In January 1964, Arab governments finally gave in to increasing pressure, and allowed the creation of a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It is important to note the historical timing in relation to other Arab liberation struggles against a foreign oppressor; just two years before, after years of bloody fighting, the Algerian resistance had finally overthrown the settler colonialism of the French. A wave of optimism was spreading, over which Arab regimes wished to keep a tight control. This was exactly the case with the origins of the PLO.

The PLO began in Cairo as a conservative body under the leadership of Ahmad Shuqairi, a man who would not step out of line with the Arab governments and did not support military operations. But by 1964, Arafat and the other Fatah founders had a core group of guerilla fighters recruited from refugee camps across the Arab world and Palestinian students in Europe and the US. They believed that the time for sitting around and waiting for Arab government action was over.

Fatah, however, while not asking Arab governments to join a war, expected that the regimes would not put obstacles in the way of their cross-border attacks, and also, that they would provide protection for civilians on Arab borders against the inevitable Israeli retaliation. Their vision was of a popular movement, a popular war by fedayeen, “the men who sacrificed themselves.” Arab governments varied over time in their response to the movement, but in the beginning it was the Syrian Ba’athist regime who gave a base to the fighters from Damascus, in defiance of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser was firmly opposed to independent Palestinian fedayeen action, seeing it as a threat to his own plans to pioneer Arab unity. He would only tolerate Palestinian political action through the forum of the PLO.

Nasser saw the dangers and immediately threw a media blackout on all reporting of fedayeen activity. Shuqairi, chair of the Nasserist controlled PLO, condemned the attacks and interestingly, so too, for very different reasons, did George Habash. Habash, a medical doctor by profession, was head of the Arab National Movement (ANM), which was the precursor of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP). He opposed unilateral action initially because he believed it more strategic to wait for the whole Arab world to unite and attack Israel. However, seeing the increasing popularity of Fatah’s armed groups, he quickly formed his own armed faction.

By February 1965, Fatah and those who supported the resistance were strong enough to seize control of the PLO and Yasser Arafat of Fatah would be become leader of the Palestinians until his death four decades later. In those early years, Arafat tried to lead the resistance from the West Bank, but to the disappointment of the external fedayeen, largely exiled in 1948, the people living in the West Bank still had too much to lose by actively joining the resistance. From 1967, living under a new Israeli occupation, West Bankers and Gazans were facing a new way of living, and while largely supporting Palestinian resistance, were not so willing to partake of it themselves. In January 1968, Arafat left the West Bank for the last time, until he returned under the Oslo agreements of the 1990s.

By 1968, the East Bank of the River Jordan, over half of whose population were Palestinian refugees, became the home of the Palestinian resistance. While fighters wandered freely in the streets, the threat to the short-lived monarchy of Jordan was clear. However, at this stage King Hussein was forced to publicly embrace the movement as he did not have the power to overthrow it.

Mid-March 1968, after a series of cross-border attacks, it became clear that the Israelis were preparing a massive reprisal on Jordanian territory. Despite their small numbers and the brute strength of the Israeli army, the fighters took the unexpected decision to stay and wait in Karameh refugee camp for the enemy. At dawn on 21 March, the Israelis stormed into the camp to be faced by Palestinian fighters with guns blazing. While the Palestinians lost several hundred fighters, 28 Israelis were killed, 90 Israelis were injured, and Israel was taken aback. The Battle of Karameh passed into Palestinian legend as a military success, the first time Palestinians had faced Israelis in open combat. Hundreds of other Arabs joined Palestinian mourners and the funeral parades of these martyrs who had died looking the enemy in the eye. Within two years of Karameh, around 30,000 new recruits of all nationalities had signed up to the Palestinian resistance.

In 1968, Palestinian political rhetoric moved from how to organize essentially vengeance operations to planning strategies for liberation. Political debate began to center around the kind of state the future Palestine would be, the rights of Jews who had lived there before 1948, and those who had come afterwards. In the meantime, a “state within a state” had formed in Jordan, with hundreds of PLO-supported institutions, hospitals, schools, clinics, and welfare organizations providing for the Palestinians of Jordan and also those abroad in Lebanon. If a resistance fighter died in combat, he (or she) could be certain their family would be taken care of.

Pre-Karameh, Fatah operations had been relatively small sabotage and mine laying operations just over the border. However, after their perceived victory, the fedayeen got bolder, carrying out attacks deep into the heart of 1948-occupied areas. As military attacks developed, much debate occurred within the different factions as to what forms of struggle were acceptable. What if children were caught in the attacks? Was it legitimate also to carry out operations that potentially resulted in the deaths of non-Israelis (such as the hijacking of airliners)? Fatah itself, generally kept inside Palestine, but the PFLP saw the world as its legitimate stage to force the Palestinian cause onto the agenda. At the end of the 60s, a series of high-profile airline hijackings took place, the most famous face becoming Leila Khalid, whom people across the world would begin to recognize from their newspapers.

