under Israeli occupation or languished in sprawling refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or in the émigré communities throughout the Middle East. In the decades after the founding of Israel, and especially after the Arab's ignominious defeat in the Six Day War, thousands of Palestinians rushed to become fedayeen—“men of sacrifice” in Arabic—in the ranks of several guerrilla organizations later affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Founded in 1964, the PLO came to be identified with Yasser Arafat, its perennial chairman, and associated with the international terrorism committed under the banner of Palestinian nationalism after the Six Day War. The reality is more complex. Arafat actually resisted leading his guerrilla movement fully into the PLO until 1969, five years after its creation, when he was in a position to dominate it. By then another Palestinian organization had already committed the first acts of international terrorism.
Born in Cairo in August 1929 to Palestinian parents as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Raouf Arafat, Yasser Arafat would emerge as the acclaimed leader of the Palestinians before his fortieth birthday. Yet he lived only briefly in Palestine in the mid-1930s, as a young child when his father sent him to live with relatives in Jerusalem after the death of his mother.4 Arafat returned to the Egyptian capital in 1937 and spent his formative years there. Soon after he entered the university to study engineering in 1947, he became engaged in the politics of the Palestinian émigré community, participating in Palestinian student organizations and smuggling weapons into a Palestine still under the British mandate. When Israel declared independence and war erupted between the Arabs and Jews in 1948, Arafat set off to fight with the irregular forces of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, where he distinguished himself by his valor. The Arab defeat left Arafat with some inveterate judgments about the inclination of Arab states to betray their Palestinian brothers. The coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in Egypt in 1952 did not substantially alter his thinking. In 1956, when Egypt went to war against combined forces of Israel, Great Britain, and France, Arafat was called up with other Egyptian reserve officers and sent to Port Said to clear mines. But a year after the Suez Crisis he left—or was compelled to leave—Egypt for Kuwait.
It was in Kuwait where Arafat and other Palestinian exiles incrementally formed the Palestine Liberation Movement, or Fatah, a process complete by 1959.5 With Arafat was a tight group of close collaborators that included Khalil al-Wazir, who went by the name Abu Jihad, and Salah Khalaf, who took Abu Iyad as his nom de guerre. (Both men would be killed for their politics, al-Wazir in 1988 by Israeli commandos led by a future Israeli prime minister, Khalaf in 1991 by a rival Palestinian terrorist group.) Arafat called his movement Fatah, the Qur'an's word for “conquest,” by inverting the Arabic acronym for the Palestine Liberation Movement, Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini. But despite the allusion to Islam and his earlier connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat was a secular Palestinian nationalist who eschewed ideology in order to broaden Fatah's appeal. For Arafat and the men around him the armed struggle to liberate Palestine took priority over all else. Fatah's guiding principle approached heresy in 1959 when pan-Arab nationalism was at its zenith. Embodied by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the pan-Arab dream envisioned the liberation of Palestine, but only after the unification of the Arab nations made the military defeat of Israel practicable. Arafat inverted the logic of pan-Arabism. Whereas Nasser insisted that Arab unity was necessary for the liberation of Palestine, Arafat countered that the war to liberate Palestine would produce Arab unity: “an armed Palestinian revolution is the only way to liberate our homeland…. Only the idea of the armed struggle can bridge ideological differences and accelerate the process of unification.”6 The triumphs of revolutionary movements in China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and Algeria in 1962 gave the Palestinian fedayeen reasons to believe in the efficacy of guerrilla warfare. (Each of these revolutionary states would provide Fatah substantial material support for the coming struggle.) Fatah was to become the preeminent guerrilla movement, Arafat the acclaimed leader of the Palestinians and eventually president of the Palestine National Authority, a title he held until his mysterious death in November 2004.
