10

1958–1967

‘The strongest feeling, vocally and bitterly expressed by the great mass of refugees, is the demand to return to their old homes.’

UNRWA, 1956

THE FIRST TEN YEARS

Ecstatic Israelis celebrated the tenth anniversary of their independence on 24 April 1958 (according to the Hebrew calendar). The military parade that was held to mark the occasion in West Jerusalem, ‘almost under the sullen guns of the Jordan army ringing the Israel-held sectors of the ancient city’,1 deliberately emphasized the armed might of the Jewish state – and its defiance of international opinion. David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, and President Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi – who had succeeded Chaim Weizmann in 1952 – took the salute in the newly built sports stadium on the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University, watched by a cheering crowd of 20,000 with many thousands more lining the route. French tanks and artillery, US-made Sherman tanks and British anti-aircraft guns were followed by paratroop, infantry and naval units, their flags flying in spring sunshine that was welcome after a chilly spell. Many members of the foreign diplomatic corps stayed away for fear their attendance might be interpreted as recognition of Jerusalem as the country’s capital (as declared by Israel in December 1948), although some heads of mission came in their private capacity. The event took place despite protests by the United Nations, which declared that the concentration of Israeli forces in Jerusalem violated the 1949 armistice agreement with Jordan. Israel insisted there was no violation because the troops would be withdrawn immediately after the celebration. On the other side of the city, King Hussein – who maintained indirect contact with the Israelis via the US – inspected the reinforced units he had carefully deployed to counter-balance the unusually heavy Israeli presence.

Israel’s conflict with its Arab enemies was nowhere near being resolved in 1958, and it was hard to see anything changing given the entrenched positions on both sides, the divisions in the Arab world and the absence of any recognized body representing the Palestinians and their interests. ‘Since the death of King Abdullah [in 1951], no Arab ruler has been willing to parley with Israel’, observed Walter Eytan, a senior foreign ministry official, in a book he published that year that employed standard Israeli government arguments.

The fact that the Arab states put themselves in the wrong by refusing to negotiate with Israel has not weighed with them. They do not recognise Israel; consequently there is no one with whom to negotiate. Their whole attitude is based on the thesis that Israel has no right to exist and that to negotiate with her is out of the question because it would mean conceding her this right. Israel has shown that she could ride out ten years of unrelenting enmity from the Arab side, and she can live with it for decades and generations more if she must.2

Abba Eban, Israel’s famously eloquent ambassador to the US, marked a decade of independence in a prime-time TV interview with Mike Wallace on ABC News, describing ‘incomparable years of joyous creation, of sovereignty restored, of a people gathered in, of a land revived, of democracy established’. Yes, he admitted, there had also been ‘violence imposed by the hostility of our neighbours’. However, he flatly rejected comparisons between the Arab ‘refugee problem’ and the Nazi Holocaust that had recently been made by the British historian Arnold Toynbee, a long-standing critic of Zionism:

It is a monstrous blasphemy. He takes the massacre of millions of our men, women and children and he compares it to the plight of Arab refugees, alive, on their kindred soil, suffering certain anguish but of course possessed of the supreme gift of life. This equation between massacre and temporary suffering which can easily be alleviated is a distortion of any historic perspective. But the refugee problem isn’t the cause of tension. The refugee problem is the result of an Arab policy which created the problem by the invasion of Israel, which perpetuates it by refusing to accommodate them into their expanding labour market and which refuses to solve the problem which they have the full capacity to solve. There is a basic immorality in this attitude of Arab governments to their own kinsmen whose plight they could relieve immediately once the will to relieve it existed.3

Israel’s refusal to take back Arab refugees was certainly supported by the country’s Jewish citizens. The overwhelming majority subscribed to the officially promoted belief that the Arabs were entirely responsible for the 1948 war; that the refugees had fled of their own accord or at the urging of the invading Arab armies in anticipation of victory; that the Arab countries were deliberately perpetuating the problem for political reasons by failing to integrate the refugees despite ties of kinship, language, religion and national sentiment; and that repatriation was simply not an option. In February 1956, the government had released the report of an official inquiry into the military government. It heard testimony from thirty-nine Jews and fifty Arabs, one of whom was adamant that Arab citizens had not demonstrated loyalty to the state. The Ratner Commission highlighted fears that Arabs could constitute a fifth column as well as encroach on state land. It opposed the return of refugees for security reasons and argued that since the refugees had left the country voluntarily, they had relinquished any claims to return.⁴ Another, more heavyweight commission reached similar conclusions less than three years later. Views did not change, but it was only in 1965 that the authorities quietly ordered the destruction of those abandoned Arab villages that still remained.⁵

