and political weaknesses, scarce material resources, and harsh repression by the state. Along with the tradition of Mandatory time, they maintained practical and ideological ties with Arab political centers such as Damascus and Cairo, which turned them all the more dangerous from the Jordanian authorities’ viewpoint.

It was during the first decade after the disaster of Palestine that the ideological and organizational foundations were laid for the evolution of the main constitu-ents of the PLO a few years later. These were also the years in which the outlook and political tendencies of many of the founders of Palestinian activist move-ments were molded along with acquiring higher education at the universities of Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus where they established networks with fellow- activists and contacts with official security and intelligence apparatuses alike. For many of them, this experience offered a ‘theoretical laboratory’ in which ideas and modes of action were constantly reviewed concluding that a thorough change in socio-cultural, political, and economic fields in the Arab world was inevitable. This was also the period in which many of these activists experienced imprison-ment and exile due to their political involvement and felt the lack of interest and alienation toward their problem by the Arab authorities.

The first generation of Palestinian activists after 1948 represented a different socioeconomic section compared to the Palestinian urban elite of the Mandate period which drew its power from traditional family positions, real estates, or senior and prestigious positions in the religious Islamic establishment. The new Palestinian leadership was mostly comprised of educated descendants of urban and rural leader and the newly emerging middle class. As such, these individuals had closer connections with the peasants and salaried workers because of their relatively modest background by which they could successfully mobilize masses of people onto the streets. Even so, their success with the lower classes, especially the rural people who comprised the majority of the population, was limited.

By the late 1950s or early 1960s, many of the Palestinian activists, similarly to other counterparts, experienced a serious crisis of expectations. In the internal arena, the militant political movements were fiercely repressed, whereas in the inter-Arab arena the Arab states failed in materializing the yearned Arab unity as demonstrated by the breakup of the United Arab Republic made of by Egypt and Syria only three and a half years after it had been created. These were the years of fierce inter-Arab struggles for regional leadership, hostile inter-Arab propaganda, and mutual subversion. The prevalent ideological fervor during those years although saturated with militant pan-Arabism and social revolutionary vision, could hardly conceal the low priority given to the Palestine problem by the Arab regimes. In hindsight, the marginalization of the cause of Palestine—though



highly attended rhetorically—and its subordination to the state’s interest were unavoidable at this tumultuous phase of state-building and the urgent need to bolster one’s particular sovereignty and independence as an autonomous entity in the face of strong popular and official endeavors to realize varied visions of Arab unity.

The PLO was founded in East Jerusalem by a conference comprised of public Palestinian figures approved by the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes held in late May 1964 in the presence of King Hussein. Originating from a temporary conver-gence of inter-Arab interests and discernible urge among Palestinian communities for action on their cause, the PLO virtually replaced the hitherto official Palestinian institution namely, the ‘All-Palestine Government,’ which had been established in Gaza in September 1948 and was represented in the League of Arab States until his passing away in 1963 by Ahmad Hilmi Basha, a leading Palestinian politician during the British Mandate. This coincidence indeed enabled Nasser to substitute Hilmi by Ahmad al-Shuqayri, a Palestinian nationalist figure and former representa-tive of Saudi Arabia in the United Nations. From the outset, the PLO was meant to serve as a national representation for the Palestinians and to be sponsored and controlled by the Arab states and mainly by Nasser’s Egypt. The initiative for this endeavor was an indivisible element of what Malcolm Kerr called the ‘Arab Cold War,’ especially between Nasser and his adversaries, both conservative monar-chies and revolutionary regimes. Within this context of regional conflict, each of the Arab revolutionary regimes endeavored to enlist the Palestinian problem as a source of self-legitimization and de-legitimization of the rivals. Practically, the birth of the PLO was given by a shared, albeit temporary, interest of Nasser and King Hussein to contain Palestinian radicalization and especially stem the tide represented by the Syrian-backed Palestinian guerilla groups. By the early 1960s, Palestinian activist groups had been in the midst of clandestine efforts of organi-zational processes with the goals of restoring the public awareness of the Palestinian national identity and bringing the Palestinian problem back to the center stage of collective Arab action. In this context, Fatah defined the role of the Palestinians as pioneers in the imminent Arab war for the liberation of Palestine. The broad enthusiasm with which the idea of establishing a Palestinian liberation organization was received by Palestinian communities across the Arab world also indicated the former’s authentic urge for rallying around a national leadership of their own as a symbol and expression of common values and yearnings.

Indeed, the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement can hardly be explained without the socio-political upheavals, both domestic and regional, that swept the Arab states in the first two decades after 1948 and culminated in the deterioration to the 1967 war. In hindsight, it is questionable whether the Palestinian national movement would have been born and thrived without the political, financial, and military support provided by the Arab states, both collec-tively and individually. It is equally questionable, however, whether this would have occurred without the Palestinians’ own activism and pressure from below on the Arab governments to share their national struggle.


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The PLO on Balance: Regional and Self-made Resources

Ever since the Palestinian national movement re-established itself in the early 1960s, it displayed impressive vitality and survivability despite the disastrous consequences of the 1948 war. In addition to reconstructing a particular Palestinian identity and a national authority enjoying compliance of the vast majority of the Palestinians, the PLO under Yasser Arafat’s leadership won a broad international recognition as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and sup-port for its national rights. These achievements are especially impressive in view of the Palestinians’ geographical distribution and the myriad restrictions the Arab states and Israel imposed on their respective Palestinian populations which the PLO sought to mobilize, and even more so considering the military defeats and political downfalls that were its lot ever since its formation. Time and again, the PLO bounced back into the regional and international center stage after it appeared to have received a clear-cut knock-out.1

This historical phenomenon calls for explanation, which seems to stem from two sets of factors namely, the regional-Arab environment and its interrelations with the Palestinians, and the Palestinians as a discernible collective. The regional-Arab factors are twofold: first, factors deriving from the symbolically-loaded issue of Palestine in the Arab political culture, rendering it the ‘foremost all-Arab core concern’; and second, factors more directly affected by the complex inter-relations between the Arab and Muslim states and the Palestinian national movement.

The Palestine Problem in the Arab Collective Consciousness

The centrality of the Palestinian problem in the Arab national doctrine and collec-tive consciousness took shape along with the crystallization of Arab nationalism between the two world wars and especially in the wake of the foundation of the State of Israel and the ‘Disaster of Palestine’ in 1948. Carrying an immense emo-tional symbolism in both Arab national and Islamic contexts, the Palestine Problem (qadiyyat Filastin) developed into a core issue in the emerging doctrine of pan-Arab nationalism and Arab regional politics, closely intertwined with the policies of the hatching Arab states surrounding Palestine. As such, the Palestine problem became the most powerful rallying symbol in Arab-Muslim societies, an invaluable source of legitimacy and thus, indispensable in public discourses.

Precisely because the Zionist enterprise became commonly identified with Western colonialism, exploitation of Arab resources, a formidable obstacle to realization of the yearned Arab unity, and a threat to the Arab-Muslim nature of Palestine, along time it assumed a momentous symbolic significance, especially among the emerging political societies in the Arab world, which ruling elites and politicians exploited for their own domestic and regional interests. Not surpris-ingly, since the late 1930s, it became increasingly a collective all-Arab issue



which, parallel to the weakening Arab-Palestinian community, led to the margin-alization of the Palestinian national leadership in policymaking regarding Palestine, as demonstrated during the 1948 war. Since 1948, the symbolic and emotional significance of this issue gathered evermore momentum along with the intensified Arab–Israeli conflict and perpetuation of the Palestinian refugee problem.

In the Arab political culture, solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians is a symbol of rejection of the Western legacy, a prominent pan-Arab and Islamic value loaded with political and cultural myths, and legitimacy, tightly related to existential matters, such as the aspirations for Arab unity, power, prosperity, and dignity. The Palestinian problem had long been more than mere national myth. In view of the primary role of rhetoric and ideology in Arab and Islamic politics, the cause of Palestine became, along the years, a major concern of Arab internal and regional politics nourishing rivalries and competitions among the ruling elites and public figures, and political and social movements on both regional and domestic levels. The Arab discourse on ‘The Palestinian Problem’ and claim for its just solution has often been euphemism of the aspiration for Zionism/Israel to be erad-icated from the Middle East political reality.

Already before 1948, Palestinian leaders, foremost of them al-Haj Amin al-Husseini, realized that Arab commitment to their cause could be fostered and counted upon based on the deep societal sense of solidarity with fellow Arabs and Muslims, especially in view of imminent threats to primary collective symbols by foreign, non-regional invaders, more than promises and statements by ruling elites. Hence, under dire circumstances, Palestinian leaders confronted Arab rul-ers by threatening to, or directly approaching, the public in the Arab states as a bargaining chip to get their needs met. A case in point is Ahmad al-Shuqayri’s exemplary defiance of the Arab summit conference held in Khartoum shortly after the June 1967 war to cope with the consequences of defeat and loss of national territories. Inter-Arab deliberations prior to the summit indicated that King Hussein, with Nasser’s backing, had taken measures concerning a separate agree-ment with Israel on the return of the West Bank to Jordan. Having been left out of the list of invitees to the conference, Shuqayri traveled on his own initiative to Khartoum and warned Prime Minister Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub that unless he was invited to take part in the conference he would go to the city’s grand mosque and explain to the public that the Arab governments were about to sale Palestine out, to which the Sudanese Prime Minister had no choice by to cave in. Shuqayri’s participation in the summit, especially in view of the law-level representation of the more radical regimes of Syria, Iraq, and Algeria, had a significant impact on the conference’s famous three ‘nays’ (to peace, recognition, and negotiations with Israel) that portrayed the Arab collective position as utterly intransigent and served Israel’s reluctance to return to the 1967 lines.

Just how deeply this societal sense of solidarity with the Palestinian cause has remained rooted in Arab-Muslim societies was plainly indicated by the societal attitudes toward Israel despite the peace treaties it signed with Egypt (1979) and


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Jordan (1994) and the short-lived diplomatic relations between a number of Arab states and Israel established in the 1990s. Contrary to the pragmatic raison d’état that guided Arab political elites in their practices toward Israel, the Arab public opinion had remained largely hostile to Israel even during the Oslo process in the 1990s as demonstrated by the dominant popular discourse against peace between the Arab states and Israel. Opposition movements throughout the political spectrum—primarily the Islamist movements—were especially active in prevent-ing ‘normalization’ of Arab-Israeli relations—economic, social, and techno logical cooperation. In Egypt and Jordan, the opposition organized ‘black lists’ of those individuals defined as ‘normalizers’ following their visit to, or establishing pro-fessional collaboration with Israel.

The societal impact on the Arab governments culminated in the popular dem-onstrations initiated in many of the Arab states against Israel in response to the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, forcing the governments of Egypt and Jordan to temporarily lower the level of diplomatic representation in Tel Aviv and, in the case of Morocco, Tunisia and Oman to severe their diplomatic ties with Israel. Yet, although this public opinion effectively constrained Arab leaders’ freedom of maneuver in relation to Israel and often forced them to demonstrate their commit-ment to the Palestinian cause, in a historical perspective it failed in preventing the erosion of Arab collective interest in this matter. As observed by an astute Palestinian intellectual, ‘the problem of Palestine rendered the problem of the Palestinians’ (Bishara 2009).

A regional, inter-state perspective, however, provides another angle for exam-ining the historical transformation of Arab-Palestinian relations and of the PLO’s political trajectory since its foundation. From this perspective, despite the politi-cal turmoil that marked the Arab world during the first two decades after 1948—domestic instability, inter-Arab competition for hegemony, and leadership, and active Arab–Israeli conflict—the post-1967 years witnessed a steady growth of the state in terms of its ability to insulate itself from rallying around issues of symbolic Arab concern and instead, conduct its autonomous policies with ever-decreasing interference of advocates of Arab uniform policy. In view of the scorching Arab military defeat in 1967 and loss of national territories to Israel, this process entailed, moreover, a decline of the moral and political impact of political forces—regimes and ideological movements—committed to supra-state identity and unified Arab action ‘for the sake of Palestine.’

The interrelations between the Palestine conflict as a pivotal issue in the Arab states system and Egypt’s regional primacy was what set in motion a process of changing relations between pan-Arab nationalism and state particularism. The decline of compulsive Arab conformity was by and large a reflection of Egypt’s regional policy, shaped by its capabilities, and constraints. Just as Egypt’s high level of stateness and capabilities underlay the pan-Arab challenge to other Arab states’ legitimacy, so were they instrumental in reshaping the Arab states system along norms of mutual respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, despite continuous efforts of Arab ruling elites to carve out their fully



independent and sovereign nation-states from the imagined ‘one Arab nation from the Atlantic to the Gulf,’ this long-term historical process has only mitigated the tension between all-Arab concerns, such as the Palestine problem, and particular state interests and priorities. In other words, the prevalence of supra-state symbols and beliefs in Arab-Muslim societies is bound to remain a potential source of state–society conflicts. The shift from collectivity to state sovereignty, thus, entailed a parallel process of ‘normalization’ of the conflict with Israel, lowering the profile of its symbolic significance and decreasing its rhetorical use for claim-ing conformity with certain policies, particularly by assertive state and non-state regional actors. Thus, the new Arab regional order that developed in the course of the 1970s and 1980s increasingly assumed the character traits of a ‘Westphalian order’ along with reshaping collective Arab strategies for joint action in the Palestine conflict. Historically, these changes were led by Egypt from whom the conflict had claimed the highest toll and which, thanks to its strategic weight and national capabilities, was able to sustain collective Arab sanctions for striking a separate peace with Israel.

Growing control of the domestic political arena by the state resulted in a declining impact of supra-state symbols on Arab societal behavior, as demon-strated in Arab responses to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the Intifada, and the Gulf war. In the aftermath of the 1973 war, state-building turned these symbols into a burden on most ruling elites, making inevitable their departure from pan-Arab rhetoric and commitments, especially concerning the conflict with Israel and the Palestine cause. The process entailed an ongoing inter-Arab political dia-logue, conducted by intellectuals and politicians, media campaigns, and power struggles over values and beliefs, vision, reality, norms, and rules of political behavior. It is this half-century experience of ‘routinization’ of inter-state rela-tions, coupled with bitter lessons of military failures and broken dreams that shaped the boundaries of sovereignty of the Arab states.

As a product of both authentic Palestinian agonies and aspirations, on the one hand, and inter-Arab interests and rivalries, on the other, the PLO was from the outset dependent on the active support of at least part of the Arab states— especially those bordering with Israel—for its continued existence as a political and military factor. This, together with Israel’s systematic policy of military retali-ations against the Arab states whose territories were used by the Palestinian guer-rilla groups for attacking Israeli targets inevitably resulted in a confrontation between the armed Palestinian ‘revolution’ and the sovereign Arab state.

The Palestinian guerrilla groups, thus, adopted Jordan and Lebanon as their main territorial bases in the heydays of the late 1960s, taking advantage of the large Palestinian refugee populations in these countries to effectively force their regimes to tolerate their activities despite the cost of Israeli punitive operations. The expulsion from Jordan in 1970–71 forced the Palestinian armed struggle to entrench itself in Lebanon, the weakest Arab state neighboring Israel and most vulnerable to external pressures of the PLO’s allies, especially Syria. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and consequent expulsion of the Palestinian armed forces


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and headquarters from this country—in tacit cooperation of Syria and the Gulf monarchies—reiterated the anomaly of the Palestinian ‘state within a state’ strat-egy which entangled the PLO in conflicts with domestic and regional Arab actors.

It was against this backdrop of constant state- and nation-building processes that the Palestinian national movement adopted as a matter of self-assertion and adjustment, similar character traits of particular nationalism, demonstrated so viv-idly in the rephrased Palestinian National Charter by the newly shaped PLO after 1967 (see below). Palestinian self-assertion was expressed by the very emergence of guerrilla groups as the avant-garde in the collective Arab war for the liberation of Palestine at the cost of colliding head-on with the Arab states’ wills and agen-das. Adjustment soon followed as a realistic conclusion of the limits of guerrilla warfare from the Arab countries neighboring Israel, especially because this war-fare entangled the Palestinians in violent confrontations with those Arab states. By a historical process of trial and error, the PLO had to shift its strategy of trying to bring the Arab world into war with Israel which, though scored some success in triggering the 1967 war, eventually brought the PLO to an all-out confrontation with raison d’état, where Israel found some common ground with some of the Arab states.

The expulsion of the Palestinians from Lebanon indeed explains the growing emphasis of Palestinian national action on the Occupied Territories and its even-tual shifting center of gravity from the Arab neighboring countries surrounding Israel into these territories. The process of localization of Palestinian national struggle culminated in the Intifada, which proved to be by far more effective in bringing Israel to acknowledge the Palestinians—first, the residents of these ter-ritories and later the PLO itself—as a primary party to negotiations and a settle-ment over these territories.

Complex Relationship: The Arab States and the PLO

Historically, the rhetorical and ideological discourse of regional Arab elites on the Palestine question was rarely accompanied by policies matching the discourse of unlimited commitment and dedication to its resolution. This gap between rhetori-cal exploitation of the Palestine issue for the purpose of earning domestic and regional legitimacy, on the one hand, and the practical political conduct toward the Palestinians, on the other, represented the Arab states’ strict cost–benefit cal-culations taking into account also possible military and economic losses by sup-porting Palestinian groups in their struggle against Israel.

Much of the vicissitudes in the Arab states’ relations with the Palestinians as individuals and a collective can be explained by the gap between ideology and practice, ranging from emotional identification to rejection and resentment. This spectrum was manifest all along the PLO’s half-century history in the harsh treat-ment by most Arab states of the Palestinian refugees as a security hazard and economic burden, denying them—except Jordan—of civil status or—with Syria’s



exception—access to the labor market; the measurable economic and military aid historically provided to the Palestinian national movement, from the Mandate era Arab Higher Committee to the PLO and, above all, the occasional employment of military means to repress the Palestinian guerilla groups when the latter seemed to be challenging the Arab regimes’ sovereignty and security. The frictions between the PLO and Arab states, especially those bordering Israel, grew more acute parallel to the former’s rise to regional non-actor due to both military and political capabilities, leading to head-on collisions between the Palestinian resist-ance organizations and the state. The most striking examples of such military showdowns took place in Jordan in 1970–71 and especially in Lebanon, first at the height of its civil war (1975–76), followed by head-on confrontations with the Syrian forces in Lebanon in 1976 and again in 1983.

