| In July 1972, Kanafani was assassinated in a car bombing by the Mossad, together with his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamis Najm.[[#notes.html#note233|32]] His enormous funeral, which I attended, drew what seemed to be hundreds of thousands of people mourning him. It was the first of many funerals of Palestinian leaders and militants that I would attend during my fifteen years in Beirut.[[#ch03.html#star1|*]] The reshaping and revival of Palestinian identity that Kanafani, Darwish, Zayyad, Touqan, Habibi and others helped to spark with their literary output went in tandem with the rise of new political movements and armed groups. After 1948, Palestine had ceased to exist on the map, with most of the country absorbed into Israel and the rest under the control of Jordan and Egypt. Palestinians had almost no voice, no central address, and no champions other than the bickering, self-interested Arab states. The Zionist movement’s deepest desire had been to transform Palestine into Israel and replace the country’s indigenous inhabitants with Jewish immigrants. After 1948, it appeared as if the Palestinians had largely disappeared, both physically and as an idea. The Palestinians of course had not disappeared in the years after 1948. The collective trauma of the Nakba had perversely cemented and reinforced their identity, and the small irredentist militant groups that arose in the 1950s had already had a significant impact on the Middle East, having played a role in triggering both the 1956 and 1967 wars. These groups were founded by young middle-class and lower-middle-class radicals, many of whom saw themselves as the progeny of Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, whose death in battle with the British had been one of the sparks of the 1936 revolt and who remained a revered symbol of heroic armed militancy. They continued after 1956 to work to reestablish the Palestinians as a regional force and to represent their rights and interests. In the 1960s, these efforts culminated in two main trends. One was led by the Movement of Arab Nationalists, a pan-Arab organization founded largely by Palestinians, which gave birth in 1967 to the Marxist PFLP. The other was headed by a group formally established in Kuwait in 1959, and which in 1965 publicly announced itself as Fatah. The origins of both go back to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when their first leaders were university students or recent graduates. MAN was founded by George Habash, a physician trained at the American University of Beirut who had experienced the Nakba as a young man in Lydd, a town that was depopulated after 1948, resettled with Jewish immigrants, and renamed Lod. Habash set up MAN together with a group of other young Palestinians and Arabs, most of them middle-class professionals like himself and his closest collaborator, Wadi‘ Haddad, another AUB-trained physician. Habash and his colleagues argued for Arab unity around the question of Palestine as the sole means to reverse the results of the Nakba. After Nasser’s Egypt became the standard-bearer for Arab nationalism in the mid-1950s, a close alignment between MAN and the Egyptian regime developed. MAN profited greatly from this alliance, becoming a pan-Arab political force, implanted in countries from Libya and Yemen to Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Egyptian foreign policy benefited as well from its connection with MAN’s widespread network of young militants.[[#notes.html#note234|33]] Habash, Haddad, and their comrades’ view of Palestine as the central issue for the Arab world had in large measure been imparted to them at the American University of Beirut by the historian and intellectual Constantin Zureiq through a student organization, Al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa, of which Zureiq was the mentor and to which my father belonged.[[#notes.html#note235|34]] This influential Syrian-born, Princeton-trained professor of history did much to spread the ideas of Arab nationalism and the centrality of the Palestine issue in lectures to his students in Beirut and to people across the Arab world through his writings. His short eighty-six-page book, ''The Meaning of the Catastrophe'', was one of the first post-mortems of the 1948 defeat, written while the war was ongoing, and featured perhaps the first use of the word ''nakba'' in this context.[[#notes.html#note236|35]] Zureiq argued in it for rigorous, introspective self-criticism of Arab weaknesses and failures, and for Arab coordination and unity as the only means of overcoming the effects of the 1948 disaster. My father studied with Zureiq at the AUB in the late 1930s and was strongly influenced by him; several of Zureiq’s historical and political books, some inscribed by the author, were in my father’s library. When I first met Zureiq in the early 1970s in Beirut at the Institute for Palestine Studies, of which he was a cofounder, he urged me and other young historians associated with the IPS to focus on the future. This was more important than history, he seemed to imply, which had already been written by him and his generation. Faced by an upsurge of activist, nationalist sentiment, spurred by Fatah’s first military operation (carried out in January 1965), and feeling the need to keep up with one of its core constituencies, MAN was forced to move away from its broad Arab nationalist stance and concentrate more on Palestine. The defeat of Egypt and Syria in 1967 put the last nail in the coffin of MAN’s reliance on the Arab regimes to resolve the question of Palestine.[[#notes.html#note237|36]] The result was the formation of the PFLP by Habash and his colleagues in 1967. Although it was not the largest Palestinian group, the PFLP rapidly became the most dynamic, a stature it maintained for several years. It carried out multiple airplane hijackings in that short time; these were masterminded by Wadi‘ Haddad, as were most of what it called its “external operations,” seen as terrorist attacks by much of the world. Much of the prestige that the group enjoyed among Palestinians was due to the image and integrity of Habash, who was respected even by his political rivals. He was known as ''al-Hakim'', the doctor, which he was, but the term is also used for someone who is wise, and it was applied to Habash in both senses. He was a riveting speaker, especially in small groups, where his articulate and intellectual approach and his approachable and pleasant affect made the greatest impact. He spoke softly but firmly, with no trace of demagoguery. As I witnessed in south Lebanon in the early 1970s, Habash could keep an audience rapt for hours, in spite of the complexity of his ideas. With its Marxist-Leninist affinity, the PFLP was popular among students, the educated, the middle class, and particularly those drawn to leftist politics. It also had a dedicated following in the refugee camps, where its radical message resonated strongly with the Palestinians who had suffered the most. Fatah, by contrast, was decidedly nonideological in its political approach, when compared to the PFLP and other avowedly leftist Palestinian groups. At the time of its founding, Fatah represented a reaction both to the Arab nationalist orientation of groups like MAN and the Baath Party, and to communist, leftist, and Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which argued for societal change before other problems, notably that of Palestine, could be addressed. Fatah’s call for direct and immediate action by Palestinians, as well as its broad-tent nonideological stance, was one of the factors that rapidly enabled it to become the largest political faction. Some of the details are hazy, but we know that Fatah was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by a group of Palestinian engineers, teachers, and other professionals, headed by Yasser ‘Arafat. The core of the group had coalesced earlier in the Gaza Strip and in the universities of Cairo, where it competed with MAN for leadership of the Union of Palestinian Students. Salah Khalaf—Abu Iyad—once told me an emblematic story about ‘Arafat and university politics in Cairo. In danger of losing a student election the following day to MAN, ‘Arafat said he had an idea and took Khalaf to visit someone he knew at the Egyptian Interior Ministry. They sat drinking tea and coffee and making small talk until the man had to leave his office for a moment, at which point ‘Arafat leaped up, went behind the official’s desk, did something furtive, and returned to his seat. When the man returned, the two took their leave. Khalaf objected that they hadn’t once brought up the imminent election. ‘Arafat told him to go home: the problem was solved. The next day, Khalaf glumly went to the union office to wait out the election only to find an official-looking notice on the door, stamped by Egypt’s Ministry of the Interior, ordering the election postponed. This was ‘Arafat’s doing, and he used the delay, Khalaf said, to enroll Palestinian students studying at al-Azhar University, many of whom were blind, and none of whom had been courted for their votes by the competing factions. When the election was finally held, they voted en bloc for the Fatah list, securing its victory. Fatah’s main, indeed only, focus was the Palestinian cause. To further this end, Fatah called for a campaign of direct armed action against Israel, which it launched on January 1, 1965, with its sabotage attack on the water-pumping station in central Israel. Like much of what Fatah did in this era, the act was more symbolic than effective. Nonetheless, Egyptian officials considered Fatah to be dangerously adventurist at a time when Egypt could ill afford such provocations across its borders. While MAN and other groups made excuses for the inaction of the nationalist regimes they were associated with, Fatah deliberately tried to show up the Arab states for their lack of true commitment to Palestine. This posture infuriated the regimes (especially since Fatah’s fervent rhetoric was not matched by much effective armed action), but it went over well with most Palestinians, who were frustrated by the Arab states’ lack of engagement. It was also attractive to many Arab citizens, who supported the Palestinians and shared their frustrations. This appeal to public opinion over the heads of the Arab regimes via direct action against Israel was one of the great secrets to the early success of the Palestinian resistance groups, especially Fatah. They spoke to the widespread sense among Arabs that an injustice had been done in Palestine and that their governments were doing nothing substantive about it. In the years during which this appeal was effective, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the support for the Palestinian resistance by a broad sector of public opinion served to restrain even undemocratic Arab governments. However, that restraint had severe limits, which were reached when Palestinian militancy threatened the Arab states’ domestic status quo or provoked Israel to take action. In the meantime, the small militant groups went from strength to strength, and it became clear that a full-scale revival of the Palestinian national movement was underway. By the mid-1960s, this coalescing movement threatened to seize the initiative in the conflict with Israel from the Arab states, and indeed helped to precipitate the events that led to the 1967 war. For all their rhetoric, most of the Arab states (Syria being the exception under the ultraradical regime in power from 1966 to 1970) were preoccupied with other issues and were deeply reluctant to challenge a status quo that heavily favored Israel, whose demonstrated military power they regarded with trepidation. While in the West, Israel still retained its image as a beleaguered victim of Arab hostility, this was far from how it was seen in the Arab world, which instead viewed its decisive military victories and potential possession of nuclear weapons as evidence of towering strength. To co-opt and control the rising tide of Palestinian nationalist fervor, the Arab League, under Egypt’s leadership, founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. This was meant to be a tightly controlled subsidiary of Egyptian foreign policy that would channel and manage Palestinian enthusiasm for striking against Israel, but this attempt to keep the Palestinians under Arab tutelage rapidly unraveled. In the immediate wake of the 1967 war, the militant Palestinian resistance groups took over the PLO, sidelining its Egypt-oriented leadership. ‘Arafat, as the head of Fatah, the largest of these groups, soon became chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, a post he retained, among others, until his death in 2004. Henceforth, the Arab states were obliged to take account of an independent Palestinian political actor, based mainly in the countries bordering Israel, a situation that had already proved problematic for these states and that would eventually become a source of great vulnerability for the Palestinian movement. The rise of this independent actor further complicated the strategic situation of the border states, notably Egypt and Syria, while it constituted a grave domestic problem for Jordan and Lebanon, both of which had large, restive Palestinian refugee populations. For Israel, the reemergence of the Palestinian national movement as a force in the Middle East and increasingly on the global stage constituted a great irony: its victory in 1967 had helped to precipitate even more intransigent Palestinian resistance. This constituted a sharp reversal of one of Israel’s great successes of the 1948–1967 period, in which the very issue of Palestinian nationhood had almost been fully eclipsed in both arenas. The return of the Palestinians, whose disappearance would have signified a final victory for the Zionist project, was a most unwelcome apparition for Israel’s leaders, as unwelcome as the return of any indigenous population would be for a settler-colonial enterprise that believed it had dispensed with them. The comforting idea that “the old will die and the young will forget”—a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion, probably mistakenly—expresses one of the deepest aspirations of Israeli leaders after 1948. It was not to be. While the Palestinian resurgence posed little or no threat to Israel in strategic terms (although the attacks by militant groups did create serious security problems), it constituted an entirely different kind of challenge on the discursive level, one that was existential. The ultimate success of the Zionist project as hard-line Zionists defined it depended in large measure on the replacement of Palestine by Israel. For them, if Palestine existed, Israel could not. Israel was in consequence obliged to focus its powerful propaganda machine on a new target, while still having to counter the efforts of the Arab states. Since from the Zionist vantage point the name Palestine and the very existence of the Palestinians constituted a mortal threat to Israel, the task was to connect these terms indelibly, if they were mentioned at all, with terrorism and hatred, rather than with a forgotten but just cause. For many years, this theme was the core of a remarkably successful public relations offensive, especially in the United States. Finally, the reemergence of the Palestine question posed a problem for US diplomacy, which with SC 242 had chosen to ignore it and act as if the Palestinians did not exist. For a decade thereafter, the United States strove to keep its head in the sand, even as much of the international community began to extend to the Palestinian movement some degree of recognition. This US stance was in keeping with pronounced Israeli preferences, and it was made possible by the inadequate representation by the Palestinians of their own cause in the US arena, and the weakness of pro-Palestinian sentiment in American public opinion. At the same time, administrations from that of Nixon onward also gave various forms of covert and overt support to military action directed against the PLO by Israel, Jordan, Lebanese factions, and Syria. BY MANAGING TO impose themselves on the map of the Middle East in spite of the best efforts of Israel, the United States, and many Arab governments, the Palestinians succeeded in reacquiring something long denied to them, what Edward Said called the “permission to narrate.” This meant the right to tell their story themselves, taking back control of it not only from Israel’s omnipresent narrative in the West, in which the Palestinians scarcely figured except as villains (as in ''Exodus'', for example), but also from the Arab governments. For many years, the Arab states had taken charge of the Palestinian side of the story as their own, relating it feebly as a conflict between Israel and themselves over borders and refugees.[[#notes.html#note238|37]] One aspect of the rapid ascent in the fortunes of their national movement that has been overlooked is the effectiveness of the Palestinians’ communications strategy in the Arab countries, in the developing world, and to a lesser extent in Europe and the West. At the UN, where Third World countries by the 1960s had a much bigger presence, this translated into a more favorable environment for the Palestine cause. In consequence, the historic gap between the Zionists’ success in shaping world public opinion and Palestinian ineptness in this sphere began to narrow, partly due to an increase in the number of Palestinians steeped in Western culture or with experience in other parts of the globe. In the Arab world, the movement received an enormous boost in March 1968, nine months after the war, in Karameh, a small Jordanian town (whose name by fortuitous coincidence means “dignity”). In Israel’s biggest military operation since the war, about fifteen thousand troops with armor, artillery, and air support crossed the Jordan River to eliminate a concentration of Palestinian fighters based in and around Karameh. The attackers unexpectedly met fierce resistance from the Jordanian army and the PLO, which inflicted between one hundred to two hundred casualties on the seemingly invincible Israeli army, and forced it to abandon a number of damaged tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other equipment. In the wake of the disastrous war barely a year earlier, this relatively small engagement, in which the Israelis seemed to leave the battlefield in disarray, electrified the Arab world and revolutionized the image of the Palestinians. Although it was Jordanian artillery and armor, positioned in the hills overlooking the Jordan River valley, which undoubtedly inflicted the most damage on Israel’s forces, the Palestinians fighting inside Karameh reaped most of the glory from this episode. The battle of Karameh proved to be a godsend to the propaganda of the Palestinian resistance movement, which effectively publicized the clash as a stand for Arab dignity, trampled underfoot as it had been by the failures of the Arab regimes. As a result, the Palestinian resistance was lionized throughout the Arab world. The irony of this self-presentation was that at its height, the PLO never posed any kind of military challenge to Israeli forces, which defeated all the Arab armies in the field in every one of their conventional wars. Even when PLO forces fought well defensively, as at Karameh, they were rarely capable of going head-to-head for very long with one of the most experienced, well-trained, and best-equipped militaries in the world. Moreover, from the beginning of the Palestinian armed struggle in the 1960s until the PLO later renounced this approach, they never were able to develop a successful guerrilla war strategy that might have countered the superiority of Israel’s conventional forces or the limitations of being based in Arab countries vulnerable to Israeli military pressure. In fact, the PLO’s greatest success in its heyday during the late 1960s and 1970s came in the realm of diplomacy, despite the United States’ refusal to engage with the Palestinians. This was visible not only in the Arab world and the Eastern Bloc, which extended limited support to the PLO from the late 1960s onward, but also in much of the Third World, many countries of Western Europe, and even at the UN, Resolution 242 notwithstanding. In the General Assembly, the PLO could now muster majorities that were immune to the veto that the US wielded in the Security Council. There and in other arenas, the PLO achieved a high level of diplomatic recognition, even succeeding to some small degree in isolating Israel. The PLO was recognized by the Arab League in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, while simultaneously opening PLO missions in more than one hundred countries. The invitation to Yasser ‘Arafat to speak before the UN General Assembly that same year was the greatest diplomatic success in Palestinian history, after so many decades of nonrecognition by the League of Nations, the UN, and the great powers. There were different reasons for these limited triumphs. This was an era when successful national liberation movements in Algeria, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia garnered support, including among young people, in the West. The PLO’s anticolonial and Third-World revolutionary appeal also resonated with China, the Soviet Union and its satellites, with Third World countries, and among those countries’ representatives at the UN.[[#notes.html#note239|38]] In most of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa, the Palestinians were seen as another people struggling against a colonial-settler project backed by the Western powers; they therefore deserved the sympathy of those who themselves had just thrown off the colonial yoke. At the height of the Vietnam War, these themes had great appeal to disaffected youth in Europe and the United States. Finally, the PLO succeeded to some extent in galvanizing the Palestinian and Arab diaspora in the Americas, who became advocates for the national cause. Yet all of these efforts had severe limitations. Among them were the PLO’s failure to devote sufficient energy, talent, and resources to diplomacy and information, despite the gains made in these areas. Nor did the PLO work hard enough at understanding their target audiences, the most crucial of them being the United States and Israel. There, the PLO ultimately failed to overcome a more effective competing narrative generated by Israel and its supporters that equated “Palestinian” with “terrorist.”[[#notes.html#note240|39]] The PLO’s incapacity to understand the importance of these two vital arenas started with its top leadership. Respected Palestinian-American academics in the United States, notably Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Walid Khalidi, Hisham Sharabi, Fouad Moughrabi, and Samih Farsoun, repeatedly tried to impress on Palestinian leaders that they needed to take American public opinion into account and devote to it sufficient resources and energy, but to no avail. At a 1984 meeting in Amman of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the PLO’s governing body, a US-based group in which I participated strove to make this point to Yasser ‘Arafat. He agreed to meet us and listened courteously until, after only a couple of minutes, an aide came in and whispered in his ear. We were hurriedly ushered out while ‘Arafat received one Abu al-‘Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, a tiny, insignificant faction that caused great damage to the Palestinian cause (but was on Iraq’s payroll). Our audience was over and the opportunity for us Palestinian-Americans to make the case for the importance of appealing to US public opinion evaporated. 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. Notwithstanding this failure, the Palestinian cause did make some progress in the United States after 1967. This was largely thanks to the efforts of the same group of Palestinian-American academics, who were effective in putting the Palestinian narrative before college campuses, the alternative media, and other sectors of public opinion. Edward Said in particular had an outsized impact, articulately making a case for the Palestinians in ways that his audiences had never heard before. While he and his Palestinian-American colleagues were unable to achieve a breakthrough with the mainstream media, which by and large continued to repeat the Israeli line, they laid the groundwork for an increased understanding of the Palestinian perspective in future years. As the PLO appeared to go from one diplomatic and propaganda victory to another after 1967, these successes did not go uncontested, each one provoking ferocious opposition from its many foes. Israel’s raid on Karameh was one of its first efforts to counter the PLO’s growing status; a devastating raid on the Beirut airport in 1968 was another. In 1970, the PFLP’s aircraft hijackings and Palestinian excesses in Jordan precipitated a disastrous confrontation with the Hashemite regime that the resistance movement was in no position to win. Facing superior force, and having lost some popular sympathy, the movement was driven from Amman that year in what became known as Black September, and then completely expelled from Jordan in the spring of 1971. One of the casualties of the Jordan debacle was the aura of successful dynamism that some components of the movement, notably the PFLP, had maintained until that point. The resistance movement’s pattern of recklessly provoking its enemies, alienating its hosts, and ultimately being expelled was to be repeated in Beirut eleven years later. Meanwhile, Israel carried out further punishing attacks on Syria and Lebanon, countries from which the Palestinians continued to launch military operations. These included a major ground incursion into south Lebanon in 1972, an aerial bombardment in 1974 of the Nabatiya Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, which was completely destroyed and never rebuilt, and an invasion that resulted in the long-term occupation of parts of south Lebanon in 1978. All these moves against the PLO benefited from strong US support: both the Israeli and Jordanian militaries received American arms, and both countries were able to count on full US diplomatic backing. The United States reacted to the increased visibility of the PLO and to what seemed to be a unified Arab bloc in another way, as well. Given the USSR’s support for the PLO and the Arab bloc, President Nixon and his national security advisor and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, expended great efforts to weaken the Soviet Union’s links to what they saw as its Arab clients in the Middle East. The centerpiece of this Cold War strategy was the American attempt to prise Egypt away from the USSR, align it with the US, and induce it to agree to a separate peace settlement with Israel. When this American-led initiative finally succeeded in the late 1970s, under the Carter administration, it had the effect of splitting the (nominally) unified Arab front and leaving the Palestinians and other Arab actors to face Israel in a much weaker position. In all of this, the United States stuck to the lines laid down in SC 242, which excluded the Palestinians from any share in the negotiations for a settlement. US policymakers were guided by their hostility to the PLO because of its militancy and its alignment with the USSR, but also by Israel’s intense opposition to discussion of any aspect of the Palestine question. Thereafter, the PLO was trapped in a dilemma: how could it achieve Palestinian national aspirations through participation in a Middle East peace settlement when the internationally recognized terms for such a settlement, SC 242, negated these aspirations? It was a dilemma remarkably similar to that posed by the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate: in order to be recognized, the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence. THE SMALL MILITANT groups that relaunched the Palestinian national movement in the 1950s and early 1960s put forward simple objectives for their struggle. For them, Palestine had long been an Arab land with an Arab majority. Its people had been unjustly dispossessed of their homes, their property, their homeland, and their right of self-determination. These groups’ main purpose was to return the Palestinian people to their homeland, restore their rights, and oust those whom they saw as usurpers. The term “return” was central, as it has been for Palestinians ever since. 