The word ‘Palestinian’ was not used in either Hebrew or English discourse in the Israel of the 1950s – except on the far left.⁶ In the same period, as official spokesmen always pointed out, Israel had assimilated nearly 1 million Jewish refugees, 450,000 of them from Arab countries. Selective quotations, and false, partial or misleading contemporary testimony were employed to support the case about the war of independence. Eytan, for example, described the ‘astonishment’ in the Jewish Agency when the Arab population of Tiberias decamped en masse in April 1948; it was not until the late 1980s that newly declassified files in the Israeli state archives allowed historians to paint an accurate picture of what had happened there (notably including the influence of Haganah psychological warfare and a nearby massacre), and in many other places during the war.7

Eban’s speech to the UN General Assembly in 1958 spelled out the Israeli case on the refugees in detail. The bottom line was this:

Repatriation would mean that hundreds of thousands of people would be introduced into a state whose existence they oppose, whose flag they despise and whose destruction they are resolved to seek. Israel, whose sovereignty and safety are already assailed by the states surrounding her, is invited to add to her perils by the influx from hostile territories of masses of people steeped in the hatred of her existence.

Of nearly a million refugees, more than half were under fifteen: thus in 1948 many of those were under five and had no ‘conscious memory of Israel at all’.⁸ Eban’s eloquence did not make the issue disappear: in 1961 Ben-Gurion instructed the Shiloah Institute, a government-backed think tank in Tel Aviv, to report in detail on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus. The idea was to use the material for public diplomacy in the face of calls from the Kennedy administration in the US to make concessions on the refugee issue. Rony Gabbay, one of the Shiloah researchers, had already concluded from his own academic work on 1948 that in many cases ‘Jewish forces took Arab villages, expelled the inhabitants and blew up places which they did not want to occupy themselves, so that they could not be reoccupied by their enemies and used as strongholds against them.’⁹

MINORITY RIGHTS, ISRAELI WRONGS

Independence Day 1958 was a good opportunity to showcase Israel’s achievements in all spheres, including the sensitive issue of the Arab minority. In the preceding months, after the first anniversary of the Kafr Qassem killings, considerable efforts were made to persuade Arab citizens to take part in the festivities. The government offered to cover part of the costs of bands, fireworks, loudspeakers and exhibitions: one in Acre’s old Turkish bathhouse showcased the ‘folklore of the minorities’, complete with traditional embroidery, Arabic coffee and sweets. It was ready to provide generators for the occasion as few villages were connected to the national grid, though local councils were expected to pay. When a boycott movement, galvanized by Maki, gathered momentum, leaflets signed by previously unknown groups called Sons of the Galilee and the Voice of the Arabs in Israel attempted to counter it – the names suggesting a clandestine effort orchestrated by the government. Pressure was brought to bear on individuals, including the young poet Rashid Hussein, who was asked to pen a verse to mark the holiday. Officials claimed a turnout of 8,000 in Nazareth on 26 April.10