Especially after the PLO had won all-Arab recognition as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,’ Syria accounted for repeated attempts to subordinate the PLO to its particular interests, first, in preventing Egypt from conducting a separate diplomacy with Israel in the post-1973 peace process; sec-ond, in maintaining the political status quo in Lebanon at the height of its civil war; and finally, in combating Israel’s influence in this country. Syria’s interest in subordinating the PLO assumed its most vehement form following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and siege of Beirut when, following Arafat’s refusal to evacuate his headquarters and military units to Syria, Damascus endorsed the US-mediated expulsion of the Palestinians from Lebanon. Syria persisted in its efforts trying to dismiss Arafat from the PLO leadership by encouraging a violent rebellion against him led by Fatah senior members. Even non-state organizations perceived the Palestinian organizations as a threat as demonstrated in the after-math of Israel’s withdrawal from most of the occupied Lebanese territory, when Amal, the prominent Shi’a-Lebanese movement, placed the Palestinian refugee camps, from Beirut southward, under two-year long siege, backed by Syria. In hindsight, it seems that the expulsion of the PLO’s armed forces and headquarters from Beirut in 1982 under Israel’s military pressure would not be possible without the active support not only of the Lebanese government but also of a number of Arab states including Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Since 1967, the PLO and the Palestinians paid a heavy price in material and human losses in recurring clashes between ‘raison de la revolution’ and ‘raison d’état.’ Until 1973, these clashes represented mainly attempts by the Palestinian armed groups to impose their presence and military activities on Jordanian and Lebanese territory, effectively creating a ‘state within a state.’ Less acute clashes between the PLO and the Arab states resulted from the former’s unequivocal criticism of Egypt and Jordan for accepting the UN Security Council 242 Resolution and three years later, for accepting Secretary of State William Rogers Initiative of August 1970. The American-led diplomacy conducted in the region following the 1973 war in an attempt to bring about partial settlements between Israel and its Arab neighbors confronted the PLO with a new challenge of being overlooked in discussing the future of the Occupied Territories. No less important,


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as it gathered more capabilities, both military and political stature, the PLO came under growing pressures by Arab regimes—especially Syria—to coalesce with them, mainly against Egypt’s autonomous conduct in advancing Israel’s with-drawal from Sinai. These pressures collided head-on with the PLO’s sacrosanct principle of ‘Palestinian freedom of decision-making,’ connoting that the PLO was the sole sovereign authority in making decisions concerning Palestinian affairs.

As serious as the physical blows inflicted on the Palestinian resistance move-ment and population were, they could not wipe off the Palestinian cause from the collective Arab agenda. On the contrary, the fragmented nature of the inter-Arab relations and competition among its protagonists, especially after the 1973 war, rendered the PLO a valuable non-state actor in the regional Arab politics. The PLO was subjected to repeated manipulations in order to advance particular goals of one state at the expense of others as demonstrated by Egypt’s repeated gestures toward the PLO in response to crises in its relations with Syria in 1976 and 1983. Precisely because of what the PLO represented in the conflict with Israel, those Arab states directly involved in the conflict could not afford to lose this valuable political actor in their diplomatic quest for retrieving their national territories in accordance with their own parameters and possibilities. Hence, serious blows inflicted on the PLO called for reassurance of the Arab commitment to the Palestinian national rights as in the aftermath of the Syrian military offensive on the Palestinian strongholds in Lebanon in October 1976. This ambivalent policy kept the Palestine problem in focus even if the declarations in its favor were rarely followed up by practical measures of support for the PLO.

At times of broad Arab consensus over the strategy in the conflict with Israel, the Palestinian interest was subordinated to the common objectives of the main Arab protagonists as was the case in the first two years after the 1973 war when the Arab regional system was led by a ‘core coalition’ of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Not only Egypt and Syria accounted for initiating and implementing the war which came to be perceived as a grand Arab victory, but the soaring clout of Arab oil enabled the Arab states to incorporate the Islamic and non-aligned blocks in their effort to upgrade the PLO stature in the international arena turning it the spearhead in their intensive political warfare aimed to delegitimize and isolate Israel. Under these circumstances, the PLO had to adjust to the shifting Arab strat-egy in the conflict from war to indirect negotiations which the Arab summit con-ference in Algiers in November 1973 defined in terms of ‘strategy of phases,’ stipulating that the first step was the entire liberation of the territories occupied in 1967. In June 1974, the PLO followed up by adopting this concept, clearly antici-pating its inclusion in the upcoming international diplomacy. The joint Arab efforts to upgrade the PLO’s international status and the new definition of its strategic objectives—broadly interpreted as willingness to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—culminated in Arafat’s speech at the UN General Assembly in November 1974, a month after the Arab summit conference held in Rabat recognized the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.’ The PLO’s soaring international stature was indicated by the



simple fact that by the mid-1970s the PLO was diplomatically represented in more countries around the world than Israel.

In contrast, inter-Arab fragmentation and weak collective action had mixed implications for the PLO: it led Arab regimes to compete for the PLO’s support as a potent source of legitimacy. While this competition enabled the PLO to earn more material and political resources and promote its maneuverability, it also entangled the Palestinians in domestic and inter-Arab conflicts. This was best attested by the Palestinian involvement in the Lebanese civil war and the disas-trous results of Arafat’s endorsement of Saddam Hussein following Iraq’s inva-sion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990.

The Palestinian refugees residing in the Arab states had a discernible impact on the latter’s interactions with the PLO. Concentrated mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and as of the 1950s increasingly also in the oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf, the Palestinian diaspora communities were perceived as foci of political radicalism resulting in growing suspicion and restrictive measures on the part of the ‘hosting’ states toward their Palestinian undesirable residents. By the late 1960s, the PLO had made significant headway in penetrating the Palestinian refugee communities as part of its nation-building efforts via their recruitment and organization under its leadership, turning them into significant pressure groups on the ‘hosting’ states.

Nonetheless, the fragmented nature of the inter-Arab system, with rivalry and competition between the ruling elites over regional leadership and all-Arab legiti-macy as its watermark, formed short-lived political alliances and cooperation as well as conflicts between Arab regimes and some Palestinian organizations. The radical Arab regimes of Syria and Iraq which were more prone to intervene, often aggressively, in foreign policies of other regional actors, attained built-in access to the PLO’s top institutions and directly interfered in the process of decision- making via their respective proxies. Specifically, each of these states established its own faction—al-Saìqa (Syria) and the Arab Liberation Front (Iraq)—com-prised of Palestinians whose loyalty to their respective state-patron rendered them Trojan Horses within the PLO. The Baàth regimes of Syria, Iraq, and to a lesser extent Muàmmar Qadhafi of Libya, fostered fringe Palestinian groups and encouraged them to carry out acts of terror, also against the main stream in the PLO. The most notorious among these groups was the Abu-Nidal organization which commenced action in 1974 with Iraqi backing after seceding from Fatah. The group shifted collaboration more than once, serving Syrian and Libyan inter-ests as well. In addition to committing a number of assassinations of senior Fatah members known for their dovish attitudes regarding the PLO strategic objectives, and meetings with Israeli peace activists in the late-1970s and early 1980s, it was Abu-Nidal’s attempt on the life of Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, in early June 1982 that gave Israel the pretext to invade Lebanon, thus breaking a year of ceasefire between Israel and the PLO over south Lebanon.

The ability of Palestinian organizations to establish and maintain stable coop-eration with Arab states, especially of the ‘confrontation line’ with Israel and the


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oil-rich Gulf monarchies, determined their scope of resources and survivability. Moreover, alliances with diverse Arab regimes ensured better chances of political and material support and lowering the risk of a fallout in the relations with part of them. It was no coincidence that already before 1967 Fatah had become the larg-est organization in terms of the scope of members, military capabilities, and finan-cial resources rendering it by far the most dominant faction in the PLO. Though Fatah also got entangled in violent clashes with Arab regimes, unlike the radical left-wing, or state-backed Palestinian organizations, it, from the very start, wisely adopted a pragmatic, Palestinian-centered approach in its relations with the Arab states, regardless of their type of regime, while refraining whenever possible from intervening in their internal matters.

The political and ideological radicalism of the Palestinian resistance groups, their popularity in Arab public opinion, militancy toward Israel and the West, and sabotage capabilities, all won them generous financial support, especially from the domestically vulnerable oil-rich Gulf states. Unlike the measurable approach of radical Arab oil producers, such as Iraq and Libya, the Gulf states provided the PLO in general, and Fatah, in particular, generous financial aid—including, as of 1967, also for residents of the Occupied Territories—as a security valve against Palestinian sabotage and subversion. It should be noted, however, that the scope of this financial aid since the early 1980s slowly diminished along with the declin-ing status and prestige of the PLO after the expulsion from Lebanon, the heavy burden of extending by far more substantial amounts of aid to Iraq in its eight-year-long war with Iran parallel to the decreasing oil price in the international markets and the growing stature of the Arab states as individual international actors and weakened collective Arab performance. The PLO relations with the Gulf monarchies reached a point of crisis following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Arafat’s unequivocal support of Saddam Hussein. The results of Arafat’s policy in the Kuwait crisis were all-time costly for the PLO—expulsion of most of the near 400,000 Palestinian residents from Kuwait after the war and total halt of financial aid to the PLO by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Gulf states.

Palestinian Resources and Institutions

This section focuses on the Palestinians’ autonomous resources such as demogra-phy, institutions, political coherence, and leadership. It aims to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the Palestinians as a political factor in the context of their efforts to advance their cause and retrieve their collective rights.

Demography

In late 2013, the Palestinian world population was estimated by the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics at slightly over 11 million, half of which reside within historic Palestine (40 percent in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and about 10 percent in



Israel. About 44 percent reside in the immediately surrounding countries, prima-rily Jordan (near 30 percent) and the rest (16 percent) in Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab countries, and the rest in other parts of the world. As mentioned above, the distribution of the Palestinian refugees, especially in Jordan and Lebanon, offered the re-emerging national movement a convenient basis for social and political penetration and mobilization, rendering them a semi-autonomous national space and a staging ground for military acti vity against Israel.

The demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in historic Palestine was a primary consideration in Israel’s ambivalent policy concerning the West Bank and Gaza Strip: while avoiding annexation of these territories to Israel (other than East Jerusalem), all Israeli governments since 1967 supported and advanced the effort of settlement by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Contrary to Israel’s disengage-ment from the Gaza Strip in 2005, including the evacuation of all Israeli settle-ments, the continued settlement and its geographic distribution in the West Bank (about 350,000 in late 2013, not including East Jerusalem) has increasingly dis-tanced the prospects for establishing a territorially coherent Palestinian state. Nonetheless, the West Bank remained predominantly resided by Palestinians while Israel’s policy of settlement, including in East Jerusalem, has been increas-ingly criticized by the international community, including the Western world.

Nation-building and national institutions

Much of the Palestinians’ ability to rise from the ashes of their 1948 disaster and re-establish themselves as an organized political community against all odds can be explained by their highly politicized nature as well as by the Arab states’ restrictive policies toward the Palestinian refugees. Palestinian politicization had grown along decades of political activism in the British Mandate and the political upheavals of the Arab region, and their relatively low rate of illiteracy (one of the lowest in the Arab world), largely thanks to the UN Relief and Work Agency’s services to the Palestinian refugee population. For a large segment of the second and third generation of the Palestinian refugee society who managed to exit the refugee camps, the absence of a stable and safe space and the constant quest for improved sources of living, whether in the oil-producing states or the West, under-pinned the development of distinct characteristics of modernity and relative open-ness to the world, social mobility, and political involvement to which the absence of a safe and stable environment contributed a great deal.

The Palestinian intellectual elite played a primary role in the process of national ‘awakening’ by various means of producing and publishing knowledge about the Palestinian history and society for the Arab world and beyond. Already in 1963, a group of leading Palestinian scholars established the Institute for Palestine Studies (mu’assassat al-dirastat al-filastiniyya) in Beirut, a private institution ‘devoted exclusively to documentation, research, analysis, and publication on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict,’2 which has since acquired world name. In 1965, the newly emerging PLO established its own Research Center (markaz al-abhath),


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which delegated and funded studies and documentation projects on the Palestinian Arabs under the Mandate as well as on Israeli society and politics. These research institutes, as well as others established by NGOs following the signing of the Oslo accords,3 undertook to rewrite the history of the Palestinians, emphasizing their ori-gins of identity, heroic armed struggle against both the Zionist enterprise and the British Mandate, the exodus in 1948 and life as refugees in the Arab world, and their rights, foremost of which the right of return. These institutions issue periodicals and books in English, Arabic, and French.

Parallel to the intellectual effort aimed at reconstructing the bases of a distinct Palestinian national identity, the armed struggle waged by numerous political groups played a leading role in mass mobilization to collective action instilling a spirit of self-esteem and self-righteousness in their cause (see below). In addition to research and documentation, the PLO also sponsored social, cultural, eco-nomic, and health projects aimed at helping and organizing the Palestinian refu-gees in the Arab countries. These character traits may explain the ability of the PLO to rally the vast majority of the Palestinians around one flag and shape, despite their geographical dispersion and social differences, a virtual political community, sharing a collective identity based on common perceptions of the past and visions for the future.

One of the main lessons learned by the PLO leaders from their historical expe-rience, before and after 1948, was the indispensability of social and political institution-building to attain effective mobilization of the Palestinian people in support of a centralized authority capable of securing broad compliance and legit-imacy of its constituency. This tendency was especially manifest in Fatah and, in view of its dominant role in the PLO, also served as a guideline for the latter. The Palestinian awareness of the significance of national institutions was reflected in the establishment of a representational system and operational institutions befit-ting the envisioned state in the making. The following are the main institutions in the PLO establishment:

(a) The Palestinian National Council (PNC) functions as an all-Palestinian conference. Since its foundational meeting in 1964, the PNC held 23 sessions, the most recent of which were convened in Gaza (1998) and Ramallah (2009), serv-ing mainly as a national confirmation of policies and decisions desired by Fatah and other armed factions that, since 1968 constituted the hard core of the PLO. In addition to representatives of the combatant groups, according to an early agreed upon proportion, the PNC also includes quotas of representatives of Palestinian communities from the homeland and the diaspora, professional associations, such as workers, writers, engineers, doctors, students, etc., as well as women and nota-ble individuals. In the absence of elections (except in professional associations), the civilian representatives in fact represent the same proportion of representation by the combatant groups. The number of the PNC members changed from session to session according to internal political needs and negotiations among the resist-ance factions. The council’s membership is thus determined—similarly to other national institutions—by the armed factions reflecting their relative strength or



bargaining capacity. Some PNC sessions accounted for historical turning points of the PLO, most conspicuous of which were the 1974 12th Session held in Cairo confirming the principle of phased liberation of Palestine; the 1988 19th Session held in Algiers which adopted the declaration of an independent state of Palestine on the basis of the UN 181 decision of partition (1947); and the 22nd Session in Gaza City, which endorsed the abolition of those articles in the National Charter denying Israel’s right to exist or calling indirectly for its annihilation. The con-secutive PNC sessions, thus, provided the PLO executive leadership headed by Arafat the legitimacy they needed for new policies especially when they clashed with the National Charter (see below). As such, these sessions in fact tell the his-tory of the PLO’s shifting policies, especially in the context of the conflict with Israel, as it incrementally distanced itself from the restrictions imposed by the National Charter on the Palestinian leadership.

(b) The Executive Committee functions as a government with equal representa-tion of one member for each military organization (not including the PLO Chairman, thus giving Fatah two seats in the committee). In addition, a smaller number of seats were traditionally held by civilians (such as the head of the treasury—the National Fund), mostly identified with Fatah. The Executive Committee is comprised of departments acting as ministries such as Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs, Propaganda/Information, Education and Culture, Popular Organizations, Refugees, and the ‘Occupied Land’ affairs. In addition, the Executive Committee also includes institutions and centers for research and planning. The Department of Foreign Affairs is in charge, among others, of the PLO delegations in foreign countries and, as of the 1970s, also to the UN and its agencies, functioning as officially or unoffi-cially recognized representatives by the hosting state. The Executive Committee offered aid to families of the fallen and those injured in military or civic activities against Israel, as well as those killed or injured in the course of the armed struggle against Israel and in the latter’s operations against the Palestinians. This structure clearly left security and military functions in the hands of the military factions, save a loose link to the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). In the case of Fatah, operating as the nucleus of the ‘state in the making,’ it also run social welfare projects aimed to provide vocal education and employment for family members of the fallen, which developed into a profit-bearing financial concern (samed).

(c) The Central Council—It was established in 1973 by the PNC from its own membership to serve consultative functions to the PLO, follow up, and implement its resolutions. As in the case of the PNC, it was initially comprised of a few doz-ens of members and was expanded in the course of the years. Recently, it has been comprised of 124 members, including 18 members of the PA’s Legislative Council, underlining the PLO’s status as the supreme Palestinian representative institution. The Central Council is headed by the chairman of the PNC and its membership was distributed among resistance factions as well as representatives of civil organizations, unions, and independents. Practically, this mid-level body was meant to fill the gap in cases when the PNC could not be convened and fulfill similar functions of sanctioning the Executive Committee’s policies.


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(d) The Palestinian National Fund—Established as part of the PLO institu-tions in 1964 to fund the organization’s activities, it is managed by a board of 11 directors and by a chairman elected by the PNC and who serves ex-officio as a member of the Executive Committee. Revenues for the fund come from two sources—a fixed tax on the wages earned by all Palestinians living in Arab coun-tries and collected by those respective governments and from financial donations by Arab governments and people. Both of these sources shrunk substantially in the years following the Gulf War and the signing of the Oslo accords (see below).

Calculated Armed Struggle

The concept of armed struggle has always been more of a symbolic than a practi-cal matter. Despite its definition in the Palestinian National Charter (1968) as the ‘only strategy’ for the liberation of Palestine, it meant to signal a way of action, a means of directing energy against the enemy, a tool for the achievement of inter-nal unity, and a way of obtaining legitimacy in Palestinian and inter-Arab spheres. Paradoxically, Israel’s response by military means to the Palestinian armed acti-vities effectively elevated the status of the Palestinians as a party to reckon with in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the frequency of incidents rose after 1967 and the number of casualties on both sides was on the rise, the Palestinian-Israeli aspect of the dispute became more prominent and the Palestinian armed struggle more prestigious. Especially in the post-1973 peace process, the Palestinian organiza-tions, headed by Fatah, used the military option as a calculated political instru-ment aimed to pressure the Arab protagonists and the US administration to incorporate the PLO into the process on an equal footing. Shaped by Fatah’s political needs and constraints, the calculated employment of the armed struggle directly affected most other Palestinian factions. This was clearly indicated by Fatah’s decision in 1974 to cease international terrorist activities, which was fol-lowed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) a year later, and the tacit accord with Israel in the summer of 1981 on ceasefire in south Lebanon, which led to almost complete standstill of Palestinian attacks on Israel until the latter’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.