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. In the Palestinian reading of the day, Israel was a colonial-settler project that the West had helped create and supported (which was largely true), and the Israeli Jews were part of a religious group only, not a people or a nation (which the successful creation of a powerful nation-state with a strong national identity had already shown to be false). At this point, the Palestinians had not come to terms with the reality of a new national entity in Palestine, in part because this had happened at their expense and at a ruinous cost to them. The culmination of this thinking about the objectives of the Palestinian struggle was articulated in the National Charter (''al-mithaq al-watani''), adopted by the PLO in 1964. The charter stated that Palestine was an Arab country where national rights belonged only to those residing there before 1917 and their descendants. This group included Jews then resident in Palestine, but not those who had immigrated after the Balfour Declaration, who would therefore be obliged to leave. From this perspective, liberation involved the reversal of everything that had taken place in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, the partition of the country, and the Nakba. It meant turning back the clock and refashioning Palestine into an Arab country once more. Although the ideas the charter embodied were reflective of much, perhaps most, Palestinian sentiment at the time, it was adopted by a body created by the Arab League, not one that was elected by or represented the Palestinians. These objectives would change rapidly with shifting circumstances and the transformations of Palestinian politics after 1964. With the takeover of the PLO by Fatah and the other resistance groups in 1968, the national movement formulated a new objective, advocating the idea of Palestine as a single democratic state for all its citizens, both Jews and Arabs (some iterations referred to a secular democratic state). This was meant to supersede the aims laid down in the National Charter, recognizing that Israeli Jews had acquired the right to live in Palestine and could not be made to leave. The change was also meant to refashion the PLO’s image and appeal to Israelis, who were treated by the 1964 National Charter as if they did not exist. The statement that Jews and Arabs living in Palestine were entitled to be equal citizens of the country represented a major evolution of the movement’s thinking. However, the single democratic state proposal did not recognize the Israelis as a people with national rights, nor did it accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel or of Zionism. Over time, this new objective came to be broadly accepted among Palestinians and was embodied in successive authoritative pronouncements of PLO policy via resolutions of the PNC. In the end, it superseded the charter and rendered it obsolete, yet these fundamental changes were resolutely ignored by the PLO’s opponents, who continued to harp on the charter’s original provisions for decades to come. The change also achieved little traction with most Israelis and failed to convince many in the West. Again, the inability of the PLO leadership to understand how important these audiences were, and its unwillingness to devote sufficient resources to explaining the significance of this evolution in order to win them over, doomed any effort to convince others of the validity of these aims. More important, achieving an objective of this magnitude would require the dissolution of Israel with a new state of Palestine taking its place. This would mean overturning what since 1947 had become an international consensus around the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, as specified by the wording of GA 181. Only a revolutionary shift in the balance of forces both within Israel and globally could accomplish such an end, something that the Palestinians could hardly achieve or even contemplate on their own. And they could not count on their brothers in the Arab regimes. Radical Arab states such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya continued to talk a big game where the Palestine cause was concerned, but their rhetoric was empty. What these states actually did was to sabotage the PLO by sponsoring nihilistic terrorist groups, such as the Abu Nidal organization, which assassinated numerous PLO leaders and killed Israelis and Jews indiscriminately. As for the other key Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, with the support of Saudi Arabia, had by 1970 accepted SC 242, and Syria followed in 1973. This major development (unacknowledged by Israel), amounted to those states’ de facto recognition of Israel, at least within the 1949 armistice lines. The dissonance between this crucial shift by several major Arab states and the PLO’s position was to have grave consequences for the Palestinians. Changes in regional circumstances led many PLO leaders to consider a further modification of their objectives. A number of factors exerted an influence: the PLO’s inability to sustain an effective guerrilla campaign against Israel after the loss of its bases in Jordan; the Arab states’ growing acceptance of the conflict with Israel not as existential but as a state-to-state confrontation over frontiers; and Arab and international pressure on the PLO to conform to more limited objectives. At the Arab League’s summit in Khartoum in 1967, the League had declared that there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel (the “three nos” that were much repeated in Israeli propaganda). In reality, Egypt and Jordan welcomed mediation with Israel through UN special envoy Gunnar Jarring and later via US Secretary of State William Rogers. The Khartoum summit notwithstanding, the most powerful Arab country bordering Israel had, by accepting SC 242, conceded in principle that its neighbor had a right to secure and recognized boundaries. It remained only for the Arab states and Israel to negotiate those boundaries and the other terms of a settlement. The Jordanian crackdown on the Palestinians in September 1970, although provoked by the PFLP aircraft hijackings, was meant among other things to punish the Palestinians for not accepting the new limitations of the key Arab states’ aims. Starting in the early 1970s, members of the PLO responded to these pressures, in particular to the urging of the Soviet Union, by floating the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in effect a two-state solution. This approach was notably promoted by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which had split off from the PFLP in 1969), together with Syrian-backed groups, discreetly encouraged by the leadership of Fatah. Although there had been early resistance to the two-state solution by the PFLP and some Fatah cadres, in time it became clear that ‘Arafat, among other leaders, supported it. This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242. THE PATH TOWARD these radical modifications was not an easy one for the PLO. Only after some of the most severe blows inflicted on the Palestinian national movement since the Nakba did the PLO come to accept a two-state approach based on SC 242. These blows came in quick succession during the Lebanese civil war, which began formally in April 1975. However, for the Palestinians the war began two years earlier, on April 10, 1973, with the assassination of three PLO leaders in their homes in West Beirut by Israeli commandos led by Ehud Barak (later Israel’s prime minister).[[#notes.html#note241|40]] The crowds of Palestinians and Lebanese attending the funerals of the poet and PLO spokesman Kamal Nasser and Fatah leaders Kamal ‘Adwan and Abu Yusuf Najjar were immense. As I walked with the masses of mourners, I was not surprised to see that they were even larger than those for Ghassan Kanafani. These four men were among the scores of Palestinian leaders and cadres who fell victim to the assassination squads of the Mossad. It is true that nominally Palestinian groups murdered other Palestinian figures, including three members of the Fatah Central Committee and the PLO ambassadors in London and to the Socialist International. These groups served as agents of the three dictatorial Arab regimes—those of Hafez al-Asad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi in Libya—that were loud in their proclamation of support for the Palestinian cause but harsh in their treatment of the PLO. These regimes were patrons at different times of the gunmen of the Abu Nidal organization, which did most of this killing, and other small splinter groups. While the impact of these assassinations by Israel and the hostile Arab powers is a mark of the extraordinarily difficult path trodden by the Palestinian national movement, there is an important distinction between them. The Arab states that used such means wanted to bend the PLO to their will, even by using brute force, as when the Asad regime sent troops to confront the PLO in Lebanon in 1976. However, they operated on the basis of cold, calculating raison d’état. They did not want to destroy the PLO or to extinguish the Palestine cause. Israel’s case was quite different, as this was always its objective. Its long-standing policy of liquidating Palestinian leaders, inherited from the Zionist movement during the late Mandate period, aimed at eliminating the Palestinian reality, demographically, ideationally, and politically. Assassinations were thus a central element in Israel’s ambition to transform the entire country, from the river to the sea, from an Arab to a Jewish one. To use Baruch Kimmerling’s term once again, this was an example of politicide in its most literal form. As evidence of the extent of the campaign of liquidations, we have two new accounts of it, one of them based on classified Israeli intelligence and military material. Among much else that is new, it contains sensational revelations about repeated attempts to assassinate Yasser ‘Arafat.[[#notes.html#note242|41]] The pretext that such killings were a blow against “terrorism” simply do not wash when the target is the leader of a national movement, unless the aim is to destroy that movement. Leaders of other anti-colonial movements were invariably vilified by their colonial masters in similar terms—terrorists, bandits, and murderers—whether they were Irish, Indian, Kenyan, or Algerian. Similarly, Israel’s demonization of the PLO as “terrorist” served as a justification for its eradication. The private statements of Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon in 1982 about Palestinian “terrorists” in Beirut could not be clearer on this point.[[#notes.html#note243|42]] The justification of assassinations as necessary protection against terrorists, who would kill if not killed first, also rings hollow when many of those killed—Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasser, for example, or PLO representatives abroad such as Mahmoud Hamshari and Wael Zu‘aytir—were intellectuals and advocates for the Palestine cause, rather than military personnel. Their artistic ventures were supplementary and linked to their political activities: Kanafani was a gifted novelist and painter, Nasser a poet, Zu‘aytir a writer and budding translator. These were not “terrorists,” but the most prominent voices of a national movement, voices Israel was determined to stifle. In Lebanon, the assassinations of Nasser, ‘Adwan, and Najjar in April 1973 were followed one month later by an armed confrontation with the Lebanese army during which the air force strafed the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Throughout the remainder of the Lebanese civil war, which dragged on until 1990, Palestinian refugee camps and population centers were a frequent target: besieged, devastated, the scenes of massacres and forced expulsions. Tal al-Za‘tar, Karantina, Dbaye, Jisr al-Basha, ‘Ain al-Hilwa, Sabra, and Shatila—Palestinians in all these places suffered such atrocities. The war also brought horrific massacres of Lebanese Christians by factions of the PLO and its Lebanese allies, notably at Damour in January 1976 where hundreds of Christians were killed, and the town was sacked and looted. Tal al-Za‘tar was the largest, poorest, and most isolated of the Palestinian refugee camps in the Beirut area, with a population of about twenty thousand Palestinians and perhaps ten thousand impoverished Lebanese, mainly Shi‘ites from the south. It was located in the East Beirut suburb of Dikwaneh, which was inhabited largely by Lebanese Maronites sympathetic to the right-wing anti-Palestinian Phalangist Party. I was living in Beirut with my wife, Mona, in the years leading up to the civil war, first working on my doctoral dissertation, and then teaching at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut. With a group of friends—Palestinian graduate students and residents of Tal al-Za‘tar—we had opened the first preschool in the camp, backed by Jamiyat In‘ash al-Mukhayam, a Lebanese-Palestinian charitable organization. Relations between the camp and its surroundings became increasingly fraught as the situation in Lebanon deteriorated, and by May 1973 it was clear that Tal al-Za‘tar and the nearby Dbaye and Jisr al-Basha refugee camps, as well as the Palestinian community in the Karantina area, were in decidedly hostile territory. Their neighbors deeply resented the presence of heavily armed Palestinian militiamen in the camps. In these perilous circumstances, we were all concerned about the safety of the small children in the preschool, so we dug a shelter beneath the center. Several other groups, and eventually the PLO, also built shelters, which saved many lives when the war broke out in earnest in 1975. One Sunday in April that year, Mona and I were having lunch in Tal al-Za‘tar, at the home of the parents of our friend Qasim, when we heard that there had been an incident on the road that led to the camp, which ran through the mainly Maronite suburb of ‘Ain al-Rummaneh. We were advised to leave immediately. Driving back to West Beirut in our old VW Beetle, we spotted a small bus stopped at an awkward angle in the middle of the road. It had just been ambushed on its way back to Tal al-Za‘tar by Phalangist militiamen, who had killed all of its twenty-seven passengers. It transpired that the Phalangists had taken revenge for a shooting at a Maronite church nearby where their leader, Pierre Gemayel, had been present.[[#notes.html#note244|43]] Thus began the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war. We were never able to return to Tal al-Za‘tar. Besieged by what came to be called the Lebanese Forces, headed by Pierre Gemayel’s son, Bashir, the camp was overrun in August 1976 and its entire population was expelled. Perhaps two thousand people were killed in what was probably the largest single massacre during the entire war. Some died during the siege, some when they fled the camp, and some at LF checkpoints, where Palestinians were picked up and taken away to be murdered. Two of the teachers from our preschool were killed in this way, as was Jihad, Qasim’s eleven-year-old niece, who was kidnapped and murdered at a roadblock together with her mother. The LF carried out the Tal al-Za‘tar massacre with Israel’s covert support. Years later, in 1982, facing parliamentary attacks by Labor Party leaders, Ariel Sharon upheld his conduct during the notorious Sabra and Shatila massacres in September of that year (in which over one thousand civilians were killed) by pointing to the Israeli government’s support for the Phalangists at the time of the 1976 killings in Tal al-Za‘tar.[[#notes.html#note245|44]] In a secret meeting of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, Sharon revealed that Israel’s military intelligence officers, who were on the spot at the time of the Tal al-Za‘tar massacre, reported that the Phalangists were killing people “with the weapons we supplied and the forces we helped them build.”[[#notes.html#note246|45]] Sharon went on to say to Shimon Peres, leader of the opposition Labor Party, which had been in power in 1976: You and us are acting according to the same moral principles. . . . The Phalangists murdered in Shatila and the Phalangists murdered in Tal Za‘atar [''sic'']. The link is a moral one: should we get involved with the Phalangists or not. You supported them and continued to do so after Tal Za‘atar.[[#notes.html#note247|46]] While Israeli military and intelligence officers may not have been inside the camps, as Sharon pointed out to the Knesset committee, they were present at the command posts from which both operations were directed. According to Hassan Sabri al-Kholi, the horrified Arab League mediator in Lebanon, who was present in the LF operations room and tried to halt the 1976 massacre as it was taking place, Israeli officers and two Syrian liaison personnel, Colonel ‘Ali Madani and Colonel Muhammad Kholi, were there at the time.[[#notes.html#note248|47]] Few images are more symbolic of the odds faced by the Palestinians during the Lebanon War than that of Israeli and Syrian officers—whose coexistence in Lebanon had been brokered by Henry Kissinger to “break the back” of the PLO[[#notes.html#note249|48]]—looking on as LF commanders directed a massacre at a Palestinian refugee camp. But as Kissinger said in another context, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”[[#notes.html#note250|49]] The war in Lebanon had multiple protagonists, Lebanese and non-Lebanese, each one with different objectives, but for a number of them the PLO was a major target. To those Lebanese who opposed the PLO, most of them Maronite Christians, their resistance to the armed Palestinian presence was carried out in the name of Lebanese nationalism and independence. As most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were Sunni Muslims, and because the secular PLO was allied with Lebanese leftist and Muslim groups, the Maronites feared a disruption of the country’s sectarian political system, which the French Mandate had rigged in their favor in the early 1920s. To Syria, Lebanon was a vital strategic arena it sought to dominate, a potential point of vulnerability in the conflict with Israel, and the site of its struggle with the PLO over leadership of the Arab front against Israel. These became crucial issues for Damascus as Egypt moved inexorably toward a separate peace with Israel and in effect became the US client state it has been ever since. While losing its Egyptian ally, Syria needed to find another counterweight to Israel, and domination of Lebanon, the Palestinians, and Jordan may have seemed like the only viable option. The boundless mistrust between the Syrian president Hafez al-Asad and the PLO’s ‘Arafat exacerbated the situation, as did the PLO’s backing of Lebanese leftist formations, which were thereby enabled to take a position more independent of Damascus. For the Israeli government, indirect and direct involvement in the Lebanon War furnished a welcome opportunity to acquire Lebanese clients, develop a new sphere of influence, and weaken Syria and its allies. Most important, the war provided an opening to retaliate against the PLO’s sporadic attacks on Israelis, undermining and perhaps crippling it. This would also neutralize the threat that Palestinian nationalism posed to Israel’s permanent control of the Occupied Territories, where millions more restive Palestinians had come under Israel’s rule after 1967. The PLO’s attacks launched from Lebanon, which often targeted civilians, gave different Israeli governments all the provocation they needed to justify interventions against their northern neighbor. Israeli methods ranged from direct support in the form of arms and training for the PLO’s foes, notably the LF (which received equipment worth $118.5 million and training for 1,300 militiamen, according to an official Israeli source[[#notes.html#note251|50]]), to the assassinations and car bombings that killed Palestinian leaders and countless civilians. Senior Israeli military and intelligence personnel recounted details of some of these operations in a book in which the chapter on Lebanon is entitled “A Pack of Wild Dogs.”[[#notes.html#note252|51]] The reference is to how Israeli operatives described their allies in the LF, which they employed for many of the most gruesome of these lethal operations. The United States supported Israel’s goals in Lebanon under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, and later under Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski, as well as during the Reagan administration. The two essential objectives of US Middle East policy were to woo the most important Arab state, Egypt, away from the Soviet Union, while not allowing the Middle East conflict to complicate détente with the USSR. This required steering Egypt toward acceptance of Israel. Egypt’s complete alignment with the US would let American leaders claim that they had won the Cold War in the Middle East while establishing a Pax Americana. Given the magnitude and importance to Washington of these strategic objectives, the PLO’s opposition was a relatively minor obstacle, and there were plenty of Middle Eastern parties that were happy to help the United States by acting against it. With the explicit approval of the United States, one of these parties, Syria, launched a direct military assault on the PLO in Lebanon in 1976 as the civil war there was already underway. While Washington and Syria were working toward an understanding about this intervention, Kissinger clarified US objectives: “We could let the Syrians move and break the back of the PLO.” This was, he said, “a strategic opportunity which we shall miss.”[[#notes.html#note253|52]] In the end, the United States did not let the opportunity slip away, and Syrian troops engaged in pitched battles with Palestinian commandos in Sidon and the Shouf Mountains and elsewhere. This Syrian intervention was only made possible after Kissinger persuaded Israel not to oppose it, via a tacit agreement on “red lines” that set geographical limits to the Syrian advance.[[#notes.html#note254|53]] THE INVOLVEMENT OF the United States in hostilities against the Palestinians long preceded its green light to Syria in 1976. Henry Kissinger had no place for the PLO or for the resolution of the Palestinian problem in his Cold War–driven framework for the Middle East. For him, the Palestinians—in league with the Soviets and “radical” Arab regimes—were at worst a hindrance to be removed, and at best a problem to be ignored. In furtherance of the American Cold War aims and in his single-minded pursuit of these goals, Kissinger was instrumental in negotiating three important disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Syria after the 1973 war, which were precursors to a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. To achieve this, Kissinger sought only to contain the Palestine issue, prevent it from interfering with his diplomacy, and render it manageable, if necessary by the use of force exerted by a range of proxies. This was the case in Jordan from the late 1960s until 1971, and later in Lebanon in the early to mid-1970s, when the PLO opposed Egypt’s US-encouraged drift toward a direct settlement with Israel. In both cases, Kissinger colluded with America’s local allies to crush the Palestinian movement. Standing behind all of them, in the shadows, often indirectly responsible, was the United States. Still, Kissinger admitted in his memoirs that the Palestinians’ “fate was, after all, the origin of the crisis,” and as anyone who followed his long career can attest, he was nothing if not a pragmatist.[[#notes.html#note255|54]] Even as he was negotiating the terms of Syria’s military intervention against the Palestinians in 1975, Kissinger also authorized covert, indirect talks with the PLO. These contacts were necessarily clandestine because of a pledge the secretary of state had made in a secret US-Israel Memorandum of Agreement in September that year. According to this pledge, the United States promised not to “recognize or negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization” until the PLO recognized Israel’s “right to exist,” abjured from the use of force (coded as terrorism), and accepted SC Resolutions 242 and 338 (which, passed in 1973, reaffirmed SC 242 and called for “negotiations . . . between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices,” meaning a multilateral peace conference, later convened at Geneva).[[#notes.html#note256|55]] Notwithstanding this clandestine promise to Israel, soon after Kissinger asked President Gerald Ford to approve US contact with the PLO. He argued that “There would be no change in our position toward the PLO on the Middle East question but we have no commitment to Israel not to talk to the PLO exclusively about the situation in Lebanon.”[[#notes.html#note257|56]] Ostensibly, the purpose of these contacts was to ensure the security of the US embassy in Beirut and of American citizens during the Lebanese civil war, which the PLO undertook to do. Over several subsequent years, there was extensive coordination between intelligence personnel from the two sides about such security, provided by the PLO. When these dealings became known, Israel’s response was harshly critical, but the US government affirmed their limited nature. However, US-PLO contacts rapidly expanded well beyond these original limited aims to encompass the general political situation in Lebanon. In 1977, the US ambassador in Beirut, Richard Parker, was tasked with maintaining contacts regarding a variety of political issues through intermediaries affiliated with the PLO, among them a professor at the AUB and a prominent Palestinian businessman. There can be little question that despite Kissinger’s justification, US discussions with the PLO violated the terms of the 1975 Memorandum of Agreement with Israel.[[#notes.html#note258|57]] Once the Israeli government discovered what was going on, it reacted forcefully to this betrayal, as they saw it. In January 1979, Israeli agents in Beirut assassinated Abu Hassan Salameh, the key PLO figure involved in these contacts, by bombing his car, causing a “huge explosion” that resulted in a “ball of fire.” Salameh had been the head of Yasser ‘Arafat’s personal security service, Force 17, and Israel claimed that he had been involved in the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. However, an account based on interviews with Israeli intelligence officers involved in the operation states that “the Mossad eventually reached the conclusion that ‘cutting this channel was important . . . to give the Americans a hint that this was no way to behave towards friends.’”[[#notes.html#note259|58]] The assassination did not end the contacts, although they became even more deeply shrouded in secrecy, as both the United States and the PLO took the heavy-handed Israeli hint. In 1978, John Gunther Dean, Parker’s successor as ambassador to Lebanon, was ordered to continue the channels of communication, which broadened to include the first direct interactions between American and PLO officials and came to address an even wider range of political topics. Among these were the terms for PLO acceptance of SC 242 and for US recognition of the PLO; the inclusion of the PLO in peace negotiations; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and freeing American hostages being held in Tehran. For at least four years, the United States was clandestinely negotiating with the PLO, its pledge to Israel notwithstanding. Dean was the target of an assassination attempt in 1980. The Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners claimed responsibility, but this group was later identified in interviews with Israeli intelligence sources as an Israeli-controlled operation.[[#notes.html#note260|59]] Dean always maintained that Israel was behind the attempt to kill him, and this evidence, in addition to Israel’s assassination of several Palestinians involved in contacts with the United States, appears to bear out Dean’s claim.[[#notes.html#note261|60]] Correspondence with the State Department during 1979, to which Dean provided me access, illustrates the extent of these US-PLO contacts in ways that are not fully reflected in the official State Department documentary series ''Foreign Relations of the United States''.[[#notes.html#note262|61]] They include, for example, extensive exchanges on PLO efforts to free American hostages held in the embassy in Tehran (a number of whom were apparently released at least in part because of Palestinian intercession with the Iranian revolutionary regime). While the contacts began via intermediaries, they led to direct meetings between Dean and, among others, Brigadier Sa‘d Sayel (Abu al-Walid)—a former Jordanian army officer, the PLO’s chief of staff, and its senior military officer.[[#notes.html#note263|62]] He, too, was later assassinated, perhaps by Syrian agents or possibly by those of Israel. As important as the extent and range of the exchanges was their tenor. The Palestinian intermediaries involved talked at length with Dean and one of his colleagues about terms for the PLO’s acceptance of SC 242 (it was willing to do this with some reservations) and how that could lead to official, open US-Palestinian contacts. Agreement on this matter was never reached. The Palestinians involved repeatedly relayed the PLO’s desire for recognition from Washington of its efforts on behalf of US interests, but Dean was authorized only to express his government’s gratitude for the provision of security to American institutions. The United States never offered the political recompense for these services that the Palestinian leadership apparently expected. WHILE AMERICAN CONTACTS were ongoing with the PLO in Beirut, President Jimmy Carter’s administration, working to hold a multilateral Middle East peace conference in Geneva, issued a joint communiqué with the USSR in October 1977. The communiqué broke ground, referring to participation of all parties to the conflict, including “those of the Palestinian people.” A statement made by Carter some months earlier, calling for a homeland for the Palestinians, signaled a different tone in Washington. However, under pressure from the newly elected Likud government in Israel, led by Menachem Begin, and from Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, the administration soon abandoned its push for a comprehensive settlement and the inclusion of the Palestinians in negotiations.[[#notes.html#note264|63]] Instead, it adopted the bilateral Camp David process, resulting in the separate Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. This process was specifically designed by Begin to freeze out the PLO, allow unimpeded colonization of the Occupied Territories occupied in 1967, and put the Palestine issue on hold, which is where it remained for over a decade. While Sadat and American officials feebly protested this sidetracking of the Palestinian issue, whose importance Carter had stressed at the outset of his presidency, in the end they acquiesced. For Sadat, the treaty restored the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. For Begin, the unilateral Egyptian peace strengthened Israel’s control of the rest of the Occupied Territories and permanently removed Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the United States, the treaty completed Egypt’s shift from the Soviet to the American camp, defusing the most dangerous aspects of the superpower conflict in the Middle East. Given the vital importance of these national goals to all three parties, Begin was allowed to dictate the terms where Palestine was concerned at Camp David and in the 1979 peace treaty.[[#notes.html#note265|64]] All of this was apparent to the PLO leadership, and the later phases of their indirect interaction with the United States government reflected their increasing bitterness. They saw that the PLO’s cooperation in Lebanon, far from having been reciprocated, was in fact repaid with further isolation of the organization by the United States and its Israeli ally. Although under Carter the United States had come close to endorsing the Palestinians’ national rights and their involvement in negotiations, the two sides found themselves farther apart than ever. Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration. Begin and his successors in the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and then Benjamin Netanyahu, were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people with national rights did not exist. At most, autonomy might be possible for the “local Arabs,” but this autonomy would apply only to people, not to the land. Their explicit aim was to transform the entirety of Palestine into the Land of Israel. Via the treaty with Egypt, Begin ensured that nothing would interfere with the implementation of the Likud vision. The foundation he had cannily laid down, which was adopted by the United States, formed the basis of everything that would follow.[[#notes.html#note266|65]] Future negotiations would be restricted to the terms of self-rule for an infinitely extendable interim period and exclude any discussion of sovereignty, statehood, Jerusalem, the fate of refugees, and jurisdiction over the land, water, and air of Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel set about reinforcing its colonization of the Occupied Territories. In spite of occasional meek American and Egyptian protestations, the conditions imposed by Begin set the ceiling of what the Palestinians were allowed to negotiate for. In the wake of the 1979 peace treaty, conditions became even worse for the Palestinians. The Lebanon War ground on, destroying much of the country, exhausting its people, and debilitating the PLO. At different stages, the PLO found itself facing the Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese armies, as well as Lebanese militias supported covertly by an array of states, including Israel, the United States, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, after all this and despite an Israeli incursion in 1978—the Litani Operation—which left a swath of south Lebanon under the control of its proxy, the South Lebanese Army, the PLO was still standing. Indeed, it remained the strongest force in large parts of Lebanon, those that were not in the hands of foreign armies or their proxies, including West Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, the Shouf Mountains, and much of the south. It would take one more military campaign to dislodge the PLO, and in 1982, American Secretary of State General Alexander Haig agreed to Ariel Sharon’s plans for Israel to finish off the organization and with it Palestinian nationalism.