Reality intruded a few days later on May Day. The mood in the country’s only Arab city had been soured by the confiscation of a large tract of land which already housed Jewish immigrants who were mostly employed by the government. The early stages of the project were managed by an inter-departmental committee dominated by ministry of defence personnel.¹¹ This would eventually become the separate Jewish town of Upper Nazareth, whose purpose was described as ‘ “to break” Arab autonomy in the region and in this city, and later, to create a Jewish majority’.¹² More generally, there was resentment at continuing restrictions on movement – albeit lightly eased in 1957 – which still applied to the 85 per cent of Israeli Arabs who lived under the military government.¹³ Communist organizers were arrested and placed in administrative detention and a planned May Day rally banned. When the ban was ignored, clashes erupted, followed by beatings and three hundred arrests, that the Hebrew media described as a ‘riot’, while Arabs boasted of their collective strength in the face of ‘truncheons and vicious abuse’.¹⁴ Slogans included ‘Down with Ben-Gurion’, ‘End military rule’ and ‘Long live Nasser’. These events, observed a foreign visitor, were not typical of Nazareth life and politics. ‘They brought out into the streets, for all to see, what had hitherto been only argued about in cafes or recorded in the files of the military government. They dramatised an obscure, all-pervading tension between government and governed.’¹⁵ Further efforts were made to forestall trouble on 15 May, the Gregorian calendar date for Israel’s independence and the Palestinian Nakba. Warnings of ‘forceful measures to punish incitement against the state’ were issued, especially to teachers, but pupils in Nazareth ignored them and followed the habit of the wider Arab world and observed five minutes’ silence to mark the occasion. In one school students put up a picture of Nasser.16

Later that year attempts to set up a non-Communist organization led a small group of Arab intellectuals to form al-Ard (the Land) in the spirit of Nasserism and the wider Arab nationalist movement. It represented the first Arab challenge to the Jewish nature of the state. It called for a repeal of all discriminatory laws and recognition of the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return. These demands were articulated in a paper, edited by Salah Baransi, which was refused a licence but still managed to appear thirteen times until the group was formally outlawed. Al-Ard’s appearance signalled a parting of the ways between Arab nationalists and the Communists, who were still the only Arab grouping to have formally accepted the existence of Israel. It reflected the rivalry between Nasser’s pan-Arabist view and the approach of the Communist-backed Iraqi leader, Abdel-Karim Qasim, who had overthrown the monarchy. It also reflected ‘more than anything else the weariness with the ambiguity or the limbo imposed on the Palestinians’.¹⁷ It did not however win automatic support from the Arab community. Al-Ard’s call to boycott the 1959 Knesset elections was controversial because it reduced Maki’s representation from six to three seats and thus, its critics complained, weakened overall Arab representation in the Knesset. The Israeli security establishment was still alarmed. Al-Ard was ‘accused’, among other things, of helping to open independent sports clubs in Arab villages.¹⁸ In 1960 the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, Shmuel Toledano – another Arabic-speaking official who had served in the Mossad (the foreign intelligence service) – warned publicly that al-Ard constituted a threat to the very existence of the state. Toledano described the notion of ‘Israeli Arabs’ as a contradiction in terms as they belonged to ‘another nationality’.¹⁹ Still, one small new group could not overcome the general quiescence of the Palestinians inside Israel, marginalized and carefully controlled as they were, as Palestinian nationalism began to revive elsewhere.²⁰

AND ACROSS THE DIASPORA

Freedoms were in short supply for the majority of Palestinians who were scattered across the Arab world at a time of ferment and regional rivalry. In February 1958, Egypt and Syria had come together to announce the creation of the United Arab Republic. In May civil war broke out in Lebanon. In July the Iraqi monarchy was violently overthrown, a blow to the West and an ominous sign for its Hashemite cousins in Jordan, where the US and Britain – as well as Israel – feared a Nasserist coup. Elsewhere, the Algerian rebellion against France that had erupted in 1954 continued its bloody course, a source of inspiration and solidarity for other Arabs who saw Western imperialism as their main enemy. Palestinians in the front-line states, or further afield in the Gulf, were neither immune from nor indifferent to these developments.

Overall, Jordan treated Palestinians far better than any other Arab country, granting them citizenship and dropping the use of the term ‘refugee’ in official documents. Even before April 1950 King Abdullah had decreed that the territory now under his control, most of it allotted to the Palestinians under the 1947 UN partition decision, would be known henceforth as the West Bank. Use of the term ‘Palestine’ in any official document or correspondence was banned. Associations with an obviously Palestinian character – such as the Haifa Cultural Association in Nablus, the Jaffa Muslim Sports Club in Ramallah – were not allowed to engage in any political activity. Like Israel, Jordan offered Palestinians formal citizenship, but like Israel it also delegitimized Palestinian identity. Both countries’ policies ‘emphasised control and co-optation rather than partnership and equality’.21 Palestinian separatism was presented as a blow to Arab unity.²² That approach was maintained by King Hussein when he succeeded his father Talal in 1952. Jordan moved government offices from Jerusalem to Amman and faced complaints from Palestinians that the city, now on the front line with Israel, was being discriminated against and neglected. In 1961 the entire municipal council resigned in protest. Palestinians joked that if Hussein could have got away with demolishing the walls of the Old City, he would have done that as well.