The use of terrorism overseas was especially well calculated, selective of the venue, and subject to political cost–benefit ratio considerations. Despite the inflated world perception of Palestinian international terrorism, it was in fact mar-ginal (no more than 5 percent) relatively to the scope of global terrorism at its heights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nonetheless, the innovation and novelty displayed by Palestinian international terror operations was a role model for other terrorist organizations. Furthermore, the diplomatic and intelligence aid extended by certain Arab regimes (primarily by Qadhafi) to Palestinian factions provided the latter with international infrastructure for terrorist operations with weapons, training, documentation, liaison agents, and rescue routes. In hindsight, it seems that the PLO leadership maintained—with its objective difficulties of control—



a calculated policy of using violence and rarely lost contact with its strategic objectives of survival, legitimization, and recognition. In this respect, the ability of the PLO/Fatah to combine rural, urban, and international violence with political flexibility was indeed discernible though not exceptional in relation to other national liberation movements.

Hence, the more recognition the PLO attained in the international arena, it came under growing pressures to cease activities identifying it with terrorism and adopt political moderation so as to increase its international legitimacy. The PLO was thus compelled, especially after the expulsion from Lebanon, to develop diplomatic options in order to maintain its international stature and promote the Palestinian national interests.

Historic National Leadership

Compared to the pre-1948 and pre-1968 Palestinian leadership, the founders of the guerilla groups, represented by Yasser Arafat, George Habash, Na’if Hawatmah, and Ahmad Jibril, reflected a revolutionary change in terms of the social and political background of the newly emerging Palestinian leaders. Contrary to their predecessors, the new Palestinian leaders originated from middle- or lower-middle-class background which placed them in a convenient social junction for interacting with the public as a whole. This change was well depicted in the new modes introduced to the political organization by the new leadership, and its improved ability to penetrate and mobilize the middle and lower social strata. The post-1967 Palestinian leadership was based on charisma and bargaining ability in which financial temptations and benefits were combined with violence. Many of the new leaders were professionals and thus treated the more educated with respect attempting to incorporate them in the Palestinian establishment. These leaders recognized the value of the written word and sup-ported dozens of periodicals and mouthpiece newspapers in which the refugees of 1948 strongly figured.

Despite the splits and ideological divisions among and within the various groups, the personal comradeship between leaders of the same generation and of similar socioeconomic background along the years of national struggle is obvi-ous. These leaders shared common political activities during the formative period of their lives resulting in the formation of almost a political kinship group, which was especially the case with the founding fathers of Fatah. This group manifested a high level of coherence and collective policymaking to the extent of allowing no-entry or mobility options to newcomers into the core circle which was firmly preserved for Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad). This lack of mobility is well reflected in Fatah’s attitude toward Palestinian activ-ists deported from Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza Strip along the late 1960s and 1970s. Apart from Abd al-Jawad Salih, former mayor of al-Bireh who was appointed to the Executive Committee for a short while, only a handful of figures


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of that caliber were fully incorporated into key operational position in Fatah or other factions. Having originated from the 1948 refugee population, the PLO leadership saw to keep out of the inner circles those who had not shared with them the same experience.

The PLO attitude to the eruption of the Intifada in late 1987 is a case in point, reflecting the hidden competition between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ leaderships over influence and prestige. Despite the lack of political sanction and weakened organization of the ‘inside’ leadership in the course of the Intifada, no one could deny its immense impact on the Israeli and international public opinion. It could be well expected that the joint leadership of the Intifada—the ‘United National Command’ combining the PLO factions—would play an important role in the political process or elicit fundamental influence on the policy of the PLO. Yet, the grass-root activists that triggered the Intifada constituted a threat to secular lead-ers in the Occupied Territories identified with the PLO (such as Hanna Sinyora, Radwan Abu-Ayyash, Faysal Husseini, Haidar Abd al-Shafi, and others). In fact, the Intifada represented a major challenge to the PLO leadership itself because it erupted without the knowledge or involvement of the PLO leadership and was marked by social protest of the refugee camps and low class urban dwellers reflected by the appearance of the ‘shock committees’ that took control of city streets in disregard of the ‘official’ national leadership.

It, therefore, came as no surprise that the instigators of the Intifada were to be contained and subordinated to the PLO in Tunis. The PLO thus acted rapidly to take control of the uprising portraying it as its own initiative and defining the ‘National Command’ as its authorized delegates, a necessary response especially in view of the separate conduct of the Islamic groups. The PLO’s concerns of the spontaneous uprising coincided with those of Israel and Jordan, both of whom had high stakes in putting an end to the popular activities of protests, demonstrations, violation of public order, and sporadic violence. The weakness of the Intifada leadership was enhanced by the political divisions among the population due to traditional rivalry between urban elites.

The resumption of American mediation efforts with Israel and leading figures from the West Bank and Gaza Strip shortly after the eruption of the Intifada, con-fronted the PLO with the question of how to navigate its policy in maintaining the momentum of the Intifada without losing ground to the inside leadership. This became especially acute in view of the Israeli government’s initiative of May 1989 which called for negotiations with elected Palestinian representatives from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the basis of the Israeli-Egyptian agreed upon autonomy plan (see below). The Israeli initiative put the PLO in quandary, entan-gling it in an embittered discord with the US and Egypt. Accepting such a signifi-cant role for the ‘inside’ Palestinian representatives was unacceptable at that juncture though the PLO would have to cave in under the circumstances generated by the Gulf War toward the International Peace Conference held in Madrid in October 1991. The PLO virtually accepted the Israeli condition restricting the Palestinian representation to residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while



maintaining close control over them which led to a prolonged deadlock and paved the road to the Israeli–Palestinian back channels which eventually resulted in the Oslo accords of September 1993.

Conflict Management and Political Survival

Despite its revolutionary character and the politically and geographically frag-mented Palestinian community, the PLO leaders demonstrated an impressive ability of conflict management within its constituency. Fatah’s hegemony and the PLO’s structure of hierarchical institutions allowed Arafat a significant level of maneuver and ability to legitimize shifts from sacrosanct principles by semi- democratic processes of institutional debates and transparent majority decisions. Notwithstanding their instrumentality, however, these factors were second to the PLO leadership’s pragmatism and determination to maintain utmost unity among all factions as a prerequisite for survival and successful national endeavor.

The history of the Palestinian national movement since the 1930s rebellion is indeed saturated with violent and costly infighting due to personal and factional conflicts. These character traits largely continued into the period under discussion in which inter-Arab conflicts further aggravated Palestinian ideological, political, and personal divisions. Against this backdrop, the mission undertook by Fatah to pre-serve the PLO’s integrity and status as an exclusive national framework may seem nearly impossible. The all-inclusive and pluralistic structure of the PLO allowed all factions to maintain their loose membership in it and yet exercise almost unlimited military and political autonomy. Incorporating most of the existing factions, includ-ing those owing allegiance to Syria or Iraq, helped diffusing pressures and threats to the PLO autonomous policymaking. At times of acute differences, certain factions could temporarily suspend their participation in the Executive Committee without seceding altogether or resist the dominant group by force.

The historical experience of the Palestinian national movement was rife with factional splits, personal disputes, and even armed rebellions by fringe groups against their leaders. Such occurrences, however, were by and large short term and limited in scope leaving little imprint on the PLO except for the failed attempt in May 1983 by a group of Syrian-backed rebels to dismiss Arafat by force fol-lowing which all Syrian-based factions were banished from the PLO. Moreover, despite the prevalence of arms in Palestinian hands, the Palestinian national movement developed means and abilities to conduct open intellectual debates on matters of political significance, such as establishing a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories or the need to recognize the State of Israel as a prerequisite for realizing the vision of such Palestinian state.

Political maneuverability of Arafat and his peers was, thus, essential to main-tain the PLO’s routine activity, to keep its institutions functioning, and to ensure the compliance of the Palestinian constituency. The PLO’s member factions main-tained independent ties with the Arab states to secure financial aid, military bases,


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training and weapons, and space for their political activities, all of which dictated prudence in their relations with their Arab patrons and rivals. It is, thus, hardly surprising that the inter-Arab diplomacy of the PLO along the years of its exist-ence seemed to be nothing but skillful aerobatics reflecting Arafat’s ‘thousand faces,’ or his evasive policy aimed at not making decisions and keeping all options open. However, these maneuvers were the result of an unenviable complex regional political scene in which the PLO operated and the many constraints forced by the Palestinian community, the various military organizations (including threats of terror from Palestinian extremist and dissident groups), and Arab rulers.

The eagerness of Fatah leaders to preserve the PLO integrity, however, was not without a cost in terms of sluggish decision-making processes and entanglement in crises with Arab regimes triggered by ultra-extremist groups as in the crisis in Jordan 1970 or the Lebanese civil war. For the radical groups, maintaining their membership in the PLO granted them not only access to financial resources but also provided them with some immunity from Palestinian rivals and Arab govern-ments. The need to preserve the internal unity of the PLO and ensure a supportive Arab back-up necessitated acceptance of ideological and political pluralism with a minimal common ideological ground namely, the Palestinian National Charter. This pluralism was manifest in the differing, sometimes polar, positions among PLO factions, especially over the conflict with Israel and the policy of armed struggle. Nevertheless, the Fatah leadership headed by Arafat has succeeded in bringing the PLO to adopt the diplomatic process after the 1973 war, to demon-strate political flexibility shown by the readiness to make do with a Palestinian state in only part of Palestine, to conduct ongoing dialogues with the Israeli left-wing and finally, officially declare the independence of the Palestinian state in the borders defined by the UN in 1947.

As long as the PLO had to cope with conflicts among diaspora groups, it largely succeeded in containing them and preserving its unity, personalized by Arafat. The outbreak of the Intifada, however, confronted all PLO factions with a new situation especially because of the emergence of a new Palestinian actor in the Occupied Territories in the form of Hamas. Not only Arafat’s efforts to incor-porate the new movement in the PLO were responded by Hamas’s unacceptable conditions, the ‘Islamic Charter,’ published by Hamas less than a year after its advent, posed the Islamic option as a national alternative to the secular PLO. Here again, despite this challenge to the PLO’s status, the bitter power struggles and violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas over control of public institutions, espe-cially in Gaza Strip, conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fatah opted for dialogues and reconciliation efforts with its rivals, occasionally through support-ive mediation by Arab leaders and Israeli-Palestinian political figures. This policy toward Hamas remained largely intact under the PA. Arafat apparently perceived Hamas’s violence against Israel as a useful instrument to keep the pressure on the latter to ensure continued progress in the Oslo process.

A salient exception of this policy was the brutal repression conducted by Arafat’s security agencies against Hamas’s leading activists following the wave of



suicide bombings in February–March 1996, estimating that Hamas had become too dangerous for the PA and future settlements with Israel. Whereas many Israeli commentators fostered expectations shortly after the formation of the PA for a drastic blow by the latter’s security forces against Hamas as a necessary measure to get rid of the Islamic terrorist attacks on Israel, for Arafat, or his successor, Mahmud Abbas, to adopt such measures would mean a political suicide, defi-nitely under conditions of stalemated negotiations and grievances over Israel’s continued settle ment policy in the West Bank.

Constituting an Exclusive National Authority

The PLO interest in emphasizing its all-inclusive nature as an exclusive repre-sentative of all walks of the Palestinian people (the majority of the members of the Palestinian National Council represent civilian sectors rather than the mili-tary factions) could not blur the fact that the armed groups effectively dictated the PLO policymaking. Moreover, the Palestinian ‘guerilla’ groups were in fact led by civilians who had rarely been involved in armed activities, functioning more as political parties with a military component—identified with particular ideological platforms. The organized civilian sectors were represented in the PNC by individuals elected on a factional basis, that is, identified with one of the military organizations. In fact, ever since 1968, the PLO has been ruled by Fatah whose members or adherents also occupied most of the key positions in the PLO institutions. Similarly to Fatah, other factions competed for influence in educa-tional institutions, trade unions, and voluntary associations, strengthening the bonds between them and the Palestinian society.

The main effort of the Palestinian factions in political mobilization and institution-building focused on the refugee camps’ population. The preference for the refugee camps may be attributed to the fact that the majority of the founders of the Palestinian groups were refugees themselves, but also due to the relatively easy access to these populations and their residential areas and isolation from the local authorities. The refugee camps provided the ideal arenas for carrying out clandestine activities, enlist the youth for military service, and organize the camps around committees and procedures, also because they enjoyed political autonomy recognized by the local government (Lebanon from 1969, Jordan 1969–71), thanks to pressure exerted by other Arab regimes on behalf of the PLO.

Ever since 1973, Fatah conducted systematic efforts toward political mobiliza-tion and institutionalization of the civilian population in the West Bank within a new clandestine framework of the Palestinian National Front (PNF). The goal was to thwart attempts by Israel and Jordan to form an alternative Palestinian leader-ship from the residents of the Occupied Territories, and serve as a civil, comple-mentary extension of Fatah’s guerilla activities. The establishment of the PNF was followed by purchasing or investing in East Jerusalem’s newspapers and other local private and public enterprises, and institutions. This effort was accelerated


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toward the close of the 1970s thanks to the decisions of the 1979 Arab summit meeting in Bagdad which provided the PLO and Jordan with significant resources earmarked for the residents of the Occupied Territories. Although these funds were utilized under common Jordanian-PLO supervision, it served well Fatah’s objective of consolidating its authority in the territories utilizing the existing organizational infrastructure and the growing identification of the intelligentsia and urban elites with the PLO.

The growing penetration of the PLO into the Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories and the frustrated efforts of Jordan to preserve its influence in the West Bank following the 1973 war led to increasing recognition of the PLO as a national leadership at the expense of the Hashemite Kingdom. From the PLO viewpoint, this was essential for preventing any attempt by the Jordanian monarch to bypass the PLO, especially in view of the ongoing secret contacts he had been conducting with Israel. Even before attaining a collective recognition of the Arab states as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, Fatah sought to silence local public figures (by force, if necessary) who made public statements concerning the future of the Occupied Territories, challenging the PLO exclusive authority as the ulti-mate Palestinian policymaker.

Tensions and differences between the ‘outside’ PLO and public figures in the Occupied Territories reached a boiling point already in the late 1960s resulting in threats on the lives of Hebron Mayor Muhammad Ali al-Ja`bari, and publicists Hamdi al-Taji al-Farouqi and Muhammad Abu Shalbayah, and the lawyer Aziz Shehadeh (who was eventually assassinated)—all avant-garde advocates of the idea of a Palestinian state within the Occupied Territories. Fatah employed a simi-lar strategy also toward public figures demonstrating autonomy in their relations with Israel and Jordan, such as Rashad al-Shawwa, Mayor of Gaza City (1971–82), and Zafer al-Masri, murdered in 1986 for accepting an Israeli appointment as mayor of Nablus. The PLO’s efforts in repressing dissident voices from among the residents of the Occupied Territories were practically supported by Israel’s refusal to conduct serious negotiations with the local Palestinian leadership over meaningful self-government or encourage the local leadership to undertake politi-cal responsibility. The PLO’s harsh treatment of Palestinian dissidents reflected its constant concern over possible erosion of its authority, especially in view of the Arab states repeated attempts to intervene in its policymaking and to co-opt or buy off certain factions willing to challenge the PLO leadership. The cases of the Iraqi-backed secession (in 1974) of Abu Nidal from, and fight against Fatah, the Syrian-backed rebellion of Abu Musa against Arafat (in 1983), and of Abu Za’im (in 1986) backed by Jordan—were all insignificant episodes as was the abortive attempt of the Israeli government to establish ‘village associations’ in the West Bank during 1978–81. These attempts to undermine the PLO’s status were the main reason for the PLO’s continued rejection of the idea to establish a govern-ment in exile brought up by Presidents Anwar Sadat and Habib Bourguiba in the course of the 1970s to facilitate its incorporation in the Middle East peace process.



The structure of the PLO was adjusted to the geopolitical conditions under which it came to operate after 1968: on the one hand, a loose umbrella organiza-tion with a scattered constituency, which increased the bargaining and blackmail-ing power of fringe groups in the PLO and outside of it and limited the freedom of maneuver of Fatah/PLO leadership. In addition, the lack of a safe territorial basis enabled the Arab governments to restrict and manipulate the Palestinian groups beyond proportion compared to their real scope of aid. It was this consi deration, in addition to the need to ensure access to the Israeli-controlled territory, that was at the root of the Palestinian guerilla groups’ constant quest, ever since 1967, for an autonomous territorial base in one of Israel’s neighboring Arab countries. Hence, in the wake of the deportation from Lebanon in 1982 and the loss of the de-facto autonomous hold in that country, the PLO made an effort to cooperate with King Hussein in order to attain some access to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The PLO made a significant and continued effort to construct its position as a representative leadership of all segments of Palestinian society both in the home-land and the diaspora. This was best represented in the organization’s propaganda, news reports, and messages through autonomous radio broadcastings from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, calling the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for passive resistance (sumud) to the Israeli occupation, especially in the sense of staying put on their land to prevent its take-over by Israel. Another example is the PLO response to the Land Day of March 30, 1976 on which Israel’s Palestinian citizens declared a general strike to protest at Israel’s plan to confiscate a large scope of land for establishing new Jewish settlements. In the violent clashes that ensued that day six Palestinian citizens were killed and dozens were wounded by the Israeli army. The Land Day events paved the road for Israel’s Palestinian citi-zens to be embraced by the PLO and praised for their persistence following dec-ades of being blamed by other Arabs as collaborators with Israel. The event also brought Israeli Arabs closer to the PLO as a symbol of their Palestinian identity. Following the outbreak of the Intifada in late 1987, Israeli Arabs became increas-ingly active in demonstrating their unreserved solidarity and identification with their Palestinian brethren in the Occupied Territories, which occasionally led to riots and violent clashes with the Israeli authorities. Israeli Palestinian citizens remained, however, largely law-abiding, avoiding participation in violent activi-ties against Israel, and maintaining a clear division between themselves and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The eruption of the Intifada in late 1987 abruptly shifted the spotlights to the Occupied Territories as the main stage of Palestinian struggle for national libera-tion. The continuous uprising underlined the PLO’s weakness as a ‘non- territorial’ actor now increasingly challenged by a newly declared Islamic Resistance Movement which questioned the PLO’s legitimate status as the sole representa-tive of the Palestinian people and presented itself as the ultimate alternative. Drawing on its large constituency of Muslim Brothers and lubricated system of social services, Hamas set a new ideological and practical approach to the struggle for national liberation phrased in strict Islamic terms, all of which enabled it


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to attain rapidly developing popular support. By the time the PA was established in May 1994, Hamas had already struck deep roots in the Palestinian society, especially in the Gaza Strip, undergone a process of institutionalization and esta-blished close relations with Syria and Iran, all of which rendered it a firm rival to reckon with (see below).