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| A Century of War on the Palestinians == In 1917, Arthur James Balfour stated that in Palestine, the British government did not “propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” The great powers were committed to Zionism, he continued, “and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”[[#notes.html#note437|1]] One hundred years later, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying, “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it will ever take place.”[[#notes.html#note438|2]] The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes. Throughout the intervening century, the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them or over their heads, or pretending that they did not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds. Indeed, more than 120 years after the first Zionist congress in Basel and over seventy years after the creation of Israel, the Palestinian people, represented on neither of these occasions, were no longer supposed to constitute any kind of national presence. In their place was meant to stand a Jewish state, uncontested by the indigenous society that it was meant to supplant. Yet for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians’ resistance, their persistence, and their challenge to Israel’s ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era. Over the decades, the United States has wavered, going back and forth between paying lip service to the existence of the Palestinians and trying to exclude them from the map of the Middle East. The provision for an Arab state in the 1947 partition resolution (albeit never implemented), Jimmy Carter’s mention of a Palestinian “homeland,” and nominal support for a Palestinian state from the Clinton to the Obama administrations were artifacts of that lip service. There are many more instances of American exclusion and erasure: Lyndon Johnson’s backing of UNSC 242; Kissinger’s years of sidelining the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s and covertly making proxy war on it; the 1978 Camp David accords; the Reagan administration’s green light for the 1982 war in Lebanon; the lack of will of US presidents from Johnson to Obama to stop Israeli seizure and settlement of Palestinian land. Regardless of its wavering, the United States, the great imperial power of the age, together with Great Britain before it, extended full backing to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. But they have been trying to do the impossible: impose a colonial reality on Palestine in a postcolonial age. Eqbal Ahmad summed it up: “August 1947 marked the beginning of decolonization, when British rule in India ended. It was in those days of hope and fulfillment that the colonization of Palestine occurred. Thus at the dawn of decolonization, we were returned to the earliest, most intense form of colonial menace . . . exclusivist settler colonialism.”[[#notes.html#note439|3]] 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 characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.”[[#notes.html#note440|4]] With the establishment of Israel, Zionism did succeed in fashioning a potent national movement and a thriving new people in Palestine. But it could not fully supplant the country’s original population, which is what would have been necessary for the ultimate triumph of Zionism. 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. There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record sixty-eight million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict, and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect. Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the West’s support for Israel, on which it relies. Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than at any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step. If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.”[[#notes.html#note441|5]] This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other. RECENT POLLS HAVE revealed the shifts that have begun to take place among some segments of American public opinion. While encouraging to advocates of Palestinian freedom, they do not reflect the stance of most Americans. Nor are they necessarily based on a sound understanding of the colonial dynamic at work in the conflict. Moreover, public opinion can shift again. Events on the ground in Palestine have recently tilted the scales of sympathy slightly in favor of the Palestinians, but other events could cause them to tilt in the opposite direction, as happened during the Second Intifada. Amply funded efforts have been launched to achieve just such a reversal, in particular by smearing critics of Israel as “anti-Semites,”[[#notes.html#note442|6]] while counterefforts to strengthen this positive trend are puny by comparison. The experience of the past few decades shows that three approaches have been effective in expanding the way in which the reality in Palestine is understood. The first rests on the fertile comparison of the case of Palestine to other colonial-settler experiences, whether that of Native Americans or South Africans or the Irish. The second, related to the first, involves focusing on the gross imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians, a characteristic of all colonial encounters. The third and perhaps most important is to foreground the issue of inequality. Establishing the colonial nature of the conflict has proven exceedingly hard given the biblical dimension of Zionism, which casts the new arrivals as indigenous and as the historic proprietors of the land they colonized. In this light, the original population of Palestine appears extraneous to the post-Holocaust resurgence of a Jewish nation-state with its roots in the kingdom of David and Solomon: they are no more than undesirable interlopers in this uplifting scenario. Challenging this epic myth is especially difficult in the United States, which is steeped in an evangelical Protestantism that makes it particularly susceptible to such an evocative Bible-based appeal and which also prides itself on its colonial past. The word “colonial” has a valence in the United States that is deeply different from its associations in the former European imperial metropoles and the countries that were once part of their empires. Similarly, the terms “settler” and “pioneer” have positive connotations in American history, arising from the heroic tale of the conquest of the West at the expense of its indigenous population as projected in movies, literature, and television. Indeed, there are striking parallels between these portrayals of the resistance of Native Americans to their dispossession and that of the Palestinians. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a violent, murderous, and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity. While many Americans have begun to contest this strand of their national narrative, Israeli society and its supporters still celebrate—indeed, depend on—its foundational version. Moreover, comparisons between Palestine and the Native American or African American experiences are fraught because the United States has yet to fully acknowledge these dark chapters of its past or to address their toxic effects in the present. There is still a long way to go to change Americans’ consciousness of their nation’s history, let alone that of Palestine and Israel, in which the United States has played such a supportive role. The second track for changing existing perceptions of the conflict—highlighting the great imbalance between the Palestinians and the powers arrayed against them—involves showing that the Zionist movement was almost always on the offensive in its effort to achieve mastery over an Arab land. Presenting this reality otherwise has been central to the discursive advantage achieved by Zionism, in which Israel is David to the Arab/Muslim Goliath. A more recent fiction casts the conflict as one of two peoples, or even two states, in an equal fight, sometimes framed as right vs. right. Even then, the accepted version is that Israel has constantly wished for peace, only to be rebuffed by the Palestinians (“there is no partner for peace,” as the phrase goes, leaving Israelis, the victims, to defend themselves against unjustifiable terrorism and rocket fire). In reality, the Zionist movement and then the state of Israel always had the big battalions on their side, whether this was the British army before 1939, US and Soviet support in 1947–48, France and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, or the situation from the 1970s until today, where besides receiving unlimited US support, Israel’s armed might dwarfs that of the Palestinians, and indeed that of all the Arabs put together. It is the issue of inequality that is most promising for expanding the understanding of the reality in Palestine. It is also the most important, since inequality was essential to the creation of a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab land, and is vital to maintaining that state’s dominance. Inequality is so crucial not only because it is anathema to the egalitarian, democratic societies that the Zionist project has primarily relied on for its support, but because equality of rights is key to a just, lasting resolution of the entire problem. Within Israel, certain important rights are reserved exclusively for Jewish citizens and denied to the 20 percent of citizens who are Palestinian. Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights. This systemic ethnic discrimination was always a central facet of Zionism, which by definition aimed to create a Jewish society and polity with exclusive national rights in a land with an Arab majority. Even as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaimed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,”[[#notes.html#note443|7]] dozens of crucial laws based on inequality of rights were implemented in the ensuing years. These severely restricted or totally banned Arab access to land and to residency in all-Jewish communities, formalized the seizure of the private and collective (''waqf'') property of non-Jews, prevented most indigenous Palestinians who were made into refugees from returning to their homes while giving citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants, and limited access to many other benefits. This core problem is even more stark today, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel from the Jordan River to the sea that is equal to or perhaps slightly larger than the Jewish population. That inequality is the central moral question posed by Zionism, and that it goes to the root of the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is a view that is shared by some distinguished Israelis. Imagining scholars looking back one hundred years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”[[#notes.html#note444|8]] For decades Zionists insisted, often referring to the state’s declaration of independence, that Israel could be and was both “Jewish and democratic.” As the contradictions inherent in this formulation grew ever more apparent, some Israeli leaders admitted (indeed, even declared it with pride) that if they were forced to choose, the Jewish aspect would take precedence. In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the “Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State,” which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people, downgrading the status of Arabic, and declaring Jewish settlement a “national value” with precedence over other needs.[[#notes.html#note445|9]] Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, one of the more forthright advocates of Jewish supremacy and a sponsor of the law, had made the case bluntly a few months before the legislation came to a vote: “There are places where the character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state must be maintained and this sometimes comes at the expense of equality.”[[#notes.html#note446|10]] She added, “Israel . . . isn’t a state of all its nations. That is, equal rights to all citizens but not equal national rights.” Where this ideology leads was summarized in the equally blunt words of Likud Knesset member Miki Zohar. 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.”[[#notes.html#note447|11]] This connection between an exclusive right to land and peoplehood is central to a specific type of “blood and soil” Central European nationalism, which is the ground from which Zionism sprang. Commenting on an early draft of the Jewish Nation-State law, Sternhell, whose area of expertise is European fascism, noted that the constitutional ideas behind the legislation are consonant with those of Charles Maurras, the French anti-Semite and neo-fascist of the 1930s, or of modern-day Polish and Hungarian nationalists and the “hardest-line European chauvinists.” However, he added, they are entirely at odds with the liberal ideas of the French and American revolutions.[[#notes.html#note448|12]] By embracing its illiberal and discriminatory essence, modern Zionism is increasingly in contradiction with the ideals, particularly that of equality, on which Western democracies are based. For the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany, which cherish these values, even if they are often honored only in the breach, and are currently threatened by potent illiberal populist and authoritarian right-wing trends, this should be a serious matter, especially given that Israel is still dependent on the support of these Western countries. Finally, uprooting the systemic inequality inherent in Zionism is crucial to creating a better future for both peoples, Palestinians and Israelis. Any formula advanced as a resolution of the conflict will necessarily and inevitably fail if it is not squarely based on the principle of equality. Absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies. This is a high-sounding recommendation, but nothing else will address the core of the problem, nor will it be sustainable and lasting. 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, but in response to this past trauma, generations have now been brought up on a reflexive dogma of aggressive nationalism whose tenacious hold will be hard to break. Thus the Jewish citizens of a regional superpower that cows its neighbors (and has bombed the capitals of seven of them with impunity[[#notes.html#note449|13]]) suffer from a deep insecurity rooted in part in this history, and perhaps in part from an unspoken concern that the carefully constructed and justified colonial reality they live in might suddenly unravel. The syndrome that drives this imperative to dominate and discriminate can probably only be addressed by those within Israeli society (or close to it) who understand the grim direction of the country’s current course, and who can challenge the distortions of history, ethics, and Judaism that this ideology constitutes. Doing so is surely the primary and the most urgent task of Israelis and their supporters who wish to change the dynamic of injustice and inequality. 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, no matter how this transmutation came about. Palestinians, too, today consider themselves a people with ''national'' links to what is indeed their ancestral homeland, for reasons that are as arbitrary and as conjunctural as those that led to Zionism, as arbitrary as any of the reasons that led to the emergence of scores of modern national movements. Such a conclusion about the constructed nature of all national entities, enraging to apostles of nationalism, is self-evident to those who have studied its genesis in myriad different circumstances.[[#notes.html#note450|14]] 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, although many have been there for generations now, and have a deeply felt and ancient religious connection to the country, albeit one quite different from the ancient rootedness in the country of the indigenous Palestinians. Because this is a colonial conflict, this difference matters enormously. However, no one today would deny that fully developed national entities exist in settler states like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, despite their origins in colonial wars of extermination. Moreover, to those intoxicated by nationalism, such distinctions between settlers and indigenous peoples do not matter. As the anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, “Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent . . . political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: ''that'' is a reality.”[[#notes.html#note451|15]] 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. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other. Overcoming the resistance of those who benefit from the status quo, in order to ensure equal rights for all in this small country between the Jordan River and the sea—this is a test of the political ingenuity of all concerned. Reducing the extensive sustained external support for the discriminatory and deeply unequal status quo would certainly smooth the path ahead. HOWEVER, THE WAR on Palestine passed the hundred-year mark with the Palestinians confronting circumstances more daunting than perhaps at any time since 1917. With his election, Donald Trump began pursuit of what he called “the deal of the century,” purportedly aimed at a conclusive resolution of the conflict. Closing the deal has so far involved dispensing with decades of bedrock US policies, outsourcing strategic planning to Israel, and pouring contempt on the Palestinians. Inauspiciously, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (his bankruptcy lawyer and a longtime financial supporter of the Jewish settler movement), spoke of an “alleged occupation” and demanded that the State Department stop using the term. In one interview, he declared that Israel has the “right” to annex “some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.”[[#notes.html#note452|16]] Jason Greenblatt, for over two years envoy for Israel-Palestine negotiations (previously Trump’s real-estate lawyer and also a donor to Israeli right-wing causes), stated that West Bank settlements “are not an obstacle to peace,” rejected use of the term “occupation” in a meeting with EU envoys,[[#notes.html#note453|17]] and endorsed Friedman’s views regarding annexation. The new administration quickly trumpeted an “outside-in” approach, in which three of the Sunni Arab Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain (often falsely described as representing Sunni Arabs) were brought into a de facto alliance with Israel to stand together against Iran. The by-product of this configuration was that these and other Arab regimes allied to the US were encouraged to bully the Palestinians to accept maximalist Israeli positions that would be, and appeared intended to be, fatal to their cause. This initiative was coordinated closely with these regimes, via the mediation of presidential envoy extraordinaire Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, also a real-estate mogul, and an ardent extreme Zionist whose family had also donated to Jewish settlements. In collusion with their Gulf partners at a June 2019 conference in Bahrain and in other venues, Kushner, Greenblatt, and Friedman publicly pushed what was essentially an economic development initiative for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, meant to operate under existing conditions of virtually complete Israeli control. Kushner cast doubt on the feasibility of independent Palestinian self-rule, saying, “we’ll have to see.” He drew on the classic colonialist lexicon to add, “The hope is that they over time can become capable of governing.” All the Palestinians deserved, in Kushner’s view, was “the opportunity to live a better life . . . the opportunity to pay their mortgage.”[[#notes.html#note454|18]] With their essentially economic solution, this troika displayed remarkable ignorance of a solid expert consensus that the Palestinian economy has been strangled primarily by the systematic interference of the Israeli military occupation that their plan meant to keep in place. The Trump administration exacerbated this economic stranglehold by cutting off US aid to the PA and to UNRWA. The US also continued to support Israel’s blockade of Gaza, aided by Egypt, with its disastrous effects on 1.8 million people. The crucial political aspect of Trump’s deal of the century was reportedly contained in the outlines of an American-Israeli proposal that the PA was pressured to accept. This purportedly involved creating a noncontiguous, non-sovereign entity without removal of any of the existing illegal Israeli settlements, which would be recognized, “legalized,” and annexed to Israel. This entity would remain under full Israeli security control (for which the Palestinians would reportedly have to pay!) and therefore be a state in name only. It would exclude sovereignty or control over Jerusalem and be located in the Gaza Strip and the scores of disparate fragments totaling under 40 percent of the West Bank that constitute Areas A and B, with some parts of C perhaps to be included, but only subject to further negotiations.[[#notes.html#note455|19]] Integrally linked to such an approach was Trump’s December 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the subsequent relocation of the US Embassy there. This move marked a revolutionary departure from over seventy years of US policy, going back to UNGA 181, whereby the status of the holy city was to remain undetermined pending a final resolution of the Palestine question to be mutually agreed by both sides. This affront was then followed by Trump’s proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the annexed Golan Heights, another radical US policy shift. With these two pronouncements, the administration unilaterally took issues—one of which, that of Jerusalem, Israel is treaty-bound to negotiate with the Palestinians—off the table. As well as reversing decades of American policy, the Trump ensemble spurned an entire body of international law and consensus, UN Security Council decisions, world opinion, and of course Palestinian rights. Trump accepted fully Israel’s stand on the vital issue of Jerusalem and did so without any quid pro quo from Israel and without any acknowledgment of Palestinian demands for recognition of the city as the capital of Palestine. Equally important, by implication, Trump endorsed Israel’s expansive definition of a “unified Jerusalem,” including the extensive Arab areas in and around the city appropriated by Israel since 1967. Although the administration stated that actual borders were still to be negotiated, its proclamation meant in effect that there was nothing left to negotiate. Through these and other actions, the White House implicitly confirmed the outlines of the American-Israeli proposal: it explicitly avoided endorsing a two-state solution; it closed the Palestinian mission in Washington, D.C., and the US consulate in East Jerusalem that had served as an informal embassy to the Palestinians; it claimed that, contrary to the status of all other refugees since World War II, the descendants of Palestinians, declared refugees in 1948, are not themselves refugees. Finally, by endorsing Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Trump cleared the way for the annexation of whatever parts of the occupied West Bank Israel should choose to swallow up. In exchange for these drastic derogations of Palestinian rights, the Palestinians were to be offered money, collected from the Gulf monarchies. The offer was formalized at the June 2019 conference in Bahrain that the PA refused to attend. Kushner’s proposal to buy off Palestinian opposition to a plan that obviated a negotiated political settlement was in fact no more than a reheated version of similar plans for “economic peace” in lieu of rights peddled by Israeli leaders from Shimon Peres to Netanyahu. For Netanyahu and ultranationalist supporters of extremist settlers, an economic sweetener for the bitter pill the Palestinians were meant to swallow had become an essential plank in their explicitly annexationist approach. Indeed, what was most striking about this White House’s Middle East policy was that it had been effectively outsourced to Netanyahu and his allies in Israel and the United States. Its initiatives seem to have come prepackaged from the Israeli right’s storehouse of ideas: moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Golan, airily dispensing with the Palestinian refugee issue, trying to liquidate UNRWA, and withdrawing from the Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran. Only a few items remained on Netanyahu’s wish list: annexation of much of the West Bank, formal American rejection of sovereign Palestinian statehood, the creation of a toothless Palestinian Quisling leadership—the entire package meant to coerce the Palestinians to accept that they are a defeated people. None of this was entirely new, given past American practice. But Trump’s people abandoned even the shabby old pretense at impartiality. With this plan, the United States ceased to be “Israel’s lawyer,” becoming instead the mouthpiece of the most extreme government in Israel’s history, proposing to negotiate directly with the Palestinians on Israel’s behalf, with the welcome assistance of its closest Arab allies. Perhaps the White House was up to something else: generating draft proposals that were so offensively pro-Israel as to be unacceptable to even the most compliant Palestinians. With this tactic, the Israeli government could paint the Palestinians as rejectionist and continue to avoid negotiations while maintaining the status quo of creeping annexation, expanding colonization, and legal discrimination. In either case, the outcome would be the same: the Palestinians were put on notice that the prospect of an independent future in their homeland was closed off and that the Israeli colonial endeavor had a free hand to shape Palestine as it wished. This is a conclusion that most of the world rejects, and it will surely be met with resistance, both locally and globally. It is also at odds with every principle of freedom, justice, and equality that the United States is supposed to stand for. A resolution imposed strictly on harsh Israeli terms will inevitably bring more conflict and insecurity for all concerned. For the Palestinians, though, it also presents opportunities. THE EXISTING STRATEGIES of both of the leading Palestinian political factions, Fatah and Hamas, have come to nothing, evidenced by the acceleration of Israeli control over all of Palestine. Neither dependence on US mediation in fruitless negotiations as part of the sole resort to feeble diplomacy of the ‘Abbas era nor a nominal strategy of armed resistance has advanced Palestinian national aims over the past few decades. Nor is there much for the Palestinians to expect from Arab regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan, which today have no shame in signing massive gas deals with Israel, or Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have purchased Israeli weapons and security systems through American cut-outs that only thinly disguise their origins.[[#notes.html#note456|20]] These realizations necessitate a careful reassessment by the Palestinians of their methods, whether their national goals are defined as an end to occupation and reversing the colonization of Palestinian land; establishing a Palestinian state in the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital; the return to their ancestral homeland of that half of the Palestinian people who are currently living in exile; or creating a democratic, sovereign binational state in all of Palestine with equal rights for all, or some combination or permutation of these options. As the weaker party in the conflict, the Palestinian side cannot afford to remain divided. But before unity can be achieved, a redefinition of objectives must take place on the basis of a new national consensus. It is a searing indictment of both Fatah and Hamas that in recent decades civil society initiatives such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and student activism have done more to further the Palestine cause than anything either of these two main factions has undertaken. A reconciliation would at least repair some of the damage caused by their split, but reconciliation between two ideologically bankrupt political movements, important though it would be, cannot provide the dynamic new strategy needed to dislodge the Palestinian cause from its current state of stagnation and retreat. One key change that is needed involves acknowledging that the diplomatic strategy adopted by the PLO since the 1980s was fatally flawed: the United States is not and cannot be a mediator, a broker, or a neutral party. It has long opposed Palestinian national aspirations and has formally committed itself to support the Israeli government’s positions on Palestine. The Palestinian national movement must recognize the true nature of the American stance and undertake dedicated grassroots political and informational work to make its case inside the United States, as the Zionist movement has done for over a century. This task will not necessarily take generations, given the significant shifts that have already occurred in key sectors of public opinion. There is a great deal to build on. Yet the bifurcated Palestinian leadership today appears to have no better understanding of the workings of American society and politics than its predecessors had. It does not have any idea of how to engage with American public opinion and has made no serious attempt to do so. This ignorance of the complex nature of the US political system has prevented the fashioning of a sustained program to reach potentially sympathetic elements of civil society. By contrast, in spite of the dominant position Israel and its supporters enjoy in the United States, they continue to expend lavish resources to advance their cause in the public arena. Although the effort to support Palestinian rights is poorly funded and has been comprised only of initiatives by elements of civil society, it has achieved remarkable successes in such spheres as the arts (notably cinema and theater); the legal realm, where defenders of free speech and the First Amendment have become vital allies against sustained attacks on supporters of BDS; sectors of academia, notably Middle East and American studies; some unions and churches; and key parts of the base of the Democratic Party. Similar work needs to be directed at Europe, Russia, India, China, Brazil, and nonaligned states. Israel has made progress in recent years in cultivating the elites and public opinion in these countries, while many of them, especially China and India, are becoming more active in the Middle East.