It was Lebanon which imposed the most severe restrictions on the 100,000–130,000 Palestinians who had arrived by 1949, a reflection in part of the country’s own fragile sectarian balance. Prejudice and mistreatment were common. Fawaz Turki, from the Haifa area, remembered how, as a teenage refugee, he wept with humiliation when a Beirut street entertainer ordered his pet monkey to ‘show us how a Palestinian picks up his food rations’. Even Lebanese children taunted Palestinians, telling them to ‘go back where you came from’, and accused them of having sold their land to the Jews.23 Samira Azzam, an Acre-born writer living in Beirut, created a hero who was frustrated because he was never allowed to forget that he is a Palestinian and who makes desperate efforts to become a naturalized Lebanese; when he finally succeeds in getting hold of the necessary passport, for a high price, he discovers it has been forged.²⁴ The authorities tracked down Palestinian activists, especially anyone suspected of being a Communist, to prevent them visiting refugee camps. The situation was better in neighbouring Syria, which took in 85,000–100,000 refugees, though with a far larger host population. Their affairs were administered by the General Authority for Palestine Arab Refugees, set up in 1949. By 1960, through natural increase, numbers had risen to 127,000.

The majority of the 300,000 Palestinians in Egypt lived under the military administration and emergency laws in the Gaza Strip that lasted until 1962. Most were no more able to enter the Nile valley than they were to return to their lost homes and lands inside Israel.²⁵ None of the refugees could go back to a now non-existent Palestine, while full integration in the host countries – with the exception of Jordan – was equally impossible. ‘The strongest feeling, vocally and bitterly expressed by the great mass of refugees, is the demand to return to their old homes’, UNRWA reported in the mid-1950s. ‘They have remained opposed to the development of large-scale projects for self-support, which they erroneously link with permanent resettlement and the abandonment of hope for repatriation.’²⁶

Nasser’s popularity, at its height after the Suez war, helped galvanize the new Arab Nationalist Movement, which provided Palestinians who were pondering their fate a decade after the Nakba with a framework for action. George Habash, a refugee from Lydda, had founded the ANM while a medical student at the American University of Beirut, where he had been influenced by Constantine Zurayek’s emphasis on the way the Arab states had first failed in the war of 1948 and then effectively abandoned the Palestinians, their leaders making fiery speeches but doing little else. Habash went on to work in refugee camps in Jordan where he ran a clinic with another doctor, named Wadie Haddad, a native of Safad. Both were forced to flee Jordan for Syria in 1957. The ANM, in the words of an American CIA report, ‘was motivated by the formation of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland’. Its basic ideology ‘reflected what its title implies – a desire for the union of all Arab states, a wish to exclude foreign influence from the Arab world, and the compulsion to eradicate the state of Israel’. The organization was never cohesive and its national chapters formed local alliances on an opportunistic basis.27 In the late 1960s, Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which combined revolutionary Marxism with a Palestine-first strategy.