The above discussion explains why the Palestinian issue has survived as a primary factor in the Arab–Israeli conflict, regardless of the prevalent view among Israeli right-wing spokesmen that it is primarily an instrument of Arab and Muslim states in their effort to eliminate Israel. The historical centrality of the Palestine issue, however, is deeply rooted in the Arab-Muslim political culture and memory which would preserve its longevity at least as long as the Israeli-Palestinian con-flict had not been resolved. This was unequivocally demonstrated in the rush of Arab ruling elites to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of the PLO–Israel Oslo accords and their surrender to public opinion to severe those relations following the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. In addition, other factors partly emanating from Palestinian demography and potential of violence com-bined with diplomacy, international support for Palestinian statehood and impa-tience with the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank, all seem to keep the Palestinian issue high on the regional and international agendas.

The Limits of Armed Struggle and Quest for a Political Option

Transformation of the PLO

The initial success in practically establishing and shaping the ideological and organizational concepts of the PLO can be largely attributed to the energy and assertiveness of its founder and first chairman, Ahmad al-Shuqayri, who enjoyed Nasser’s backing and short-lived support from King Hussein. The birth of the PLO, however, could hardly mitigate the inter-Arab tensions and their impact on intra-Palestinian competitions. The dispute focused on the Arab strategy in the conflict with Israel. Contrary to Nasser’s concept of promoting Arab unity first, even if only ‘unity of action,’ and then waging the long-delayed decisive war for the liberation of Palestine, Fatah supported by the Syrian and Algerian radical regimes, advocated popular armed struggle without delay and long preparations. In retrospect, Nasser’s insistence on long-term preparations by the Arab armies as a necessary condition for a successful Arab war against Israel was euphemism for an indefinite postponement of the war to which Shuqayri had to succumb.

The controversy was first and foremost rooted in domestic Egyptian and Syrian factors. Nasser realized the complexity, almost impracticality of inflicting a death blow to Israel even if he himself repeatedly spoke, at least from the early 1960s, about the elimination of Israel. In addition to having about a third of his armed forces bogged down in a long and exhausting civil war in Yemen, he had no trust



in his Arab counterparts concerning their commitment to contribute to the joint Arab military effort against Israel. Contrarily, the revolutionary Ba’ath regime in Syria adopted the concept of popular armed struggle mainly as a means to pro-mote its domestic and regional legitimacy in addition to challenging Nasser and force him to recognize the regime in Damascus. This concept was adopted and developed by Fatah, drawing on the experience of other revolutionary and national liberation movements, especially the Algerian one. Precisely because the found-ers of Fatah could not overlook the collision of interest between their revolution-ary approach and raison d’état, they had little faith in the Arab states’ willingness, let alone preparedness, to take the cost of war for the sake of the Palestinians. Fatah’s alternative strategy for coping with the stalemated liberation war was waging guerilla warfare which needed little preparations and could be initiated with modest means and without delay. Theoretically, this type of warfare, antici-pating retaliatory actions by Israel, was meant to be a catalyst for chain reaction leading to an all-Arab fusion of wills and capabilities and ultimately to Arab unity followed by the inevitable victory. Practically, the unhidden objective of this strat-egy was to militarily entangle the Arab states in the conflict with Israel against their own will.

The Fatah–PLO rivalry also drew on sociological cleavages which should not be overlooked. Shuqayri and his colleagues in the PLO echelons largely repre-sented the younger part of the Mandatory socioeconomic urban elite, even if many of them were political refugees. Many of them held senior posts in the Palestinian national movement or the public sector under the British Mandate and some, as in the case of Shuqayri, served as senior officials in Arab administrations and belonged to the generation of leaders held responsible for the defeat. The strategy of popular armed struggle—as opposed to a conventional war—thus effectively challenged Nasser’s leadership and the state order in the region.

In addition to bringing the Palestinians back into the limelight in the Arab-Israeli conflict as an active national factor after a long period of erosion of their national identity and reduction of their cause to the humanitarian aspect of refu-gees, Fatah and other militant groups called for the liberation of Palestine through sacrifice and violence not diplomacy and propaganda, Fatah’s strategy also aimed to reinforce the self-confidence of the ‘Palestinian personality.’ In this respect, Fatah consciously adopted, similarly to many other national liberation move-ments, Franz Fanon’s idea regarding the essential role of violence as a psycho-logical catharsis for the subjugated struggling for liberation from colonialism (Fanon 1963, pp. 34–105). The guerilla warfare was thus meant to be a strategy, not a mere tactic. It aimed to break the state of Arab inaction and drain Israel’s capabilities by employing limited military actions executed by a handful of Palestinian guerilla fighters with the passive support of the ‘confrontation states.’ These fighters were to be an avant-garde force leading and serving as a shining example to the Arab nation at large.

The doctrinal disagreement between these two trends in Palestinian politics was not limited only to intellectual debates and propaganda. It accelerated the


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militarization process in both PLO and Fatah. Under the leadership of Shuqayri, the PLO continued to mirror Nasser’s Arab policy by which the PLO remained confined to social and political activities. Nonetheless, to add a military hue to the PLO’s mission of ‘liberation,’ in 1965, the Arab League confirmed the establish-ment of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) comprised of three brigades formed by Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. The three brigades were largely manned by Palestinians residing in the latter countries and commanded by officers of the respective Arab states. The PLA was virtually part of the PLO but in fact each of the brigades reported to the general staff of the respective hosting countries.

In the radical wing supported by Syria, the establishment of the PLO expe-dited the decision to embark on armed struggle. Hence, Fatah’s first military operation on January 1, 1965 was launched earlier than the military prepara-tions allowed, with the clear intention to assert itself as the core liberation instrument and outweigh the PLO in the campaign for the hearts and souls of the Palestinians. Henceforth, sabotage, mine-laying, and murder rapidly became hallmarks of the Palestinian guerillas with the participation of additional organi-zations with nationalist-activist doctrines. Thirty months later, the combined effect of proliferating Palestinian guerilla operations from Jordan and Lebanon, with Syria’s backing, paved the road for the unintended escalation of May–June 1967 to war.

Regardless of its disastrous consequences, the 1967 War may be considered a success and realization of the Palestinian effort to entangle the Arab states in war with Israel against their will. The echoing defeat of the Arab regular armies in the war underpinned the enormous prestige now bestowed on the Palestinian guerilla groups. Under circumstances of military paralysis of now the Arab armies, the guerilla concept appeared in Arab public opinion as the ultimate alternative press-ing the regimes to succumb to these expectations by allowing such groups almost unlimited freedom of action on their territories. The 1967 defeat thus opened up new opportunities for the guerillas as indicated by the emergence of many new groups especially during the 1967–69 years, bringing about fundamental changes in the leadership, structure, and strategies of the PLO. The ousting of Shuqayri who had been identified with Nasser was inevitable but the change went deeper than mere personal changes at the top.

The post-1967 years indeed witnessed a rapid transformation of the PLO from a political representation of the Palestinians to an umbrella organization of ‘resist-ance’ movements at its core and various Palestinian civil sectors and communi-ties. The replacement of Shuqayri in December 1967 by Yahya Hammuda—a veteran activist in Palestinian refugee affairs—paved the road to the appointment of Fatah’s leader Yasser Arafat as the PLO spokesman by the third PNC session held in Cairo in 1968, by which time the organization had come under full control of the guerrilla groups. The PLO now came to assume the form of a confederation of the main guerilla groups led by Fatah, the most prominent organization both militarily and materially, which had committed itself to social and political ‘revo-lution until victory’ through popular armed struggle.



The radical changes undergone by the PLO entailed the rewriting of its 1964 basic document—the Palestinian National Charter (al-mithaq al-qawmi al- filastini)—placing the armed struggle as the primary national strategy, not merely tactic, and redefining its objectives. Unlike the previous national charter which carried a discernible pan-Arab character, the 1968 version reflected modi-fied directions and objectives phrased in strictly narrow Palestinian national terms—manifest in altering the previous Arabic title of the charter to al-mithaq al-watani al-filastini—emphasizing particular characteristics including history, identity, people, and territory. At the same time, the PLO reasserted its adherence to all-Arab national principles and expectations for solidarity and support of the Arab world for the Palestinians as an indispensable component in the struggle for liberating the lost homeland.

By 1969, the PLO structure had taken shape comprised of guerilla groups that represented three main ideological and political concepts:

1. Particular Palestinian nationalism and social pragmatism, represented by Fatah, striving to establish an independent Palestinian state on the liberated territory of historic Palestine in its entirety, that is, on the ruins of Israel. This stream persisted in maintaining its decision-making free of the Arab states’ intervention.

2. Pan-Arab revolutionary trend, represented by the Arab Nationalist Move-ment’s offshoot established in late 1967, of the PFLP, led by George Habash. Within the next two years, this organization split twice, giving birth to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), headed by Ahmad Jibril, and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), led by Na’if Hawatmah (in the late 1970s it became the DFLP). While the PFLP and the PFLP-GC remained mark-edly pan-Arab in their ideology, the PDFLP adopted as of the October 1973 war increasingly national attitude, close to that of Fatah, though it remained deeply committed to social revolution, similarly to the PFLP.

3. Arab-based factions, established by Arab regimes to serve their national interests and provide them a foothold in the Palestinian political arena, namely, al-Saìqa of Syria’s Baàth regime and the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) of the Iraqi rival Baàth regime. Joining the PLO in late 1968 and mid-1969, respectively, these groups effectively represented first and foremost their respective state patrons.

With Fatah at the helm, its ideological doctrine of promoting strictly Palestinian national interests by all means, effectively guided the PLO in establishing an institutional infrastructure for reaching out to as many Palestinian sectors and communities as possible and provide limited social services to needy refugees. This was reflected in the effort to preserve the name, symbols and some of the institutions, and modes of operation of the PLO in order to form a continuity effect despite the essential changes the organization had undergone. Though the


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armed organizations now constituted the ‘hard core’ of the PLO, Fatah saw to preserve the status of the organization as a national umbrella framework repre-senting all sectors and institutions of the Palestinian society in Arab countries, the West Bank, and Gaza.

The Limits of Armed Struggle: The State against the Revolution

The new PLO leadership, headed since 1969 by Yasser Arafat of Fatah sought to construct and disseminate its new concept of a national liberation movement based on armed resistance as the cornerstone in the process of mobilization, insti-tution- and nation-building. The radicalized PLO leadership also strove to expand its autonomy and maximize its control over all Palestinian affairs at large, espe-cially its own activities and policymaking, at the expense of the Arab states. Hence, although Fatah, the largest group in the PLO, undertook from the outset to refrain from intervening in domestic Arab affairs, troubled relations with certain Arab regimes could hardly be avoided. Indeed, already before 1967, the PLO’s activity among Palestinians in Jordan was one of the reasons for the fallout between the Hashemite regime and Nasser, the PLO’s patron.

It was, however, the proliferating Palestinian armed presence on, and opera-tions from, Arab national territories against Israel, coupled by the latter’s painful retaliatory policy in response, that rendered a confrontation between the sovereign Arab authorities of those states and the resistance groups inevitable. Already in the summer/fall of 1967, Fatah’s efforts to establish guerilla networks in the West Bank failed, forcing this and other organizations to operate from Jordan, parallel to their continued raids from Lebanon. That Jordan and Lebanon were taken by the Palestinian groups as staging grounds for their operations against Israel was no surprise given the presence of massive Palestinian population in the former and relatively weak state apparatuses in the latter. Holding the neighboring Arab states responsible for any violation of its sovereignty originating from the Arab territo-ries, Israel adopted an escalating retaliatory policy aimed to force the Arab gov-ernments to prevent such violations or pay a high cost for allowing them.

The Palestinian armed struggle assumed varied forms of guerilla warfare—rural, urban, and international—indicating a constant search for the most efficient and applicable strategies in accordance with the PLO’s agenda. Along the years, the Palestinian guerilla groups had found to their chagrin that no Arab country was willing to serve as their ‘Hanoi,’ similarly to the North Vietnamese backing for the Vietcong guerilla warfare. Indeed, unlike the Vietnamese case the Palestinians’ guerilla warfare was theirs, aimed at liberating their land, not of any of the Arab states.

The Palestinian perception of the armed struggle underwent a process of change in accordance with political and military constraints. Until 1967, the objective was to drag the Arab states to war with Israel while after that war, the PLO combatant leadership sought to fulfill an active role, together with the Arab



armies, in the war against Israel hoping to muster the support of the West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinian population. The failure of that effort forced the Palestinian armed groups to operate from within Jordan and Lebanon which brought them into confrontations with these two states and entangled the Palestinian resistance movements in exhausting struggles. Israel’s painful military operations and ongoing security measures along its borders, the Arab states’ efforts to limit, or prevent altogether the military activity of the guerilla groups organizations on their soil to avoid Israeli retaliations, all forced the Palestinian guerilla groups to develop new battlegrounds, targets, and methods. These made the armed struggle a potent political instrument and powerful source of propa-ganda which, together with the echoes of Israel’s retaliatory operations, signifi-cantly amplified the psychological impact of the Palestinian armed struggle.

By the late 1960s, Palestinian military activity against Israel had encompassed rural, urban, and international operations, aimed strictly and indiscriminately at civi-lians, including children and women, as in the attack on Avivim’s children bus in May 1970 near the Lebanese border in which 13 children were murdered. The 1970s witnessed the most extensive and lethal series of terrorist attacks conducted by a host of Palestinian guerilla groups. The early 1970s saw the conti nuation of attacks against Israel’s international air traffic, harbingered by the PFLP and later adopted by other groups, occasionally conducted in cooperation with, or practically by foreign terrorist groups as in the case of the May 1972 massacre of dozens of passengers at Lod Airport by the Japanese Red Army at the request of the PFLP. The aftermath of ‘Black September’ and the expulsion of the guerilla groups from Jordan resulted in a major upsurge of Palestinian international terro rism as a result of Fatah’s adoption of these type of operations; the most ostentatious of which was the massacre of the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972.

The American-mediated Arab-Israeli peace process in the wake of the 1973 war shifted the center of gravity of Palestinian armed struggle to spectacular border-crossing and via-sea raids on Israeli civilians in towns and villages in the northern part of the country. In most of these raids, the perpetrators captured inno-cent hostages for bargaining purposes, demanding the release of prisoners, which often ended with a bloodbath as a result of Israel’s military attempt to release the hostages, resulting in suicide bombing by the perpetrators. Salient cases were the millitary raids on Kiryat Shmona, Ma`alot, and Beit She’an, all in 1974, and the coastal road bus in 1978.

Regardless of their formats, the Palestinian terrorist activities were largely cal-culated and purposeful, often motivated by competition for prestige and popular support. As far as Fatah was concerned, these activities were often guided by political consideration as indicated by its commencement of operating in the inter-national arena in the wake of the expulsion from Jordan, representing a desperate effort to restore the organization’s prestige and stature in the Arab world. Evidently, this kind of terrorism was stopped in the mid-1970s when Fatah leaders concluded that it was damaging their efforts to promote their international recognition. In July 1981, the PLO leadership was willing to accept an American-mediated


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understanding with Israel on a ceasefire in south Lebanon following a period of heavy artillery exchanges, rocket launching, and air attacks by Israel. The unofficial accord constituted a milestone in the PLO’s struggle for international recognition. In retrospect, however, it was only a prelude to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon less than a year later with the aim of eliminating the Palestinian military presence in this country.

By 1969, the much praised guerilla warfare had already revealed its limitations in the geopolitical reality of the Arab–Israeli arena. Faced with painful retaliations by Israel, the armed Palestinian groups were increasingly forced to take refuge in the heartland of Jordan and Lebanon, establishing their headquarters and bases in refugee camps and urban areas, all of which violated the law and order of the ‘hosting’ state and generated frequent collisions with the local security establish-ments. Though Fatah adhered to the principle of avoiding a clash with any other Arab state, ultra-radical member groups in the PLO, especially George Habash’s PFLP, took the liberty to challenge the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Hashemite regime, which the Fatah leaders could not prevent or overlooked. In both Jordan and Lebanon, the Palestinian groups coalesced with local opposition elements as a shield against the authorities adding further weight to voices calling the state to take decisive measures against such violations of public order and the state sover-eignty. In Lebanon in particular, the Palestinian armed groups became an integral part of the domestic political conflicts and with the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, became actively involved in the fighting.

The growing tension and occasional clashes between the Palestinian resistance groups and state security apparatuses drew other Arab state actors into the fray, largely as biased mediators supporting the Palestinian guerilla activities from Jordan and Lebanon. These efforts often ended with agreed compromises such as the PLO-Lebanon Cairo Agreement of 1969 mediated by Nasser; the Amman Agreement of 1970 mediated by a joint Arab committee; and the Malkart Accord of 1973 mediated by Syria. Although these agreements acknowledged the sover-eignty of Lebanon and Jordan respectively, they also sanctioned the Palestinian right to operate on and from their territories. It is noteworthy that neither Syria nor Egypt allowed the Palestinian guerilla groups any facilities other than holding liaison offices and headquarters on their soils.

Despite these accords and inter-Arab interventions in support of the Palestinian armed resistance, the built-in contradiction with the state was inevitable. In the case of Jordan, stronger military institutions and adherence to the Hashemite monarch made it possible for the state to confront the Palestinian armed groups head-on at costly price in terms of civilian losses and temporarily severed rela-tions with other Arab states. In September 1970 (‘Black September’), amidst repelling Syria’s military intervention, and again in July 1971, Jordan managed to expel the Palestinian armed groups and restore full control of its territory. In the case of Lebanon, the precarious political balance among political and ethnic com-munities, coupled by Syrian vehement pressures and intervention in support of the Palestinians, disallowed or crippled the option of inflicting a decisive blow to



the Palestinian military groups in this country. In hindsight, Israel’s heavy hand in punishing Lebanon for the Palestinian attacks further weakened the Lebanese state without producing the desirable results as in the case of Jordan.

It took Israel’s nine week-long siege of West Beirut during its 1982 Lebanon war, with daily aerial bombings and blocking of essential commodities from reaching the civilian population, to convince Washington, the PLO leadership, Syria, and Saudi Arabia to accept Israel’s strict demand—mediated by the United States—that the PLO’s headquarters and military personnel must leave Lebanon. The tacit collaboration of Arab states with Israel in defeating the Palestinian gue-rilla and forcing its withdrawal from Lebanon was followed a year later by the Syrian offensive on the refugee camps in northern Lebanon after Arafat’s return to Lebanon in an effort to reassert his presence in this country. It was one of Arafat’s most desperate situations: besieged by Syrian and Palestinian enemies and confined to a small enclave with his back to the sea.

