Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
After years of preparation, Fatah's first military action took place on Jan. 2, 1965, when a squad of guerrillas crossed the border and unsuccessfully attempted to blow up a water line in the Negev Desert. Although Jordan and Egypt, fearing being dragged into a war with Israel, tried to suppress the movement, Fatah's military wing succeeded in carrying out about a hundred raids before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in June 1967. Fatah and Arafat gained standing with Palestinians because of their militancy, and Arafat was named head of the new Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been born in 1964.
The PLO's charter stated that Palestinians had the right to return to their country, declared the 1947 United Nations partition null and void, and asserted that "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine." Saying that its goal was "the elimination of Zionism in Palestine," the PLO denied that Jews had any historical claim on Palestine.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, which inflicted a crushing defeat on Egypt and Syria and resulted in Israel's occupying the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat and the PLO decided to continue their guerrilla war. This time, however, the war was to be waged from inside Israel or the occupied territories, not from neighboring Arab states. Arafat attempted to use guerrilla raids to instigate a popular uprising in the West Bank. The bloodiest attack killed 11 and wounded 55 Israeli civilians in Jerusalem in 1968. But the raids were largely ineffective and the Israelis crushed Fatah, killing 200 operatives and arresting 1,000. Israeli reprisals against West Bank towns weakened popular support for the guerrillas: In November 1967, for example, Israeli forces demolished all 800 houses in the village of Jiftliq. Moreover, the traditional Palestinian leadership in the West Bank did not back the militants and was co-opted by the Israelis. The war of national liberation never materialized. Arafat, who had been moving between West Bank safe houses and back and forth across the Jordanian-West Bank border, narrowly escaped being captured by the Israelis, who on one occasion burst into his hiding place and found a warm bed and water still boiling for tea.
Driven into Jordan by Israeli strikes, Fatah and other guerrilla groups, the most significant of which was George Habash's PFLP, became a virtual state within a state. Fatah's prestige among young Palestinians rose dramatically after the battle of Karameh, in which Arafat's guerrillas, or fedayeen, fought fiercely against an overwhelmingly superior Israeli force. After the battle, Fatah's numbers swelled from two or three thousand to 10-15,000.
As was to happen repeatedly throughout his career, Arafat's militants came into bitter conflict with the Arab states in which they were based. (In Lebanon, they also clashed with the people.) The new power of the Palestinian guerrillas increasingly threatened the ruling Hashemite dynasty, headed by King Hussein. When the PFLP, which openly questioned the need for Hashemite rule, hijacked four international jets -- a move opposed by Arafat and the majority of the PLO -- Hussein decided it was time to get rid of the Palestinian resistance groups once and for all. In a 10-day virtual civil war, Jordanian troops killed close to 2,000 fedayeen and many thousands of innocent refugees. The battle of "Black September," as Palestinians called it thereafter, concluded with the militants' expulsion from Jordan.
Deprived of a haven in the nation sharing the longest border with Israel, Arafat, Fatah and the other resistance groups moved to Lebanon and Syria, where they began to stage attacks on Israel across the border. While Arafat's Fatah faction continued with its tactics of infiltration, the more radical of the fedayeen embarked on a new strategy of attacking Israelis anywhere around the world. Aerial piracy was their most spectacular tactic. The PFLP and another rejectionist group, Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-General Command, hijacked numerous planes, planted bombs on others, and launched bloody attacks at airports, embassies and Jewish private organizations around the world. The purpose of the attacks was both to terrorize Israelis and to draw the world's attention to the existence of the Palestinian cause. Between 1968 and 1977, Palestinian groups hijacked or attempted to hijack 29 aircraft. The most infamous attack took place during the 1972 Olympic Games at Munich, when Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization took nine Israeli athletes hostage. All the Israelis were killed by the Palestinians during a botched rescue attempt.
Black September, founded in 1971, was an offshoot of Arafat's Fatah; according to Morris, pressure from Palestinian extremists drove Arafat and the PLO to embrace international terrorism. "The moderates apparently acquiesced in the creation of Black September in order to survive." For three years, the group led a surge of international terrorism committed by Palestinians: In 1973, 60 terrorist attacks erupted outside Israel and the occupied territories, compared to two in 1968. In 1973, the PLO closed down Black September, deciding that international terrorism was hurting the Palestinian cause. The decision was influenced by the 1973 October War between Egypt and Israel, which put the Palestinian problem back on the world's agenda. In 1974, the PLO formally renounced international terrorism.
Morris notes, "Without doubt, Arafat recognized the value of the terrorist splinter groups; they could be relied upon both to keep the Palestinian issue alive and to hurt Israel -- while he himself could denounce these groups as anti-PLO renegades, or at least dissociate himself from their actions." But the terrorist tiger proved hard to get off. Arafat's opportunistic, on-again, off-again relation with international terrorism was evidence of a pattern that was to recur throughout his career -- and in the end led to his diplomatic isolation.
In 1978, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed the historic Camp David peace treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a treaty that returned the Sinai to Egypt and ended hostilities between Israel and the most powerful Arab state. Arafat and many Arab states immediately denounced it; with Syrian President Hafez Assad, he released a communiqué announcing that they would "apply all their resources to the elimination of its consequences." This stance made sense from the Palestinian perspective. Although the Camp David treaty was seen as a historic breakthrough by Americans and many observers, it had a fatal flaw: It was essentially a separate peace between Israel and Egypt that completely failed to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in particular the central issue : Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which it had conquered in the 1967 war. Begin, for his part, had made it clear he had no intention of giving up any of the West Bank, which he regarded as part of the biblical Eretz Israel and referred to as having been "liberated." Begin insisted that the Israeli military remain. He proposed "autonomy," a euphemism for very limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, and rapidly expanded the building of settlements. His agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, was in charge of much of the Israeli expansion into the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon stated that the entire West Bank would have to be populated with not less than 300,000 Jews to serve as Israel's permanent "security shield."
Over the next 25 years, while peace plans came and went, Sharon succeeded in implementing his plan. Although large numbers of Israelis saw the Camp David peace plan as providing a historic opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians and dissented from these aggressive settlement policies, Begin -- and every successive Israeli leader -- continued to implement them.
Sadat also turned away from the Palestinian cause. Enraged at Palestinian terrorist attacks, in particular the murder of the editor of the leading Cairo newspaper, al-Ahram, by a radical breakaway faction headed by Abu Nidal, Sadat told Israel that there should be no Palestinian state and that the West Bank should be ruled by Jordan, Israel and local representatives.
Howard M. Sachar, the author of a standard history of Israel, quotes Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh, who sums up Begin's position thus: "A fraction of the Palestinian people ... is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the national right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of this homeland ... and this processs is to be fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement."
It is impossible to understand Arafat's career, or his many mistakes, without taking into account the implacable resistance his movement faced from both Israel and the United States. Some of that resistance was legitimately based on the terrorist acts committed by the PLO. But the Israelis also used "terrorism" -- in the Israeli press, often used as a virtual synonym for "Palestinian" -- as an excuse to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. As the Israeli writer Amos Elon has noted, the tragedy was that the Palestinians triggered an existential fear of extinction in Israelis, many of whom had just escaped Hitler's Europe: Their fear prevented them from addressing the problems that could have removed that fear. (In this regard, as in so many others, Israel prefigured post-9/11 America.)