FATAH IS BORN

Other Palestinians were also thinking about how to advance their people’s cause, but, crucially, without relying too much on other Arabs. Yasser Arafat, born in Egypt in 1929 to a Gazan father and a mother from a well-connected Jerusalem family – he had lived there briefly as a child – had studied at Cairo University and fought in the early stages of the 1948 war with a Muslim Brotherhood unit in southern Palestine. He complained later that he had been disarmed twice: first by the Egyptian army, and then again while serving with Abdul-Qader al-Husseini’s Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas near Jerusalem, by the Jordanian Arab Legion.²⁸ According to some sources he was involved in guerrilla attacks on British forces in the canal zone in the run-up to the Suez crisis. As a student activist, Arafat promoted a strong Palestine-first awareness. By 1957 he was in the Gulf, along with a growing number of Palestinian men who endured the sort of hardships described by Ghassan Kanafani in his novel Men Under the Sun as they tried to make a new life and support their families. Arafat failed to get a visa to Saudi Arabia and ended up in Kuwait as an engineer with the ministry of public works. Strikingly, in the light of his subsequent career and fame, Arafat was not strictly speaking a refugee – he always spoke with a distinct Egyptian accent – but his closest friends and colleagues bore the scars of the Nakba; Salah Khalaf, a literature student who had fled Jaffa as a teenager in 1948, and Khalil al-Wazir, born in Ramla and expelled as a thirteen-year-old with his family to Gaza, were with him in October 1959 in Kuwait when they established the Palestine Liberation Movement. It was named Fatah – a reverse of its Arabic acronym (Harakat al-tahrir al-filastiniyya) – which alluded to victory or conquest in the first glorious decades of Islamic history. ‘Arafat and I … knew what was damaging to the Palestinian cause’, Khalaf wrote later. ‘We were convinced, for example, that the Palestinians could expect nothing from the Arab regimes, for the most part corrupt or tied to imperialism, and that they were wrong to bank on any of the political parties in the region. We believed that the Palestinians could only rely on themselves.’29

Fatah was founded in conditions of great secrecy, the protagonists adopting noms de guerre and oaths of allegiance suitable for a clandestine organization. Funding was provided by wealthy sympathizers in the Gulf, including the Kuwaiti and Qatari ruling families, while another founder member, Khaled al-Hassan, from Haifa, used his Kuwaiti government job to obtain visas for more activists.³⁰ They soon began publishing a magazine, Filastinuna (‘Our Palestine’), edited by Wazir, but did not reveal who was backing it or the names of contributors and editors, using a Beirut post office box number for correspondence. In November 1959 it set out its stall:

The youth of the Nakba are dispersed … Life in the tent has become as miserable as death … [T]o die for our beloved motherland is better and more honourable than life, which forces us to eat our daily bread under humiliations or to receive it as charity at the cost of our honour … We, the sons of the Nakba are no longer willing to live this dirty, despicable life, this life which has destroyed our cultural, moral and political existence and destroyed our human dignity.³¹

The front page of Filastinuna often carried photographs showing the harsh conditions in the refugee camps. The desire to return was evident to anyone who encountered refugees in person. ‘If you go among them in the hills of Judaea, they will take you by the arm to a crest of land and point downwards, across the rusty skeins of barbed wire’, reported one visitor to the West Bank. ‘ “Can you see it, over there, behind those trees? That is my home.” ’32 In 1963 the popular British writer Ethel Mannin published The Road to Beersheba, a sympathetic portrayal of Palestinian refugees and a conscious effort to respond to the stunning success of Exodus, the 1958 novel by the American-Jewish author Leon Uris and the subsequent epic film starring Paul Newman. (Mannin’s book was dedicated ‘To and for THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEES, who, in all the Arab host-countries, said to me, “Why don’t you write our story – the story of the other exodus – our exodus?” ’³³) And the feelings were not confined to those living in misery. In her comfortable house in East Jerusalem, Nuzha Nusseibeh, born to a wealthy land-owning family near Ramla, spoke to her son Sari of

the idyllic innocence of a magical dreamland … oranges I envisioned as the sweetest on earth growing on a plantation stretching all the way to the gently swelling waves of the Mediterranean, a sea I’d never seen because of No Man’s Land but that, like the oranges, I pictured as the noblest on earth. Then came the intrusion by the foreigners, the struggle with the British, the depredations of the Zionists, and the terrorised flight on foot.³⁴

In the Palestinian ‘master narrative’ the pre-1948 village landscape had acquired the magical aura of a golden age, of innocence and abundance – often represented by the fine quality of baladi (local) fruit and vegetables – before the disaster.³⁵ Even inside Israel, in the mid-1960s, Arab voices were growing bolder and more articulate as poets like Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq Zayyad wrote in al-Jadid of sumoud (steadfastness/perseverance) and resistance, and Mahmoud Darwish, ‘patient in a country where people are enraged’, of what it meant to be a Palestinian, most famously in his 1964 poem ‘Identity Card’:

Write down!