In Quest of Political Action: The PLO–Jordan Dialogue

The forced withdrawal from Lebanon effectively meant that the PLO guerilla groups lost the military option though it also enhanced a worldwide conscious-ness of the gravity of the Palestinian problem and need to invest efforts in resolv-ing it. In hindsight, the blow inflicted by Israel and Syria on the PLO’s military posture and autonomous territorial base in Lebanon also forced the PLO to reas-sess its political strategies and priorities, resulting in a greater, albeit temporary, freedom of political maneuver on both Palestinian and inter-Arab levels. Interestingly enough, in an article published in 1985 in a semi-official PLO jour-nal Shu’un Filastiniyya, the editor went as far as welcoming the exodus from Lebanon and the end of the ‘Fakahani Empire’ which entangled the PLO in un necessary battles, exhausted its power, and distracted the movement from its original political agenda (Jiryis 1985, pp. 19–20).

In practice, the Lebanon war resulted in the Reagan Plan announced on September 1, 1982 in an effort to appease the US Arab allies in the region. The American plan stressed the need to resume the peace process by addressing the Palestinian issue while providing impetus for Jordan to join this process, paving the road to the PLO-Jordan dialogue, despite fierce objection on the part of the radical factions, especially the PFLP and DFLP. In February 1985, Arafat and King Husain signed an accord of joint diplomatic action, evading the obstacle of the PLO’s rejection of Resolution 242 by adopting a formula of ‘land for Peace as mentioned in the UN resolutions, including the Security Council resolutions.’

The PLO was willing to accept resolutions 242 and 338 only in exchange for American recognition of the Palestinian people’s right for self-determination. The PLO justifiably argued that such recognition was necessary given the lack of any reference in these resolutions to the Palestinians, or to their national rights. Washington, however, adhered to its basic prerequisites for opening a dialogue


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with the PLO: an unequivocal recognition of Resolutions 242 and 338; renuncia-tion of terrorism and acceptance of direct negotiations with Israel. In January 1986, during King Husain’s visit to Washington, the Reagan administration informed him that it was willing to invite the PLO to an international conference if it would accept these three conditions (al-Ra‘i 1986).

Washington’s conditions deepened the cleavages between the PLO and Jordan. In addition, the PLO rejected the American-Israeli principle of direct negotiations as opposed to an international conference perceived as a mechanism for imposing a settlement on Israel based on previous international resolutions without commit-ting the Palestinians to parallel concessions. Furthermore, Husain’s hope for flexibility on the PLO’s part concerning Resolution 242 was frustrated when the PLO firmly rejected the new American proposal. The ensuing deadlock resulted by the PLO’s position intensified the tension between the two Arab parties, lead-ing the king to announce, on February 20, the suspension of the Amman Accord until the PLO changes its political position. The manipulative nature of the king’s step was evident in his speech, which he directed primarily to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, following which the Jordanian government published its social and economic five-year ‘development plan’ worth of over $1 billion aimed at promoting their perseverance in the face of Israel’s policy of creeping annexation (Ministry of Planning, Jordan 1986).

With the return of the PLO–Jordan relations to a ‘zero-sum’ mode, the way was not only opened to a new Israeli–Jordanian rapprochement but also enabled Arafat to patch his relations with the radical Palestinian factions, especially the PFLP and DFLP. Relations with these groups improved through military cooperation during the Shi’a Amal militia’s siege of the refugee camps in Lebanon ( 1985–87). In April 1987, on the eve of the 18th PNC session, an agreement was reached between Fatah and these movements to nullify the Amman Accord, following which the radicals resumed full membership in the PLO. Arafat thus sacrificed the meager chance for progress in the peacemaking efforts for the sake of internal Palestinian unity, a typical example of Arafat’s vacillation between the warm bosom of Palestinian unity and the risky unknown diplomatic path.

The implications of the reunion with the radical groups were not ignored by moderate Fatah figures interpreting it as a heavy loss of the post-Lebanon achieve-ments embodied by the agreement with Jordan and low ebb in the PLO’s political posture. Lamenting that the PLO leadership had become a hostage of a radical minority, an astute Palestinian commentator pointed out in a semi-official PLO publication that in the absence of both military and political options the only valuable asset remaining for the PLO to rise from this low point was the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories (Jiryis 1987). Six months later the Intifada broke out.

The eruption of the Intifada in late 1987 and birth of Hamas, exposed Fatah’s distance from its founding myth of armed struggle since the expulsion from Lebanon. Similarly to the Islamic Jihad that preceded it, Hamas effectively appro-priated Fatah’s ideology of popular armed struggle as the only strategy in the



struggle for the liberation of Palestine, now defined in Islamic terms as Holy War ( jihad). At the same time, the lengthy Intifada triggered a chain reaction on the part of the main parties involved—Jordan, the PLO, and Israel—the unifying element of which was the search for a political outlet with the least damage to their respective interests. In view of the beaten and paralyzed PLO, the Intifada was an energizing injection, allowing it to return to the center stage carried on the international waves of astonishment and adoration for this enduring popular protest (see below).

The PLO Struggle for Recognition as the Representative of the Palestinian People

The main objective of the PLO under Arafat’s leadership was to reconstruct the divided Palestinian populations in the diaspora as a particular political commu-nity, attain regional and international recognition of its national rights, and of itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Recognizing the PLO as such became a high priority and urgent matter as of late 1973 in view of the post-war military settlements mediated by the US administration by which Egypt and Syria managed to retrieve part of their national territory lost in 1967. The prospects for such a settlement over the West Bank between Israel and Jordan—despite the latter’s avoidance of fighting along this front in the October 1973 war—triggered a bitter competition between the latter and the PLO over the right to represent the Palestinian-inhabited territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in any future settlement on these territories.

Lacking a foothold in the homeland and threatened by Jordan’s claim over the West Bank—half-heartedly endorsed by Israel’s ‘Jordanian option’—the princi-ple of Palestinian representation became an urgent necessity, constituting a virtual substitute for sovereignty. By late 1973, the PLO’s need to be recognized as such coalesced with Egypt’s interest in attaining all-Arab legitimacy for a new approach in the conflict with Israel defined as ‘the interim objective’ (al-hadaf al-marhali) aimed at retrieving the territories lost in 1967 and ‘the recovery by the Palestinian people of its established national rights in accordance with the PLO decisions through diplomacy.’ The Arab summit conference held in Algiers in November 1973 also endorsed, despite Jordan’s objection, a decision defining the PLO as ‘the sole representative of the Palestinian People.’ The failed American effort to bring Israel and Jordan to accept a settlement enabling Jordan to restore its pres-ence in the West Bank coupled by the Syrian outcry against this option played again into the hands of the PLO and against Jordan. The question of Palestinian representation of the Occupied Territories was prominent in the Arab summit con-ference held in Rabat in October 1974, marked by overt competition between Arafat and King Hussein, both presenting to the summit petitions signed by West Bank public figures supporting their respective claims.

The Rabat summit was held at an advantageous timing for the PLO whose soaring international prestige was clearly indicated by the UN invitation for Arafat


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to address the UN General Assembly. The PLO indeed had attracted a great deal of attention following the historical resolution made at the 12th PNC meeting in Cairo in June 1974 in which the PLO simultaneously implied its approval of a political settlement defined as an interim national objective. Without conceding the strategic goal of establishing an independent Palestinian state in all of Mandatory Palestine, the PLO stated that it would, as an interim stage, establish a ‘national, independent and fighting authority on any part of Palestinian land to be liberated.’ The resolution represented a turning point in the PLO’s official strat-egy from one based on armed and total liberation of the entire historic Palestine and wiping out ‘the Zionist entity,’ to a step-by-step approach without losing legitimacy.

The adoption of the ‘strategy of phases’ by the PLO, however, remained highly controversial, subject to searing public debate in the Palestinian arena. Some raised doubts over the ability to persist along this tactics which the Tunisian President Bourguiba simply defined back in 1965 as ‘take and demand [more],’ while ensuring that the tactic would not substitute the strategy (Hourani 1984, pp. 83–89). In other words, how was the PLO to escape making political conces-sions in return for attaining its interim goals and how would it secure the next steps toward the realization of its strategic objective? Assuming that Israel would be bound to demand clear Palestinian commitments and international guarantees in return for its even a partial withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, can the PLO avoid the possibility that the first phase in the multi-step process would also be the last one? This dilemma was further sharpened by Israel’s consistent rejec-tion of this strategy defined by a leading Israeli scholar of the Arab–Israeli con-flict as ‘salami tactics’ for eliminating Israel, let alone to withdraw to the lines of 1967 and recognize the PLO as a party to a political settlement (Harkabi 1975, p. 209). Along the years, these doubts exposed the PLO’s mainstream led by Arafat to criticism from ardent nationalists, secular and Islamic, representing alle-giance to the traditional Palestinian hard line.

Against the backdrop of PLO’s growing prestige, the participants of the Rabat summit resolved to recognize the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,’ ignoring the Hashemite monarch’s objection and warning of the consequences of this decision. Adopting the PLO’s fresh tactical goal, the summit also undertook to support the establishment of an ‘independent [Palestinian] national authority’ on any land liberated from Israel.

The Arab summit conferences of Algiers and Rabat confirmed the PLO’s total and historical concept of exclusive representation of the Palestinian people. According to this concept, the future of the Occupied Territories was only one com-ponent of the broader Palestinian cause which also included the 1948 refugee prob-lem, hence the PLO’s relentless insistence on preserving the wholeness of the Palestinian problem, including its social, political, and territorial components as stated in the Palestinian National Charter. This approach also stood at the core of the PLO’s resolution adopted in 1969 calling for establishing a ‘Secular Democratic State’ over the whole territory of historic Palestine in which Muslims, Christians,



and Jews will live in equality. This vague idea, which came about after much debates and apologetics reflected the contradiction between the PLO’s official denial of Israel’s right to exist and commitment to eliminate it, and need to mobilize inter-national support for the Palestinian cause. The idea, however, left little imprint on the Arab and international public opinion though it was never officially abandoned.

By bolstering its status as the exclusive representative of the Palestinian people, however, the summit decision also charged the PLO with responsibility to the cause it represented. The Algiers and Rabat decisions indirectly increased the pres-sures of certain Arab states and attempts to acquire control of the PLO decision-making, especially now that it had been given virtually a veto power over any issue concerning the Palestinian national interests. As mentioned above, Syria made repeated attempts to subordinate the PLO’s decision-making to the Ba`ath regime’s regional interests defined by the term ‘Greater Syria,’ including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. In rejecting this and other attempts by Arab countries to subordinate the PLO to their policies, Fatah’s insistence on preserving the auto-nomous Palestinian policymaking was largely supported by the two left-wing fac-tions of the PFLP and the DFLP. The latter managed to remain largely independent of any Arab state patronage preserving their credibility as firmly prioritizing the Palestinian cause over other considerations, unlike the state-based groups (Sa`iqa and ALF) and the PFLP-GC which became closely affiliated with Syria.

Notwithstanding the decisions made at Rabat in 1974, the question of repre-sentation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Arab–Israeli peace process remained a bone of contention. Israel’s adamant refusal—backed by the US—to view the PLO as a partner to political negotiations was no encouragement for the PLO’s sensitivity about the potential cost of such participation in terms of losing legitimacy within the Palestinian constituency as well as in the Arab world unless the results could be guaranteed in advance. At the same time, the PLO leadership was hard-pressed by the growing pace of Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, which was boosted in the wake of the 1977 elections and the advent, for the first time in Israel’s history a right-wing govern-ment. Henceforth, all Israeli governments continued to construct new settlements, especially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, especially after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993.4

Be it as it may, the post-Rabat summit years witnessed a cautious and con-strained development of the ‘strategy of phases’ toward an official formulation of establishing a Palestinian state in the 1967 Occupied Territories. Although the Arab summit held in Cairo in October 1976 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to ‘to establish its independent state on its own soil,’ the 13th PNC session held in Cairo in March 1977, just a few months after being militarily defeated by the Syrians in Lebanon, adopted a militant attitude with the obvious intent of pre-serving unity among all Palestinian factions in view of the anticipated struggle for their very presence on, and military operation from, the Lebanese territory. The PNC resolutions, thus, reiterated the PLO’s rejection of Security Council Resolution 242 and its commitment to continue the armed and political struggles


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for the restoration of ‘the permanent national rights of the Palestinian nation, without peace [with Israel] or recognition [of Israel].’ It also emphasized the Palestinian people’s ‘right to return, to self-determination and to the establish-ment of its national independent state on its independent soil.’5

Nonetheless, as of the mid-1970s, officials of Fatah met in Europe with Israeli public figures identified with the Left explicitly stating the PLO’s intention of establishing the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in coexistence with Israel.6 This tendency was also indicated by Palestinian intellectuals who risked their lives by publishing their views in this respect in the Arab and inter-national media. The PLO’s political goal of establishing a Palestinian state in the liberated Occupied Territories won formal inter-Arab backing ever since 1976 in consecutive summit meetings until their final consolidation in the Fez Conference of 1982, shortly after the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon. For the first time in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, this summit concluded with a consensus on an Arab peace plan based on the principles of full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories conquered in 1967, the Palestinian right to self-determination and of the PLO as being the sole representative of the Palestinians, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and guarantees for the security of all neighboring states by the UN Security Council.

Nonetheless, despite the expanding international recognition of the PLO as such, it had little practical meaning as long as Israel, backed by the US, utterly refused to consider the PLO’s participation in the Arab–Israeli peace process as long as it had not accepted the Security Council 242 Resolution and Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism. Moreover, the Hashemite monarch continued his secret contacts with Israel to materialize, and at least preserve his claim over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, virtually until the eruption of the Intifada in December 1987. A case in point is the Amman agreement signed by Arafat and King Hussein in February 1985 after a long Jordanian–Palestinian dialogue launched in the wake of President Reagan’s plan of September 1, 1982 which was designed to renew the peace process by primarily addressing the Palestinian issue together with Jordan. The three-year-long dialogue was another example of the intricate issue of the Palestinian representation, especially in the context of the continued competition between the PLO and the Hashemite regime over the West Bank. The king sought to take advantage of his sovereignty and access to Israeli policymakers insisting on establishing a Jordanian–Palestinian federation under his crown, meaning a Jordanian predominance. The PLO, however, preferred con-federal relations with Jordan, insisting on establishing an independent Palestinian state prior to determining the future relations with Jordan, all of which resulted in the failure of this episode. It is noteworthy that the dialogue with Jordan resulted in the temporary secession of the PLO radical-leftist groups as well as the Syrian-backed ones, from its Executive Committee indicating the priority ascribed by Arafat to the dialogue’s political significance for the PLO’s political survival following the expulsion from Lebanon.



The problem of Palestinian representation was yet again a procedural stum-bling block in the discussions—planned for February 1990 in Cairo—over the elections in the Occupied Territories in accordance with the Israeli initiative of May 1989. The issue that repeatedly arose both in the PLO–Jordan dialogue and the discussions over the matter of election of Palestinian delegates was the PLO’s insistence on being the sole source of authority to guide them, determining their identity, directing them, and legitimizing their actions. The PLO repeatedly insisted that it was to be the source of PA, whereas from Israel’s point of view, appointment of representatives by the PLO was perceived as negotiating with the PLO itself.

The PLO success in attaining control over the Intifada through the local ‘National Command’ and its messages to the public indeed eliminated King Hussein’s prospects for speaking on behalf of the West Bank. Apart from its spill-over effect on Jordan, the Intifada carried an overwhelming Palestinian national character forcing King Hussein to make his historical announcement on July 31, 1988 on Jordan’s ‘relinquishment of the legal and administrative ties between the two banks,’ and surrendering any claim of sovereignty over this territory. As far as Israel was concerned the Jordanian disengagement constituted the coup de grâce to the ‘Jordanian option’ adhered by Israel’s Labor-led governments since 1967, leaving Israel with the Palestinians as the only possible partner.

The Jordanian disengagement from the West Bank effectively put an end to the long rivalry over representation of the Occupied Territories. Moreover, it encour-aged activists in the Occupied Territories, mostly attached with Fatah, to instigate the PLO leadership to seize the moment and claim Palestinian sovereignty over these territories, paving the road for the PLO’s Declaration of Independence by the PNC session held in November 1988 in Algiers. Though the declaration made no reference to the legitimacy of the Jewish state, it referred to the UN Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 on Partition of Palestine into two states, heralding an increasing tendency of the PLO policymakers to draw on ‘inter-national legitimacy,’ namely, resolutions by the UN institutions, as their most promising source of support.

Another episode in the chain reaction triggered by the Intifada and the Jordanian disengagement was the invitation of Arafat to address a special session of the UN General Assembly held in Geneva following the US refusal to issue Arafat an entry visa. At the same time, however, Washington repeated its willingness to open a diplomatic dialogue with the PLO on conditions identical to those pre-sented by President Reagan to King Hussein in early 1986. In December 1988, a day after Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in which he failed to satisfy the American administration, he publicly stated his unequivocal acceptance of the Security Council Resolution 242, reaffirmed his renunciation of terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist. On the same day, the US government announced the opening of a ‘substantial dialogue with the PLO’ at an ambassadorial level.

All that, however, did not bring the PLO much closer to realization of its politi-cal goals of independent and sovereign state nor did it bring Jordan to entirely


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given up its interest to be involved in any settlement over the West Bank and preserve its ‘special status’ over al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), as was later recognized in the Israel–Jordan peace treaty. The Rabat summit decisions indeed bolstered the PLO’s posture rendering it an indispensable actor in any future endeavor to settle the conflict with Israel. The US–PLO dialogue, however, was apparently futile and in any case was suspended in June 1990, following Arafat’s refusal to condemn an attempted attack on the Israeli coastline by a small PLO member group. Arafat’s refusal to condemn the attack typically marked the priority he gave to preservation of the PLO unity over adaptation to international norms, especially under poor prospects of reaping gains. Shortly after the suspen-sion of the PLO–US dialogue, Arafat further distanced himself from the US and its Arab allies by fully siding with Saddam Hussein and his invasion of Kuwait.

The PLO effort to attain international recognition as the exclusive legitimate representative of the Palestinian people as a whole was indeed long and rocky, reflecting the political, ideological, and psychological barriers of shifting from a revolutionary mode of thought and action to political program and practice along with international expectations and norms. Especially in the PLO case, these bar-riers proved to be long-lasting given the burden of the Palestinian past and asym-metric power relations with Israel, which the Arab world failed to balance. As explained above, the PLO struggled for recognition and statehood as the more urgent needs in view of the geopolitical conditions created by the 1967 war. In essence, however, the PLO’s origins and raison d’être were rooted in the Palestinian diaspora population, the political culture of which played a major role in shaping the organization’s historical trajectory. Although the Palestinian refu-gee issue was repeatedly included in the PLO and collective Arab decisions—referring to their ‘right of return’ based on the recurrent UN resolutions, or included in vague phrases such as ‘just rights’ or ‘inalienable rights’—it often appeared to be of a secondary importance on the PLO agenda.

