Within six days, in June 1967, the Israeli army devastated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It had scaled Syria's Golan Heights, whence it threatened to coast along the gentle plains to Damascus; it occupied Gaza and the whole of Sinai and was able to launch offensive strikes deep into the heart of Egypt; it had conquered East Jerusalem and invested the whole of the West Bank with relative ease. All Fateh's earliest fears about the probable course of a regular-army confrontation with Israel were realised, to the profound shock of the whole of the Arab world.

In Egypt, President Nasser, who had for so long and from a position of such apparent authority counselled the Palestinians against precipitate action against Israel, was himself forced to appear, humiliated, before his own people to offer his resignation. Though the Egyptians clamorously refused to allow him to step down, he had to spend long months and years following June 1967 in patiently patching back together Egypt's military hierarchy, its defences and its popular consensus; he was in no position then to dictate tactics or strategy to anyone else, especially the Palestinians. Similarly in Jordan, whose king was now blamed for ‘losing the rest of Palestine [i.e. East Jerusalem and the West Bank] to the Zionists’ and to a lesser extent in Syria, whose government had been allowing the Palestinian guerrillas a far freer hand than they enjoyed in Egypt or Jordan, even before the Six-Day War: in all these countries, the military defeat at the hands of Israel had sent their governments' negotiating power vis-a-vis the guerrillas plummeting to near zero.

On 22 October 1973, the United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution calling for a cease-fire in the 16-day-old Middle East war; but Israeli units commanded by General Ariel Sharon continued their movement southwards from Deversoir, along the west bank of the Suez Canal, and within two days had completely cut off supply lines to the Egyptian Third Army now trapped on the east bank.

It was on 26 October that Fateh's Salah Khalaf and Farouq al-Qaddumi, who had both stayed in Cairo throughout the war, went to President Sadat's Tahra Palace. The question with which the Egyptian leader confronted them there was one which was to haunt the Fateh leadership for most of the next four years. According to Khalaf ‘Before we even had a chance to sit down he asked us point-blank: “Well now, will you agree to participate in the Geneva Peace Conference?’” The two men did not feel they could provide an answer right there and then. The next day, they travelled to Beirut, where they convened an enlarged meeting of the Fateh leadership to discuss Sadat's question. As Khalaf recalled it

This study has already documented at some length the extent to which the Arabs' 1967 defeat marked a turning-point in the politics of the Palestinian diaspora: how much more decisive a development was it for those Palestinians who had remained within the boundaries of Mandate Palestine! Eight hundred thousand Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and 400,000 residents of Gaza were now brought under direct Israeli military rule. These figures include both traditional Palestinian inhabitants of the two areas and their substantial populations of refugees from within the boundaries Israel had staked out in 1948–49. Almost overnight in 1967, these Palestinians' relationship to Israel was transformed from a more or less remote, more or less idealistic, and generally indirect confrontation into the daily question of survival under an occupying power. For those Palestinians who had remained in their homes inside 1948 Israel, too (the ‘Israeli Arabs’, who now numbered about a half a million), Israel's occupation of the new areas was to have far-reaching consequences over the years ahead. For the first time in two decades they could reach out from the social and political isolation to which their citizenship of Israel had confined them and come into contact with virtually intact Arab societies in the West Bank, Gaza and (to a lesser extent) the Golan and Sinai.

These by-products of Israel's resounding military victory in 1967 were to have profound effects, over the 15 years which followed, on the goals, tactics and political make-up of the Palestinian national movement, which at the time of its revival in the late 50s had been based primarily on the struggle of the Palestinian exiles to return to their homes.

By the spring of 1981, the Palestinian nationalist movement found itself in a complex situation of contrasting strengths and weaknesses. The Camp David accords, with their provisions for self-rule in the occupied territories, had dealt the PLO a harsh diplomatic setback. But the unanimity of the opposition expressed to those provisions by the Palestinians of the occupied territories had stalled their implementation and brought valuable new bases of support from inside the occupied areas into the PLO's constituency. The Arab League's score of member-states found themselves weak and divided as never before. This practically ruled out the chances of arriving at any negotiated settlement with Israel which might satisfy the PLO's already reduced aspirations. But it did leave the PLO/Fateh leaders some room for that inter-Arab manoeuvring which had traditionally been their key to survival; while the very fragility with which many Arab regimes maintained their hold on power gave the PLO/Fateh leaders, with their near-unanimous base of Palestinian support, a relatively stronger position in their bilateral dealings with these regimes. Militarily, meanwhile, the situation in Lebanon had turned into a treacherous stalemate: the Israelis launched repeated and damaging air, land and sea raids against the PLO/ Joint Forces1 positions throughout 1981, but were ultimately unable – short of mounting a really major offensive – to dent them significantly.