I am an Arab

And my identity card number is fifty thousand

I have eight children

And the ninth will come after a summer

Will you be angry?³⁶

The poem’s curious power, as Edward Said wrote later, ‘is that at the time it appeared … it did not represent as much as embody the Palestinian cause, whose political identity in the world had been pretty much reduced to a name on an identity card’.37

Fatah’s goal was ‘to liberate the whole of Palestine and destroy the foundations of what it terms a colonialist Zionist occupation state and society … and restore Palestine as it still existed in the mind of most Palestinians, the homeland that existed before 1948’. The Jewish community that pre-dated the British Mandate could remain but under Arab sovereignty.³⁸ The key elements of its programme were revolution, armed struggle and readiness to establish a Palestinian entity. Frantz Fanon’s writings on the Algerian war, the Mau Mau fight against the British in Kenya and the Black civil rights movement in the US all influenced its thinking. But it was hard to get any traction for the cause. ‘It was very difficult for us at the start because Nasser was the great attraction’, al-Hassan recalled later. ‘Most of those who accepted our views were teachers. And every time they went off to other Arab countries for their three-month vacation, we found ourselves having to start all over again.’ By 1963, the movement still only had a few hundred members and an inner circle of fewer than twenty.³⁹ Still, changes in the region proved favourable to the Palestinian cause. The break-up of the Egypt–Syria union, the United Arab Republic, in September 1961 and the civil war in Yemen – the Saudis and Nasser backing opposing sides (and the Israelis secretly helping Nasser’s enemies) – were blows to ambitions for Arab unity, though the victory of the FLN and Algerian independence in 1962 gave a powerful fillip to the notion of anti-colonial armed struggle. In the context of the so-called Arab ‘cold war’ between ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ states, both camps sought to play the Palestinian card. Syria agreed to host Fatah and young men from the refugee camps were sent there for military training. Iraq also provided facilities for a while and Algeria became a loyal supporter. Israeli awareness of Fatah was limited until 1965, when it was seen by IDF intelligence as a ‘nuisance’ rather than a real military challenge.⁴⁰ The Israeli public paid it very little attention; newspaper commentators deployed inverted commas to describe Fatah’s goal of ‘liberation’, refusing to see it as the representative of an authentic national movement.⁴¹

ENTER THE PLO

Israel was raising Arab hackles at this time by the impending completion of its project to divert water from the river Jordan, via its national water carrier canal, to the Negev desert, which had led to armed clashes on the Syrian border. In Arab eyes, this decade-old effort underlined that Israel was there to stay – preparing the ground, literally, for the absorption of millions more Jewish immigrants and settling the sparsely populated south of the country. Israel’s plan to acquire a nuclear weapon was another fear that was emphasized in Palestinian and Arab discourse during this period. Both developments threatened to ‘turn the existing status quo into a permanent reality’.42 Against this background, in January 1964 Nasser convened a summit conference of Arab kings and presidents in Cairo, the first of what was to become a regular if largely ritualistic fixture on the Middle Eastern diplomatic scene. It declared, for the first time, that the collective goal of the Arab states was the ‘final liquidation of Israel’.⁴³ It also spoke of ‘organizing the Palestinian Arab people to enable it to play its role in liberating its country and determining its future’. That difficult task was entrusted to Ahmed al-Shuqayri, a middle-aged, patrician Palestinian lawyer who had served as the Syrian and then Saudi representative at the United Nations. Shuqayri, who had a reputation for verbosity, was not a popular choice for the new generation of Palestinian activists, who saw him as part of the defeated and discredited old guard, ‘powerless opportunists who lacked political integrity’.⁴⁴