As demonstrated in the course of the dialogue with Jordan, the PLO had long adhered to its refusal to accept Security Council 242 Resolution because it only refereed to ‘refugees’ without clearly pointing to the Palestinian refugees. Moreover, PLO leaders repeatedly renounced the collective nature of the right of return insisting on the individual right of return (or compensation to those choos-ing not to return). Indeed, this demand remained a high priority in the Palestinian official discourse and was especially emphasized in the Declaration of Independence of November 1988. In essence, the ‘right of return’ is tightly con-nected to another prominent Palestinian and collective Arab demand, namely, the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination. Given that about half of the Palestinian people reside out of historic Palestine, the right of return and for self-determination is essentially indivisible.

The three core rights of the Palestinian people conceived by the PLO as ‘con-stant’ and ‘inalienable’—the right to a state, the right of return, and the right for self-determination—illustrate the PLO dilemma between adherence to the deeply rooted perception of historic Palestine as an Arab territory under Palestinian



national sovereignty, which would maintain the organization’s unity and legiti-macy, and need to present pragmatic and realistic objectives entailing domestic criticism and division, as indeed became prevalent in view of the inadequacy of the Oslo accords. The need to appease Palestinian skeptics and critics, on the one hand, and appeal to the international community for support and recognition, on the other, made obtrusive the tendency of PLO officials to employ vague, even contradictory, phrasings of the relationship between practical policies and vision, between acceptance of a Palestinian state in a small part of Palestine and the fun-damental objective of returning Palestine as a whole to its legal owners, and between what may be feasible to what is just and dreamed about. Even during the Oslo process reminiscent of this debate surfaced once and again when Fatah offi-cials, frustrated by the absent progress toward Palestinian statehood, would occa-sionally resort to the old maximalist discourse.

The PLO, Israel, and the Oslo Process

The Road to the Oslo Accords

Given the PLO National Charter’s decisive denial of Israel’s international legiti-macy and right to exist, its unequivocal commitment to liberate by force Palestine in its Mandatory boundaries ‘from the river to the sea’ connoting a total annihi-lation of the State of Israel and expulsion of the vast majority of its Jewish popula-tion perceived as ‘invaders,’ the PLO has indeed traveled a long and tortuous road to partnership with Israel in the Oslo accords. This journey passed through two intertwined processes described above namely, incremental redefinition of the Palestinian political objectives in realistic terms and ever-increasing international recognition as the exclusive representative of the Palestinian people. In the after-math of the failed PLO-Jordan dialogue, however, neither of these trajectories seemed to have brought the PLO any closer to realization of its trimmed strategic goal of statehood in a small part of historic Palestine.

The Oslo accords signed by Israel and the PLO in September 1993 resulted from a convergence of interests between these two parties emanating from three-level events: the continued Palestinian Intifada which, given Israel’s inability to quell, it further aggravated the threat of Hamas to Fatah/PLO leadership; the col-lapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rendering the United States the single global superpower; and the Gulf War which shattered what had remained of the Arab states’ capability to function collectively and seek common objec-tives, including the Palestine cause. Similarly to the agreements Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan, the Oslo agreement was not the result of international media-tion or multi-party conference but of bilateral negotiations. In the Israel–PLO case, it was the lengthy deadlock of the Madrid peace conference coupled by other constraints that pushed the parties toward each other, with the right mechanism produced by a third party, that enabled this unthinkable event.


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The Intifada originated entirely from within the Occupied Territories, preceded by a decade long emergence of a younger and more militant local leadership which had demonstrated its ability to wage civil disobedience along with the rise of various popular committees, organizations of women, students, and workers many of which were involved in voluntary welfare activities. Though much of this development of active civil society was affiliated to specific political factions, most notably Fatah, the initiation of the Intifada and its conduct was the result of these grass-root organizations rather than pre-planned by the PLO and its appara-tuses. The Intifada’s portrayal as a daring popular—and during its first few months mostly non-violent—protestation against the continued Israeli occupation indeed captured the imagination of the world community, defined by a leading Palestinian historian the ‘fourth major attempt by the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine to stem the Zionist colonization of the country’ (Khalidi 1988).

The Intifada indeed brought the Palestinian cause forcefully back to the world consciousness enabling the PLO to ride this tide and reappear as an indispensable actor in any attempt to advance a solution to the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The new energies that the Intifada in the Occupied Territories injected into the veins of the stifled PLO notwithstanding, it also marked the emergence of an old-new ex-PLO social actor in the Palestinian arena in the form of Hamas—a militant Islamic-nationalist movement which grew increasingly challenging to the PLO’s status as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.’ By repudiating the PLO’s acceptance of a two-state solution in the conflict with Israel, Hamas claimed legitimacy on grounds of suc-ceeding the original combat tradition of Fatah vowing to fight Israel to the end thus tacitly questioning the PLO’s legitimacy.

Contrary to the relative ease by which the PLO appropriated the uprising and took full control of the secular leadership behind it—representing the main PLO factions—the transformation of the Muslim Brotherhood society into Hamas (Harakat al-muqawamah al-Islamiyyah) represented a fundamental threat to the PLO. For the first time since its formation, a popular Palestinian movement openly challenged the PLO’s legitimacy as the sole national institution, rejected its secu-lar nature and presented itself as an alternative. Under Arafat’s pressures Hamas ostensibly agreed to join the PLO on condition of being represented in all the PLO institutions on an equal footing with Fatah, which the latter utterly rejected. The competition between the secular PLO factions and the Muslim Brotherhood move-ment, especially over public institutions in Gaza in fact preceded the eruption of the Intifada sowing the seeds of animosity and mistrust between these camps. Upholding the banner of armed struggle against the PLO’s futile involvement in diplomatic efforts further aggravated the challenge Hamas posed to the PLO.

The rapid development of Hamas during the Intifada was a typical revolutionary situation in which the existing rules and norms deem invalid. Hence, at a time when the PLO was overtly sponsoring the pointless negotiations with Israel on self- government in the Occupied Territories, Hamas sought to revive and appropriate the revolutionary ethos of Fatah albeit dressing them with Islamic terminology.



Under the circumstances of spreading violence and growing Israeli repression and restrictions on the Palestinians’ free movement in and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hamas’s practical adherence to absolute attitudes and means in the conflict with Israel earned increasing popularity among these territories’ residents.

In the bitter competition between Hamas and the PLO secular factions, the former won much public support by its voluntary welfare activities and treatment of individual agonies through almsgiving and social services. These activities made Hamas seem more accountable especially in the poor and densely populated Gaza Strip, where half of the population resides in refugee camps. Whereas the institutionalized PLO had been operating in a complex international environment expecting the official Palestinian leadership to remain confined to the diplomatic sphere—in disconnection from its constituents in the Occupied Territories—Hamas enjoyed the advantage of being locally rooted within its natural constitu-ency delegitimizing the PLO’s political conduct as contradictory to basic Islamic tenets. In the six years leading up to the Oslo accords, Hamas had, thus, managed to strike roots in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as a popular social and political movement which accounted for reviving fundamental Palestinian national sym-bols and social values that the PLO had allegedly long abandoned. Anchoring its ideology and discourse in Islamic traditions and terminology added further rele-vance to Hamas in a predominantly Islamic society.

In addition to the uneasy challenge posed by Hamas to the PLO’s exclusive status as a national authority and to Fatah’s primacy in it, the Gulf War turned to be disastrous for the Palestinians primarily because of Arafat’s unequivocal sup-port of Saddam Hussein. The defeat of the Iraqi invaders and restored Kuwaiti regime resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Kuwait and other Gulf countries and cutting off the latter’s financial aid to the PLO. The end of the war indeed witnessed the PLO’s regional posture deteriorat-ing to the lowest level ever, with far-reaching consequences for the organization’s ability to function for the scarcity of funding. In addition, Saudi Arabia expelled all PLO diplomats and, along with other Gulf states, stopped all financial remit-tances from Palestinian employees to the PLO, estimated at $400 million annu-ally. At the same time, the PLO’s arch-rival Hamas was receiving generous financial aid from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil states, representing a growing threat to its status as the exclusive Palestinian national leadership especially within the Occupied Territories. The Madrid talks further intensified the ideo-logical competition and political rivalry between Hamas and Fatah, which soon assumed a regional dimension with Hamas allying itself with Iran and Syria, as well as with other rejectionist Palestinian groups constituting the Damascus-based ‘Ten Front.’ The faltering Madrid process during the first two years indeed bene-fited Hamas, while the PLO, which sponsored and supported the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza delegation in the negotiation with Israel, was losing ground among the Palestinians in these territories.

Similarly to the PLO, the Intifada took Israel by surprise, confronting its politi-cal and military echelons with unprecedented dire moral dilemma and heavy


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international pressures, represented in their failed attempts to put an end to the Palestinian rebellion. The growing threat of Hamas to the PLO added a dimension of urgency to the efforts by Israeli left-wing groups wishing to establish a direct dialogue with the Palestinians, first with leading figures from Jerusalem and the West Bank and later with the PLO. The shifting attitude from the ‘Jordanian Option’ toward direct negotiation with the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories was no less than tectonic in its dimensions, especially in view of what the PLO had represented in Israeli perspective. It partly reflected the growing polarization in the Israeli society over the desirable future of the Occupied Territories espe-cially in view of the Intifada’s continuity and increasing violent nature. This was further intensified by Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank, confronting Israel with a new situation of absent sovereignty, at least from an international legal viewpoint. In May 1989, following a series of meetings between Defense Minister Rabin and Palestinian figures from both Fatah and Hamas, Israel’s national-unity government announced its peace initiative calling for negotiations with an elected delegation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinian residents with the aim of establishing a self-governing authority over these territories in accordance with the autonomy plan agreed at Camp David (1978) between Israel and Egypt (Rubinstein 1989; WAKH 1990).

It was the first time in the history of the Palestine conflict that the Zionist movement and Israel defined any Palestinian group as their primary partners for negotiating a political settlement, and definitely one recognizing the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Israel’s counterparts for determining the future of the these territories. In fact, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel made recurrent attempts, some of which were conducted parallel to the Oslo process, to reach agreements with its neighboring states rather than with the Palestinians. Underpinning this tendency until 1948 was the latter’s total denial of Jewish claims on any part of Palestine. In the post-Gulf War years, this approach presum-ably stemmed from the assumption that agreements with the neighboring states were more acceptable by the Israeli public in addition to their weakening effect on the Palestinian bargaining position.

The Israeli initiative obviously sought to drive a wedge between the PLO and the residents of the Occupied Territories. Whereas the former remained utterly unacceptable, primarily because of what it represented, namely, the Palestinian national cause as a whole, including the 1948 refugee problem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip residents apparently seemed a lucrative option, ostensibly representing only the 1967 issues (ignoring the large refugee population, especially in Gaza Strip) in addition to their living under Israeli domination. The Israeli initiative was indeed implemented in the aftermath of the Gulf War when Palestinian resi-dents of the Occupied Territories, without direct organizational attachment to the PLO, were selected to participate in the international peace conference in Madrid as part of a Jordanian–Palestinian delegation.

Israel’s assumption, however, that it could negotiate the autonomy plan with a local Palestinian leadership without interference of the PLO turned utterly



baseless. Not only the PLO approved each one of the figures selected for Madrid, demonstrating its position as a supreme national authority, along the Madrid deliberations the PLO maintained close contact with the Palestinian delegates set-ting the boundaries and conditions for the negotiations with the Israeli delegation. Israel’s nominal interpretation of the ‘self-governing authority’ and the PLO’s restrictive guidelines were a sure formula for futile diplomacy, even though the dynamics of Madrid incrementally brought the Israeli delegation to accept the separation of the Palestinian delegates from the Jordanian one and conduct direct and separate negotiations with each of them.

The Madrid peace conference was a direct result of the end of the Gulf War with its parameters shaped by the seemingly unchallenged American superpower. At this historical crossroad the American administration was more than ever before determined to establish a peaceful and stable Middle East in conjunction with the envisioned ‘new world order.’ Yet, despite the vigorous effort by the Bush administration to resume and sponsor the peace process in the Middle East under a broad international umbrella, including most of the Arab states and the Russian Federation, the first two years were of no tangible results in any of the tracks conducted by Israel with its Arab neighbors.

The advent of a Labor-led government under Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership in 1992 indicated a turning point in Israel’s approach, shifting from total mistrust in the process to a sincere intent to reach settlements with Syria as well as with the Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. Rabin was especially committed to reaching an agreement with the Palestinians on self-rule on the basis of the 1989 Israeli initia-tive within a year from the beginning his term. As time went by with no progress toward this goal, the Israeli government adopted a back-channel of secret negotia-tions between Israeli academics and PLO officials facilitated by the Norwegian government. Turning to direct contacts with the PLO was indeed a matter of necessity, not of choice: futile negotiations with an ‘inside’ Palestinian delegation stifled by the PLO, endangered parliamentary coalition and most of all, facing escalating violence of the Islamic opposition groups. The way out of this deadlock was opened in the spring of 1993 after it had become clear that the West Bank and Gaza Strip representatives with whom Israel maintained negotiations were fully controlled by the PLO and that the secret diplomatic channel with the latter had reached an advanced stage.

The Declaration of Principles (DoP) signed by Israel and the PLO in September 1993 outlined a two-phased process: first, the creation of a Palestinian interim self-government and an elected Palestinian Legislative Council; second, a permanent settlement within five years from establishing the Palestinian autonomy. The DoP resulted in the recognition by the PLO of the State of Israel and the recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and as partner in negotiations. Although the DoP aimed to fulfill the ‘right of the Palestinian people to self-determination’ and recognized the Palestinian ‘legitimate and political rights,’ it remained silent about their future treatment in the post-interim phase. Similarly, it made no definition of the nature, powers, and responsibilities of the


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PA nor did they define the pace of Israel’s military withdrawal from, or the terri-torial borders the PA would govern during the interim phase.

That the parties opted to leave open the most sensitive core issues to be dealt with in the negotiations on a permanent settlement—the final status of the Palestinian government, borders, Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, water resources, and the Jewish settlements—was a clear indication that the signatories were well aware of the unbridgeable gap between the PLO and Israeli positions and apparently deep awareness of their domestic constraints. To circumvent this gap, the parties opted for giving priority to a gradual progress in establishing a self-governing PA, first in Gaza and Jericho and later in other parts of the West Bank. Negotiations on the core issues were to begin in May 1996 and be finalized in May 1999. In retrospect, this envisioned order of progress failed to grasp the tremendous aggregate impact of uncontrolled Palestinian violence, repeated delays in the implementation of agreed upon commitments, and soured relations as a result of unilateral policies on the part of Israel.

The essential uncertainty built in the Oslo process about its very ability to pro-gress and reach the final status phase was what drew most of the fire from critics, Palestinians and Israelis alike. From a critical Palestinian viewpoint, Arafat was seen as a collaborator of Israel because he had not secured the basic Palestinian claims, primarily Palestinian statehood and sovereignty, the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, and an end to Israeli settlements. From a critical Israeli viewpoint, the Oslo process risked emptying Israel’s assets without securing a Palestinian consent over the permanent settlement matters.

Indeed, the envisioned process toward a two-state solution with Palestinian sovereignty and close economic cooperation between them was adhered by Yossi Beilin and a few others involved in the back-channel talks that paved the road to the Oslo accords. This concept, however, was not accepted by Rabin and Shimon Peres, the leading figures in the Israeli government. Indeed, their policies in the years that followed their signature of the Oslo accords represented a narrowly defined agreement on a temporary and transitional process which would preserve Israel’s overall control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, keep Jerusalem unified and deny the PA any symbol of sovereignty. Hence, beyond domestic constraints, Israeli policymakers from Rabin to Ehud Barak lacked a clear vision of a final settlement or the parameters by which such a settlement should be worked out, without yet considering the minimum Palestinian claims.

From an Israeli perspective, turning to the PLO as the official partner could not be preceded by any preparation of the Israeli public opinion. Hence, the breaking news in late August about an agreement between Israel and Arafat’s PLO were indeed shocking given the long-lived legacy of the Palestine conflict and its deep imprint on the memory and consciousness of the Israeli society. The Oslo accords thus faced an immense obstacle of the deep-seated demonization and de-legitimization of the PLO as an organization of ‘saboteurs’ (mehablim) and especially of Arafat whose personality, aims, and methods of action had long been perceived as a symbol of evil, bigotry, and terrorism.



Indeed, if Israel is ‘the unfinished business’ of the Arab world, the PLO repre-sented ‘the unfinished business’ of Israel. The PLO is a live and painful reminder of the disaster that befell the Palestinians as a result of the 1948 war and never been resolved or healed, especially the looming problem of the Palestinian refu-gees and their ‘right of return’ to their homes in Israel, reaching out to the very roots of Israel’s moral existence. Against this backdrop, Israel’s abrupt crossing of the distance from total rejection of the PLO to acceptance as its partner to negoti-ated settlement still remains difficult to explain.

Arafat’s acceptance of Israel’s conditions in the DoP—portrayed by Palestinian critics as dangerously vague and humiliating in nature—indeed reflected the PLO’s stress in the face of growing popular support for Hamas coupled by its dire financial situation as a result of the dried flow of funds from the Gulf oil monar-chies. From the radical factions’ viewpoint, however, these considerations were no justification even for allowing a non-PLO Palestinian participation in the Madrid conference let alone for signing the DoP. The DoP finalized the secession of the radical factions from the PLO which emptied this organization of its essence as a national framework for all Palestinian factions. By the time the DoP was signed the PLO had already shrunk in scope to include only Fatah and the Palestinian Democratic Group (FIDA) a small faction of former DFLP members led by Yassir Abd Rabbo. The Oslo accords also fractured Fatah: more than half of the Central Committee members rejecting the agreement resigned and were later replaced by West Bank and Gaza Strip residents. The most senior, tenacious opponent of the Oslo accords is Farouq Qaddoumi, one of Fatah’s founders and a member of the PLO Executive Committee since 1973 as Head of the Political Department in charge of foreign affairs. Qaddoumi refused to take part in the PA and remained in Tunis where he continued to criticize the PA, especially after Arafat’s decease in 2004. Despite his critique of the Oslo process Qaddoumi remained a member of the PLO Executive Committee.