[[#notes.html#note457|21]] Although most Arab states are controlled by undemocratic regimes subservient to the United States and desirous of Israeli approval, Arab public opinion remains acutely sensitive to the appeal of Palestine. Thus in 2016, 75 percent of respondents in twelve Arab countries considered the Palestine cause one of concern to all Arabs, and 86 percent disapproved of Arab recognition of Israel because of its policies directed against Palestine.[[#notes.html#note458|22]] The Palestinians need to resurrect the PLO’s former strategy of appealing over the heads of unresponsive regimes to sympathetic Arab public opinion. Most important is that should entering negotiations based on a Palestinian consensus become feasible, any future diplomacy must reject the Oslo interim formula and proceed on an entirely different basis. An intensive global public relations and diplomatic campaign must be aimed at demanding international sponsorship and rejecting exclusive US control of the process (a demand that has already been feebly made by the PA). Beyond this, for the purpose of negotiations, the Palestinians ought to treat the United States as an extension of Israel. As a superpower, it would necessarily be represented at any talks, but it should be considered as an adversarial party, even seated with Israel on the opposite side of the table, which would represent its real position at least since 1967. New negotiations would need to reopen all the crucial issues created by the 1948 war that were closed in Israel’s favor in 1967 by UNSC 242: the 1947 UNGA 181 partition borders and its ''corpus separatum'' proposal for Jerusalem; the return and compensation of refugees; and the political, national, and civil rights of Palestinians inside Israel. Such talks should stress complete equality of treatment of both peoples, and be based on the Hague and Fourth Geneva conventions, the United Nations Charter with its stress on national self-determination, and all relevant UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, not just those cherry-picked by the United States to favor Israel. The current administration in Washington and the Israeli government would of course never accept such terms, and so these would, for the moment, constitute impossible preconditions for negotiations. That is precisely the point. They are meant to move the goalposts away from formulas devised as advantageous to Israel. Continuing to negotiate on the existing deeply flawed basis can only entrench a status quo that is leading toward the final absorption of Palestine into the Greater Land of Israel. 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.[[#notes.html#note459|23]] A forgotten but essential element of the Palestinian political agenda is work inside Israel, specifically convincing Israelis that there is an alternative to the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. This is a long-term process that cannot be dismissed as a form of “normalizing” relations with Israel: neither the Algerians nor the Vietnamese shortsightedly denied themselves the opportunity to convince public opinion in the home country of their oppressor of the justice of their cause—efforts that contributed measurably to their victory. Nor should the Palestinians. The Palestinian people, whose resistance to colonialism has involved an uphill battle, should not expect quick results. They have shown unusual patience, perseverance, and steadfastness in defending their rights, which is the main reason that their cause is still alive. It is now essential for all the elements in Palestinian society to adopt a considered, long-term strategy, which means rethinking much that has been done in the past, understanding how other liberation movements succeeded in altering an unfavorable balance of forces, and cultivating all possible allies in their struggle. GIVEN AN ARAB world that is in a state of disarray greater than at any time since the end of World War I and a Palestinian national movement that appears to be without a compass, it might seem that this is an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians, and declare victory. It is not likely to be quite so simple. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the Arab public, which can be fooled some of the time but not all of the time, and that emerges with Palestinian flags flying whenever democratic currents rise against autocracy, as in Cairo in 2011 and in Algiers in the spring of 2019. Israel’s regional hegemony depends in very large measure on the maintenance in power of undemocratic Arab regimes that will suppress such sentiment. However distant it may seem today, real democracy in the Arab world would be a grave threat to Israel’s regional dominance and freedom of action. Just as important, there is also the popular resistance that the Palestinians can be expected to continue to mount, whatever the shabby deal to which their discredited leaders may mistakenly assent. Though Israel is the nuclear regional hegemon, its domination is not uncontested in the Middle East, nor is the legitimacy of the undemocratic Arab regimes which are increasingly becoming its clients. Finally, the United States, for all its power, has played a secondary role—sometimes no role at all—in the crises in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the region. It will not necessarily maintain the near monopoly over the Palestine question, and indeed over the entire Middle East, that it has enjoyed for so long. Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve. == NOTES == INTRODUCTION [[#intro.html#note1|1]]. Both buildings date to the late seventh century, although the Dome essentially kept its original form, while the al-Aqsa Mosque was repeatedly rebuilt and expanded. [[#intro.html#note2|2]]. The main library building, known as Turbat Baraka Khan, is described in Michael Hamilton Burgoyne, ''Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study'' (London: British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and World of Islam Festival Trust, 1987), 109–16. The structure contains the tombs of Baraka Khan and his two sons. The former was a thirteenth-century military leader whose daughter was a wife of the great Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars. Her son Sa‘id succeeded Baybars as sultan. [[#intro.html#note3|3]]. With these funds from my great-grandmother, my grandfather renovated the building. The manuscripts and books grouped together in the library were collected by my grandfather from the holdings of various of our ancestors, including collections that had originally been put together in the eighteenth century and earlier. The library website contains basic information about it, including access to the catalogue of manuscripts: http://www.khalidilibrary.org/indexe.html. [[#intro.html#note4|4]]. Private Palestinian libraries were systematically looted by specialized teams operating in the wake of advancing Zionist forces as they occupied Arab-inhabited villages and cities, notably Jaffa, Haifa, and the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, in Spring 1948. The stolen manuscripts and books were deposited in the Hebrew University Library, now the National Library of Israel, under the heading “AP” for “abandoned property,” a typically Orwellian description of a process of cultural appropriation in the wake of conquest and dispossession: Gish Amit, “Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s ‘Collection’ of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 40, no. 4 (2010–11): 6–25. [[#intro.html#note5|5]]. The most important source on Yusuf Diya is the section on him by Alexander Schölch, ''Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development'' (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), 241–52. That section was reprinted in the ''Jerusalem Quarterly'' 24 (Summer 2005): 65–76. See also Malek Sharif, “A Portrait of Syrian Deputies in the Ottoman Parliament,” in ''The First Ottoman Experiment in Democracy'', ed. Christoph Herzog and Malek Sharif (Würzburg: Nomos, 2010); and R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness'', rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 67–76. [[#intro.html#note6|6]]. His role as an upholder of constitutional rights against the absolutism of the sultan is described in R. E. Devereux, ''The First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A Study of the Midhat Constitution and Parliament'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). [[#intro.html#note7|7]]. Profiting from his service as governor in the Bitlis district of Kurdistan, in the southeast of what is today Turkey, he produced the first Arabic-Kurdish dictionary, ''al-Hadiyya al-Hamidiyya fil-Lugha al-Kurdiyya''. I found copies of this book and of several of his other publications among material in the Khalidi Library. The book was published in 1310AH/1893 in Istanbul by the Ottoman Ministry of Education, and it has since been republished several times. Beyond its title, which alludes to Sultan ‘Abd al-Abdul Hamid II’s name, its introduction includes a fulsome dedication to the sultan, which was virtually obligatory to ensure that works passed through censorship, especially one by an author considered potentially subversive by the authorities. [[#intro.html#note8|8]]. ''Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage'' (Leipzig and Vienna: M. Breitenstein, 1896). This pamphlet is eighty-six pages long. [[#intro.html#note9|9]]. Theodor Herzl, ''Complete Diaries'', ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 88–89. [[#intro.html#note10|10]]. Letter from Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi, Pera, Istanbul, to Chief Rabbi Zadok Kahn, March 1, 1899, Central Zionist Archives, H1\197 [Herzl Papers]. I received a digitized copy of this document courtesy of Barnett Rubin. The letter was written from the Khedivial Hotel in the Pera district of Istanbul. All translations from the original French are my own. [[#intro.html#note11|11]]. Letter from Theodor Herzl to Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi, March 19, 1899, reprinted in Walid Khalidi, ed., ''From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem'' (Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), 91–93. [[#intro.html#note12|12]]. Ibid. [[#intro.html#note13|13]]. Herzl’s attitude toward the Arabs is a contentious topic, although it should not be. Among the best and most balanced assessments are those of Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl’s Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 22, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 30–47; Derek Penslar, “Herzl and the Palestinian Arabs: Myth and Counter-Myth,” ''Journal of Israeli History'' 24, no. 1 (2005), 65–77; and Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism: A Reading of Herzl’s ''Altneuland'',” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'', 30, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 55–67. [[#intro.html#note14|14]]. The text of the charter can be found in Walid Khalidi, “The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company.” [[#intro.html#note15|15]]. Herzl’s almost utopian 1902 novel ''Altneuland'' (“Old New Land”) described a Palestine of the future that had all these attractive characteristics. See Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism.” [[#intro.html#note16|16]]. According to the Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell, during the entire decade of the 1920s “the annual inflow of Jewish capital was on average 41.5 percent larger than the Jewish net domestic product (NDP). . . . its ratio to NDP did not fall below 33 percent in any of the pre-World War II years . . .”: ''The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 217. The consequence of this remarkable inflow of capital was a growth rate of 13.2 percent annually for the Jewish economy of Palestine from 1922 to 1947: for details see R. Khalidi, ''The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 13–14. [[#intro.html#note17|17]]. Figures on Palestinian losses during the revolt were extrapolated from statistics provided by Walid Khalidi, ed., ''From Haven to Conquest'', appendix 4, 846–49. [[#intro.html#note18|18]]. ''Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy & Governor-General of India, 1898–1905'' (London: Macmillan, 1906), 589–90. [[#intro.html#note19|19]]. Ibid., 489. [[#intro.html#note20|20]]. ''Der Judenstaat'', translated and excerpted in ''The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader'', ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 222. [[#intro.html#note21|21]]. Zangwill, in “The Return to Palestine,” ''New Liberal Review'' (December 1901), 615, wrote that “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.” For a recent example of the tendentious and never-ending reuse of this slogan, see Diana Muir, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” ''Middle East Quarterly'' (Spring 2008), 55–62. [[#intro.html#note22|22]]. Joan Peters, ''From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine'' (New York: HarperCollins, 1984). The book was mercilessly eviscerated in reviews by Norman Finkelstein, Yehoshua Porath, and numerous other scholars, who all but called it a fraud. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who was briefly my colleague at Columbia University, told me that the book was produced by Peters, who had no particular Middle East expertise, at the instigation and with the resources of a right-wing Israeli institution. Essentially, he told me, they gave her their files “proving” that the Palestinians did not exist, and she wrote them up. I have no way of assessing this claim. Hertzberg died in 2006 and Peters in 2015. [[#intro.html#note23|23]]. Such works are numerous. See, e.g., Arnold Brumberg, ''Zion Before Zionism, 1838–1880'' (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985); or in a superficially more sophisticated form, Ephraim Karsh’s characteristically polemical and tendentious ''Palestine Betrayed'' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). This book is part of a new genre of neoconservative “scholarship” funded by, among others, extreme-right-wing hedge-fund multimillionaire Roger Hertog, who receives generous thanks in the preface to Karsh’s book. Another star in this neocon firmament, Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute, of which Hertog is a member of the Board of Trustees, is equally generous in his thanks to Hertog in the preface to his book ''Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016). [[#intro.html#note24|24]]. American public attitudes on Palestine have been shaped by the widespread disdain for Arabs and Muslims spread by Hollywood and the mass media, as is shown by Jack Shaheen in books like ''Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People'' (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001), and by similar tropes specific to Palestine and the Palestinians. Noga Kadman, ''Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), shows from extensive interviewing and other sources that similar attitudes have taken deep root in the minds of many Israelis. [[#intro.html#note25|25]]. M. M. Silver, ''Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story'' (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010) analyzes the impact of the book and the movie on American popular culture. Amy Kaplan argues that the novel and the movie played a central role in the Americanization of Zionism. See her article “Zionism as Anticolonialism: The Case of ''Exodus'',” ''American Literary History'' 25, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 870–95, and most importantly, chapter 2 of her book ''Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 58–93. [[#intro.html#note26|26]]. See Zachary J. Foster, “What’s a Palestinian: Uncovering Cultural Complexities,” ''Foreign Affairs'', March 12, 2015, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143249/zachary-j-foster/whats-a-palestinian. Similar views are strongly held by major political donors like the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the largest single donor to the Republican Party for several years running, who has stated that “the Palestinians are an invented people.” During every pre-presidential election “money primary,” he has orchestrated the unseemly spectacle of potential Republican candidates dancing to his tune. See Jason Horowitz, “Republican Contenders Reach Out to Sheldon Adelson, Palms Up,” ''New York Times'', April 27, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/us/politics/republican-contenders-reach-out-to-sheldon-adelson-palms-up.html; and Jonathan Cook, “The Battle Between American-Jewish Political Donors Heats Up,” ''Al-Araby'', May 4, 2015, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Articles/14d22f412e42dbf1. One of the largest donors to Trump, Adelson got his reward when in December 2017 the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and thereafter moved the US embassy there. [[#intro.html#note27|27]]. Vladimir (later Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” first published in Russian under the title “O Zheleznoi Stene” in ''Rassvyet'', November 4, 1923. [[#intro.html#note28|28]]. The original Hundred Years’ War, between the house of Plantagenet in England and the Valois dynasty in France, actually lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. [[#intro.html#note29|29]]. These include ''Palestinian Identity''; ''The Iron Cage''; ''Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War'', rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and ''Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East'' (Boston: Beacon Press), 2013. [[#intro.html#note30|30]]. Baron, who was the Nathan L. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions at Columbia University from 1929 to 1963 and is regarded as the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century, taught my father, Ismail Khalidi, who was a graduate student there in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Baron told me four decades later that he remembered my father, and that he had been a good student, although given Baron’s unfailing courtesy and good nature, he may simply have been trying to be kind. [[#intro.html#note31|31]]. I explored the poor choices made by leaders of the Palestinian national movement and the heavy odds they were up against in my book ''The Iron Cage''. CHAPTER 1 [[#ch01.html#note32|1]]. This quote is widely attributed to Arthur James Balfour, and it indeed sounds like him. [[#ch01.html#note33|2]]. For details, see Roger Owen, ed., ''Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the 19th and 20th Centuries'' (London: Macmillan, 1982). [[#ch01.html#note34|3]]. See Ben Fortna, ''Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Selçuk Somel, ''The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1908: Islamization, Autocracy, and Discipline'' (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Thus, by 1947 nearly 45 percent of the Arab school-age population and the large majority of urban boys and girls were in school, which compared favorably with the situation in neighboring Arab countries: A. L. Tibawi, ''Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of British Administration'' (London: Luzac, 1956), tables, 270–71. The foundation for these education advances was laid in the Ottoman era. See also R. Khalidi, ''The Iron Cage'', 14–16; and Ami Ayalon, ''Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900–1948'' (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). [[#ch01.html#note35|4]]. Contrasts between the highlands and the coast are among the themes in Salim Tamari, ''Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 2008). Tamari ascribes this insight to Albert Hourani: see Hourani’s 1985 lecture “Political Society in Lebanon: A Historical Introduction,” http://lebanesestudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/c449fe11.-A-political-society-in-Lebanon-Albert-Hourani-1985.pdf. See also Sherene Seikaly, ''Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine'' (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Abigail Jacobson, ''From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule'' (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Mahmoud Yazbak, ''Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period, 1864–1914: A Muslim Town in Transition'' (Leiden: Brill, 1998); and May Seikaly, ''Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918–1939'' (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). [[#ch01.html#note36|5]]. These developments are explored in detail in R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity''. See also Muhammad Muslih, ''The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Ami Ayalon, ''Reading Palestine''. [[#ch01.html#note37|6]]. An abundance of scholarship now shows the high degree of integration of the ''mizrahi'' and Sephardic communities within Palestinian society, in spite of occasional friction, and anti-Semitism often spread by European Christian missionaries. See Menachem Klein, ''Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron'' (London: Hurst, 2015); Gershon Shafir, ''Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Zachary Lockman, ''Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948'' (Oakland: University of California, 1996); Abigail Jacobson, ''From Empire to Empire''. See also Gabriel Piterberg, “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 44, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 17–38. [[#ch01.html#note38|7]]. The best brief refutation of what was once a widespread paradigm of the “decline” of Middle Eastern societies is Roger Owen, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century—An ‘Islamic’ Society in Decline? A Critique of Gibb and Bowen’s ''Islamic Society and the West'',” ''Bulletin'' (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 3, no. 2 (1976): 110–17. [[#ch01.html#note39|8]]. To cite the realm of demography alone, Justin McCarthy’s ''The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), is an example of work based mainly on Ottoman archival sources for the pre-1918 period, and which puts paid to the myths of the emptiness and barrenness of Palestine before the “miraculous” effects of Zionist colonization began to be felt. [[#ch01.html#note40|9]]. Among the most important works on these transformations in Palestine are Alexander Schölch, ''Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development'', trans. William C. Young and Michael C. Gerrity (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993); Beshara Doumani, ''Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 1995); and Owen, ''Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the 19th and 20th Centuries''. [[#ch01.html#note41|10]]. Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, “The Famine of 1915–1918 in Greater Syria,” in ''Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective'', ed. John Spagnolo (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1912), 234–54. For the lasting traumatic impact of the horrific suffering the population endured during the war, see Samuel Dolbee, “Seferberlik and Bare Feet: Rural Hardship, Citied Dreams, and Social Belonging in 1920s Syria,” ''Jerusalem Quarterly'', no. 51 (Autumn 2012), 21–35. [[#ch01.html#note42|11]]. Perhaps 1.5 million Armenians perished in the genocide that started in April 1915. Even without including those victims, the 1.5 million other Ottoman wartime deaths as a proportion of total population were nearly double the next-highest tolls, those of France and Germany, at 4.4 percent and 4.3 percent of total population, respectively. Other figures put the total wartime Ottoman death toll as high as five million, or around 25 percent of the population. [[#ch01.html#note43|12]]. These figures are from Edward Erikson, ''Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in World War I'' (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 211. See also Hikmet Ozdemir, ''The Ottoman Army, 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield'' (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008); Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, ''The First World War in the Middle East'' (London: Hurst, 2014); and Yigit Akin, ''When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire'' (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). [[#ch01.html#note44|13]]. McCarthy, ''The Population of Palestine'', 25–27. By way of contrast, McCarthy points out that in spite of its grave war casualties, only 1 percent of the French population was lost during the First World War, during which England and Germany “suffered no loss of total population.” [[#ch01.html#note45|14]]. ‘Anbara Salam Khalidi, ''Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist: The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi'' (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 68–69. [[#ch01.html#note46|15]]. Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat: Mudhakkirat Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi'' [The Era of hypocrisy (literally: niceties) has ended: The memoirs of Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi] (Amman: Dar al-Shuruq, 2014), 1:75. [[#ch01.html#note47|16]]. The impact on my aunt of the execution of her fiancé is described in ''Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist'', 63–67. ‘Abd al-Ghani al-’Uraysi was coeditor of the influential Beirut newspaper ''al-Mufid'' and a prominent Arabist intellectual. ‘Anbara Salam Khalidi’s reminiscences and her memoir were among the primary sources for an article I wrote about him and his newspaper: “‘Abd al-Ghani al-’Uraisi and ''al-Mufid'': The Press and Arab Nationalism Before 1914,” in ''Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939'', ed. Marwan Buheiri (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1981), 38–61. [[#ch01.html#note48|17]]. Interviews, Walid Khalidi, Cambridge, MA, October 12, 2014, and November 19, 2016. My first cousin Walid, born in 1925, heard the story of the family’s wartime displacement when he was young from our grandfather. Some details are confirmed by the memoirs of our uncle, Husayn Fakhri al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', 1:75. [[#ch01.html#note49|18]]. Interview with Fatima al-Khalidi Salam, Beirut, March 20, 1981. [[#ch01.html#note50|19]]. ‘Arif Shehadeh (best known as ‘Arif al-‘Arif) is one of three soldiers from Palestine whose harrowing World War I memoirs are drawn on by Salim Tamari in ''Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011). [[#ch01.html#note51|20]]. See Raja Shehadeh’s imaginative narration of the odyssey of his great-great uncle, Najib Nassar: ''A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle'' (New York: OR Books, 2011). See also the novel by Nassar, which recounts his adventures in semifictional and semiautobiographical form: ''Riwayat Muflih al-Ghassani'' [The story of Muflih al-Ghassani] (Nazareth: Dar al-Sawt, 1981). [[#ch01.html#note52|21]]. See Noha Tadros Khalaf, ''Les Mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa: Journaliste et intellectuel palestinien (1878–1950)'' (Paris: Karthala, 2009), 159–75. [[#ch01.html#note53|22]]. For British motivations, see Jonathan Schneer, ''The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict'' (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Henry Laurens, ''La question de Palestine'', vol. 1, ''1799–1922: L’invention de la Terre sainte'' (Paris: Fayard, 1999); and James Renton, ''The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914–1918'' (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007). See also A. L. Tibawi, ''Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914–1921'' (London: Luzac, 1977), 196–239; Leonard Stein, ''The Balfour Declaration'' (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1961); and Mayir Vereté, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers,” ''Middle Eastern Studies'' 6 (1970): 416–42. [[#ch01.html#note54|23]]. This is a central argument of my book ''British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914: A Study of the Antecedents of the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration'', St. Antony’s College Middle East Monographs (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1980). [[#ch01.html#note55|24]]. The statement of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar for Foreign Affairs, after he had opened up the Tsarist diplomatic archives and revealed these secret wartime Anglo-French-Russian arrangements on this occasion, is reproduced in ''Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917–1924'', ed. Jane Degras, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951). [[#ch01.html#note56|25]]. Reported in Yehuda Reinharz’s monumental biography, ''Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 356–57. [[#ch01.html#note57|26]]. Ronald Storrs, ''Orientations'' (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1937). The memoirs of Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, mention the strict control the British exercised over the press and over all forms of Arab political activity in Palestine: 327ff. Storrs had served as censor of the local press in his previous post, as Oriental secretary to the British high commissioner in Egypt. [[#ch01.html#note58|27]]. ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali, ''Watha’iq al-muqawama al-filistiniyya al-‘arabiyya did al-ihtilal al-britani wal-sihyuniyya 1918–1939'' [Documents of the Palestinian Arab resistance to the British occupation and to Zionism, 1918–1939] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968), 1–3. [[#ch01.html#note59|28]]. Special issue of ''Filastin'', May 19, 1914, 1. [[#ch01.html#note60|29]]. For details of these land purchases and the resulting armed clashes, see R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity'', 89–117. See also Shafir, ''Land, Labor, and the Origins of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict''. [[#ch01.html#note61|30]]. For details of this evolution, see R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity'', especially chapter 7, 145–76. [[#ch01.html#note62|31]]. This has been strikingly shown by Margaret Macmillan, ''Paris, 1919: Six Months That Changed the World'' (New York: Random House, 2002). [[#ch01.html#note63|32]]. See Erez Manela, ''The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Manela rightly credits Wilson with a major role in (unintentionally) sparking the nationalist spirit of rebellion against the colonial powers in the immediate aftermath of World War I but does not sufficiently appreciate how large was the Bolshevik contribution to this process. [[#ch01.html#note64|33]]. “Ghuraba’ fi biladina: Ghaflatuna wa yaqthatuhum” [Strangers in our own land: Our drowsiness and their alertness], ''Filastin'', March 5, 1929, 1. [[#ch01.html#note65|34]]. A total of nine autobiographical memoirs and diaries have been published in Arabic by the Institute for Palestine Studies alone since 2005: Muhammad ‘Abd al-Hadi Sharruf, 2017; Mahmud al-Atrash, 2016; al-Maghribi, 2015; Gabby Baramki, 2015; Hanna Naqqara, 2011; Turjuman and Fasih, 2008; Khalil Sakakini, 8 vols., 2005–2010; Rashid Hajj Ibrahim, 2005; Wasif Jawhariyya, 2005. The institute also published the memoir of Reja-i Busailah in English in 2017. Among them, those of Sharruf, a policeman; al-Maghribi, a worker and communist organizer; and Turjuman and Fasih, enlisted men in the Ottoman army in World War I, represent non-elite points of view. See also the important memoirs of a central political figure for the Mandate period, Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, ''Mudhakkirat, 1887–1984'' (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1993). [[#ch01.html#note66|35]]. One of the few works to rely on oral histories of the 1936–39 revolt is Ted Swedenburg, ''Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past'' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). [[#ch01.html#note67|36]]. R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity'', 225, n32 ; and Noha Khalaf, ''Les Mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa'', 58. Khalaf’s book references articles by my grandfather and numerous articles and poems by al-‘Isa that reflect the evolution of the Palestinian sense of identity. [[#ch01.html#note68|37]]. I heard almost identical versions of this and other stories from my aunt Fatima (interview, Beirut, March 20, 1981) and from my wife’s uncle, Raja al-‘Isa, the son of ‘Isa al-‘Isa, who was also a newspaper editor (interview, Amman, July 7, 1996). [[#ch01.html#note69|38]]. R. Khalidi, ''Palestinian Identity'', chapter 6, 119–44, covers the treatment of Zionism in the Arabic press. [[#ch01.html#note70|39]]. Storrs, ''Orientations'', 341. The speech, at a dinner he hosted in honor of Weizmann and the members of the Zionist Commission, was reported by Storrs. Those in attendance included both the mayor and the mufti of Jerusalem, as well as several other leading Palestinian political and religious figures. [[#ch01.html#note71|40]]. Tom Segev, ''One Palestine, Complete'' (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 404. [[#ch01.html#note72|41]]. One of the great ironies of this and many other colonial conquests is that of the five infantry regiments of the French 24th Division that defeated Arab forces at the Battle of Maysalun on July 23, 1920, and the next day occupied Damascus, only one was ethnically French: two were Senegalese, one was Algerian, and one was Moroccan. Employing colonial subjects in such a fashion was a crucial element in European imperial expansion. This divide-and-rule tactic was equally important in colonial projects in Ireland, North America, India, North and South Africa, and Palestine and the rest of the Middle East. [[#ch01.html#note73|42]]. Two excellent recent articles in the ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 46, no. 2 (Winter 2017) deal with this topic: Lauren Banko, “Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality Under the Mandate,” 26–43; and Nadim Bawalsa, “Legislating Exclusion: Palestinian Migrants and Interwar Citizenship,” 44–59. [[#ch01.html#note74|43]]. George Antonius, in ''The Arab Awakening'' (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), was the first to reveal the details of Britain’s wartime pledges to the Arabs, and to publish the documents in which they were embodied. This forced an embarrassed British government to publish the entire correspondence: Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Cmd. 5974, ''Report of a Committee Set Up to Consider Certain Correspondence Between Sir Henry McMahon [His Majesty’s High Commissioner in Egypt] and the Sharif of Mecca in 1915 and 1916'' (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939). [[#ch01.html#note75|44]]. Balfour’s obtaining the senior position of chief secretary for Ireland, second only to the lord lieutenant, was generally ascribed to his family connection with the prime minister, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, whence the popular expression, “Bob’s your uncle.” [[#ch01.html#note76|45]]. E. L. Woodward and R. Butler, eds., ''Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939'', first series, 1919–1929 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), 340–48. [[#ch01.html#note77|46]]. The case of George Antonius was one of many egregious instances in this regard. Trained at Cambridge, and clearly highly qualified, he was constantly passed over for high office in the mandate administration in favor of mediocre British officials: See Susan Boyle, ''Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius'' (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Sahar Huneidi, ''A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism, and the Palestinians'' (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 2. [[#ch01.html#note78|47]]. Stein, ''The Land Question in Palestine'', 210–11. [[#ch01.html#note79|48]]. Zeev Sternhell, ''The Founding Myths of Israel'', 217. According to Sternhell, the ratio of capital inflow to NDP “did not fall below 33 percent in any of the pre–World War II years.” [[#ch01.html#note80|49]]. Population figures can be found in W. Khalidi, ed., ''From Haven to Conquest'', appendix 1, 842–43. [[#ch01.html#note81|50]]. Speech to the English Zionist Federation, September 19, 1919, cited in Nur Masalha, ''Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948'' (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), 41. [[#ch01.html#note82|51]]. Edwin Black, ''The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Agreement Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine'' (New York: Macmillan, 1984). [[#ch01.html#note83|52]]. This is from a passage in his revealing diaries, cited in Shabtai Teveth, ''Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs: From Peace to War'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 166–68. [[#ch01.html#note84|53]]. For details, see R. Khalidi, ''The Iron Cage'', 54–62. The “job interview” is described on pp. 59–60. [[#ch01.html#note85|54]]. How the British did this is the main subject of chapter 2 of ''The Iron Cage'', 31–64. [[#ch01.html#note86|55]]. This figure is based on statistics provided by W. Khalidi, ''From Haven to Conquest'', appendix 4, 846–49. [[#ch01.html#note87|56]]. For details of this repression, see Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” ''English Historical Review'' 124, no. 507 (April 2009), 313–54. [[#ch01.html#note88|57]]. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, ''The Palestinian People: A History'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 119. [[#ch01.html#note89|58]]. For a chilling account of arbitrary summary executions of Palestinians by mixed units of British soldiers and Zionist militiamen under the command of Orde Wingate see Segev, ''One Palestine, Complete'', 429–32. Wingate comes off as a murderous psychopath in Segev’s account; he adds that some of his men privately considered him to be mad. The Israeli Ministry of Defense later said of him: “The teaching of Orde Charles Wingate, his character and leadership were a cornerstone for many of the Haganah’s commanders, and his influence can be seen in the Israel Defense Force’s combat doctrine.” [[#ch01.html#note90|59]]. Segev, ''One Palestine, Complete'', 425–26. Many veterans of the Irish campaign, including former members of the notorious Black and Tans, were recruited into the British security forces in Palestine. See Richard Cahill, “‘Going Berserk’: ‘Black and Tans’ in Palestine,” ''Jerusalem Quarterly'' 38 (Summer 2009), 59–68. [[#ch01.html#note91|60]]. The memoirs of Ernie O’Malley, a senior IRA commander during the Irish War of Independence, ''On Another Man’s Wound'' (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013), offers a detailed picture of the brutal means utilized by the British from 1919 to 1921 in their vain attempt to master the Irish uprising, including the burning of homes, public buildings, creameries, and other vital economic resources in retaliation for attacks on British troops, police, and armed auxiliaries. [[#ch01.html#note92|61]]. H. Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1. The section relating to his exile in the Seychelles is 247ff. [[#ch01.html#note93|62]]. Ibid., vol. 1, 247. [[#ch01.html#note94|63]]. The extent of control exercised by the rebels over large parts of Palestine is assessed in an excellent article by Charles Anderson, “State Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 39–55. [[#ch01.html#note95|64]]. Report by General Sir Robert Haining, August 30, 1938, cited in Anne Lesch, ''Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939: The Frustration of a National Movement'' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 223. [[#ch01.html#note96|65]]. British National Archives, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/282/5, Palestine, 1938, “Allegations against British Troops: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for War,” January 16, 1939, 2. [[#ch01.html#note97|66]]. His exile and the burning of his home are described in Khalaf, ''Les Mémoires de ‘Issa al-‘Issa'', 227–32. [[#ch01.html#note98|67]]. Ibid., 230. [[#ch01.html#note99|68]]. For details on how sweeping the collaboration was between the British and the Zionists during the revolt, see Segev, ''One Palestine, Complete'', 381, 426–32. [[#ch01.html#note100|69]]. British National Archives, Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/283, “Committee on Palestine: Report,” January 30, 1939, 24. [[#ch01.html#note101|70]]. Ibid., 27. [[#ch01.html#note102|71]]. This was the bitter conclusion of Dr. Husayn after the fact, as he reviewed the record of broken British promises in his memoir, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 280. [[#ch01.html#note103|72]]. The cabinet meeting where the British position at the St. James’s Palace Conference was decided is discussed in Boyle, ''Betrayal of Palestine'', 13. [[#ch01.html#note104|73]]. For details of the ways in which the crucial British commitments made in the White Paper were undermined, see R. Khalidi, ''The Iron Cage'', 35–36, 114–15. [[#ch01.html#note105|74]]. H. Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 350–51. [[#ch01.html#note106|75]]. Ibid., 300–305. In her judicious treatment of this topic, see Bayan al-Hout’s masterful ''al-Qiyadat wal-mu’assassat al-siyasiyya fi Filastin 1917–1948'' [Political leaderships and institutions in Palestine, 1917–1948] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1981), 397, which comes to the same conclusion. [[#ch01.html#note107|76]]. Ibid., 352–56. [[#ch01.html#note108|77]]. Ibid., vol. 1, 230ff. This section of the memoir, recounting dealings with the Peel Commission, includes one among many examples Dr. Husayn gives of British bias in favor of the Zionists. [[#ch01.html#note109|78]]. He also wrote a volume of memoirs in English about his Seychelles exile full of critical observations on the British titled ''Exiled from Jerusalem: The Diaries of Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi''. The book is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. [[#ch01.html#note110|79]]. H. Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 110–14. [[#ch01.html#note111|80]]. Ibid., vol. 1, 230. [[#ch01.html#note112|81]]. Cited in Masalha, ''Expulsion of the Palestinians'', 45. [[#ch01.html#note113|82]]. “The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919,” http://www.hri.org/docs/king-crane/syria-recomm.html. [[#ch01.html#note114|83]]. George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose,” ''Tribune'', March 22, 1946, reprinted in ''The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell'', vol. 4, ''In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50'', ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 124. [[#ch01.html#note115|84]]. The official was E. Mills, speaking during his secret testimony to the Peel Commission, cited in Leila Parson, “The Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission: A Preliminary Analysis,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'', 49, no. 1 (Fall 2019). [[#ch01.html#note116|85]]. The best study of how the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission oversaw the Palestine Mandate is Susan Pedersen, ''The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). [[#ch01.html#note117|86]]. The myth that the British were pro-Arab throughout the Mandate period, one cherished by Zionist historiography, is exploded by Segev in ''One Palestine, Complete''. [[#ch01.html#note118|87]]. I addressed this question in more detail in ''The Iron Cage'', 118–23. CHAPTER 2 [[#ch02.html#note119|1]]. https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/07175DE9FA2DE563852568D3006E10F3. [[#ch02.html#note120|2]]. My cousin Leila, who was born in the mid-1920s, related this to me in a personal email on March 18, 2018, recalling that she had to stay up with our grandmother in order to turn on the radio for her. [[#ch02.html#note121|3]]. My father later became treasurer of the institute. At one stage, Habib Katibah was also secretary: Hani Bawardi, ''The Making of Arab-Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship'' (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 239–95. [[#ch02.html#note122|4]]. For details on the institute, see ibid. [[#ch02.html#note123|5]]. An item on the conclusion of my father’s tour can be found in ''Filastin'', January 24, 1948, “Tasrih li-Isma‘il al-Khalidi ba‘d ‘awdatihi li-Amirka,” [Statement by Ismail al-Khalidi after his return to America]. [[#ch02.html#note124|6]]. My grandfather had a total of nine children: seven boys and two girls. My father, born in 1915, was the youngest. [[#ch02.html#note125|7]]. I found a few letters from Dr. Husayn among my father’s papers. My cousin Walid Khalidi reports, in “On Albert Hourani, the Arab Office and the Anglo-American Committee of 1946,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 35, no. 1 (2005–6), 75, that he was also in correspondence with our uncle during his exile, and kept him supplied with books, which Dr. Husayn mentions with gratitude in the forthcoming English-language diaries of his Seychelles exile, ''Exiled from Jerusalem''. [[#ch02.html#note126|8]]. Mustafa Abbasi, “Palestinians Fighting Against Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in the Second World War,” ''War in History'' (November 2017): 1–23, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321371251_Palestinians_fighting_against_Nazis_The_story_of_Palestinian_volunteers_in_the_Second_World_War. [[#ch02.html#note127|9]]. For the text of the Biltmore declaration, see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-biltmore-conference-1942. [[#ch02.html#note128|10]]. Denis Charbit, in ''Retour à Altneuland: La traversée des utopias sionistes'' (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 2018), 17–18, notes that the creation of a Jewish state was always prominently featured in Zionist writings, starting with the very first Zionist utopian projects in the late nineteenth century, and down to that set out by Herzl in his book ''Altneuland''. [[#ch02.html#note129|11]]. Amy Kaplan, ''Our American Israel'', offers the most persuasive and profound examination of how and why this effort was crowned with success. See also Peter Novick’s brilliant ''The Holocaust in American Life'' (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). [[#ch02.html#note130|12]]. H. Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 434–36. [[#ch02.html#note131|13]]. “The Alexandria Protocol,” October 7, 1944, ''Department of State Bulletin'', XVI, 411, May 1947, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/alex.asp. Saudi Arabia and Yemen joined the League in 1945. [[#ch02.html#note132|14]]. W. Khalidi, “On Albert Hourani,” 60–79. [[#ch02.html#note133|15]]. “The Case Against a Jewish State in Palestine: Albert Hourani’s Statement to the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry of 1946,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 35, no. 1 (2005–6), 80–90. [[#ch02.html#note134|16]]. Ibid., 86. [[#ch02.html#note135|17]]. Ibid., 81. [[#ch02.html#note136|18]]. R. Khalidi, ''The Iron Cage'', 41–42, gives examples of such treatment of delegations of Palestinian leaders by Sir Herbert Samuel in 1920, and by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and the colonial secretary, Lord Passfield, in 1930. Samuel told the former group: “I meet with you in a private capacity only.” [[#ch02.html#note137|19]]. O’Malley, ''On Another Man’s Wound'', illustrates amply the complexity of the centralized organization that Irish nationalists developed from 1919 to 1921 during their struggle with the British. [[#ch02.html#note138|20]]. This body is also called the Arab National Treasury by Sayigh. His account from which this section was largely drawn was published in two parts: see part 1, “Desperately Nationalist, Yusif Sayigh, 1944 to 1948,” as told to and edited by Rosemary Sayigh, ''Jerusalem Quarterly'' 28 (2006), 82; Yusuf Sayigh, ''Sira ghayr muktamala'' [An incomplete autobiography] (Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2009), 227–60. A full-length memoir based on these materials, but not including some of the events recounted in this two-part selection, was later edited and published by his wife, the noted anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh: ''Yusif Sayigh: Arab Economist and Palestinian Patriot: A Fractured Life Story'' (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2015). [[#ch02.html#note139|21]]. Half of that sum was intended for land acquisition in Palestine: “100 Colonies Founded: Established in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund,” ''New York Times'', April 17, 1936, https://www.nytimes.com/1936/04/17/archives/100-colonies-founded-established-in-palestine-by-jewish-national.html. By the 1990s, the JNF was raising about $30 million annually in the United States. However, according to an internal investigation in 1996, only about 20 percent of that money actually went to Israel; the rest was apparently spent on administration and on US-based “Israel programming” and “Zionist Education”: Cynthia Mann, “JNF: Seeds of Doubt—Report Says Only Fifth of Donations Go to Israel, but No Fraud Is Found,” October 26, 1996, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ''J.'', http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/4318/jnf-seeds-of-doubt-report-says-only-fifth-of-donations-go-to-israel-but-no-/. [[#ch02.html#note140|22]]. My uncle was exiled first to the Seychelles and then to Beirut. H. al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 418. The British permitted al-‘Alami to return to Palestine when my uncle did in 1943, but they only allowed Jamal al-Husayni, another key leader, to come back from exile in Rhodesia in 1946. Jamal al-Husayni had evaded capture by the British in Jerusalem in 1937, and eventually reached Baghdad. After the British reoccupation of Iraq in 1941, according to his daughter Serene’s memoir, he and his comrades who (unlike the mufti) had “rejected the possibility of going to Germany . . . decided to give themselves up to the British,” and were arrested and held in Iran, and then were moved to Rhodesia: Serene Husseini Shahid, ''Jerusalem Memories'' (Beirut: Naufal Group, 2000), 126–27. [[#ch02.html#note141|23]]. Sayigh, “Desperately Nationalist,” 69–70. [[#ch02.html#note142|24]]. This is clear from his first-person account: “On Albert Hourani, the Arab Office and the Anglo-American Committee of 1946.” [[#ch02.html#note143|25]]. H. al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 432–34. Details of this trip were related to Dr. Husayn by al-‘Alami himself. [[#ch02.html#note144|26]]. H. al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 2, 33–35. This was Col. Ernest Altounyan, a British-Syrian-Armenian surgeon, a decorated veteran of World War I, and a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, whose entry in ''Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons'', http://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/E004837b.htm, notes that during World War II, “His official role of medical officer was an effective cover for activities as an expert adviser on Middle Eastern affairs.” He told Dr. Husayn that he was serving in military intelligence. Interestingly, both were doctors by training, and both were acting at that time in a very different capacity. Dr. Husayn mentions nothing about the colonel’s background, nor in which language they spoke to one another; H. al-Khalidi, ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 1, 431. [[#ch02.html#note145|27]]. Sayigh, “Desperately Nationalist,” 69–70. [[#ch02.html#note146|28]]. Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables,” in ''Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century'', ed. William Polk and Richard Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 41–68. In writing about the “notables,” Hourani knew whereof he spoke, as his teaching in Beirut, his war work for Britain in Cairo, and his efforts with the Arab Office in Jerusalem brought him into close contact with many examples of this group over nearly a decade. [[#ch02.html#note147|29]]. In ''‘Ibrat Filastin'' [The lesson of Palestine] (Beirut: Dar al-Kashaf, 1949), Musa al-‘Alami does suggest that implementation of the Fertile Crescent scheme would be a suitable response to the loss of Palestine, which Dr. Husayn takes as an explanation for the Iraqi government’s support for al-‘Alami: ''Mada ‘ahd al-mujamalat'', vol. 2, 30. [[#ch02.html#note148|30]]. Avi Shlaim, ''Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), examines these negotiations in detail. [[#ch02.html#note149|31]]. Walid Khalidi has recounted how he discovered this palace “back-door” on a visit to Amman in the early 1950s: personal communication with the author, January 16, 2016. Sometimes British “advice” was rendered via intermediaries, such as members of the royal family. [[#ch02.html#note150|32]]. For Roosevelt’s letter confirming these pledges, dated April 5, 1945, see United States Department of State, ''Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers'' [hereafter ''FRUS'']'', 1945. The Near East and Africa'', vol. 8 (1945), http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decad161.asp. It reaffirmed the US government’s commitment regarding Palestine “that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews,” adding that the president “would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.” For details, see R. Khalidi, ''Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 20–25. [[#ch02.html#note151|33]]. Again, the basic reference is the extensive work on this topic of Walid Khalidi, notably his pioneering article “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” republished in the ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 4–33. The article originally appeared in ''Middle East Forum'' in 1961. Other historians have since confirmed most of his basic findings, even those who disagree with him on some points like Benny Morris, ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Simha Flapan, ''The Birth of Israel: Myth and Reality'' (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Tom Segev, ''1949: The First Israelis'', 2nd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1998); and Ilan Pappe, ''The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine'', 2nd ed. (London: Oneworld, 2007). [[#ch02.html#note152|34]]. “Desperately Nationalist,” 82. Sayigh’s memoirs include a much fuller account of his experiences in this period. See Yusuf Sayigh, ''Sira ghayr muktamala'', 227–60. [[#ch02.html#note153|35]]. Walid Khalidi, ''Dayr Yasin: al-Jum’a, 9/4/1948'' [Dayr Yasin: Friday, 9/4/1948] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1999), table, 127. [[#ch02.html#note154|36]]. Nir Hasson, “A Fight to the Death and Betrayal by the Arab World,” ''Haaretz'', January 5, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-most-disastrous-24-hours-in-palestinian-history-1.5729436. [[#ch02.html#note155|37]]. The best account of the Arab states’ decision to enter Palestine can be found in Walid Khalidi, “The Arab Perspective,” in ''The End of the Palestine Mandate'', ed. W. R. Louis and Robert Stookey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 104–36. [[#ch02.html#note156|38]]. The fate of these villages is described in detail in Walid Khalidi, ed., ''All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948'' (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). [[#ch02.html#note157|39]]. The ruined house is the subject of a sixty-two-page architectural paper in Hebrew that shows phases of its evolution over time and provides images of its current state. The house was not destroyed, as were most other Arab houses in the area that became Israel in 1948, because of its revered place in Zionist history. Before my grandfather purchased it, a group of early Zionist immigrants under the leadership of Israel Belkind and his brother Shimshon, a group known as the Bilu’im, rented rooms in the house for a few months in 1882 before they went on to found Rishon LeZion, the second Zionist agricultural colony in Palestine. The building is now called the Bilu’im House. I am grateful to Dr. Nili Belkind, grand-niece of Israel Belkind, for this information, and for directing me to the essay by Lihi Davidovich and Tamir Lavi, titled “Tik Ti‘ud: Bet Antun Ayub-Bet Ha-Bilu’im” [Documentation File: The Anton Ayyub House-House of the Bilu’im], 2005/2006, which can be found on the website of the School of Architecture at Tel Aviv University: http://www.batei-beer.com/aboutus.html. [[#ch02.html#note158|40]]. One of the best accounts of this transformation can be found in Tom Segev, ''1949: The First Israelis'' (New York: The Free Press, 1986). See also Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ''The Transformation of Palestine'' (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). [[#ch02.html#note159|41]]. This is the title of a chapter in Avi Shlaim, ''The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921–1951'' (London: Oxford University Press), 18, which is an abridged paperback edition of ''Collusion Across the Jordan''. [[#ch02.html#note160|42]]. Mary Wilson lays out precisely how the British and ‘Abdullah planned to do this: ''King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 166–67ff. [[#ch02.html#note161|43]]. Shlaim, ''Collusion Across the Jordan'', 139. Shlaim explains in detail the elements of this complex collusion against the Palestinians. [[#ch02.html#note162|44]]. The first to explode this myth were Israeli authors, including Flapan, ''The Birth of Israel''; Tom Segev, ''1949: The First Israelis''; and Avi Shlaim, ''The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World'', who were described as “new” or “revisionist historians” because they challenged the encrusted received version of the founding of the Jewish state. [[#ch02.html#note163|45]]. Avi Shlaim, ''Collusion Across the Jordan'' is indispensable for understanding how this happened. See also Mary Wilson, ''King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan''. [[#ch02.html#note164|46]]. Eli Barnavi, “Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe,” in Eli Barnavi, ed., ''A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People from the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present'' (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-immigration-from-eastern-europe/. [[#ch02.html#note165|47]]. There is a voluminous literature on the topic of the Truman administration and Palestine. A quite comprehensive recent account is John Judis, ''Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict'' (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). See also the authoritative biography: David McCullough, ''Truman'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). [[#ch02.html#note166|48]]. Col. William Eddy, ''FDR Meets Ibn Saud'' (Washington, DC: America-Mideast Educational and Training Services, 1954; repr., Vista, CA: Selwa Press, 2005), 31. [[#ch02.html#note167|49]]. Irene L. Gendzier, ''Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Power in the Middle East'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). [[#ch02.html#note168|50]]. Secretary of State to Legation, Jedda, August 17, 1948, ''FRUS'' 1948, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1318. [[#ch02.html#note169|51]]. For more on the Saudi-American relationship at this time, see R. Khalidi, ''Brokers of Deceit'', 20–25. [[#ch02.html#note170|52]]. From 1949 until 1971, total US economic and military aid to Israel topped $100 million only four times. Since 1974, it has been in the billions annually. [[#ch02.html#note171|53]]. Between 1953 and 1974, the Security Council passed at least twenty-three resolutions to “condemn,” “deplore,” or “censure” Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and the Occupied Territories. [[#ch02.html#note172|54]]. A typical and early example of criticisms of Arab performance was Constantin Zureiq’s 1948 book, ''The Meaning of the Catastrophe.'' For details, see p. 113. [[#ch02.html#note173|55]]. The poem is reproduced in Ya’qub ‘Awadat, ''Min a‘lam al-fikr wal-adab fi Filastin'' [Leading literary and intellectual figures in Palestine], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Dar ''al-Isra''’, 1992). The phrase “little kings,” besides its general derogatory implication, is probably a reference to King ‘Abdullah’s short stature in particular. [[#ch02.html#note174|56]]. In the words of the JNF website, “land which had been purchased for Jewish settlement belonged to the Jewish people as a whole,” https://www.jnf.org/menu-3/our-history#. [[#ch02.html#note175|57]]. Leena Dallasheh, “Persevering Through Colonial Transition: Nazareth’s Palestinian Residents After 1948,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 45, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 8–23. [[#ch02.html#note176|58]]. A memoir by one of the most senior Arab officers of the Arab Legion, Colonel Abdullah al-Tal, published in 1959, revealed details of these clandestine relations, later examined by Avi Shlaim in detail in ''Collusion Across the Jordan'': ‘Abdullah al-Tal, ''Karithat Filastin: Mudhakkirat ‘Abdullah al-Tal, qa’id ma‘rakat al-Quds'' [The Palestine disaster: The memoirs of ‘Abdullah al-Tal, commander in the battle for Jerusalem] (Cairo: Dar al-Qalam, 1959). [[#ch02.html#note177|59]]. A detailed contemporary account of the incident and its aftermath can be found in “Assassination of King Abdullah,” ''The Manchester Guardian'', July 21, 1951, http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1951/jul/21/fromthearchive. [[#ch02.html#note178|60]]. Kanafani’s 1962 novel has been translated by Hilary Kirkpatrick: ''Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories'' (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999). [[#ch02.html#note179|61]]. Gamal Abdel Nasser, ''Philosophy of the Revolution'' (New York: Smith, Keynes and Marshall, 1959), 28. [[#ch02.html#note180|62]]. Benny Morris, ''Israel’s Border Wars: 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). [[#ch02.html#note181|63]]. From 1953 to1968, when my father worked in the Political and Security Council Affairs division (now the Division of Political Affairs), Israel was condemned or censured nine times by the council for its actions. [[#ch02.html#note182|64]]. This is confirmed by memoirs by military officers who served as UN observers of the armistice agreements, including E. H. Hutchinson, ''Violent Truce: Arab-Israeli Conflict 1951–1955'' (New York: Devin-Adair, 1956); Lieutenant General E. L. M. Burns, ''Between Arab and Israeli'' (London: Harrap, 1962); and Major General Carl Von Horn, ''Soldiering for Peace'' (New York: D. McKay, 1967). [[#ch02.html#note183|65]]. On this episode, see Muhammad Khalid Az‘ar, ''Hukumat ‘Umum Filastin fi dhikraha al-khamsin'' [The All-Palestine government on its 50th anniversary] (Cairo: n.p., 1998). [[#ch02.html#note184|66]]. For the condescending and almost contemptuous view that British diplomats took of the sole episode to this day of Jordanian democracy, see R. Khalidi, “Perceptions and Reality: The Arab World and the West,” in ''A Revolutionary Year: The Middle East in 1958'', ed. Wm. Roger Louis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 197–99. When my uncle’s government was dismissed by the young King Husayn in May 1957, the formidable Queen Mother, Zayn, helped the British ambassador to browbeat Jordanian politicians into accepting the formation of a “civilian” government that would serve as a cover for the military rule that Britain and the Hashemites desired, and that was ultimately established. The ambassador’s description of that meeting at the royal palace is worthy of Evelyn Waugh: “The Ministers had been reluctant to assume the responsibilities of office, and had asked the King why a military Government could not be formed. . . . The Queen Mother . . . pointed out forcibly that a military Government would make any other form of Government unnecessary. Finally Her Majesty told the Minister’s designate that they would not be allowed to leave the Palace until they had taken the oath of office, and it was on this not altogether encouraging basis that the new Government was eventually formed”: UK Public Records Office, Ambassador Charles Johnston to Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, no. 31, May 29, 1957, F.O. 371/127880. [[#ch02.html#note185|67]]. The best work on this topic is Salim Yaqub, ''Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East'' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). [[#ch02.html#note186|68]]. This was first shown by Avi Shlaim in a pioneering article, “Conflicting Approaches to Israel’s Relations with the Arabs: Ben Gurion and Sharett, 1953–1956,” ''Middle East Journal'' 37, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 180–201. [[#ch02.html#note187|69]]. These accounts can be found in Abu Iyad with Eric Rouleau, ''My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle'' (New York, Times Books, 1981); and Alan Hart, ''Arafat: A Political Biography'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). [[#ch02.html#note188|70]]. See the eyewitness account of the immediate aftermath of the attack by the American naval officer who was in charge of the United Nations Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) that investigated the attack: E. H. Hutchinson, ''Violent Truce''. [[#ch02.html#note189|71]]. UN Security Council Resolution 101 of November 24, 1953. [[#ch02.html#note190|72]]. My cousin Munzer Thabit Khalidi, who was drafted into the Jordanian army and served as an officer in a border area of the West Bank during the 1950s, related to me in 1960 that these were the orders he was given for the troops under his command. For further details on efforts by Jordan’s Arab Legion to stop Palestinian infiltration in this period, see the memoir of its commander, John Bagot Glubb, ''Soldier with the Arabs'' (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1957). The extent of these efforts is confirmed by the account of the chairman of the UN Mixed Armistice Commission, Commander E. H. Hutchinson, ''Violent Truce''. [[#ch02.html#note191|73]]. This is clear from the extracts from Sharett’s diaries in Livia Rokach, ''Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents'' (Belmont, MA: Arab American University Graduates, 1985). [[#ch02.html#note192|74]]. This is attested by Mordechai Bar On, who was a member of the Israeli General Staff at the time: ''The Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Suez and Back, 1955–57'' (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 72–75. See also Benny Morris, ''Israel’s Border Wars''. [[#ch02.html#note193|75]]. Avi Shlaim, “Conflicting Approaches.” [[#ch02.html#note194|76]]. An authoritative account of these events is the memoir of the Canadian officer Lt. Gen. Burns, who commanded the UN Truce Supervisory Organization on the Egyptian-Israeli armistice line between 1954 and 1956: ''Between Arab and Israeli''. See also Shlaim, “Conflicting Approaches.” [[#ch02.html#note195|77]]. Matthew Connelly, ''A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origin of the Post-Cold War Era'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). [[#ch02.html#note196|78]]. There is a vast literature on the 1956 Suez war. For a good collection of essays on the topic see ''Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences'', ed. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). See also Benny Morris, ''Israel’s Border Wars''. [[#ch02.html#note197|79]]. “Special Report of the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” A/3212/Add.1 of December 15, 1956, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/6558F61D3DB6BD4505256593006B06BE. [[#ch02.html#note198|80]]. These massacres were the subject of a debate in the Knesset in November 1956 in which the phrase “mass murder” was used. For a detailed account by an Israeli soldier who was a witness to the slaughter, see Marek Gefen, “The Strip is Taken,” ''Al-Hamishmar'', April 27, 1982. These massacres are the main focus of Joe Sacco, ''Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel'' (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). [[#ch02.html#note199|81]]. El-Farra later spoke about this in a United Nations oral history: http://www.unmultimedia.org/oralhistory/2013/01/el-farra-muhammad/. [[#ch02.html#note200|82]]. In the second edition of his book, ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', Benny Morris lists twenty such massacres. [[#ch02.html#note201|83]]. Jean-Pierre Filiu, ''Gaza: A History'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). CHAPTER 3 [[#ch03.html#note202|1]]. ''Le dimanche de Bouvines: 27 juillet 1214'' (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 10. The original quote in French is: “Je tachai de voir comment un événement se fait et se défait puisque, en fin de compte, il n’existe que par ce qu’on en dit, puisqu’il est à proprement parler fabriqué par ceux qui en répandent la renommée.” [[#ch03.html#note203|2]]. Lyndon Johnson, ''The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency'' (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 293. [[#ch03.html#note204|3]]. The US military and CIA estimated that Israel would handily defeat all the Arab armies combined, even if the latter attacked first. See US Department of State, ''Foreign Relations, 1964–1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967'' [hereafter Foreign Relations, 1967], https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/28054.htm. At a meeting with President Johnson and his top aides on May 26, 1967, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earl Wheeler, stated: “The UAR’s dispositions are defensive and do not look as if they are preparatory to an invasion of Israel. . . . He concluded, however, that Israel should be able to resist or undertake [''sic''] aggression and that in the long term Israel would prevail. . . . He believed that the Israelis would win air superiority. The UAR would lose a lot of aircraft. Israel’s military philosophy is to gain tactical surprise by striking airfields first” (“Memorandum for the Record,” Document 72). The CIA had the same view: “Intelligence Memorandum prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency” stated: “Israel could almost certainly attain air superiority over the Sinai Peninsula in 24 hours after taking the initiative or in two or three days if the UAR struck first. . . . We estimate that armored striking forces could breach the UAR’s double defense line in the Sinai within several days” (Document 76). The notions that Israel was weaker than the Arabs and was on the brink of annihilation have nevertheless become among the hardiest falsehoods about the conflict. [[#ch03.html#note205|4]]. The generals—four of them major generals in 1967—were Ezer Weizman (air force commander in 1967 and later president of Israel, and a nephew of Chaim Weizmann), Chaim Herzog (chief of military intelligence until 1962 and also later president of Israel), Haim Bar Lev (deputy chief of staff in 1967 and later chief of staff), Matitiyahu Peled (a member of the General Staff in 1967), and Yeshiyahu Gavish (head of the Southern Command in 1967): Amnon Kapeliouk, “Israël était-il réellement menacé d’extermination?” ''Le Monde'', June 3, 1972. See also Joseph Ryan, “The Myth of Annihilation and the Six-Day War,” ''Worldview'', September 1973, 38–42, which summarizes the “war of the generals” waged against this particular untruth: https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v16_i009_a009.pdf. [[#ch03.html#note206|5]]. It has been falsely claimed that Egypt was about to launch a surprise air attack on Israeli air bases on May 27, 1967, and was dissuaded only by the efforts of the United States and USSR: see William Quandt, ''Peace Process'' (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993), 512n38. The Israeli military apparently believed in this possibility, but while there was such an Egyptian contingency plan codenamed Fajr (Dawn), it was never seriously considered by Egypt’s leaders, who were intensely discouraged from attacking by both the United States and USSR: see Avi Shlaim, “Israel: Poor Little Samson,” in ''The 1967 Arab-Israeli War'', ed. Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 30. A high-level Egyptian delegation was in Moscow at this time, and their Soviet interlocutors, including Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, defense minister Andrei Grechko, and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, all strongly advised restraint on the Egyptians: for details based on an interview with the Egyptian defense minister, Shams Badran, the accounts of several other participants, and the minutes of the meetings, see Hassan Elbahtimy, “Did the Soviet Union Deliberately Instigate the 1967 War?” Wilson Center History and Public Policy blog (his conclusion in response to the question in his title is: no), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/did-the-soviet-union-deliberately-instigate-the-1967-war-the-middle-east. For a fuller exposition of the sources and his conclusions, see Hassan Elbahtimy, “Allies at Arm’s Length: Redefining Soviet Egyptian Relations in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War,” ''Journal of Strategic Studies (''February 2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1438893. See also Hassan Elbahtimy, “Missing the Mark: Dimona and Egypt’s Slide into the 1967 Arab-Israeli War,” ''Nonproliferation Review'' 25, nos. 5–6 (2018): 385–97, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10736700.2018.1559482. [[#ch03.html#note207|6]]. One of the first and perhaps the most influential of those who originally spread this myth was Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban. In one of his famous bon mots, he told the Security Council on June 8, 1967, that while many doubted Israel’s “prospect of security and survival . . . The fact is that we turned out to be less cooperative than some might have hoped with the plan for our extinction.” United Nations Security Council Official Records, 1351 Meeting, June 8, 1967, S/PV.1351. For more details on the rebuttal of this myth and its endurance, see Joseph Ryan, “The Myth of Annihilation and the Six-Day War,” 38–42. [[#ch03.html#note208|7]]. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo invoked the myth of Israel being on the brink of extermination in 1967 to justify the Trump administration’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying, “This is an incredible, unique situation. Israel was fighting a defensive battle to save its nation, and it cannot be the case that a U.N. resolution is a suicide pact.” David Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner, “Netanyahu Says Golan Heights Move ‘Proves You Can’ Keep Occupied Territory,” ''New York Times'', March 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/world/middleeast/golan-heights-israel-netanyahu.html. [[#ch03.html#note209|8]]. For a summary of these issues, see Elbahtimy “Allies at Arm’s Length,” and Eugene Rogan and Tewfik Aclimandos, “The Yemen War and Egypt’s War Preparedness,” in ''The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences'', ed. W. Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Jesse Ferris, ''Nasser’s Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). [[#ch03.html#note210|9]]. Michael Oren, ''Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), notes that the surprise air attacks were “long planned” (p. 202), and that a range of long-standing contingency plans existed for attacking and occupying the Syrian Golan Heights (p. 154), the West Bank and East Jerusalem (p. 155), and the Sinai Peninsula (p. 153). [[#ch03.html#note211|10]]. Times have changed at the UN: this division is now called Political Affairs and is usually headed by an American. [[#ch03.html#note212|11]]. My father can be seen briefly rising in the last row around the council table just as the resolution is passed (presumably to confirm the vote count) in a Universal Newsreel clip on the June 9 cease-fire vote, which is embedded in the Wikipedia article on the June war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War. [[#ch03.html#note213|12]]. United Nations Security Council Official Records, 1352nd Meeting, June 9, 1967, S/PV.1352. [[#ch03.html#note214|13]]. See Itamar Rabinovich, ''The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Shlaim, ''The Iron Wall''. [[#ch03.html#note215|14]]. France had secretly provided the necessary technology for Israel’s nuclear weapons, while the Israeli government systematically deceived the Americans about the nature of their nuclear program. For a 1987 Department of Defense report that was declassified by court order in 2015 touching on the technical level of Israel’s nuclear weapons development, see: http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/02/12/nuc%20report.pdf. For the best description of Israel’s deception of the United States regarding its nuclear program, see Avner Cohen, ''Israel and the Bomb'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See also Cohen’s work on Israeli nuclear weapons with the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. [[#ch03.html#note216|15]]. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Archive, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-135-001.aspx. In his letter, the future president predicted nine years ahead of the event that the partition of Palestine would eventually be the outcome of the conflict. [[#ch03.html#note217|16]]. Fortas’s biographer, Laura Kalman, described him as a “Jew who cared more about Israel than Judaism” in ''Abe Fortas: A Biography'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). [[#ch03.html#note218|17]]. References on Bundy et al. can be found in: https://moderate.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/lyndon-johnson-was-first-to-align-us-policy-with-israel%E2%80%99s-policies/. [[#ch03.html#note219|18]]. Feinberg was president of the American Bank and Trust Company and a substantial contributor to the Democratic Party. Krim was president of United Artists and chairman of the Democratic National Party Finance Committee. [[#ch03.html#note220|19]]. On Mathilde Krim see Deirdre Carmody, “Painful Political Lessons for AIDS Crusader,” ''New York Times'', January 30, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/30/nyregion/painful-political-lesson-for-aids-crusader.html; Philip Weiss, “The Not-so-Secret Life of Mathilde Krim,” Mondoweiss, January 26, 2018, http://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/secret-life-mathilde; and the account of Grace Halsell, who worked in the White House as a staff writer for the president in 1967, “How LBJ’s Vietnam War Paralyzed His Mideast Policymakers,” ''Washington Report on Middle East Affairs'', June 1993, 20, http://www.wrmea.org/1993-june/how-lbj-s-vietnam-war-paralyzed-his-mideast-policymakers.html. [[#ch03.html#note221|20]]. The official US record of the meeting is in ''Foreign Relations'', 1967, Document 124, “Memorandum for the Record, June 1, 1967, Conversation between Major General Meir Amit and Secretary McNamara,” https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xix/28055.htm. For Amit’s account, see Richard Parker, ed., ''The Six-Day War: A Retrospective'' (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 139. The US account is vaguer than that of Amit, noting only that the general said that “he feels extreme measures are needed quickly,” and that McNamara “asked Gen. Amit how many casualties he thought he would incur in an attack in the Sinai,” and promised him that he would “convey Amit’s views to the president.” Although the official US documents and accounts of this meeting by Amit and others have long been available, the manifestly false view that the United States did not give Israel a green light to attack persists. See, e.g., Michael Oren’s detailed but flawed ''Six Days of War'', 146–47. Much better on this (and nearly every other) aspect of the 1967 war are Tom Segev, ''1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East'' (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), 329–34; and Guy Laron, ''The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 278–80, 283–84. [[#ch03.html#note222|21]]. Oren, ''Six Days of War'', 153–55, 202. [[#ch03.html#note223|22]]. I was present at this meeting, to which my father had brought me. El-Farra later spoke on the record about this American collusion with Israel in an oral history: http://www.unmultimedia.org/oralhistory/2013/01/el-farra-muhammad/. [[#ch03.html#note224|23]]. United Nations Security Council Official Records, 1382nd Meeting, November 22, 1967, S/PV.1382, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/db942872b9eae454852560f6005a76fb/9f5f09a80bb6878b0525672300565063?OpenDocument. [[#ch03.html#note225|24]]. ''Sunday Times'', June 15, 1969. [[#ch03.html#note226|25]]. This was during a volatile phase of the Lebanese civil war. Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS 1969–1976'', XXVI, ''Arab-Israeli Dispute'', “Memorandum of Conversation,” March 24, 1976 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2012), 967. [[#ch03.html#note227|26]]. According to a 2018 poll by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, for every single year since 2011, over 84 percent of those polled in eleven Arab countries opposed recognition of Israel, with the main reason given for this opposition being its occupation of Palestinian lands. From 2017 to 2018, 87 percent were against recognition, with only 8 percent in favor. Three-quarters of respondents in that year considered Palestine an Arab cause, while 82 percent considered Israel the main foreign threat to the region. Negative attitudes toward US policy have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 79 percent from 2017 to 2018: Arab Opinion Index, 2017–2018: Main Results in Brief (Washington, DC: Arab Center, 2018), file:///C:/Users/rik2101/Downloads/Arab%20Opinion%20Index-2017-2018.pdf. [[#ch03.html#note228|27]]. As early as 1977, the United States made efforts to convince the PLO to accept SC 242 via the medium of indirect contacts with the organization. See Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS'', 1977–1980, vol. VIII, Arab-Israeli Dispute, January 1977–August 1978, “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Lebanon,” Washington, DC, August 17, 1977, 477, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v08/d93. [[#ch03.html#note229|28]]. Ahmad Samih Khalidi, “Ripples of the 1967 War,” ''Cairo Review of Global Affairs'' 20 (2017), 8. [[#ch03.html#note230|29]]. The Arabic title is ''al-Waqa’i‘ al-ghariba fi ikhtifa’ Sa‘id abi Nahs, al-mutasha’il''. The book was first published in Haifa in 1974, was immediately republished in Beirut, has been widely available ever since, and was later adapted for the stage as a popular one-man show by the leading Palestinian actor Muhammad Bakri, whom I saw perform it at the al-Qasaba theater in Jerusalem in the 1990s. [[#ch03.html#note231|30]]. For the best treatment of Kanafani’s writings, see the sections on him in Bashir Abu Manneh, ''The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 71–95; and Barbara Harlow, ''After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing'' (Chicago: Haymarket, 1996). Kanafani’s work has been translated into English by Barbara Harlow, Hilary Kilpatrick, and May Jayyusi, among others. [[#ch03.html#note232|31]]. Notably ''al-Adab al-filastini al-muqawim tahta al-ihtilal, 1948–1968'' [Palestinian resistance literature under occupation, 1948–1968], 3rd ed. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2012). [[#ch03.html#note233|32]]. The Israeli security services do not normally claim such assassinations. However, according to a seven-hundred-page book based on interviews with hundreds of senior intelligence officials and ample documentation by Ronen Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations'' (New York: Random House, 2018), 656fn, Kanafani was murdered by the Mossad. Crammed with details, Bergman’s book is an authoritative account by someone closely connected to the intelligence milieu of Israel’s liquidation of hundreds of Palestinian leaders and militants over several generations. It is severely marred by its tone of breathless admiration for those who planned and carried out these killings, and its acceptance of the unreflective, eliminationist zero-sum logic that is apparent from its title, taken from the Talmudic injunction, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” The title is telling: it suggests that Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian leaders are justified because they would have killed Israelis were it not for these “targeted assassinations.” For a critical but appreciative assessment of the book, see the review essay by Paul Aaron, “How Israel Assassinates Its ‘Enemies’: Ronen Bergman Counts the Ways,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 47, no. 3 (Spring 2018), 103–5. [[#ch03.html#note234|33]]. The best study of MAN is Walid Kazziha, ''Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and His Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism'' (London: Charles Knight, 1975). [[#ch03.html#note235|34]]. For more details, see the memoirs of Amjad Ghanma, ''Jam‘iyat al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa: Nash’atuha wa-nashatatuha'' [The ‘Urwa al-Wuthqa Society: Its origins and its activities] (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2002). He reproduces, on page 124, a photo of the “Administrative Committee” of the group in 1937–38 including my father, with Zureiq and the AUB president, Bayard Dodge, sitting in the front row. The name of the group echoes that of the famous pan-Islamic nationalist publication produced in Paris by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abdu in the early 1880s, which took its name from a Quranic phrase, 2:256. [[#ch03.html#note236|35]]. ''Ma‘na al-nakba'' [The meaning of the catastrophe] (Beirut: Dar al-‘Ilm lil-Milayin, 1948). This short work has been republished repeatedly, most recently in 2009 by the Institute for Palestine Studies, together with other early writings drawing on the lessons of the 1948 defeat by Musa al-‘Alami (‘''Ibrat Filastin'' [The lesson of Palestine]), Qadri Touqan (''Ba‘d al-nakba'' [After the catastrophe]), and George Hanna (''Tariq al-khalas'' [The path to salvation]). [[#ch03.html#note237|36]]. See my article, “The 1967 War and the Demise of Arab Nationalism: Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” in ''The 1967 Arab-Israeli War'', ed. Louis and Shlaim, 264–84, for a discussion of how the 1967 defeat affected Arab nationalism and the reviving Palestinian national movement. [[#ch03.html#note238|37]]. The standard work on the Palestinian resistance movement is Yezid Sayigh, ''Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Two excellent general histories of the conflict are Charles D. Smith, ''Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents'', 9th ed. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016); and James Gelvin, ''The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War'', 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, ''Palestinians: The Making of a People'' (New York: The Free Press, 1993); and William Quandt, Fuad Jabber, and Ann Lesch, ''The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 1973). [[#ch03.html#note239|38]]. An excellent study of this topic is Paul Chamberlin, ''The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order'' (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). [[#ch03.html#note240|39]]. For the most sophisticated analysis of how Israel managed to establish its discursive hegemony in the United States, see Kaplan, ''Our American Israel'', and Novick, ''The Holocaust in American Life''. [[#ch03.html#note241|40]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 162–74, gives a detailed description of this operation, in which Barak dressed as a woman. [[#ch03.html#note242|41]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 117–18, 248–61, includes many examples of such assassination attempts on ‘Arafat. For an analysis of this assassination strategy and an antidote to Bergman’s exculpatory approach, see Paul Aaron’s review of the book, “How Israel Assassinates Its ‘Enemies,’” and his two-part article, “The Idolatry of Force: How Israel Embraced Targeted Killing,” and “The Idolatry of Force (Part II): Militarism in Israel’s Garrison State,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 46, no. 4 (Summer 2017), 75–99, and 48, no. 2 (Winter 2019), 58–77. [[#ch03.html#note243|42]]. Much of the material in this chapter and the next is based on English translations of documents from the secret appendices to the Kahan Commission of inquiry into the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. In what follows, I have cited them as Kahan Papers [KP] I through VI. The documents are available on the website of the Institute for Palestine Studies: https://palestinesquare.com/2018/09/25/the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-new-evidence/. William Quandt, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and a senior staff member of the National Security Council during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, provided IPS with scanned copies of these documents. In the course of a libel suit brought against ''Time'' magazine by Ariel Sharon, Quandt served as a consultant to the defense lawyers for ''Time''. He received these documents as translated selections from the original Hebrew from the magazine’s law firm. Experts familiar with such documents have attested that they constitute the bulk of the unpublished appendices of the Kahan report. In KP IV, Meeting between Sharon and Bashir Gemayel, Beirut, July 8, 1982, Doc. 5, 229ff, where Gemayel asks if Israel would have any objection to his bulldozing the Palestinian refugee camps in the South of Lebanon so the refugees would not remain in the south, Sharon replied, “this is not our business: we do not want to deal with Lebanon’s internal affairs.” During a meeting between Sharon and Pierre and Bashir Gemayel, August 21, 1982, (KP V, 2–9), Sharon told them: “A question was raised before, what would happen to the Palestinian camps once the terrorists withdraw. . . . You’ve got to act . . . so that there be no terrorists, you’ve got to clean the camps.” For more on the eliminationist logic shared by Sharon, Gemayel, and their lieutenants, see chapter 5, below. [[#ch03.html#note244|43]]. Pierre Gemayel had founded the party after he visited Nazi Germany during the 1936 Olympic Games, in which he participated as the goalkeeper of the Lebanese soccer team. [[#ch03.html#note245|44]]. ''Jerusalem Post'', October 15, 1982. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, in ''Israel’s Lebanon War'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 20, indicate that Col. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the senior Israeli liaison officer with the LF and later Israeli minister of defense and deputy prime minister, was present at the command post where the LF directed the siege of Tal al-Za’tar in July, weeks before the camp fell. Schiff and Yaari recount the extensive collaboration between the Israeli military and intelligence services and the LF in this and subsequent periods, as does Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First''. [[#ch03.html#note246|45]]. KP III, minutes of meeting of Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, September 24, 1982, 224–25. [[#ch03.html#note247|46]]. Ibid., 225–26. [[#ch03.html#note248|47]]. WAFA on August 13, 1976, identified the senior Syrian military intelligence officer in Lebanon, Col. Ali Madani, as being present in the LF command post in order to “supervise” the operation against the camp: see ''al-Nahar'' and ''al-Safir'', August 13, 1976, for reports on Hassan Sabri al-Kholi’s press conference on August 12, 1976. Helena Cobban, who covered the war as a reporter for the ''Christian Science Monitor'' and was a witness to the fall of the camp, states that Col. Madani was seen in the LF command post by other Western journalists: ''The Palestinian Liberation Organization'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 281n35. Other accounts identify his subordinate, Col. Muhammad Kholi, as being present as well. [[#ch03.html#note249|48]]. Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS'' 1969–1976, XXVI, Arab-Israeli Dispute, “Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting,” Washington, DC, March 24, 1976, 963. [[#ch03.html#note250|49]]. Kissinger made this statement regarding American abandonment of the Kurds of Iraq to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Congressman Otis Pike in 1975. [[#ch03.html#note251|50]]. KP, I, 18. This is a document apparently prepared for the Kahan Commission by the Defense Ministry in response to accusations against Sharon. Sharon is quoted on page 48 of this document as saying that “about 130 Phalange” received training in Israel, but gives the same figure for the amount of military aid. [[#ch03.html#note252|51]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 225–61. [[#ch03.html#note253|52]]. Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS'' 1969–1976, XXVI, Arab-Israeli Dispute, “Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting,” Washington, DC, March 24, 1976, 963. [[#ch03.html#note254|53]]. Ibid. [[#ch03.html#note255|54]]. Henry Kissinger, ''Years of Renewal'' (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 351. [[#ch03.html#note256|55]]. This memo was initially only available in Meron Medzini, ed., ''Israel’s Foreign Relations: Selected Documents, 1974–1977'', vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1982), 281–90. The US government published it twenty years later in Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS'', 1969–1976, XXVI, Arab-Israeli Dispute, “Memorandum of Agreement between the Governments of Israel and the United States.” A secret letter of the same date from President Ford to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin enshrined another crucial commitment, whereby the United States pledged that during any peace negotiations it would “make every effort to coordinate with Israel its proposals with a view to refraining from putting forward proposals that Israel would find unsatisfactory,” 838–40. [[#ch03.html#note257|56]]. Adam Howard, ed., ''FRUS'', 1969–1976, XXVI, Arab-Israeli Dispute, “Minutes of National Security Council Meeting,” Washington, DC, April 7, 1976, 1017. [[#ch03.html#note258|57]]. Ibid., 831–32. See also Patrick Seale, ''Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 1989), 278–84. [[#ch03.html#note259|58]]. The description of this operation by Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 214–24, includes errors, such as a mention that in 1978 an Israeli undercover agent used as a cover work at an NGO “at a shelter in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp.” The camp was destroyed two years earlier. This NGO may have been an orphanage for children who had survived the massacre at the camp, Bayt Atfal al-Sumud. [[#ch03.html#note260|59]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 242–43ff. On the “Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners,” which we now know was no more than a front group for the Israeli security services, see Remi Brulin, “The Remarkable Disappearing Act of Israel’s Car-Bombing Campaign in Lebanon,” Mondoweiss, May 7, 2018, https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remarkable-disappearing-terrorism. [[#ch03.html#note261|60]]. For more on Dean’s charges, see Philip Weiss, “New Book Gives Credence to US Ambassador’s Claim That Israel Tried to Assassinate Him,” Mondoweiss, August 23, 2018, https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/credence-ambassadors-assassinate/. [[#ch03.html#note262|61]]. The late Ambassador Dean graciously provided me with documents that cover the entire period of his ambassadorship in Beirut, from late 1978 until 1981. Those concerning the PLO are mainly from 1979. There are also at least a half dozen classified cables dealing with the contacts undertaken by Parker and Dean with one of these intermediaries, my cousin Walid Khalidi, in Wikileaks: see, e.g., https://search.wikileaks.org/?s=1&q=khalidi&sort=0. [[#ch03.html#note263|62]]. Ambassador Dean provided copies of these documents to the Institute for Palestine Studies, where they are available for consultation by researchers. [[#ch03.html#note264|63]]. “Telegram from Secretary of State Vance’s Delegation to Certain Diplomatic Posts,” October 1, 1977, ''FRUS'', 1977–80, ''Arab-Israeli Dispute'', vol. 8, 634–36. [[#ch03.html#note265|64]]. The definitive study of this topic is Seth Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). [[#ch03.html#note266|65]]. The most rigorous account of how Begin did this, based on an exhaustive study of previously unrevealed Israeli and American documents, and how he thereby laid the foundation for subsequent negotiations, including at Madrid, Washington, and Oslo in the 1990s, is Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine''. CHAPTER 4 [[#ch04.html#note267|1]]. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague02.asp#art25. [[#ch04.html#note268|2]]. Quoted in Alexander Cockburn, “A Word Not Fit to Print,” ''Village Voice'', September 22, 1982. [[#ch04.html#note269|3]]. KP III, 196. Gur was speaking to Sharon during a meeting of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs committee on June 10, 1982. [[#ch04.html#note270|4]]. Chaim Herzog, ''The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East from the War of Independence Through Lebanon'', rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1985), 344, gives the figure of eight divisions. Herzog was a retired major general, former chief of military intelligence, and later president of Israel. Other authoritative Israeli sources have suggested that as many as nine divisions were eventually involved in the invasion force. [[#ch04.html#note271|5]]. This is according to the official report of the Lebanese General Security Services (''Da’irat al-Amn al-‘Am''), which stated that 84 percent of the casualties in Beirut were civilians: ''Washington Post'', December 2, 1982. These figures were understandably not necessarily fully accurate, given wartime circumstances. [[#ch04.html#note272|6]]. The Palestine News Agency, WAFA, on August 14, 1982, reported that obituaries in the Israeli press of soldiers killed in Lebanon for the ten weeks of combat totaled 453. This discrepancy may have resulted because the Israeli military issued figures only on those killed in action, not those who died later of their wounds or were otherwise killed in a combat theater: cited in ''Under Siege'', 199–200n4. [[#ch04.html#note273|7]]. ''The Jerusalem Post'', October 10, 1983. Sharon himself mentioned 2,500 Israeli casualties to Pierre and Bashir Gemayel on August 21, 1982: KP IV, 5. Israeli military casualties from June 1982 until the partial withdrawal of June 1985 were over 4,500. Over 500 additional Israeli soldiers were killed between 1985 and the end of the occupation of South Lebanon in May 2000, for a total of well over 800 killed from 1982 until 2000. The war and occupation of Lebanon thus produced Israel’s third-highest overall military casualty toll, after the 1948 and 1973 wars, and ahead of the 1956 and 1967 wars and the 1968–70 War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. [[#ch04.html#note274|8]]. Probably because of my prior role in WAFA, where I had helped Mona set up the new English service, a few journalists who were unaware of the ground rules under which I spoke to them during the war mistakenly described me as “Director of WAFA” or as “a PLO spokesman,” neither of which I was (Thomas Friedman, “Palestinians Say Invaders Are Seeking to Destroy P.L.O. and Idea of a State,” ''New York Times'', June 9, 1982). The former appellation would have surprised WAFA’s actual director, Ziyad ‘Abd al-Fattah, and Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahman and Mahmud al-Labadi, who were the PLO’s official spokesmen, the former for the Arabic media, and the latter for the foreign press. As head of the PLO Foreign Information section, al-Labadi was the sole person responsible for dealings with foreign journalists. All three of these officials were duty bound to put forward the position of the PLO, which I was not obliged to do. When I talked to Western journalists, it was not in any official capacity, but rather anonymously, as “an informed Palestinian source.” Almost all journalists respected this convention. [[#ch04.html#note275|9]]. David Shipler, “Cease-Fire in Border Fighting Declared by Israel and PLO,” ''New York Times'', July 25, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/25/world/cease-fire-border-fighting-declared-israel-plo-us-sees-hope-for-wider-peace.html. [[#ch04.html#note276|10]]. I knew Habib fleetingly from when I was a teenager in Seoul accompanying my father, who from 1962 to 1965 held the top UN civilian post in South Korea, where Habib was a senior diplomat in the US embassy. He and his wife had socialized with my parents, and my mother and Mrs. Habib often played bridge together at our house. I benefited from this acquaintance when Habib agreed to be interviewed for my book on the PLO during the Lebanon War: ''Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War''. [[#ch04.html#note277|11]]. This was not the first time I had met Primakov, and as always I was impressed by his knowledge of Middle East politics, his intelligence, and his candor. Following the dissolution of the USSR, he became the first head of Russia’s intelligence service, and then foreign minister and finally prime minister. When he was prime minister, he helped an Austrian colleague and me to reach an agreement with the Russian state archives for the publication of Soviet diplomatic documents on the Middle East from the 1940s through the 1980s. The project was aborted when Primakov was removed from office by President Boris Yeltsin in 1999. His account of the 1982 war can be found in ''Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present'' (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 199–205. [[#ch04.html#note278|12]]. In interviews in Tunis afterwards, both Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad confirmed to me that the PLO leadership had long known that war was coming, and had prepared accordingly: ''Under Siege'', 198n21. [[#ch04.html#note279|13]]. Arafat was apparently not surprised. In a speech in March 1982, he had predicted that the PLO and its allies would have to fight at Khaldeh: ''Under Siege'', 198n20. The PLO sector commander there, Col. Abdullah Siyam, was killed in this battle on June 12, the highest-ranking PLO officer to die during the war. Two days earlier, the highest-ranking Israeli officer ever to die in combat, Maj. Gen. Yukutiel Adam, a former deputy chief of staff and Mossad director-designate, had been killed by Palestinian fighters just down the coast in Damour, an area that had been thought pacified: ''Under Siege'', 80–81. [[#ch04.html#note280|14]]. This was revealed by Alexander Cockburn, “A Word Not Fit to Print,” ''Village Voice'', September 22, 1982. [[#ch04.html#note281|15]]. Most Western journalists had decamped to the Commodore Hotel from the legendary St. George Hotel by the sea on the Corniche, which was looted and burned in 1975. The St. George had long served as the headquarters for foreign journalists, diplomats, spies, arms dealers, and other less savory types. Although more modest than the luxurious St. George, and without its spectacular sea views, the Commodore had the inestimable virtue of being relatively far from most of the battlefronts of the civil war. Said Abu Rish, ''The St. George Hotel Bar'' (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), chronicles some of the intrigues that took place there, noting that famous intelligence agents such as Kim Philby and Miles Copeland were habitués. [[#ch04.html#note282|16]]. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, ''Israel’s Lebanon War'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), show in some detail how extensive the Israeli espionage network in Lebanon was, as does Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First.'' [[#ch04.html#note283|17]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', says that concerted efforts to kill the entire PLO leadership dated back at least to 1981: 244–47. [[#ch04.html#note284|18]]. “123 Reported Dead, 550 Injured as Israelis Bomb PLO Targets,” ''New York Times'', July 18, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/18/world/123-reported-dead-550-injured-israelis-bomb-plo-targets-un-council-meets-beirut.html. [[#ch04.html#note285|19]]. “Begin Compares Arafat to Hitler,” UPI, August 5, 1982, http://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/05/Begin-compares-Arafat-to-Hitler/2671397368000/. [[#ch04.html#note286|20]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', indicates that Israeli efforts to assassinate ‘Arafat began in 1967, 117–18. On 248–61 he includes accounts of multiple attempts to kill him during the 1982 war. [[#ch04.html#note287|21]]. Interview, Dr. Lamya Khalidi, Nice, June 1, 2018. There is a photo in Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', between pages 264–65, of the commander of an Israeli assassination squad “dressed as a beggar” sitting in a street in an unidentified Arab city, probably Beirut. [[#ch04.html#note288|22]]. This double agent had been infiltrated by Abu Iyad’s services into the anti-PLO Abu Nidal faction based in Libya in order to undermine that group, an operation that was highly successful. He was later hired as a driver by one of Abu Iyad’s top lieutenants, Abu al-Hol [Ha’il ‘Abd al-Hamid]. This agent turned out to have been suborned himself (presumably by the Iraqi regime, which supported the Abu Nidal group and which was infuriated because Abu Iyad had openly opposed its invasion of Kuwait). He assassinated Abu Iyad, Abu al-Hol, and an aide on January 14, 1991, two days before the US offensive to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. [[#ch04.html#note289|23]]. This may be the bombing described in Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 256: “Once they [the assassination squad] even heard ‘Arafat himself on the phone and sent in a pair of fighter-bombers that razed the building, but ‘Arafat had left ‘not more than thirty seconds earlier,’ according to Dayan [commander of the unit].” This may be the same attack mentioned on pages 258–59 that is incorrectly dated as August 5, and incorrectly described as being directed against “the Sana’i office block, in West Beirut, where Arafat was supposed to be attending a meeting.” According to Bergman, Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan personally participated in this bombing. [[#ch04.html#note290|24]]. ''Under Siege'', 97. ''Newsweek'' reporter Tony Clifton was on the scene, as was John Bulloch of the ''Daily Telegraph''. Clifton offers a harrowing description of the aftermath, and says that the death toll may have been as high as 260: Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, ''God Cried'' (London: Quartet Books, 1983), 45–46. See also John Bulloch, ''Final Conflict: The War in Lebanon'' (London: Century, 1983), 132–33. [[#ch04.html#note291|25]]. For details, see ''Under Siege'', 88 and 202n39. See also Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 242–43, which gives details of the use of car bombs in Lebanon by the Israeli intelligence services. [[#ch04.html#note292|26]]. In ''Under Siege'' I recounted how the PLO came to its decision to evacuate Beirut. I wrote that book on the basis of access to PLO archives that were then located in Tunis (those archives and other PLO offices were bombed by Israel on October 1, 1985, killing one of the archivists who had helped me), together with interviews with the leading American, French, and Palestinian participants in the negotiations. [[#ch04.html#note293|27]]. Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine'', 201. [[#ch04.html#note294|28]]. Palestinians always suspected that the Abu Nidal group, which served at different times as a front for the Libyan, Iraqi, and Syrian intelligence agencies, was also penetrated by the Israeli Mossad. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', says that according to his Israeli sources, “British intelligence had a double agent inside the Abu Nidal cell” that carried out the attack on Argov (249). Although Bergman describes Israeli double agents as present in virtually every group considered hostile to Israel, in spite of the Abu Nidal group’s spectacular attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets, his book makes no mention of its penetration by Israeli double agents, nor indeed does it have a proper index entry for the group. [[#ch04.html#note295|29]]. Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine'', 201–2. [[#ch04.html#note296|30]]. My mother was shot and was lucky to have been only lightly wounded when she drove past another such checkpoint, this one manned by Syrian troops, in February 1977. [[#ch04.html#note297|31]]. They included politicians such as Rashid Karami, Sa’eb Salam, and Salim al-Hoss, who had served as prime ministers of Lebanon under a formula that went back to the country’s independence in 1943, and who were traditionally aligned with the mainly Sunni Palestinian political and military presence in Lebanon. [[#ch04.html#note298|32]]. ''Under Siege'', 65, 88, and 201n16. Multiple documents from the secret appendices to the Kahan Commission papers of Inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacres refer to massacres of Druze by the LF in the Shouf: KP I, 5; KP II, 107–8; KP III, 192; KP IV, 254, 265, 296; KP V, 56, 58; KP VI, 78. These documents can be found at: https://palestinesquare.com/2018/09/25/the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-new-evidence/. [[#ch04.html#note299|33]]. The text of the Eleven-Point Plan can be found in ''Under Siege'', 183–84. [[#ch04.html#note300|34]]. Beyond the massacres in the Shouf in late June and early July, documents in the secret appendices to the Kahan Commission report other atrocities: the disappearance and presumed murder of 1,200 people in Beirut at the hands of forces controlled by Elie Hobeika, chief of intelligence of the LF (KP II, 1, and KP V, 58), and a Mossad report on 500 people “liquidated” at LF roadblocks by June 23: KP II, 3, and KP VI, 56. See: https://palestinesquare.com/2018/09/25/the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-new-evidence/. [[#ch04.html#note301|35]]. ''Under Siege'', 171, citing the original documents in the PLO archives. [[#ch04.html#note302|36]]. The entire US-Lebanese correspondence can be found in the ''Department of State Bulletin'', September 1982, vol. 82, no. 2066, 2–5. [[#ch04.html#note303|37]]. Lebanese police reports cited “at least 128 killed” and over 400 wounded that day: ''Under Siege'', 204n67, quoting an AP report published in the ''New York Times'', August 13, 1982. [[#ch04.html#note304|38]]. Diary entry for August 12, 1982, in Ronald Reagan, ''The Reagan Diaries'', ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 98. [[#ch04.html#note305|39]]. For some time afterward, they were also afraid every time they heard a plane or a helicopter overhead. [[#ch04.html#note306|40]]. Malcolm Kerr himself was assassinated right outside his office just sixteen months later, as were a number of my AUB colleagues. [[#ch04.html#note307|41]]. Jenkins later shared a Pulitzer Prize with Thomas Friedman of the ''New York Times'' for reportage on the Sabra and Shatila massacre. [[#ch04.html#note308|42]]. The most complete analysis of the number of victims of the massacre, based on extensive interviews and painstaking research, is by the distinguished Palestinian historian Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout, who in ''Sabra and Shatila: September 1982'' (Ann Arbor: Pluto, 2004), established a minimum of close to 1,400 killed. She notes, however, that as many victims were abducted and never found, the actual number was undoubtedly larger, and is unknowable. [[#ch04.html#note309|43]]. The graphic novel is by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). According to Folman’s account in ''Waltz with Bashir'', his unit fired the flares, creating “a brightly lit sky that helped other people kill” (107). Although the book and the film are unsparing in their depiction of the atrocity that is at the core of the entire story, their primary focus is on the subsequent psychological anguish of the Israelis who enabled the killers to do their work, rather than the suffering of the nameless victims, which is depicted at the end. In this, it has more than a passing resemblance to the well-known Israeli genre of “shooting and crying.” [[#ch04.html#note310|44]]. In the end, Folman’s friend lets Folman off the hook with a bit of pop psychology. He tells him that it was only “in your perception,” as a nineteen-year-old child of Holocaust survivors, that there was no difference between those who carried out the massacre and the Israelis in the circles surrounding them, and that “You felt guilty. . . . Against your will you were cast in the role of Nazi. . . . You fired the flares. But you didn’t carry out the massacre.” [[#ch04.html#note311|45]]. The text of the Kahan Commission report can be found at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/kahan.html. A scathing critique of the report’s many flaws and omissions can be found in Noam Chomsky, ''Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians'', 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 397–410. [[#ch04.html#note312|46]]. The documents released by the Israel State Archives in 2012 were made available online by the ''New York Times'' on the thirtieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, together with an op-ed on the topic by Seth Anziska, who discovered these documents in the archives: “A Preventable Massacre,” ''New York Times'', September 16, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/a-preventable-massacre.html?ref=opinion. The documents can be found online: “Declassified Documents Shed Light on a 1982 Massacre,” ''New York Times'', September 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/16/opinion/20120916_lebanondoc.html?ref=opinion. [[#ch04.html#note313|47]]. As noted earlier, the English translations of the secret appendices to the report are available on the website of the Institute for Palestine Studies: https://palestinesquare.com/2018/09/25/the-sabra-and-shatila-massacre-new-evidence/. I have cited them as Kahan Papers [KP] I through VI. [[#ch04.html#note314|48]]. As early as July 19, Sharon told Habib that Israeli intelligence reports indicated that the PLO planned to leave behind “nuclei of terrorist infrastructure” and that “this is the idea concealed behind the demand that the MLF [Multilateral Force] protect the refugee camps.” KP III, 163. Since this was not true, either Sharon was grossly misinformed, or he was already preparing a pretext for a planned move against the remaining Palestinian presence in Lebanon after the departure of the PLO. [[#ch04.html#note315|49]]. “Declassified Documents Shed Light on a 1982 Massacre,” ''New York Times'', September 16, 2012. [[#ch04.html#note316|50]]. KP IV, 273. Sharon also reported to this cabinet meeting that the LF had been sent into Sabra. [[#ch04.html#note317|51]]. “Declassified Documents Shed Light on a 1982 Massacre.” See also Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine'', 217–18. [[#ch04.html#note318|52]]. “Declassified Documents Shed Light on a 1982 Massacre.” Speaking to the Israeli cabinet on September 16, 1982, Sharon reported on an earlier exchange with Draper, whom he accused of “extraordinary impudence” for contradicting him: KP IV, 274. [[#ch04.html#note319|53]]. KP III, 222–26. As is noted in chapter 3, Sharon spoke in detail about Tal al-Za‘tar at a closed meeting of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs committee, September 24, 1982, and in the Knesset in October 1982. According to a Mossad report dated June 23, 1982, Bashir Gemayel stated to Mossad representatives at a meeting attended by six of his top advisors that in dealing with the Shi‘a, “it is possible they will need several Deir Yassins.” For Israeli knowledge about earlier LF massacres during the Israeli invasion of 1982, see notes 32 and 34 above. [[#ch04.html#note320|54]]. On July 8, 1982, Bashir Gemayel asked Sharon if he would object if LF used bulldozers to remove the Palestinian camps in the south. Sharon responded, “This is not our business: we do not wish to deal with Lebanon’s internal affairs,” KP IV, 230. At a meeting with Maj. Gen. Saguy on July 23, 1982, Bashir Gemayel stated that there is a need to deal with the Palestinian “demographic problem,” and if the Palestinian refugee camps in the south were destroyed most Lebanese would not care, KP VI, 244. At a meeting on August 1, 1982, Gen. Saguy stated that “The time has come for Bashir’s men to prepare a plan to deal with the Palestinians,” KP VI, 243. On August 21, in response to a question from Sharon about what the LF planned to do with the Palestinian refugee camps, Bashir Gemayel stated, “We are planning a real zoo,” KP V, 8. A witness before the Kahan Commission, Lt. Col. Harnof, stated that LF leaders had said that “Sabra would become a zoo and Shatila Beirut’s parking lot,” noting that they had already carried out massacres of Palestinians in the south, KP VI, 78. The director of the Mossad (from September 1982), Nahum Admoni, told the commission that Bashir Gemayel “was preoccupied with Lebanon’s demographic balance . . . When he talked in terms of demographic change it was always in terms of killing and elimination,” KP VI, 80. The Mossad director until September 1982, Yitzhak Hofi, said that the LF leaders “talk about solving the Palestinian problem with a hand gesture whose meaning is physical elimination,” KP VI, 81. [[#ch04.html#note321|55]]. The book by two knowledgeable and respected Israeli journalists, Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, ''Israel’s Lebanon War'', is replete with accounts of crucial instances of Israeli decisionmaking and the supportive role of American diplomacy, many of which have been borne out by newly declassified official documents from both sides. See also Schiff’s article, “The Green Light,” ''Foreign Policy'' 50 (Spring 1983), 73–85. [[#ch04.html#note322|56]]. Anziska, ''Preventing Palestine'', 200–201, citing Morris Draper, “Marines in Lebanon, A Ten Year Retrospective: Lessons Learned” (Quantico, VA, 1992), courtesy of Jon Randal. [[#ch04.html#note323|57]]. Over a distinguished diplomatic career, Ryan Crocker served as ambassador to six countries, many of them exceedingly difficult posts like Baghdad and Kabul. [[#ch04.html#note324|58]]. That was not my last brush with Syrian intelligence. An Arabic translation of ''Under Siege'', which included a critical description of the Asad regime’s role in the 1982 war, was halted a few years later, out of the Lebanese publisher’s fear of the menacing Syrian intelligence services, which dominated Beirut in those days. I was able to publish it in Arabic in serialized form in the Kuwaiti press. The Institute for Palestine Studies finally published an Arabic translation in 2018. While it could not then be published in Arabic in Beirut, Marachot, the publishing house of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, published the book in Hebrew translation in 1988, albeit adding an occasional snide critical marginal note. [[#ch04.html#note325|59]]. It took nearly eight months for AUB to obtain a residence permit for him, something that should have taken a couple of weeks: this was the Sureté Générale of the new regime installed by Sharon at work. The nature of Amin Gemayel’s election can be seen in Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 673n262, which details how Israeli military and security personnel “escorted” Lebanese deputies to the election, and sometimes helped “persuade” them. [[#ch04.html#note326|60]]. Before leaving Beirut, I visited the Lebanese senior statesman, Sa’eb Salam, who was related to us by multiple marriages, to interview him about his role during the 1982 war. He answered my questions, but asked to be left out of the book. Just before I left him, he told me about his much speculated-about visit to Bashir Gemayel days before his assassination. This one-on-one meeting followed an acrimonious secret encounter between Gemayel and Begin at which the former refused Begin’s demand to immediately sign a peace treaty with Israel. Details can be found in Schiff and Yaari, ''Israel’s Lebanon War'', some of which Schiff confirmed to me in an interview (Washington, DC, January 30, 1984). The now dead young president-elect had told him, “You know Sa’eb Bey [an Ottoman honorific acquired by his father], many of my top lieutenants were trained in Israel. I am not at all sure which of them are loyal to Israel, and which to me.” Although his relations with Begin had soured before his death, Gemayel had many enemies. The person who planted the explosives that killed him was supposedly a Lebanese leftist working with Syrian intelligence. Transcripts of the interrogation of one of the supposed assassins, Habib al-Shartouni, can be found in the Phalangist newspaper ''al-‘Amal'': Part 1: https://www.lebanese-forces.com/2019/09/04/bachir-gemayel-chartouni/; Part 2: https://www.lebanese-forces.com/2019/09/02/bachir-gemayel-36/; Part 3: https://www.lebanese-forces.com/2019/09/04/bachir-gemayel-37/. [[#ch04.html#note327|61]]. This is one of the conclusions that Amy Kaplan draws in her examination of US support for Israel in ''Our American Israel'', 136–77, in a chapter titled “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past,” although she concludes that in time supporters of Israel succeeded in restoring its image. [[#ch04.html#note328|62]]. Interviews with Morris Draper, Robert Dillon, and Philip Habib, Washington, DC, December 14, December 6, and December 3, 1984. These were interviews for ''Under Siege'', the idea for which first emerged during the war when I was reading Ibn Khaldun’s account of a meeting with Timur [Tamerlane] during his siege of Damascus in 1400 and I chanced to meet with a friend, Dr. Sami Musallam. Like me, Sami worked part-time at the IPS, and he was also in charge of the archives of the PLO Chairman’s office. I told him that after the war, while I was certainly no Ibn Khaldun, I would like access to those archives to write a documentary account of what we had been witness to during the siege. Sami said that if we survived, and if he managed to get the archives out of Beirut, which he did, he would get ‘Arafat’s permission, which he also did. [[#ch04.html#note329|63]]. I interviewed ‘Arafat, Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, Mahmud ‘Abbas [Abu Mazin], Khalid and Hani al-Hasan, and Faruq Qaddumi [Abu Lutf] as well as other PLO officials in Tunis in March, August, and December 1984. [[#ch04.html#note330|64]]. This massive World War II vessel’s bombardment of Druze militias in the Shouf led some Lebanese wits to dub it the “''New Derzi'',” a play on the Arabic word for Druze. [[#ch04.html#note331|65]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 560–63, coyly intimates at great length that ‘Arafat was poisoned by Israeli agents. CHAPTER 5 [[#ch05.html#note332|1]]. Caius Cornelius Tacitus, ''Agricola and Germania'', tr. K. B. Townsend (London: Methuen, 1893), 33. [[#ch05.html#note333|2]]. Reference in this chapter is primarily to the First Intifada, the unarmed and mainly nonviolent uprising that lasted in full force from 1987 to 1993, in distinction from the second, which started in 2000, and which eventually became an armed uprising featuring the use of suicide bombers by the Palestinians, and the employment of tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons by the Israeli occupation forces. [[#ch05.html#note334|3]]. Francis X. Clines, “Talk with Rabin: Roots of the Conflict,” ''New York Times'', February 5, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/05/world/talk-with-rabin-roots-of-the-conflict.html. [[#ch05.html#note335|4]]. For an excellent analysis of the impact of the intifada on US opinion toward Israel, see Kaplan, ''Our American Israel'', chapter 4. [[#ch05.html#note336|5]]. Francis X. Clines, “Talk with Rabin: Roots of the Conflict.” [[#ch05.html#note337|6]]. David McDowall, ''Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond'' (London, I. B. Tauris, 1989), 84. [[#ch05.html#note338|7]]. For an acid portrait of Milson and his role, see Flora Lewis, “Foreign Affairs: How to Grow Horns,” ''New York Times'', April 29, 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/29/opinion/foreign-affairs-how-to-grow-horns.html. [[#ch05.html#note339|8]]. For an analysis of this particular instance of the old Orientalist phenomenon of experts studying the people they were oppressing, see Gil Eyal, ''The Disenchantment of the Orient'' (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). [[#ch05.html#note340|9]]. “Colonel