The fear was that this sponsorship by rival Arab regimes would recreate the circumstances that had led to the catastrophe of 1948. Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was still leading the old Arab Higher Committee from exile in Beirut, was an especially vocal critic.⁴⁵ Arafat was cautious too, fearing the consequences of a decision which ‘formalised the maladies which had given rise to Fatah’, as one of his biographers noted. ‘Above all it was Nasser’s brainchild and had been created to work with the Arab countries to satisfy the Palestinians while keeping them under control.’⁴⁶ The Fatah leader conspicuously did not join the 420 delegates at a large Palestinian assembly, wearing ‘We shall return’ badges, in East Jerusalem’s Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives in May 1964 but instead sent Wazir, who listened to Shuqayri declare that Palestinians had experienced sixteen years of misery and that Palestine was ‘unique in its catastrophe and alone in its tragedy’. King Hussein acted as a ‘reluctant and suspicious host’ while Jordanian intelligence agents maintained an ‘intrusive and intimidating presence’.47 Jordan had first proposed that the conference be held in Amman, then at Qalia on the shores of the Dead Sea. It flatly refused to allow it to take place in the Old City of Jerusalem. ‘I embraced and kissed King Hussein’, Shuqayri would write later. ‘And each of us spoke with two tongues about the Palestinian entity.’⁴⁸ The meeting announced the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It then reconstituted itself as the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s ‘parliament’. The new organization’s charter, or covenant (mithaq), called for the total liberation of Palestine and self-determination within the borders of the British Mandate. It rejected the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate system and claims of ‘historic and spiritual ties’ between Jews and Palestine. Judaism was a religion not a nationality, Zionism a colonialist movement, ‘aggressive and expansionist … racist and segregationist … fascist in its means and aims’. On the crucial matter of Israel’s current population, it stated that ‘Jews of Palestinian origin’ – defined as those who ‘normally resided’ in the country until 1947 – were to be considered Palestinians ‘if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine’.⁴⁹ It was a big moment: ‘I had the feeling that we were all endowed with a spiritual, metaphysical strength which gave us the power to resist the pressures of intimidation, to overcome all obstacles and eliminate all doubts so that we could move forward’, wrote Shafiq al-Hout.⁵⁰

Anxious to maximize his independence, Arafat kept his and Fatah’s distance from the new body, discreetly seeking more help and training facilities in Syria, Algeria and Jordan. This did not escape the attention of IDF military intelligence, whose agents in the West Bank were tasked to report on Fatah and another group, called the Palestine Liberation Front, which both stood out from the Lilliputian run-of-the mill ‘fronts’ and other organizations that sprouted in the refugee camps and issued a few defiant statements before disappearing.⁵¹ Towards the end of 1964 Fatah decided to launch its first military operation against Israel. It was scheduled to take place on 31 December, but the fedayeen squad was intercepted and arrested by Lebanese forces before crossing the border. The bombastic communiqué announcing the abortive attack was signed by al-Asifa (‘the Storm’), a fictitious name chosen to conceal Fatah’s involvement and appease members who feared the group was not yet ready to fight a vastly superior enemy. Three days later, on 3 January 1965, Fatah did manage to infiltrate fighters from the West Bank into Israel and planted an explosive charge in the national water carrier canal in the Bet Netofa valley in lower Galilee. It did not go off but the raid was still counted ‘a stunning propaganda success’.52 Tracks were found by the IDF leading to Bet Shean (Beisan) and from there to the nearby Jordanian border. Accounts differ as to whether it was then or later when Fatah claimed its first ‘martyr’, a young man named Ahmed Musa who was shot dead by Jordanian troops when returning from Israeli territory. In fact other Palestinian factions had already lost fighters in operations against Israel prior to his death.⁵³ But a significant new chapter in the conflict had begun.