The Stumbled Oslo Process

With the advent of the PA in May 1994, Fatah assumed the role of a ‘ruling party’ with its senior members appointed to key positions in the Palestinian bureaucracy and security establishment. From the outset, the PA discernibly overlapped, and in fact overshadowed, the shrunk PLO in terms of their respective executive powers and international support. Most notably, both institutions were presided by the same political figure recognized by the Palestinians as the Ra’is, translated into English interchangeably as ‘chairman’ (of the PLO) and ‘president’ (of the PA, and later, of ‘the State of Palestine’). Officially, the PLO remained the top national institution, representing the Palestinian people at large, while the PA’s jurisdiction was confined to the territory and population assigned to it by consecutive agree-ments with Israel. Hence, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and agreements were all conducted and signed by the PLO not the PA. At the same time, the


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election of Arafat to the PA chairmanship in 1996 parallel to the elections for the PA’s Legislative Council in fact bestowed greater legitimacy on the PA than the PLO. Following Arafat’s decease in November 2004, Mahmud Abbas, former PA prime minister and a veteran member of Fatah’s Central Committee was chosen by his movement as a candidate for elections to Chairman of the PLO and in early 2005 was elected as chairman of the PA.

Both the PLO and the PA remained dominated by Fatah, despite attempts by both Arafat and Abbas to distance its senior members from key positions prefer-ring to rely on the bureaucratic system, including the security services, elevating themselves above factional differences. This was indicated, even before 1993, by assigning Fatah officials to the negotiations with Hamas and, as of 1994, between the PA and Hamas indicating the ongoing rivalry between Fatah, embodied by the PA, and Hamas. This became amply clear in the wake of Hamas violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, which created a balance between the two governing authorities with their own separate attributes of power and territorial jurisdiction. This backdrop of continued competition with Hamas might partly explain why Fatah never abandoned the ethos of armed struggle. Especially under Arafat’s chairmanship (1994–2004), this ethos remained a primary value for the move-ment’s self-perception. Senior Fatah members repeatedly brought it up as an option under circumstances of long-stalemate in the negotiations with Israel, or exercised it in the course of violent events as in the cases of the Hasmonean tunnel riots (October 1996) and more vehemently during the al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–04) when Fatah—more specifically, its combat arm, al-tanzim, headed by Marwan Barghouti—adopted and implemented the Islamic method of suicide bombings. Even under Mahmud Abbas, who repeatedly stated that the Palestinians would not resort to violence, other senior Fatah members occasionally state the opposite. It is noteworthy that until recently, repeated cycles of negotiations between Fatah and Hamas since early 2007 toward reconciliation and creation of a joint national government have all been futile.

In addition to the Fatah-Hamas schism, internal factionalism within Fatah along generational and personal divides, and pressure groups such as the 1948 refugee lobbies, all kept Arafat employing his revolutionary discourse and image of willingness to resume violence if needed. Repeating the option of return to the armed as struggle was more frequent in periods of stalemated negotiations or violent crises. The tension between raison d’etat and raison de la revolution, termed by a Palestinian scholar as ‘a state of schizophrenia,’ largely vanished dur-ing the al-Aqsa Intifada as Fatah’s revolutionary and combatant spirit proved to be still alive as demonstrated by the establishment of the ‘al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades’ whose members conducted suicide bombings against Israelis (Jarbawi 1996, p. 87). Indeed, Arafat himself made no clear statement by which the ‘revolution’ was over and that the time had come to focus on building the Palestinian state and silence opposite messages by Fatah’s senior figures. During the Netanyahu (1996–99) and Barak (1999–2001) premierships, Arafat rendered security coop-eration and normalization with Israel dependent on the progress in the Oslo



process. During the al-Aqsa Intifada and in response to Israeli military attacks, Arafat unleashed Hamas’s imprisoned activists, demonstrated acquiescence in the latter’s suicide bombings against Israel, and tacitly supported the adoption of this type of attacks by his own Fatah organization.

Backed by a broad international coalition extending generous funding and active participation in building the PA institutions and advancing regional Arab-Israeli cooperation, the first two years of the Oslo process underlined the determi-nation of Israel and the PLO to cement their partnership: implementing the Gaza–Jericho phase, signing the Paris Economic Protocol which defined their economic relations, and finally the Taba Agreement (Oslo II) of September 1995, by which Israel withdrew from all Palestinian urban centers, thus transferring responsibility for most of the Palestinians in the West Bank, in addition to all of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, to the PA’s administrative and security appara-tuses. This discernible progress, however, could hardly blur the formidable obsta-cles, first and foremost the internal opposition, with which the leaders on both sides had to cope in the process of implementation of the agreement. The assas-sination of Prime Minister Rabin in November 1995 and its shocking effect allowed the smooth implementation of the Oslo II accord but in fact even before the assassination the Labor-led government remained with a very narrow majority as demonstrated by the one vote margin by which the Taba agreement was rati-fied. The horrific series of suicide bombings perpetrated by Hamas in February–March 1996 apparently shifted the scale toward the right-wing parties leading to the election of the Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu, a reputable opponent of the Oslo accords until the election campaign, as the next Israeli prime minister.

In addition, the PA’s political economy reflected Arafat’s preference for build-ing regime security employing a number of armed organizations of police, intel-ligence and preventive security, the overall personnel of which totaled in over 40,000 men. While this centralized political economy of Arafat meant to ensure the PA’s status as the primary employer and thus secure the support of its employ-ees, Israeli right-wing figures repeatedly pointed to the dangerous inflation of Palestinian military forces, suggesting that its only rationale could be to prepare for confrontation with Israel. With the Tunnel clashes between armed PA person-nel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers still fresh in mind, the Netanyahu government insisted on substantial reduction of these forces and the arrest of those individuals among them wanted by Israel, which Arafat refused. Notwithstanding the debilitating impact Israeli security and economic policies had on the deteriorating Palestinian economy, the PA became identified with corruption and nepotism, lack of accountability and transparency in employing financial resources, mostly received from international donors, exacerbating the negative impression concerning the PA and its institutional relevance.

Despite the initial support of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians for the Oslo accords and for a two-state solution, by late 1995 the opposition groups on both sides had become determined to wreck the ship before it reaches the point of no return. With the election of Netanyahu for premiership, this mission became


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sponsored by the right-wing government itself by shifting to a low gear and destroying the trust built between the PLO and the Rabin-Peres governments. Even though the Rabin-Peres government strictly refrained from officially spell-ing the words ‘Palestinian state’ the public image of the process, largely created by the discourse of Palestinians and Israeli leftists, was one intended to attain Palestinian statehood at the end of the process. This vision alarmed the zealot opponents of the Oslo process on both sides of the divide calling to take decisive actions against it. On the Israeli side, the new agreement collided head-on with core nationalist beliefs of the Israeli right-wing, risking not only the surrender of the West Bank—the cradle of Biblical Israeli nationhood—but also the division of historic Palestine thus burying the dream of the ‘Greater Land of Israel.’ Similarly, it threatened the Palestinian Islamic creed of historic Palestine from the ‘sea to the river’ as an indivisible sacred unit for the Muslims until the Day of Judgment.

Although Netanyahu and Arafat reached two accords—on transferring Hebron to the PA in 1997 and the Wye Memorandum in 1998—they remained limited in nature, still confined to the first phase of establishing the Palestinian self-rule and materialization of previously signed but unfulfilled agreements. The return of a Labor-led government in May 1999 headed by Ehud Barak brought about a new approach of cutting the first phase short of full accomplishment and move straight to the permanent status negotiations. Notwithstanding early reservations Arafat’s eventually adopted this approach in view of Egyptian, Jordanian, and American support. In September 1999, Barak and Arafat signed the Sharm al-Sheikh Memorandum in which they agreed to resume permanent status negotiation in two-stages: reaching a Framework Agreement on a Permanent Status (FAPS) by February 2000, and a Comprehensive Agreement on a Permanent Status (CAPS) within a year from the beginning of the talks.

Despite this promising beginning of Barak’s tenure as prime minister, the Sharm al-Sheikh Memorandum’s schedule was delayed, mainly due to Barak’s intensive efforts, to Arafat’s chagrin, to attain an agreement with Syria that would enable Israel to pullout from south Lebanon, a commitment he had undertaken to implement within a year in office before being elected. By late March 2000, despite reaching a nearly final agreement as a result of previously unprecedented levels of negotiators and US presidential involvement, this attempt ended in a complete failure, leading two months later to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon.

With the Sharm al-Sheikh Memorandum’s target date of February 2000 for reaching a FAPS already behind, Israeli and Palestinian leaders employed several channels addressing the various core issues with the active involvement of US officials. These talks, however, produced only slight progress, with gaps between the positions of the two sides on all three major issues: borders, Jerusalem, and refugees. As the final date for a CAPS (September 2000) was approaching and in view of President Clinton’s second term about to end in January 2001, Barak pressed for a Camp David Summit with Arafat, which the latter was reluctant to accept fearing it was a trap set by Barak and the US president. In any case, Arafat



correctly stated to President Bill Clinton that the parties were not ready for such a meeting and that in case of failure it might lead to an explosion.

The Camp David summit, opened on July 11, 2000 was a last desperate effort of Barak to reach a final treaty and ‘end of conflict’ with the Palestinians. His zigzag diplomacy injected much bitterness and mistrust into the relations with Arafat and the PLO top negotiators, and by the time he departed for the summit, he had already lost the majority support for his government in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. It was indeed a ‘Front without a Rearguard’ as succinctly described by a senior Israeli negotiator at Camp David, which narrowed the Israeli delegates’ freedom of maneuver (Ben-Ami 2004, 129–38, 189, 206). No less problematic was Arafat’s domestic situation which, despite the success in restrain-ing Hamas’s military activities, was marked by increasing criticism and pressure from within, including from the young leadership of his own organization, Fatah. In addition to years of criticism over the chaotic, corrupt, and dysfunctional PA apparatuses, Arafat also faced increasing impatience among Fatah’s younger gen-eration over the stalemated Oslo process and Israel’s continued settlements in the West Bank. Inspired by Hizballah’s success in driving Israel out of south Lebanon, activists of Fatah strove to return to the armed struggle.

Without delving into the summit’s deliberations, and despite some partial understandings on security, the major blocks of Jewish settlements, and partition of East Jerusalem’s neighborhoods between Israel and the Palestinians, the Camp David summit ended with no agreement whatsoever. The unprepared groundwork for the summit surfaced especially in the negotiations over the most explosive issues namely, Jerusalem, particularly the Temple Mount, and the refugee prob-lem. It is noteworthy that all along the negotiations the Palestinian negotiators repeatedly anchored their claim in the ‘international legitimacy’ insisting on full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, similarly to the parameters of Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai till the last inch. The Palestinians also insisted that Israel should admit its responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, which Israel utterly refused. It is worth noting that the nature of the Palestinian state, especially in terms of possessing military means, was not discussed at all.

Worse still, the aftermath of the Camp David summit witnessed both sides resorting to mutual recriminations and projecting the blame for the failed summit onto each other. Prime Minister Barak and other senior negotiators contended that Arafat rejected the Israeli unprecedentedly forthcoming offers because he was ‘no partner’ for a historical compromise and peacemaking; that the Palestinians refused to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state or accept the idea of ‘end of conflict.’ According to Ambassador Dennis Ross, ‘Arafat was not up to peace-making’ (Ross 2004, 756). Indeed, Arafat utterly rejected Israel’s insistence on having a symbolic sovereignty over the Temple Mount denying any Jewish attach-ment to this place as historically baseless claim. Israel, on its part, was adamantly against allowing the return of Palestinian refugees into Israel beyond a minute number and on humanitarian grounds. In late September, following a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount and amidst continued efforts to keep


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the negotiations going, riots erupted on the Temple Mount and rapidly developed into a widespread violence and terrorist attacks which came to be known as ‘ al-Aqsa Intifada.’

Despite the increasing violence on both sides, in December 2000, President Clinton submitted to Israel and the PLO his ‘parameters’ for a final agreement as ‘take it or leave it’ and in the following month, after Barak had announced his resignation and new elections, another round of talks was held at the Sinai resort of Taba which, once again failed to reach an agreement. Against this backdrop, Ariel Sharon’s landslide victory against Barak clearly reflected Israel’s preference for a leader identified most of all by his military record and legacy of ruthless use of force against Arabs, thus leaving no further room for continuous negotiations. In view of the prevalent and continued violence the new American administration of George W. Bush proved to be of little contribution to the resumption of the Oslo process despite its repeated efforts by presidential ambassadors who failed to attain a sustainable ceasefire as a prerequisite for a renewed negotiation.

The Oslo process and especially its last chapter of seeking a final status agree-ment was the most thorough and comprehensive attempt to resolve one of the longest, most complex, and symbolically loaded conflicts of our time. With the benefit of hindsight, the reasons for its failure, despite repeated cycles of efforts since 2002, can be conceptually summarized as absent ripeness on both sides for a historical compromise that would put an end to their long bleeding conflict. The lack of ripeness was first and foremost demonstrated by the inability of the parties to bridge the abyss between their perceptions, values, and positions on both tangi-ble and symbolic matters. In addition, the inconclusive nature of the DoP by which the core issues were to be negotiated at the final status phase without any reference as to guiding principles created a new reality between the parties marked by high expectations, on the one hand, and determination to foil the anticipated results, on the other.

A case in point was the repeated Israeli demands that the PLO revoke those articles in its Charter that had tacitly or clearly denied Israel’s right to exist as stipulated in the interim agreement of September 1995. Even after the PNC had approved, on April 24, 1996, that changes would be made in the Charter, it failed to specify which of the 33 articles in the document was to be changed (Peace Watch 1996). Following Netanyahu’s renewed pressures at the Wye summit, President Clinton visited Gaza in mid-December 1998 and attended the PNC ses-sion in which a decisive majority of the attendees voted for the changes in the Charter proposed by Arafat in accordance with Israel’s demand. Despite the overt vote taken on this matter at Clinton’s presence by the PNC members, senior Israeli figures still claimed that the PLO Charter had never been changed. It is notewor-thy that these changes remained utterly oral, with no traces in official or non-official Palestinian records and publications.

Beyond domestic constraints, Israeli policymakers from Rabin to Barak showed little or no clear vision of a final settlement or the parameters by which such a settlement should be worked out, without yet considering the minimum



Palestinian claims. The Palestinians, on their part, repeatedly argued that by accepting the two-state solution along the 1967 borders they had in fact surren-dered 78 percent of historic Palestine and could make no more compromises. Even so, they were flexible enough to accept a 1:1 territorial swap over the Israeli blocks of settlements and Jewish neighborhoods established around Jerusalem since 1967. The two parties obviously had very different perspectives as to the meaning of a final status agreement: Israelis thought in terms of treating the prob-lems created by the 1967 war while the Palestinians wanted to address the issues of 1948.

Whether the failure of the Oslo accords was a missed historical opportunity to reach a settlement or the result of a premature attempt to settle one of the most protracted conflicts on earth, what emanated from this failure in terms of scope, brutality, and length of violence adopted by Palestinians and Israelis between late September 2000 and mid-January 2005, was unprecedented in the history of the conflict, primarily in terms of human losses. During this period, 950 Israelis were killed and more than 5,000 were wounded in more than 20,000 Palestinian attacks of various types; 68 percent of the dead were civilians (45 percent within Israel) and the rest were members of the security forces. More than 500 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings, most of them civilians within the ‘green line.’ The year 2002 was a record high with 60 suicide bombings. From the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000 to the end of March 2002, 556 Israeli civilians were killed (BBC News 2005).7 Among the Palestinians, 3,223 were killed, mostly by the Israeli military forces.

The terrorist attacks had a far-reaching impact on civilians exposed to it, directly or indirectly, defined in terms of high-levels of post-traumatic anxiety and depression, experiencing the terrorist attacks as an existential anxiety. The main implication of these attacks was represented in a growing militant perceptions and support of decisive responses against the Palestinians. More specifically, and in view of the inefficacy of the diplomatic means, the Israeli public demonstrated a growing support of a military solution represented by the popular slogan ‘Let the IDF Win!’ But whereas most Israelis perceived Operation Defense Shield (April 2002) as an inevitable act of defense against an unprecedented brutal wave of terror, the world opinion by and large perceived Israel as an invader into a sovereign Palestinian territory and as a vehement reverse of the Oslo process. Beyond the staggering cost of human lives and tens of thousands of wounded and imprisoned, and the material losses, the Intifada seriously hampered the normal development of the Palestinian society in terms of education and economic development.

The al-Aqsa Intifada clearly broadened and deepened the abyss between Israelis and Palestinians concerning the possibility of reaching an agreed upon settlement, even if imperfect. Two decades after the euphoric days of signing the DoP, Israelis and Palestinians seem to have acquiesced in the stalemated process toward realization of the ‘two-state solution’ and the loss of hope for a historical compromise in the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding the continued dialogue between top Israeli and Palestinian leaders; despite the American efforts—


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as indecisive as they were—to inject new life into the Oslo process via US presi-dential visions under the Bush administration—the ‘Road Map’ of June 2002 and the Annapolis Declaration of November 2007—despite the efforts of the inter-national Quartet (the UN, Russia, the EU, and the US) to see to the implementa-tion of the road map, and most recently the 2013–14 negotiations brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, all these efforts kept the ‘process’ going but ended with no conclusive results. The only major development in Israeli policy about the Occupied Territories was the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 including the dis-placement of all the Jewish settlers from this area. In the absence of Israel’s pres-ence in the Gaza Strip ascribed to Hamas’s military activities against Israel, and weak control of the PA, however, Hamas grew more popular and stronger culmi-nating in its decisive victory in the general elections for the Legislative Council held in January 2006. In June 2007, Hamas conducted a coup, taking by force the area as a whole and creating a new geopolitical reality of separate Palestinian centers of power.

The al-Aqsa Intifada was an echoing affirmation of the parties’ unripe condi-tions for resolving their century-long conflict. Moreover, the failed Oslo process and the bloodshed that followed clearly broadened and deepened the abyss between Israelis and Palestinians concerning the possibility of reaching an agreed upon settlement, even if temporary and imperfect. The long stalemate dominating the Israeli–Palestinian relations since 2000 had further complicated the already insurmountable difficulties confronting the two national leaderships in coming to terms with each other on the core issues of the conflict. The failure of the Oslo process reiterated the limits of third party involvement when the parties concerned are not able to follow through and stand up to their mutual commitments. Along the focused international diplomatic efforts and cycles of violence and counter- violence, reactive rather than proactive policies of the parties concerned, and chaotic domestic politics set by ideologically divided societies and weak leader-ships, all impacted the course of events to the current deadlock.

Epilogue: Whither the PLO?