By April 1981, there was already a strong expectation that just such an offensive was imminent, and by early June that year, a French reporter was writing from Beirut about expectations of ‘an Israeli-Phalangist plan which Yasser Arafat calls the “accordion” plan: its aim is to catch the Palestinian forces in a pincer movement between the Christian militia in Beirut and the Israeli army in South Lebanon'.

If, in the late 70s or the early 80s, you were to ask any Fateh leader – or come to that, any member of any other Palestinian organisation, or practically any Palestinian at all – what the resistance movement had achieved after two decades of struggle, the first answer would be to the effect that the resistance movement had re-established the Palestinian identity. ‘In the 50s,’ Yasser Arafat recalled in 1979, ‘John Foster Dulles used to say that the new generation of Palestinians would not even know Palestine. But they did! The group that made the [March 1978] operation against Israel were nearly all of them born outside Palestine, but they were prepared to die for it.’ ‘Palestine,’ said Khaled al-Hassan, ‘had been eliminated from the books and maps; the Palestinian people had been eliminated. The problem was called the Arab-Israeli problem: it was a border problem between states, not a question of a people whose rights had been infringed. Now there is a Palestinian people which is recognised – there is strong recognition everywhere except the United States and Israel. This was our first achievement.' Indeed, by the early 80s, not only was there a worldwide recognition that ‘the Palestinian question’ as such would have to be addressed, but also, inside the many different Palestinian communities themselves, both inside and outside historic Palestine, the people's identification with their own Palestinian-ness had become far deeper than – though still not at odds with*- their self-identification as Arabs, Muslims or Christians.

The present-day Palestinian movement's assertion of Palestinian-ness had, at the beginning, to be made as against the existing claims of both the Israelis and the Arab states.

The two years following the Arab states' June 1967 defeat formed, as we saw above in chapter 3, a decisive period for the Palestinian nationalist movement. It was the period when the idea of independent Palestinian guerrilla action met an explosion of support from Palestinian and non- Palestinian communities throughout the Arab world and when the fathers of that idea – the leaders of Fateh – were able to pull themselves up into the quasi-official status of controlling the PLO.

But the very dimensions of the new support expressed for the guerrilla idea in that period meant on the one hand that Fateh, with its longengrained habits of slow and careful underground work, was unable to absorb the scores of thousands of new guerrilla volunteers; and on the other, that all the pan-Arabist Arab regimes and parties were eager to stake out their own claim within the rapidly burgeoning guerrilla movement. Thus, the years 1967–69 also saw the growth of a spectrum of other Palestinian guerrilla organisations, which sometimes appeared to outside observers to be jostling with Fateh for overall control of the movement. In 1974, for example, four of the non-Fateh groups banded together in the Rejection Front1 to co-ordinate their opposition to the PLO/Fateh leaders' pursuit of a diplomatic settlement of the national cause.

In reality, though, Fateh's leadership of the movement was never seriously threatened either by the Rejection Front2 or by any of the other, earlier challenges Fateh had faced since it had consolidated its hold on the PLO in February 1969.

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.

From the very start of their association with each other, Fateh's leaders had explicitly rejected any idea of espousing a pan-Arabist ideology, or any other ‘universalist’ ideology. Yet from the earliest days of its emergence the Palestinian resistance movement's development was intricately, even symbiotically, bound up with the course of events in the Arab states. There were many reasons, both objective and subjective, for this. First, following the Palestinian disaster of 1948, the Palestinian nationalists were unable to operate from any ‘liberated area’ inside their own country. Those parts of Mandate Palestine which remained free of Israeli control between 1948 and 1967 were kept under tight control by the Jordanians and the Egyptians throughout that period. The Palestinian refugees who dreamt of Return therefore always had to work for its realisation from under the watchful eye of an Arab government (until 1967, that is, when the refugees in camps in the West Bank and Gaza came under direct Israeli rule). The Arab governments, meanwhile, and especially those in the four Arab countries bordering directly on Israel which were host to the greatest numbers of refugees, have always had their own compelling raisons d'etat to consider when addressing the question of Israel, and thus also the Palestinians’ aims towards Israel.

In addition, the ‘Palestinian question’ was always a vibrant factor in the internal politics of the Arab states. Once again, this factor was especially important in the four states directly bordering Israel, although it was also a factor of undoubted importance in the internal politics of all those other countries which consider themselves Arab, ‘from the [Atlantic] Ocean to the Gulf, as the Arab nationalists described their territory.

Source: Leila S. Kadi, Basic Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement, Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1969, pp. 137–142.

Article 1: Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Article 2: Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit…

Article 4: The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership of the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them.

Article 5: The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father … whether inside Palestine or outside it … is also a Palestinian.

Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians…

Article 8: The phase in their history, through which the Palestinian people are now living, is that of national struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Thus the conflicts among the Palestinian national forces are secondary, and should be ended for the sake of the basic conflict that exists between the forces of Zionism and of imperialism on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arab people on the other…

Article 9: Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.