COUNTDOWN TO WAR

Over the next year al-Asifa mounted three dozen or so attacks on Israel, which were of little military significance but were announced to the world in florid or mendacious communiqués. On 18 January, for example, the New York Times reported that a ‘new and secret Arab fighting organization’ claimed to have killed twelve Israelis and wounded nineteen. The following day the Israelis dismissed the story as ‘ridiculous’. The name of Fatah first appeared in the Israeli press at that time, where it was described as a group established by the Syrians under Palestinian cover.⁵⁴ These pinprick raids were a far cry from the group’s grandiloquent prediction that ‘at zero hour and the moment of the emergence of the revolution, the throngs of revolutionaries shall set off to their designated targets and strike astonishing blows that will surprise the entire world’. And Fatah’s activities also attracted the opposition of Shuqayri’s PLO, as well as that of Nasser and other leaders who feared that military action at the wrong time would mean a loss of their control. Still, they magnified the glory of the fedayeen and served Arafat’s purpose of keeping alive the idea of Palestinian resistance. And there was an underlying strategy: using attacks to set off ‘successive detonations’ that were intended to provoke an Israeli reaction and compel even reluctant Arab governments to intervene to fight the enemy. It was also a form of propaganda by deed. ‘To strike at a bridge or a culvert could not be a decisive act in liberation, but we also knew that to strike a culvert could draw ten more youths to join Fatah’, Salah Khalaf explained.55 In time decrepit sabotage equipment was replaced by chemical delay fuses and electrical timers.⁵⁶ Fatah’s growing confidence was apparent when it acknowledged publicly that it was behind al-Asifa. In June 1965 it came out of the shadows and appealed to the UN secretary general, U Thant, to demand that one of its men, Mahmoud Hijazi, a refugee from Jerusalem who was captured by the Israelis in an early raid, be considered a prisoner of war. Hijazi, who was sentenced first to death and then to life imprisonment, was released in 1971 in exchange for an Israeli who was abducted by Fatah.⁵⁷ At the Casablanca Arab summit in September Fatah also called on the Arab states to stop their ‘persecution’ of liberation movement forces.⁵⁸

Palestinian raids continued in 1966, further angering Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, which all moved to arrest fighters and prevent further attacks for fear of attracting Israeli reprisals. Tensions rose, especially on the border between Israel and Syria, now Fatah’s main base and chief sponsor – despite difficulties which included Arafat spending several weeks in prison in Damascus. Jordan, where King Hussein had already warned of ‘impulsive and extemporaneous activities’ after suffering two Israeli raids, was the state most hostile to the Palestinians. In April the Jordanians arrested about two hundred ‘subversives’, including most of the staff of the PLO office in Amman. In July Jordanian forces clashed with a Palestinian commando squad on the way to Israel, killing four of them. In October, after a bombing in Jerusalem’s Romema district, close to the border with Jordan – strikingly, the first such incident in the city since 1948 – Prime Minister Levi Eshkol issued a famous warning: ‘The ledger is open and the hand is recording.’⁵⁹ Jordan accepted from Israel lists of West Bankers who were collaborating with the fedayeen groups, and arrested them.60 But it also bore the brunt of unexpectedly heavy Israeli retaliation in November in a punitive attack on Samu, south of Hebron in the West Bank. A daytime assault by two IDF armoured columns, protected by Mirage fighter planes, left 18 dead, 130 injured and more than 120 houses destroyed. Israel had reported twelve incidents in the preceding weeks – mine explosions, the derailing of a train and attacks on water pipelines – in which seven Israelis had been killed, while the immediate trigger was provided by a Fatah mine which blew up an Israeli armoured personnel carrier and killed three soldiers in the Hebron area. The only surprise was that when retaliation came it was against Jordan, not Syria, which had been far more supportive of the guerrillas. ‘Responsibility for these attacks rests not only on the relevant governments but also on the people providing shelter and aid for these gangs,’ Eshkol told his cabinet.⁶¹ Yitzhak Rabin, now the IDF chief of staff, faced criticism for the Samu raid, which exposed Jordanian military weakness and infuriated King Hussein, and offered to resign.⁶² Angry demonstrations in East Jerusalem and the West Bank gave the king an alarming taste of anti-Jordanian sentiment and of a Palestinian nationalist awakening.⁶³

By the early spring of 1967 a process of rapid escalation was under way between Israel and the front-line Arab states. Syria was taking the lead but Egypt and, eventually, even normally cautious Jordan competed with each other, goading each other on, to raise the stakes dangerously. Fatah and the PLO played a significant part in that process, but it was bigger than them and, ultimately, beyond their control as well – another example of the Palestinians losing control of their own destiny at a critical moment. In six extraordinary days that June, just a few months short of half a century since the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist-Arab conflict took another fateful turn.