The PLO at its 50th anniversary is at one of the most fragile junctures that this institution has ever been. Though its past has been paved with severe crises and elevating political achievements, 20 years after it celebrated the signing of the Oslo accords and established the PA, the PLO’s record balance is far from reassur-ing. Despite the long travel, the PLO has gone from upholding the vision of national liberation of Palestine as a whole by armed struggle to a joint process with Israel for a gradual progress toward a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; despite the staggering human and material losses inflicted on the Palestinians along the road, in the last two decades it has no longer been functioning as the umbrella organization of the Palestinian people. Rather, since the early 1990s, the



PLO has virtually shrunk to a political framework comprised of Fatah and for Fatah, in addition to civil sectors, communities, and independent figures.

By adopting the diplomatic option in dealing with Israel, the PLO had no choice but to sacrifice its ‘national unity’ for the sake of political realism seen by the mainstream Fatah organization as the only possible way to attain a ‘mini’ independent state confined to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the time this diplomatic process begun, however, the PLO had found itself struggling with a new social and political rival in the Palestinian arena upholding a radically differ-ent ideology and approach to national action, including armed struggle, and above all, aspiring to alternate the PLO rather than to join it.

The limited rewards of the Oslo process for the Palestinians in terms of the powers and territory Israel allowed for the PA to rule while preserving its control over the whole territory, airspace, and seawaters of historic Palestine have clearly eroded the PLO posture among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and abroad. The PLO’s trouble further aggravated by the split between the West Bank-based PA and Hamas, which as of 2007 took over the Gaza Strip and established its separate governing system there. Indeed, in addition to Hamas’s refusal to accept the PLO as a single national framework and operate as an integral part of it, the West Bank and Gaza Strip became effectively ruled by two governing insti-tution with more relevance than the PLO in terms of their powers, resources, and responsibility to their respective communities. This has further eroded the politi-cal and moral stature of the PLO as the uppermost Palestinian national authority for all Palestinians regardless whether they reside in the homeland or elsewhere.

Indeed, the PLO still maintains some of these official attributes, especially concerning foreign relations, including negotiations with Israel—conducted in the name of the PLO—and representation in international organizations and agen-cies. Here too, however, the split between the PLO/Fatah and Hamas seriously hinders the former’s legitimacy to speak in the name of the Gaza Strip and Hamas. While the latter has been relatively acquiescent concerning the PLO’s diplomacy in international institutions it adopted, since the Madrid Conference in 1991, a militant attitude questioning the legitimacy of the PLO’s peacemaking diplomacy on both realistic and Islamic-based grounds. Moreover, the split between Hamas and the PA has been exploited by Israel’s right-wing government to question the PLO’s status as a national representative of the Palestinian people in their nego-tiations. Israel convincingly argued that the PLO—effectively the PA—in fact represents only part of the Palestinians, which diminishes its legitimacy as a sin-gle partner to a ‘two-state solution’ which, by definition, is said to include both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The PLO’s predicament has further aggravated by the wave of popular revolts that swept many of the Arab states since early 2011. The Arab world’s domestic turmoil indeed reiterated the diminishing relevance of the Arab states as a collec-tive and of the Arab League as an instrument capable of promoting common Arab interests. With most Arab states struck by long-term economic underdevelop-ment, corrupt authoritarianism, and absence of political legitimacy, the prospects


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for any scope of effective collective Arab action in support of the Palestinian cause are very slim. Already before the Arab revolts, the PLO faced difficulties in reaching out to Palestinian communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The ongo-ing civil war in Syria forced hundreds of thousands of the Palestinian refugees to seek refuge away from the battlefield, in Lebanon, Jordan, or Turkey, underlining the PLO’s short-handedness in extending minimum humanitarian aid to them.

Given the inability of Israel and the Palestinians to resolve their conflict, it seems that the Arab states tend to temporarily acquiesce in the current stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as a mode of conflict management. The Arab world may not accept this status quo for a long time, but under the present circumstances most of them are content with the Palestinians having some sym-bolic attributes of a governing authority and international recognition as a ‘state’ regardless of Israel’s continued domination of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hence, contrary to the first two decades after 1967 in which the Arab states demonstrated their commitment and willingness to work collectively for the sake of Palestine and specifically of the PLO as its sole legitimate representative, as of the 1980s the relations between the PLO and the Arab states witnessed continuous erosion to near abandonment in financial, political, and definitely military terms. This indeed explains why the PLO secretly conducted the negotiations with Israel that eventually led to the Oslo accords, without sharing them with any Arab state, counting on its own national resources foremost of which were the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and international legitimacy of its political claims.

The current juncture in the PLO’s history can be better understood by compari-son to the Zionist case in the transformation from Mandate to independent state. As said above, the post-1948 Palestinian national movement emerged in exile and managed to penetrate the Palestinian refugee communities and eventually also the Palestinian population in the homeland. In the Zionist case, the Jewish representa-tive and administrative institutions that operated during the Mandate, especially the Jewish Agency and National Committee, gave way to a provisional government which drew its powers and authority primarily from the Jewish community’s repre-sentatives and later by democratic elections. The Jewish Agency remained an active institution in charge of encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel and extending help to the newcomers in addition to establishing new settlements and reaching out to diaspora Jews communities for social and cultural purposes. At the same time, the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the equivalent institution to the PLO, lost much of its pre-state significance though it continued to hold annual conferences with representatives from all over the world, all in Jerusalem. Since the early 1970s, the chairmen of the WZO were also the chairmen of the Jewish Agency.

According to this example, if and when an independent Palestinian state emerges, the PLO would presumably remain active as the uppermost Palestinian national framework in charge of fostering close ties with Palestinian communities in the Arab world and beyond, raising funds, and guiding Palestinian communities abroad to help and interact with their brethren in the homeland and the Arab world



financially, socially and culturally. In the Palestinian case, only a self-governing authority was esta blished by the PLO as an interim phase. The prolongation of the interim phase by many years beyond its originally intended span with no indication about any specific end, in addition to the split with Hamas, is what risks the PLO’s relevance concerning the conflict with Israel, though it might continue to function as an all-Palestinian political framework, at least for the secular Palestinians.

Annotated Bibliography

The essay draws on a broad range of primary and secondary sources in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, including memoirs and scholarly studies; articles and books. The following is a selection of these sources divided by subjects and relevance to the historical and thematic discussions in the essay.

A number of studies, mainly by Palestinian scholars, addressed the political history of the Palestinians as a people and the origins of their national identity and liberation move-ment since the British Mandate, mostly since the early-twentieth century. Most of these studies focus on the re-emergence of Palestinian nationalism and struggle for statehood since the late 1950s and early 1960s. The origins and development of Palestinian identity have been thoroughly discussed by Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Also relevant in this context is Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Other comprehensive studies of modern Palestinian history are: Àbd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali, Tarikh Filastin al-Hadith [The Modern History of Palestine] (Beirut: al-Mu’assassa al-Àrabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 11th Edition, 1999), and Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).

The traumatic consequences of 1948 and exile are recorded in numerous bio graphies and memoirs by Palestinians, some of whom played a leading role in the PLO or served in Arab military forces: Abou Iyad [Salah Khalaf], palestinien sans patrie: responsable des services speciaux palestiniens, entretiens avec Éric Rouleau (Paris: Fayolle, 1978); Shafiq al-Hout, My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 2011) and Hassan Abu Raqabah, Azhar wa-Ashwak, Mudhakkirat Dabit Filastini [Flowers and Thorns, Memoirs of a Palestinian Officer] (Beirut: al-Mu’assassa al-Àrabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 2005). Examples of Palestinian memoirs of displacement are: Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972) and Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank: Between Mute Submission and Blind Hate (London, New York: Quartet Books, 1982).

The social and political conditions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip were studied by Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Avi Plascov, The Palestinian Refugees in Jordan 1948–1957 (London: Frank Cass, 1981); Hussayn Abu al-Namal, Qita` Gazza 1948–1967: Tatawwurat Iqtisadiyya wa-Siasiyya wa-Ijtimaìyya wa-Àskariyya [Gaza Strip 1948–1967: Economic, Political, Social and Military Developments] (Beirut: Markaz al-Abhath, Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, 1979) and Basim Sirhan, Tahawwulat al-’Usra al- Filastiniyya fi al-Shatat [Transformations of the Palestinian Family in the Diaspora] (Beirut: Mu’assassat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, 2005). Also relevant, though written as a


330 Avraham Sela

fiction based on Palestinian regugees’ testimonies, is Elias Khouri, Bab al-Shams [Gate of the Sun] (Beirut: Dar al-Aadab, 1998). Two main studies addressed the political trends and activities among the Palestinians in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967: Amnon Cohen, Political parties in the West Bank under the Jordanian regime, 1949–1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) and Avraham Sela, Ha-Baàth ha- Falastini: Mifleget ha-Baàth ha-Àravit ha-Sotzyalistit ba-Gada ha-Maàravit Tahat Shilton Yarden (1948–1967) [The Palestinian Baàth: The Arab Socialist Baàth Party in the West Bank Under Jordan’s Rule (1948–1967)] (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 1984).

The Palestinian and inter-Arab background for the re-emergence of Palestinian nation-alism and the founding of the PLO in 1964 was discussed in numerous studies, most con-spicuously in the memoirs by Ahmad al-Shuqayri, Min al-Qimma ila al-Hazima, Ma’a al-Muluk wal-Ru’asa’ [From the Summit to the Defeat, with the Kings and Presidents] (Beirut: 1971) and studies of Moshe Shemesh, The Palestinian Entity 1959–1974: Arab Politics and the PLO (London: Frank Cass, 1988); Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979); and Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with documents (New York: St Martin’s Press, 7th Edition, 2010).

The role and significance of the Palestine problem in the context of Arab nationalism, inter-Arab relations and the Arab-Israeli peace process was addressed especially by Avraham Sela, The Decline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (see above); Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Aaron D. Miller, The Arab States and the Palestine Question: Between Ideology and Self-Interest (New York: Praeger, 1986); Paul L. Scham and Russel E. Lucas, “ ‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan: The Public Debate,” Israel Affairs, 9:3 (2003), 141–164; Avraham Sela, ‘Politics, Identity and Peacemaking: The Arab Discourse on Peace with Israel in the 1990s,’ Israel Studies, 10:2(2005), 15–71, and Emanuele Ottolenghi, ‘Why Palestinians and Israelis Are Not Ready for Peace,’ Survival, 46:1 (2004), 41–54.

The Palestinian concept of armed struggle and development of post-1967 PLO and the Palestinian guerrilla groups were addressed by Yehoshafat Harkabi, Fatah ba-Astrategia ha-Àravit [Fatah in the Arab Strategy] (Tel-Aviv: Maàrakhot, 1969); Ahmad al- Shuqayri, Al-Hazima al-Kubra, Ma’a al-Muluk wal-Ru’asa’ [The Great Defeat, with the Kings and Presidents] (Beirut: 1973), Pt. II. Major studies of the PLO and Fatah are those of Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power and Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); Rashid Hamid, ‘What is the PLO?’ Journal of Palestine Studies, 4:4 (Summer 1975), 90–109; Laurie A. Brand, The Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution-Building and the Search for State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Alain Gresh, The PLO, The Struggle Within: Toward an Independent Palestinian State (London: Zed Books, 1985) and Yezid Sayigh, Armed struggle and the search for state: the Palestinian national movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

The development of Palestinian political thought from after the 1967 war was addressed mainly in the following publications: Yehoshafat Harkabi, Palestinians and Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1975); Yehoshafat Harkabi and Matti Steinberg, Ha-Amana ha-Falastinit be-Mivhan ha-Zman veha-Maàseh: Hesberim ve-Hashlakhot [The Palestinian Charter in the Test of Time and Action: Explanations and Implications] (Jerusalem: Information Center, 1987); Matti Steinberg, Òmdim le-Goralam: Ha-Todaà ha-Le’umit ha-Falastinit 1967–2007 [Standing to their Fate: The Palestinian National Consciousness 1967–2007] (Tel Aviv: Yedi’ot Sefarim, 2008) and Manuel S. Hassassian,



‘Policy and Attitude Changes in the Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965–1994: A Democracy in the Making,’ in: Avraham Sela and Moshe Maòz (eds.), The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution, 1964–1994 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). About the changing attitudes especially after the 1973 war: Abu Iyad, ‘Afkar Jadida Amam Marhala Ghamida,’ [New Ideas in Front of a Vague Phase] Shu’un Filastiniyya, 29 (January 1974), 5–10; Sabri Jiryis, al-Nahar (Lebanon), 15 May 1975; Muhammad Y. Muslih, ‘Moderates and Rejectionists within the Palestine Liberation Organization,’ The Middle East Journal, 30:2 (1975), 127–140; Walid Khalidi, ‘Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State,’ Foreign Affairs 56:4 (July 1978), 695–713, and also his ‘Toward Peace in the Holy Land,’ Foreign Affairs 66:4 (1988), 771–789; Sabri Jiryis, ‘Ìshrun Sana Min al-Kifah al-Musallah: Nahwa Nizam Filastini Jadid’ [Twenty Years of Armed Struggle: Towards a New Palestinian Order] Shu’un Filastiniyya, 142–143 (January–February 1985), and also his “Hiwar Min Naw` Akhar Hawl ‘al-Hiwar wal-Wahda al-Wataniyya’” [A dialogue of Another Type about ‘the Dialogue and the National Unity’] Shu’un Filastiniyya, 170–171 (May–June 1987), 2–16.

The Palestinian Intifada was addressed mainly by the following studies: Ann Mosley Lesch and Mark Tessler, Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians: From Camp David to the Intifada (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Shaul Mishal with Reuven Aharoni, Speaking Stones: Communiques from the Intifada Underground (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994); On the Palestinian Authority: Michael Milshtein, Bein Mahpekha le-Medina: Fatah ve-ha-Rashut ha-Falastinit [Between Revolution and State: Fatah and the Palestinian Authority] (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, 2004); Ali Jarbawi, ‘Evaluation of the Palestinian General Elections,’ Palestine-Israel Journal, 3:1 (Winter 1996); Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising – Israel’s Third Front (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

The history of HAMAS was addressed by many studies with different foci of interest: Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; 2nd Edition, 2006); Jeroen Hunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Paula Caridi, Hamas; From Resistance to Government? (Jerusalem: PASSIA, 2009); Ìmad ̀ Abd al-Hamid Faluji, Darb al-Ashwak: Hamas, al-Intifada, al-Sulta [Thorny Road: Hamas, the Intifada, the Authority] (Àmman: Dar al-Shuruq, 2002); Shlomi Eldar, Le-Hakkir et Hamas (Jerusalem: Keter, 2012); Khaled Hroub, Hamas, Politcal Thought and Practice (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000) and Azzam Tamimi, Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2007).

The Israel–PLO Oslo process and its aftermath were addressed by numerous practitioners—Israelis, Palestinians and Americans—journalists, and scholars. Notable works on the Oslo Process are: Yair P. Hirschfeld, Oslo: Nusha le- Shalom: ha-Massa ‘u-Matan àl Heskemei Oslo-ha-Astrategia ‘u-Mimusha [A Formula for Peace: The Negotiations on the Oslo Accords - The Strategy and its Implementation] (Tel Aviv: Rabin Center and Àm Òved, 2000); Yossi Beilin, Madrikh le-Yona Ptsuà [Manual for a Wounded Dove] (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2001) (Heb.); Uri Savir, Ha-Tahalikh [The Process] (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 1998) (Heb.); Shlomo Ben-Ami, Hazit le-Lo Òref: Massa` el Gvulot Tahalikh ha-Shalom [Front without a Rearguard: A Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process] (Tel-Aviv: Miskal, 2004) (Heb.); Ron Pundak, ‘From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?’ Survival, 43:3 (2001), 31–45; Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, ‘Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,’ The New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001. See also their ‘Camp David and After: An Exchange 2) A Reply to Ehud Barak,’ ibid, June 13, 2002; Denis Ross, The Missing Peace:


332 Avraham Sela

The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004), Ahmad Qureì (Abu Àlla’), Al-Riwaya al-Filastiniyya al-Kamila lil-Mufawadat min Oslo ila Kharitat al-Tariq [The Complete Palestinian Narrative of the Negotiations from Oslo to the Road Map], Vol. 1–2 (Beirut: Mu’assassat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, 2005). On the Failed Oslo process and its aftermath see: Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East 1995–2002 (New York: Other Press, 2002); Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage Books, 2001); Gerald M. Steinberg, Unripeness and Conflict Management: Re-Examining the Oslo Process and its Lessons, Bar-Ilan University, Occasional Papers, No. 4 (June 2002); Itamar Rabinovich, Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs 1948–2003 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Oren Barak, ‘The Failure of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, 1993–2000,’ Journal of Peace Research, 42:6 (2005), 719–736; Arie M. Kacowicz, ‘Rashomon in the Middle East: Clashing Narratives, Images and Frames in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,’ Cooperation and Conflict, 40:3 (2005), 343–360; Pierre Tristam, ‘Bush’s Road Map for Peace: Five Years Later,’ About.Com: Middle East Issues, 9 July, 2007, http://middleeast.about.com/od/israelandpalestine/p/me070911.htm; Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2nd Edition, 2010); Avraham Sela, ‘Difficult Dialogue: The Oslo Process in Israeli Perspective,’ Macalester International, no. 23 (2009), 104–137.

Notes

1. Especially following the forced expulsions from Jordan (1970–71), and from Lebanon (by Israel 1982, and by Syria 1983).

2. Institute for Palestinian Studies. Preserving Palestinian history: Research, documenta-tion, history. Retrieved June 13, 2014, from http://www.palestine-studies.org/index.aspx

3. In Lebanon: al-Zaytouna Center for Research and Consultation (est. 2004), interested mainly in strategic studies related to the Palestinian cause; al-Thabit Organization (est. 2006), publishing the monthly magazine al-Àwda (the return), see Ahmad al-Haj (2013); and in Palestine: Badil (est. 1998), publishing the quarterly magazine, al-Majdal.

4. For the growth of Israeli population in the Occupied Territories 1972–2010, see http://www.fmep.org/settlement_info/settlement-info-and-tables/stats-data/comprehensive-settlement-population-1972–2010

5. For the Arab summit’s resolutions, see Al-Ahram, October 27, 1976. For the 13th PNC session, see Helena Cobban (1983, pp. 81–87).

6. Most salient of whom were Ìsam Sartawi, Saìd Hamami, and Ibrahim al-Sous.7. Based on B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group. For higher figures of Israeli casu-

alties, see Maj. Gen. (res.) D. Almog in a conference on: Israel in Protracted Wars, Bar-Ilan University, December 1, 2004. See also www.IDF.il. For comparison, from mid-1996 to September 2000, the Israeli toll was 45, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3694350.stm

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