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July 1 - July 7, 2025
In the PLO leadership’s misplaced priorities, the inter-Arab balancing act at which ‘Arafat excelled was more pressing than was furthering the Palestine cause with the public of the preeminent global superpower.
Most felt no sense that there were now two peoples in Palestine, each with national rights; to them Israelis were no more than settlers, foreign immigrants to their country. This position exactly mirrored that of most Israelis, for whom there was only one people with national rights in Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and that was the Jewish people, while the Arabs were no more than transient interlopers.
Israel would soon attack Lebanon, the United States would support it fully, and the USSR did not have the capability to prevent the attack or to protect its Lebanese and Palestinian allies.
The decision to invade Lebanon was made by Israel’s government, but it could not have been implemented without the explicit assent given by Secretary of State Alexander Haig or without American diplomatic and military support, combined with the utter passivity of the Arab governments.
An inability to see the intensity of the hostility prompted by its own misbehavior and flawed strategy was among the gravest shortcomings of the PLO during this period.
the international forces supervising the evacuation—American, French, and Italian troops—would be withdrawn as soon as the last ship left. Israeli obduracy and US acquiescence had left the civilian population unprotected.
Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.42
Because of this knowledge, because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their
the paradoxical result of these events was gradually to shift the center of gravity of the Palestinian national movement away from the neighboring Arab countries, where it had been relaunched in the 1950s and 1960s, moving it back inside Palestine.
Sharon and Begin had launched the invasion to defeat the PLO and demoralize the Palestinians, thereby freeing Israel to absorb the Occupied Territories, but the end result was to spur their resistance and relocate it inside Palestine. As for those who played a
For the United States, its insistence on monopolizing Middle East diplomacy and its furtherance of Israel’s ambitions did not serve American interests well.
Hizballah, which grew out of the Lebanese maelstrom, became a deadly foe of the United States and Israel.
The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country.
this exposure dealt another blow to the image of a country largely dependent on complaisant American public opinion.
the First Intifada brought the veteran general to the realization that a political solution was necessary.12 Nonetheless, he held fast to the deterrent effect of brutality. “The use of force,” Rabin said, “including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces.”13 Maybe so, but this brutality did not put an end to the uprising.
The First Intifada was an outstanding example of popular resistance against oppression and can be considered as being the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917. Unlike the 1936–39 revolt, the intifada was driven by a broad strategic vision and a unified leadership, and it did not exacerbate internal Palestinian divisions.15 Its unifying effect and largely successful avoidance of firearms and explosives—in contrast to the Palestinian resistance movement of the 1960s and 1970s—helped to make its appeal widely heard internationally, leading to
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Hamas, founded in 1987 (and initially discreetly supported by Israel with the objective of weakening the PLO19), was already beginning to develop into a formidable competitor.
For all the effectiveness of the PLO in its first decades in putting Palestine back on the global map, it can be argued that the intifada had a more positive impact on world opinion than the organization’s generally ineffective efforts at armed struggle ever had.
This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it. This was a resounding, historic mistake,
a failure to reach a deal would have been better than the deal that emerged from Oslo.
the Oslo framework, was designed to preserve those parts of the occupation that were advantageous to Israel—the privileges and prerogatives enjoyed by the state and the settlers—while offloading onerous responsibilities and simultaneously preventing genuine Palestinian self-determination, statehood, and sovereignty.
The rise of Hamas was part of a regional trend that represented a response to what many perceived as the bankruptcy of the secular nationalist ideologies that had dominated politics in the Middle East for most of the twentieth century.
In stark contrast to the first, the Second Intifada constituted a major setback for the Palestinian national movement. Its consequences for the Occupied Territories were severe and damaging.
Israel’s reoccupation of the cities and towns of the West Bank and Gaza Strip shattered any remaining pretense that the Palestinians had or would acquire something approaching sovereignty or real authority over any part of their land. It exacerbated the political differences among Palestinians and underlined the absence of a viable alternative strategy, revealing the failure of both the PLO’s diplomatic course and the armed violence of Hamas and others.
