Arabs (72 page)

The international community still hoped to bring Israel and the Arabs together to conclude a just and enduring peace. When the United Nations debated the issue in November 1967, it found the Arab world divided over the possibility of a diplomatic solution. Resolution 242, unanimously approved by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, provided the legal framework for a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on an exchange of land for peace. The resolution called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” in return for “respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Resolution 242 has remained the basis of all subsequent “land for peace” initiatives in the Arab-Israel conflict.

The resolution gained the support of Egypt and Jordan, but not of Syria or the other Arab states. For them, the three nos of Khartoum ruled out the diplomatic solution implied by Resolution 242. It was an intransigent stance, but after losing three wars to Israel—in 1948, 1956, and 1967—most Arab leaders were only willing to negotiate with the Jewish state from a position of strength. After 1967, those leaders were convinced that the Arabs were in no position to negotiate.

The Palestinian people themselves had the most to lose from the postwar diplomacy. During the two decades since they had been driven from their homeland, the Palestinians had never gained international recognition as a distinct people with national rights. Since mandate times, they had been referred to as the Arabs of Palestine, rather than as Palestinians. In 1948 the Jews of Palestine took on a national identity as Israelis, whereas the Palestinian Arabs remained just “Arabs”—either “Israeli Arabs,” the minority who remained in their homes upon the creation of the state of Israel, or “Arab refugees,” those who took refuge from the fighting in neighboring Arab states. As far as Western public opinion was concerned, the displaced Arabs of Palestine were no different than Arabs in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, or Egypt and would be absorbed by their host countries in due course.

Between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinians disappeared as a political community. When Israeli premier Golda Meir claimed there were no Palestinians, few in the international
community disputed her admittedly self-interested remark. This lack of awareness of Palestinian national aspirations was reflected in the UN debates of autumn 1967. Reasonable though Resolution 242 may sound to us now, at the time it represented the end of all Palestinian national aspirations. The principle of “land for peace” would confirm Israel’s permanence among the community of nations, returning what little territory remained of Arab Palestine to Egyptian or Jordanian trusteeship. The country formerly known as Palestine would disappear from the atlas forever, and there would be no state for all the Palestinians driven from their homes as refugees by the two wars of 1948 and 1967. It was not enough for Palestinians to reject Resolution 242. They also had to bring the justice of their cause to the attention of the international community by all possible means.

For twenty years the Palestinians had entrusted their cause to their Arab brethren in the hopes that combined Arab action would achieve the liberation of their lost homeland. The collective Arab defeat in 1967 convinced Palestinian nationalists to take matters in their own hands. Inspired by Third World revolutionaries, Palestinian national groups launched their own armed struggle not only against Israel but also against those Arab states that got in their way.

T
he founders of the Palestinian armed struggle first met in Cairo in the early 1950s. A Palestinian engineering student named Yasser Arafat (1929–2004), a veteran of the 1948 war, was elected president of the Palestinian Student Union in Cairo in 1952. He used the position to motivate a generation of young Palestinians to dedicate their lives to the liberation of their homeland.

One of Arafat’s closest collaborators was Salah Khalaf, who came to be known by his nom de guerre, Abu Iyad. During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the fifteen-year-old Khalaf had been forced to leave his hometown of Jaffa for Gaza. He went on to study in Cairo at the teacher training college Dar al-’Ulum, where he met Arafat at a meeting of the Palestinian Student Union in the autumn of 1951. “He was four years older than myself,” Khalaf recalled, “and I was immediately taken by his energy, enthusiasm, and enterprising spirit.” Khalaf and Arafat were united by their mistrust of the Arab regimes in the aftermath of the 1948 disaster, though with the advent of Nasser and the Free Officers, Khalaf recalled, “Everything seemed possible, even the liberation of Palestine.”
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Revolutionary Egypt proved a difficult place for Palestinian politics. Though Nasser promised the restoration of Palestinian national rights, his government kept Palestinian nationalist activity under tight controls. Over the ensuing years, the Palestinian students fanned out across the Arab world, establishing footholds in various nations that would eventually become organized cells. Arafat moved to Kuwait in 1957, where
Khalaf joined him two years later. Others, like Mahmud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority, found jobs in Qatar. The well-educated Palestinians were successful in their new jobs and channeled their resources toward their national cause—the liberation of Palestine.

The Palestinians only began to create distinct political organs in the late 1950s. In October 1959, Arafat and Khalaf convened a series of meetings with twenty other Palestinian activists in Kuwait to establish Fatah. The organization’s name was doubly significant. It is both the Arabic word for “conquest” and a reverse acronym for
Harakat Tahrir Filastin
—the Palestine Liberation Movement. The movement advocated armed struggle to transcend factionalism and achieve Palestinian national rights, and it would aggressively recruit and organize new members over the ensuing five years. Fatah began to publish a magazine—
Filastinuna
, or “Our Palestine”—to circulate its views. Its editor, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), would emerge as Fatah’s official spokesman.

