The late 40s and early 50s were a time of rapid social and political change for the Arab states bordering on Israel. Egypt saw continued agitation for the ending of Britain's military presence, the overthrow of its monarchy in 1952, and the Israeli-French-British invasion four years later. Syria saw a succession of coups and counter-coups, as more powerful Arab governments contested for influence over Damascus. Lebanon, behind a facade of growing wealth and westernisation, was storing up the discontents which led to the civil war of 1958. And in Jordan, King Abdullah was accused of betraying the Palestinian cause and was shot one Friday prayer-time in 1951 at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque. His immediate heir, Talal, and later TalaPs son Hussein, then took over the task of controlling a population that (East Bank and West Bank) was overwhelmingly Palestinian in origin.

In Cairo, in particular, the years immediately preceding the Free Officers' coup against the monarchy in 1952 were marked by an often clashing ferment of ‘universalist’ ideas – from communism, to pan-Arabism, to Muslim fundamentalism – each of which sought, in adopting the Palestinian cause as its own, consciously or unconsciously thereby to subordinate it to its own.

Yet in 1951, as Yasser Arafat set about reorganising the Palestinian Students' Union in Cairo, he found several fellow students who agreed with his ‘Palestine-first’ orientation. Among them was Salah Khalaf, a literature student some four years younger than Arafat whose adolescence had been seared by the experience of the mass flight of the population of Arab Jaffa from their city.