Nasser was aware of the Palestinian discontent with the hesitancy of the Arab states to confront Israel. Nasser, who came to power in the 1952 military coup that ousted King Farouk, emerged as the icon of secular Arab nationalism after he seized control of the Suez Canal and survived an assault by British, French, and Israeli forces in 1956 to retake it. Nasser could not forsake the Palestinian cause, but he was careful to subordinate it to his own grandiose vision of pan-Arab unity. Subordination of the Palestinian cause was critical because, unless controlled, the Palestinians would prematurely provoke war between Egypt and the militarily superior Israel. A master strategist who was ever mindful of other Arab leaders' ambitions to replace him as the symbol of the Arab nation, Nasser responded by attempting to coopt the Palestinian cause. This was the origin of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.
In January 1964 Nasser convened the first Arab Summit to plan for an eventual war with Israel. Although Nasser avoided the Palestinian question during the summit, he invited Ahmed Shuqayri, a Palestinian diplomat, to attend. At the conclusion of the summit, Shuqayri took the urging to continue consultations with Arab leaders as a mandate to create a separate Palestinian entity.7 At the end of May, Shuqayri summoned Palestinian leaders to a conference in East Jerusalem to proclaim the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO was thus the creation of the old guard. The PLO charter provided for a Palestinian National Council (PNC), its supreme legislative body, and an executive committee to be elected annually. Shuqayri was the obvious choice for chairman. But although the Palestinians now had a distinct Palestinian entity, two issues were left unsettled—the PLO's relations with the Arab states and with Fatah and other guerrilla organizations committed to the liberation of Palestine by force of arms.
For Nasser and the other heads of state there could be no doubt about the imperative to subordinate the nascent PLO to the Arab states and to deny the Palestinian guerrillas freedom of action to confront Israel. That war with Israel was inevitable was never in doubt. But Nasser and the other heads of state demanded patience from the Palestinians while the Arab armies amassed weapons and forces for a conventional war. Palestinian impatience posed as great a challenge as the Palestinian demand for autonomy, because guerrilla raids into Israel from Syria and Jordan created the risk of Israeli retaliation and therefore the risk of war. In order to gain some measure of control of the Palestinian fedayeen, the Arab states pledged funds, weapons, and training to field the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), but its under-strength units were deliberately scattered among the Arab states and integrated into the command structure of the Arab armies. The PLA was as much Arab as Palestinian. When the Israelis launched the preemptive war in June 1967, the PLA saw almost no action. Arafat understood that the Arab states created the PLO not to advance the Palestinian struggle but to restrain it. But the mere existence of the PLO posed a formidable challenge to Fatah and Arafat's personal ambitions to dominate the Palestinian cause, because Arab recognition of the PLO bestowed legitimacy upon it. It became imperative for Fatah to take action to wrest the initiative from the nascent PLO and its liberation army. So, on New Year's Day 1965, Fatah's guerrilla forces—which Arafat called al-Asifa, the Storm—mounted their first attack against Israel. The war to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation—and to provoke a war between the Arab and Jewish states—was reality.
Over the next two and a half years Fatah conducted hundreds of ineffectual guerrilla raids. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) repelled Fatah's incursions. But Fatah's strategy was not so much to inflict casualties on the Israelis or cripple the Israeli economy as to forge a Palestinian identity guided by the spirit of resistance and provoke Israeli retaliation that could precipitate the war that would reverse the catastrophe of 1948. Palestinian attacks, in fact, contributed to the May crisis and the June War. But the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six Day War actually strengthened Arafat, who intensified his appeal to Palestinians to liberate the new territories lost to Israeli conquest. Fatah was not alone. By the mid-1960s there were several guerrilla organizations pleading for arms and funds from Arab states. Most of them were small and ineffective. But the Six Day War was a catalyst for the Palestinian fedayeen. The conversion of the Arab Nationalist Movement into the PFLP in late 1967 was one of its most important consequences.
George Habash and Wadi Haddad created the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in Beirut in 1951, almost a decade before Arafat, al-Wazir, and Khalaf founded Fatah.