By this time, Arab governments were frustrated by the power wielded by Palestinian guerillas within their own countries, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon. The situation had finally become too much for Jordanian King Hussein, presiding over a state in which he did not have control. The presence of the Palestinian resistance threatened his absolute monarchy and showed his weakness to his people. While Palestinian operations continued to be launched from Jordanian soil, the dangers of attacks from the militarily superior Israel remained. Israel retaliated on a scale far exceeding the nature of the initial Palestinian attack.

By September 1970, King Hussein believed that forces loyal to him were strong enough to crush the Palestinian resistance and drive them from his kingdom. The final straw was seen to be the bringing down and subsequent detonation of American, Swiss, and British airliners on Jordanian soil by the PFLP (after taking off the passengers). In what became known as Black September, civil war erupted in the country and thousands were killed. In ten days of fighting, the nucleus of the Palestinian resistance in Jordan was broken; the regime that had supported them was prepared to no longer do so.

Following the events of Black September, a certain small group of fighters were prepared to risk everything for higher profile and bloodier operations. The announcement of the creation of the shadowy Black September group followed the assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Al-Tal on the steps of a hotel in Cairo. Al-Tal was held responsible by Palestinians for crushing the resistance, and while the group itself represented only a few people, sympathy for this form of political assassination was high. However, in 1972 Black September guerillas took this form of struggle yet another stage further by taking hostage Israeli athletes in the Olympic village in Munich. The games came to a standstill as the whole of the Western world became aware of a group called Black September. After a bungled attempt to save the athletes, the hostage-takers killed all eleven and they themselves were killed in the fight.

Those who had sympathy with the Black September organization believed that such operations were necessary to attract the world and to recruit other fighters to the popular movement. Others, however, saw attacks on athletes or children, as occurred in attacks on the Jewish Galilee towns of Kiryat Shimona and Maalot, as morally wrong and also strategically ineffectual. How could Palestinians gain the sympathy of the world, they asked, if they continued to kill non-combatants and even non-Israelis in the struggle for liberation?

Arafat decided it was time to try to enforce strict control over Palestinian factions. After Munich, he publicly denounced such extreme operations, and also opposed attacks on Arab governments. The Palestinians were in a very different position from that which they had been in ten years previously. In 1973, in the October War, the Arab governments were seen to have got ahead of Israel, (although Egypt was to lose its credibility in front of the Arab public following moves by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, to make peace with Israel). In 1974, under high security and the eye of the world’s media, Yasser Arafat was invited to give his historic address to the United Nations. Bringing both his “gun and an olive branch,” Arafat’s speech represented a historic recognition of the Palestinian people, a far cry from the tiny cross-border raids of the early 1960s.

Moving its base from Jordan to Lebanon after Black September, the PLO increased attacks and raids from Southern Lebanon into the Galilee. Unlike Jordan, which was basically divided into two groups, the Bedouin Transjordanians and the Palestinian refugees, Lebanon was (and is) a tiny country carved from Greater Syria, consisting of around 17 different religious and ethnic confessions. Any rocking of the boat would threaten the fragile balance of power between all the Lebanese groups. Having been torn by civil war only a decade earlier in 1958, the stability of Lebanon could not stand the establishment of a Palestinian resistance base or a mini-state within its territory.

By this stage in the 1980s, while the nucleus of the PLO had moved to Tunis, the Palestinians remaining inside Lebanon became increasingly vulnerable. Many hundreds were killed in sieges of the refugee camps by the Shiite Amal militia groups (detailed by Rosemary Sayigh). Families of all religions and sects in Lebanon were left devastated by over a decade of killing.

In 1966, internal Israeli political wrangling resulted in the end of military rule, but this did not mean that Palestinians inside the Jewish state became free and equal citizens. The Arab community now came under the direct responsibility of the police rather than the military government. Although on the surface the laws appeared more liberal, freeing the Arab population from military rule, in practice, Palestinian concerns and anything perceived as resistance were similarly suppressed (Jiryis 1976).

By the late 1980s, the focus moved back to the 1967 occupied territories and support of the intifada. Many inside the 1948 areas mobilized to support their kin through raising money for the wounded, appealing to the Israeli Knesset and international community, and demonstrating once more on their own streets.