The Arab states decided to create an official organ to represent Palestinian aspirations. In 1964 the first summit of Arab leaders met in Cairo and called for a new organization to enable the Palestinian people “to play their role in the liberation of their country and their self determination.” Arafat and his colleagues had grave misgivings about the new organ, dubbed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Palestinians had not been consulted in the establishment of their own liberation organization, and Nasser had imposed a lawyer named Ahmad Shuqayri to head the PLO. Shuqayri’s Palestinian credentials were slim at best. Born in Lebanon of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi, and Turkish descent, the eloquent Shuqayri had served until 1963 as the Saudi representative to the United Nations. Arafat and the Fatah activists were convinced that the PLO had been created by the Arab regimes to control the Palestinians rather than to involve them in the liberation of their homeland.

At first, Fatah tried to cooperate with the PLO. Arafat and Khalaf met with Shuqayri when he visited Kuwait, and they sent delegates to the first Palestinian National Congress, convened in Jerusalem in May 1964. The PLO was formally established at the Jerusalem Congress. The 422 invited delegates, drawn mostly from elite families, reconstituted themselves as the Palestinian National Council, a sort of parliament in exile, and ratified a set of objectives enshrined in the Palestinian National Charter. The new organization even called for the creation of a Palestinian national army, which would come to be called the Palestine Liberation Army. Fatah was marginalized at the congress and left Jerusalem determined to upstage the new official Palestinian organ. To seize the initiative, Fatah decided to launch an armed struggle against Israel.

Fatah’s first operation against Israel was a military failure but a propaganda success. Three commando teams were scheduled to attack Israel from Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon on December 31, 1964. However, the governments of Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan were keen to prevent the Palestinians from antagonizing the Israelis, knowing
they would face severe reprisals against their own territory. The Egyptian authorities apprehended the Fatah squad in Gaza one week before the operation was due to take place. Lebanese security forces arrested the second group before they reached the Lebanese frontier with Israel. A third team crossed into Israel from the West Bank on January 3, 1965, and left dynamite charges in an irrigation pumping station, though the Israelis found the explosives and disarmed them before they could go off. As the Palestinian commandos returned to Jordanian territory, they were arrested by Jordanian authorities and one guerrilla was killed resisting arrest. Fatah had its first martyr, though tellingly he was killed by fellow Arabs.

The symbolism of the ultimately unsuccessful attacks was far more significant than Fatah’s military objectives. On New Year’s Day 1965, Fatah issued a military communiqué under an assumed name—
al-Asifa
, or “the Storm”—claiming “our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.”
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Palestinians around the world were electrified by the news. “On January 1, 1965, Fatah opened a new era in modern Palestinian history,” wrote Leila Khaled, a soldier of the armed struggle whose family had been driven from Haifa in 1948. To her, the attacks represented the beginning of the Palestinian revolution and the first step toward the liberation of her homeland. “The Palestinian people had spent seventeen years in exile living on hopes fostered by the Arab leadership. In 1965 they decided they must liberate themselves rather than wait for God’s help.”
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In its first eighteen months, the Palestinian armed struggle remained a marginal movement easily contained by Israel and its Arab neighbors. Salah Khalaf claimed Fatah carried out “about 200 raids” between January 1965 and June 1967, though he acknowledged such attacks were “limited in scope and not the sort that could endanger Israeli state security or stability.”

The Arab defeat in 1967 was, ironically, a moment of liberation for the Palestinian armed struggle. With Gaza and the West Bank now under Israeli occupation rather than under Egyptian and Jordanian rule, as they had been between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinian movement could claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians in the occupied territories for the first time. Moreover, the Palestinian movement gained its freedom from the defeated Arab states. Nasser and the other Arab leaders had imposed stringent restrictions on Fatah and the other Palestinian factions. The chastened Nasser could no longer stand in the way of the Palestinian movement but used his diminished authority to pressure the other Arab states bordering Israel to allow the Palestinians to launch attacks from their territory.

Jordan became the primary center of Palestinian operations in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. Weakened by the destruction of his armed forces and
the loss of the West Bank, King Hussein turned a blind eye to Fatah operations against Israel. The armed Palestinian factions set up their headquarters in the Jordan Valley, in the village of Karamah. The Israelis took note of Fatah’s preparations. In March 1968, Fatah was warned by Jordanian authorities of an imminent Israeli strike on its base in Karamah. The Palestinians decided to hold their ground and make a stand rather than retreat before superior Israeli forces. The Jordanians agreed to provide artillery support from the highlands overlooking the Jordan Valley.

On March 21 a major Israeli expedition force crossed the Jordan River in an attempt to destroy Fatah’s headquarters. Some 15,000 Israeli infantry and armor attacked both the village of Karamah and the Fatah training camps. Mahmoud Issa, a 1948 refugee from Acre, was there. “We were given orders not to intervene through the first part of the operation,” Issa recalled. “Abu Amar [Yasser Arafat’s nom de guerre] came in person to explain that we could only survive such a desperate situation by ruse. He had no difficulty in convincing us. We were materially incapable of defending Karamah.” Indeed, it is now estimated that there were only 250 Fatah guerrillas and administrative staff, and perhaps 80 members of the Palestine Liberation Army, based at Karamah at the time. “Our only option,” Issa continued, “was to ambush the Israelis, and to choose the right moment to do so.”
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Issa and his comrades took up positions outside the camp to strike their counterattack at sunset. “The day wore on,” Issa related in his memoirs. “There was nothing left of Karamah. Only ruins. Many women, men and children had been taken prisoner. There were also many dead.” After completing their mission under heavy Jordanian artillery fire, the Israelis began their withdrawal. It was the moment for which Issa and his comrades had been waiting.