Exit polls after the vote showed that the result owed more to the voters’ great desire for change in the Occupied Territories than to a call for Islamist governance or heightened armed resistance to Israel.22 Even in some predominantly Christian neighborhoods, the vote went heavily for Hamas. This is evidence that many voters simply wanted to throw out the Fatah incumbents, whose strategy had failed and who were seen as corrupt and unresponsive to popular demands.
Whether the demands were made of the PLO in the 1970s or Hamas in the 2000s, they were required without the offer of any quid quo pro by the power that had expelled much of the Palestinian people, blocked their return, occupied their territory through force and collective intimidation, and prevented their self-determination.
even with the suicide bombings, with targeting civilians in violation of international law, and with the crude anti-Semitism of its charter, Hamas’s record paled next to the massive toll of Palestinian civilian casualties inflicted by Israel
What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza.
the casualty toll tells a different story than the one that emerged from the near-total media focus on Hamas rocket fire. The coverage succeeded in obscuring the extreme disproportionality of this one-sided war: one of the most powerful armies on the planet used its full might against a besieged area of one hundred and forty square miles, which is among the world’s most heavily populated enclaves and whose people had no way to escape the rain of fire and steel.
The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 specifies that American-supplied weapons must be used “for legitimate self-defense.”
Thus the wars on Gaza joined the 1982 war in Lebanon and the First Intifada as crucial turning points in an ongoing shift in how Palestinians and Israel are perceived by Americans.
Had Obama genuinely considered the issue of peace between Palestinians and Israelis to be a priority—as important as the nuclear agreement with Iran—he could have worked to push it through against congressional opposition and the efforts of AIPAC and the Israeli government, and perhaps he might have succeeded. On behalf of a matter of supreme significance, that of war and peace with Iran, Obama was able to stand up to and overcome the Israel lobby and its Israeli patrons. However, it was apparently the view of the president that breaking the stalemate in Palestine did not constitute enough of
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In other circumstances or in another era, replacing the indigenous population might have been feasible, especially in light of the long-standing and deep religious link felt by Jews to the land in question—if this were the eighteenth or nineteenth century, if the Palestinians were as few as the Zionist settlers or as fully decimated as the native peoples of Australasia and North America. The longevity of the Palestinians’ resistance to their dispossession, however, indicates that the Zionist movement, in the words of the late historian Tony Judt, “arrived too late,” as it “imported a
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Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.
The Palestinian, he said, “does not have the right of self-determination because he is not the proprietor of the land. I want him as a resident because of my honesty, as he was born here, he lives here, and I would never tell him to leave. I regret to say it, but they suffer from one major defect: they were not born Jews.”
This leaves the thorny issue of how to wean Israelis from their attachment to inequality, which is often coded as and justified by a need for security. This perceived need is to a large extent rooted in a real history of insecurity and persecution,
Palestinians, too, need weaning from a pernicious delusion—rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood—that Jewish Israelis are not a “real” people and that they do not have national rights. While it is true that Zionism has transmuted the Jewish religion and the historic peoplehood of the Jews into something quite different—a modern nationalism—this does not erase the fact that Israeli Jews today consider themselves a people with a sense of national belonging in Palestine, what they think of as the Land of Israel,
The irony is that, like all peoples, Palestinians assume that their nationalism is pure and historically rooted while denying the same of Israeli Jews. There is of course a difference between the two: most Palestinians are descended from people who have lived in what they naturally see as their country for a very long time, for many centuries if not many millennia. Most Israeli Jews came from Europe and the Arab countries relatively recently as part of a colonial process sanctioned and brokered by the great powers. The former are indigenous, the latter settlers or descendants of settlers,
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While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other.
If a serious and sustained Palestinian diplomatic and public relations effort campaigned for such new terms aimed at reaching a just and equitable peace, many countries would be amenable to considering them. They might even be willing to challenge the half-century-long US monopoly on peacemaking, a monopoly that been crucial in preventing peace in Palestine.23