Says Rabin Ordered Breaking of Palestinians’ Bones,” Reuters, cited in the ''LA Times'', June 22, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-22/news/mn-431_1_rabin-ordered. In his biography, ''Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman'' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 156–57, Itamar Rabinovitch denies the accuracy of that quote, while admitting that Rabin “clearly was the author of a policy that sought to defeat the intifada through the use of force.” [[#ch05.html#note341|10]]. On a trip two years later, on a Fulbright fellowship, I was denied entry into Israel. After many hours of detention, I was allowed to enter due to the intercession of the US consul-general in Tel Aviv, who had been forewarned of my arrival by the State Department. [[#ch05.html#note342|11]]. These figures, collected by the Israeli human rights NGO B’tselem, include Palestinians and Israelis killed in the Occupied Territories as well as inside Israel: http://www.btselem.org/statistics/first_intifada_tables. [[#ch05.html#note343|12]]. Rabinovich, ''Yitzhak Rabin'', 157–58. [[#ch05.html#note344|13]]. “Iron-fist Policy Splits Israelis,” Jonathan Broder, ''Chicago Tribune'', January 26, 1988, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-01-27/news/8803270825_1_beatings-anti-arab-anti-israeli-violence. [[#ch05.html#note345|14]]. Julia Bacha’s prizewinning 2017 documentary film, ''Naila and the Uprising'', offers a comprehensive portrait of the central role of women in the intifada: https://www.justvision.org/nailaandtheuprising. See also Amer Shomali’s 2014 film, ''The Wanted 18'': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekhTuZpMw54. [[#ch05.html#note346|15]]. As we have seen, in spite of the divisions it engendered, the revolt effected extensive social and political transformations before it was crushed by 100,000 British troops, backed by their Zionist auxiliaries, as well as the heavy use of air power. See the remarkable article by Charles Anderson, “State Formation from Below.” [[#ch05.html#note347|16]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 311–33, says that Abu Jihad’s role in the intifada was the main reason he was killed, noting (323) that some senior Israeli officials later recognized that “the assassination failed to reach its goal,” of dampening the intifada, and that for these and other reasons, they came to feel that his killing had been a mistake. [[#ch05.html#note348|17]]. Ibid., 316–17, reports that the planners of the operation to kill Abu Jihad deliberately decided to forgo assassinating Mahmud ‘Abbas [Abu Mazin], whose home was nearby. Many Palestinians have long suspected that only those perceived by the Israeli security services as outstanding advocates of the Palestinian cause were targeted for liquidation, implying that others were not worth the effort to kill them. [[#ch05.html#note349|18]]. The virulence of the rivalry between Syria and the PLO can be discerned from the claim by Bergman, ibid., 304, that undercover Israeli intelligence agents posing as dissident Palestinians covertly passed information on PLO operatives to the Syrian intelligence station in Cyprus. The Syrian security services then “got rid of about 150 PLO people,” who were liquidated upon their arrival in Lebanon. [[#ch05.html#note350|19]]. For details, see Richard Sale, “Israel Gave Major Aid to Hamas,” UPI, February 24, 2001, and Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, ''The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). These well-connected Israeli authors make it clear that dividing Palestinian ranks was the aim of the Israeli security establishment in encouraging the rise of an Islamist rival to the PLO. [[#ch05.html#note351|20]]. After the 1982 war, Shoufani joined the Syrian-backed Fatah rebels opposing ‘Arafat’s leadership. [[#ch05.html#note352|21]]. “Statement by Yasser Arafat—14 December 1988,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Historical Documents, 1984–88, http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook7/Pages/419%20Statement%20by%20Yasser%20Arafat-%2014%20December%201988.aspx. [[#ch05.html#note353|22]]. ''FRUS'', XXVI, ''Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1974–76'', Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2012, 838–40, 831–32, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v26. [[#ch05.html#note354|23]]. While as we saw in chapter 4, the Ford letter to Rabin was published by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in its ''Israel’s Foreign Relations: Selected Documents'' series in 1982 and was thereafter available online on the Ministry website, it is never mentioned in Kissinger’s voluminous memoirs, and the US government only published it in the ''Foreign Relations of the United States'' series in 2012, thirty years later. [[#ch05.html#note355|24]]. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 311. [[#ch05.html#note356|25]]. I heard about this advice, embodied in a memo whose text I have been unable to find, from Ahmad himself, and from others. Some of these themes can be found in selections in Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds., ''The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 77–78, 296–97. [[#ch05.html#note357|26]]. In a letter to a “comrade” (recipient name is blacked out) on September 17, 1982, Ahmad later gave the PLO the same advice: while he called for “armed underground resistance” to Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon, in occupied Palestine he advocated “''militant'' and ''creative'' organization of ''non-violent political struggle''” [emphasis by author]. Copy of letter in my possession, courtesy of Nubar Hovsepian. See also Ahmad’s analysis along these lines in “Pioneering in the Nuclear Age: An Essay on Israel and the Palestinians,” in ''The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad'', 298–317. [[#ch05.html#note358|27]]. This was true although in 1947 Moscow had been one of the midwives of partition and of the resulting creation of Israel, whose existence it consistently supported thereafter, and had supported UNSC 242, which consecrated Israel’s victories of both 1948 and 1967. The Soviets were initially suspicious of the PLO’s “adventurism,” and its potential for dragging its Egyptian and Syrian clients and the USSR into a conflict that they did not want. [[#ch05.html#note359|28]]. For Primakov’s account of his effort to avert a war (and save one of the last remaining Soviet clients from the folly of its leader), see ''Missions à Bagdad: Histoire d’une négociation secrète'' (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Immediately afterwards, Primakov became head of the KGB’s foreign operations directorate, and after the dissolution of the USSR served as Russian foreign intelligence chief, foreign minister, and prime minister. [[#ch05.html#note360|29]]. Elizabeth Thompson, ''Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 249. [[#ch05.html#note361|30]]. The text of the “U.S.-Soviet Invitation to the Mideast Peace Conference in Madrid, October 18, 1991” can be found in William Quandt, ''Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967'', 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), appendix N, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Appendix-N.pdf. For the letter of assurances to the Palestinians, see ibid., appendix M: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Appendix-M.pdf. [[#ch05.html#note362|31]]. Ibid., appendix N. [[#ch05.html#note363|32]]. The letter of assurances to the Palestinians was dated October 18, 1991. See ibid., appendix M. [[#ch05.html#note364|33]]. As mentioned in chapter 4 and above, this letter was only revealed by the US government when it was published in the ''Foreign Relations of the United States'' series in 2012. However, it had been published by Israel in its Foreign Ministry’s documentary series twenty years before that in 1982, long before Madrid. [[#ch05.html#note365|34]]. Aaron David Miller, “Israel’s Lawyer,” ''Washington Post'', May 23, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200883.html. [[#ch05.html#note366|35]]. Aaron David Miller, ''The Much Too Promised Land'' (New York, Bantam, 2008), 80. [[#ch05.html#note367|36]]. “‘When You’re Serious, Call Us,’” ''Newsweek'', June 24, 1990, http://www.newsweek.com/when-youre-serious-call-us-206208. [[#ch05.html#note368|37]]. John Goshko, “Baker Bars Israeli Loan Aid Unless Settlements Are Halted,” ''Washington Post'', February 25, 1992, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/02/25/baker-bars-israeli-loan-aid-unless-settlements-are-halted/e7311eea-e6d3-493b-8880-a3b98e0830a1/. [[#ch05.html#note369|38]]. A key text in the campaign against them was Robert Kaplan, ''Arabists: Romance of an American Elite'' (New York: Free Press, 1995), based on a series of scathing articles that appeared in the ''Atlantic''. Another carping critic of both American diplomacy and Middle East scholarship is Martin Kramer, ''Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America'' (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). A student of Bernard Lewis, Kramer is one in a long line of far-right detractors of Western policies in the Middle East as being insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab, going back to the Baghdad-born British academic Elie Kedourie. [[#ch05.html#note370|39]]. The former two received their PhDs in international relations (and thus were in no way Middle East experts), and Kurtzer and Miller in Middle East studies. [[#ch05.html#note371|40]]. Roger Cohen, “The Making of an Iran Policy,” ''New York Times Magazine'', July 30, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02Iran-t.html. [[#ch05.html#note372|41]]. Peter Beinert, “Obama Betrayed Ideals on Israel,” ''Newsweek'', March 12, 2012, http://www.newsweek.com/peter-beinart-obama-betrayed-ideals-israel-63673. [[#ch05.html#note373|42]]. Indyk was later US ambassador in Tel Aviv, where this veteran fighter for Israel’s interests in Washington was vilified as too soft, as was his colleague Dan Kurtzer when he held the same position. Neither was spared continuous vulgar abuse by the Israeli hard right despite the fact that both were Jewish. [[#ch05.html#note374|43]]. R. Khalidi, ''Brokers of Deceit'', 56. [[#ch05.html#note375|44]]. Clyde Haberman, “Shamir Is Said to Admit Plan to Stall Talks ‘For 10 Years’” ''New York Times'', June 27, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/27/world/shamir-is-said-to-admit-plan-to-stall-talks-for-10-years.html. [[#ch05.html#note376|45]]. This is confirmed by Rabin’s biographer and close colleague, Itamar Rabinovich, who was the lead Israeli negotiator with Syria: ''Yitzhak Rabin'', 177–85, 193–99. [[#ch05.html#note377|46]]. Ibid., 165. [[#ch05.html#note378|47]]. Ibid., 212–14. [[#ch05.html#note379|48]]. “Outline of the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA)” delivered January 14, 1992, http://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/uploads/images/PISGA%20Jan%2014%2C%201992%20%20p%201%2C2.pdf. A more detailed version of the plan was delivered to the Israeli side on March 2, 1992: “Palestinian Interim Selfgovernment Arrangements: Expanded Outline of Model of Palestinian Interim Selfgovernment Authority: Preliminary Measures and Modalities for Elections,” March 2, 1993, http://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/uploads/files/Final%20outline%20PISGA%20elections%202%20Mar_%2092.pdf. [[#ch05.html#note380|49]]. Rabinovich, ''Yitzhak Rabin'', 183. [[#ch05.html#note381|50]]. Ibid., 189–91, cites two other “alternative channels to Oslo” and to Washington that Rabin ordered opened, but does not mention this one. [[#ch05.html#note382|51]]. Neither of them particularly modest, both Peres and Abu al-‘Ala wrote extensively, the latter exhaustively, about their roles in Oslo: Abu al-‘Ala [Ahmad Quray‘], ''al-Riwaya al-filistiniyya al-kamila lil-mufawadat: Min Oslo ila kharitat al-tariq'' [The complete Palestinian account of the negotiations: From Oslo to the Road Map], vols. 1–4 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005–2014); Shimon Peres, ''Battling for Peace: A Memoir'' (New York: Random House, 1995). [[#ch05.html#note383|52]]. In Rabinovich’s words, ''Yitzhak Rabin'', 187, “Rabin trusted former officers of the IDF,” among them himself. [[#ch05.html#note384|53]]. One can search in vain in the bios of these two men (and in the case of al-Hindi, who died in 2010, his obituary) for any mention of their roles in securing an Israeli-Palestinian security agreement. Bergman, ''Rise and Kill First'', 184–85, reports that Israeli intelligence services planned to assassinate al-Hindi in Rome in 1973, but the operation was aborted. [[#ch05.html#note385|54]]. “Draft Minutes: Meeting with the Americans,” June 23, 1993, http://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/uploads/files/Minutes%20Kurtzer%2C%20Miller%20meeting%2023%20June%2093.pdf. [[#ch05.html#note386|55]]. There are many detailed analyses of the reasons for the failures of the Oslo Accords and their sequels by participants in the Palestinian-Israeli-American negotiations, including Abu al-‘Ala, Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, Aaron David Miller, Camille Mansour, Hanan ‘Ashrawi, Ghassan al-Khatib, and my ''Brokers of Deceit''. [[#ch05.html#note387|56]]. “The Morning After,” ''London Review of Books'' 15, no. 20, October 21, 1993, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after. This deeply skeptical article was written at a time of near-universal euphoria over the 1993 signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn. Said was prescient in many respects, asking: “Does this mean, ominously, that the interim stage may be the final one?” As these lines are written, we are about to enter the twenty-seventh year of this interim stage. [[#ch05.html#note388|57]]. Rabinovich, ''Yitzhak Rabin'', 193. [[#ch05.html#note389|58]]. Some of the documents seized there, including materials dating back to the 1930s from the historical archives of the Arab Studies Society, such as papers of Musa al-‘Alami, which I examined there in the early 1990s, can now be found in the Israel National Archives, under the heading AP, for Abandoned Property. They sit alongside materials stolen from the PLO Research Center in Beirut in 1982 and books that were seized from Arab homes in an earlier organized looting spree in 1948. This continuous process of theft of Palestinian cultural and intellectual assets constitutes a form of “memoricide,” an integral part of Israel’s campaign of politicide against the Palestinians, again in the late Baruch Kimmerling’s apt usage. [[#ch05.html#note390|59]]. I was present and heard Gazit say this in response to a question from the audience during a panel discussion at Amherst College on March 4, 1994. CHAPTER 6 [[#ch06.html#note391|1]]. David Barsamian, ''The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said'' (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994). [[#ch06.html#note392|2]]. Palestinian GDP per capita remained at around $1,380 from 1995 to 2000. It declined by over $340 from 2000 to 2004, and even more in subsequent years. Statistics from UNCTAD, “Report on UNCTAD’s Assistance to the Palestinian People,” TD/B/52/2, July 21, 2005, tables 1, 6. [[#ch06.html#note393|3]]. Ben White notes that the isolation of the Gaza Strip actually began with restrictions on movement of Gaza residents into Israel via new magnetic cards in 1989, seventeen years before Hamas took over: “Gaza: Isolation and Control,” Al Jazeera News, June 10, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/gaza-isolation-control-190608081601522.html. [[#ch06.html#note394|4]]. There is a plethora of scholarship on the situation in Gaza, notably the work of Sara Roy, including ''The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development'' (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994); and ''Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); as well as Jean-Pierre Filiu, ''Gaza: A History'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). [[#ch06.html#note395|5]]. Piotr Smolar, “Jerusalem: Les diplomates de l’EU durcissent le ton,” ''Le Monde'', February 2, 2018, 3, http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2018/01/31/a-rebours-des-etats-unis-les-diplomates-europeens-soulignent-la-degradation-de-la-situation-a-jerusalem_5250032_3218.html. [[#ch06.html#note396|6]]. Evidence of this can be found in the rapturous reception in New York of the mediocre melodrama ''Oslo'', with its borderline racist caricatures of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators and hagiographic depiction of Peres, which won a Tony Award as best play in 2017, and soon was enjoying a successful run in the West End in London. [[#ch06.html#note397|7]]. The literature on Hamas is extensive. It includes Tareq Baconi, ''Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance'' (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Roy, ''Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza''; Ziad Abu-Amr, ''Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad'' (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Khaled Hroub, ''Hamas: Political Thought and Practice'' (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002); Mishal and Sela, ''The Palestinian Hamas''; and Azzam Tamimi, ''Hamas: A History from Within'' (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2007). [[#ch06.html#note398|8]]. A good summary of how Israel supported Hamas is Mehdi Hassan, “Blowback: How Israel Went from Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It,” ''Intercept'', February 19, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/. See also the sources cited in note 19 of the previous chapter. [[#ch06.html#note399|9]]. There is extensive literature on the Camp David summit, much of it self-serving or meretricious, notably the work of one of its key architects, Dennis Ross, ''The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace'' (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). The best account is by Clayton Swisher, ''The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process'' (New York: Nation Books, 2004). [[#ch06.html#note400|10]]. For details, see Rana Barakat, “The Jerusalem Fellah: Popular Politics in Mandate-Era Palestine,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' 46, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 7–19; and “Criminals or Martyrs? British Colonial Legacy in Palestine and the Criminalization of Resistance,” ''Omran'' 6, November 2013, https://omran.dohainstitute.org/en/issue006/Pages/art03.aspx. See also Hillel Cohen, ''1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict'' (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2015). [[#ch06.html#note401|11]]. For a list of the Muslim religious shrines and mosques destroyed as part of the creation of the Western Wall plaza, see R. Khalidi, “The Future of Arab Jerusalem,” ''British Journal of Middle East Studies'' 19, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 139–40. The most detailed analysis of the establishment, history, and destruction of Haret al-Magariba is Vincent Lemire, “Au pied du mur: Histoire du quartier mahgrébin de Jérusalem (1187–1967),” forthcoming. Architectural and archaeological information, as well as illustrations of many of these destroyed sites, can be found in Michael Hamilton Burgoyne, ''Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study'' (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1987). [[#ch06.html#note402|12]]. The Zawiya, a former sufi lodge adjacent to the Haram, had become the residence of the Abu al-Sa‘ud family, who were traditionally its administrators: Yitzhak Reiter, ''Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem Under British Mandate'' (London: Cass, 1996), 136. This is where Yasser ‘Arafat, whose mother was an Abu Sa‘ud, was born in 1929, according to my cousin Raqiyya Khalidi, Um Kamil, who reported visiting her neighbors, the Abu Sa‘ud family, together with her mother to congratulate them on the birth of the newborn boy: interview, Jerusalem, July 26, 1993. [[#ch06.html#note403|13]]. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Rioting as Sharon Visits Islam Holy Site,” ''Guardian'', September 29, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/29/israel. [[#ch06.html#note404|14]]. All figures are from tables published by the indispensable B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: https://www.btselem.org/statistics. [[#ch06.html#note405|15]]. Reuven Pedatzur, “One Million Bullets,” ''Haaretz'', June 29, 2004, https://www.haaretz.com/1.4744778. [[#ch06.html#note406|16]]. Ibid. According to Pedatzur’s analysis, the Israeli high command had decided beforehand on this crushing use of force in order that the Palestinians’ ultimate defeat be “burned into their consciousness.” [[#ch06.html#note407|17]]. Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi, “Human Capital and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers,” ''Journal of Economic Perspectives'' 21, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 223–38. [[#ch06.html#note408|18]]. It was my impression that his mental decline began earlier, and may have dated back to the 1992 crash landing of a plane carrying him in the Libyan desert that killed several of those aboard and left him injured: Youssef Ibrahim, “Arafat Is Found Safe in Libyan Desert After Crash,” ''New York Times'', April 9, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/09/world/arafat-is-found-safe-in-libyan-desert-after-crash.html. [[#ch06.html#note409|19]]. This doctrine is powerfully analyzed by Pedatzur, “One Million Bullets.” [[#ch06.html#note410|20]]. The most reliable and consistent polling over the past few decades has been done by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre. According to their Poll No. 52, issued in December 2004, “A majority of Palestinians opposes military operations against Israeli targets as a suitable response under the current political conditions,” http://www.jmcc.org/documentsandmaps.aspx?id=448. [[#ch06.html#note411|21]]. Nicholas Pelham and Max Rodenbeck, “Which Way for Hamas?” ''New York Review of Books'', November 5, 2009, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/11/05/which-way-for-hamas/. [[#ch06.html#note412|22]]. This was clearly shown by polling done after the election by the reputable Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research, http://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/478; and by a private firm, Near East Consulting, http://www.neareastconsulting.com/plc2006/blmain.html. [[#ch06.html#note413|23]]. The final revised version, agreed to by all Palestinian factions, dated June 28, 2006, can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060720162701/http://www.jmcc.org/documents/prisoners2.htm. [[#ch06.html#note414|24]]. This figure is from June 2018: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/53-cent-palestinians-gaza-live-poverty-despite-humanitarian-assistance. [[#ch06.html#note415|25]]. This figure is from the Israeli NGO Gisha: https://gisha.org/updates/9840. CIA World Fact Book estimates for 2016 and 2017 are lower: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html. [[#ch06.html#note416|26]]. Two excellent books on the Gaza wars are Norman Finkelstein, ''Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom'' (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); and Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, ''Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the US-Israeli War on the Palestinians'' (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). [[#ch06.html#note417|27]]. These figures are taken from the website of B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, https://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/during-cast-lead/by-date-of-event; and https://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/after-cast-lead/by-date-of-event. [[#ch06.html#note418|28]]. “50 Days: More Than 500 Children: Facts and Figures on Fatalities in Gaza, Summer 2014,” B’Tselem, https://www.btselem.org/2014_gaza_conflict/en/il/. [[#ch06.html#note419|29]]. Barbara Opall-Rome, “Gaza War Leaned Heavily on F-16 Close-Air Support,” ''Defense News'', September 15, 2014, http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140915/DEFREG04/309150012/Gaza-War-Leaned-Heavily-F-16-Close-Air-Support also available via: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=64924. [[#ch06.html#note420|30]]. Jodi Rudoren and Fares Akram, “Lost Homes and Dreams at Tower Israel Leveled,” ''New York Times'', September 15, 2014. [[#ch06.html#note421|31]]. “Protective Edge, in Numbers,” Ynet, August 14, 2014, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4558916,00.html. [[#ch06.html#note422|32]]. Mark Perry, “Why Israel’s Bombardment of Gaza Neighborhood Left US Officers ‘Stunned,’” Al Jazeera America, August 27, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/israel-bombing-stunsusofficers.html. [[#ch06.html#note423|33]]. In “Why It’s Hard to Believe Israel’s Claim That It Did Its Best to Minimize Civilian Casualties,” ''The World Post'', August 21, 2014, Idan Barir, a former crew commander in the Israeli artillery corps, notes that “The truth is artillery shells cannot be aimed precisely and are not meant to hit specific targets. A standard 40-kilogram shell is nothing but a large fragmentation grenade. When it explodes, it is meant to kill anyone within a 50-meter radius and to wound anyone within a further 100 meters,” and that Israel’s “use of artillery fire is a deadly game of Russian roulette. The statistics, on which such firepower relies, mean that in densely populated areas such as Gaza, civilians will inevitably be hit as well,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/idan-barir/israel-gaza-civilian-deaths_b_5673023.html. [[#ch06.html#note424|34]]. “Israel Warns Hizballah War Would Invite Destruction,” ''Ynetnews.com'' (''Yedioth Ahranoth''), October 3, 2008, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3604893,00.html. See also Yaron London, “The Dahiya Strategy,” ''Ynetnews.com'' (''Yedioth Ahranoth''), October 6, 2008, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3605863,00.html. [[#ch06.html#note425|35]]. E.g., Amos Harel, “A Real War Is Under Way in Gaza,” ''Haaretz'', July 26, 2014, http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.607279. [[#ch06.html#note426|36]]. 22 USC 2754: Purposes for which military sales or leases by the United States are authorized; report to Congress: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:22%20section:2754%20edition:prelim). [[#ch06.html#note427|37]]. Shibley Telhami, “American Attitudes on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Brookings, December 2, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/research/american-attitudes-on-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/. [[#ch06.html#note428|38]]. “Views of Israel and Palestinians,” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/05/05/5-views-of-israel-and-palestinians/. [[#ch06.html#note429|39]]. “Republicans and Democrats Grow Even Further Apart in Views of Israel, Palestinians,” Pew Research Center, January 23, 2018, http://www.people-press.org/2018/01/23/republicans-and-democrats-grow-even-further-apart-in-views-of-israel-palestinians/. [[#ch06.html#note430|40]]. Carroll Doherty, “A New Perspective on Americans’ Views of Israelis and Palestinians,” Pew Research Center, April 24, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/24/a-new-perspective-on-americans-views-of-israelis-and-palestinians/. [[#ch06.html#note431|41]]. The chief sponsor of the bill was Congresswoman Betty McColum (DFL-MN): https://mccollum.house.gov/media/press-releases/mccollum-introduces-legislation-promote-human-rights-palestinian-children. See also https://mccollum.house.gov/media/press-releases/mccollum-introduces-legislation-promote-human-rights-palestinian-children. [[#ch06.html#note432|42]]. These are the situations accurately described by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt in ''The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy'' (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). [[#ch06.html#note433|43]]. This emerges clearly from the previously cited poll of over 18,000 respondents in eleven Arab countries in 2017–18 by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies: https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/News/Pages/ACRPS-Releases-Arab-Index-2017-2018.aspx. [[#ch06.html#note434|44]]. Secretary of State to Legation, Jedda, August 17, 1948, ''FRUS'' 1948, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1318. For further details on how the Saudi regime catered to Washington over Palestine, see R. Khalidi, ''Brokers of Deceit'', xxiv–xxvii. [[#ch06.html#note435|45]]. This was contained in a letter from Bush to Sharon delivered on April 14, 2004, during a meeting in Washington: https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/mfadocuments/pages/exchange%20of%20letters%20sharon-bush%2014-apr-2004.aspx. [[#ch06.html#note436|46]]. Interviews with two senior officials directly involved with these matters who preferred to remain anonymous: February 1, 2010, and January 11, 2011. CONCLUSION [[#conclu.html#note437|1]]. “Memorandum by Mr. Balfour (Paris) respecting Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia,” August 11, 1919, in ''Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939'', ed. E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (London: HM Stationery Office, 1952), 340–48, http://www.yorku.ca/dwileman/2930Bal.htm. [[#conclu.html#note438|2]]. “Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel before Bilateral Meeting Davos, Switzerland,” January 25, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-netanyahu-israel-bilateral-meeting-davos-switzerland/. [[#conclu.html#note439|3]]. C. Bengelsdorf et al., eds., ''The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad'', 301. [[#conclu.html#note440|4]]. Judt’s article, “Israel: The Alternative,” ''The New York Review of Books'', October 23, 2003, controversial at the time, would probably cause fewer waves today, although in the current atmosphere, his critique of Zionism might draw absurd accusations of anti-Semitism. [[#conclu.html#note441|5]]. “Introduction,” ''Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question'', ed. Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (New York: Verso, 1988), 1. [[#conclu.html#note442|6]]. These international efforts, closely coordinated by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, focus in particular on labeling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “anti-Semitic.” The ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' has published a series of articles on these efforts: Shir Hever, “BDS Suppression Attempts in Germany Backfire,” 48, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 86–96; Barry Trachtenberg and Kyle Stanton, “Shifting Sands: Zionism and US Jewry,” 48, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 79–87; Dominique Vidal, “Conflating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism: France in the Crosshairs,” 48, no. 1 (Autumn 2018): 119–30; Moshe Machover, “An Immoral Dilemma: The Trap of Zionist Propaganda,” 47, no. 4 (Summer 2018): 69–78. [[#conclu.html#note443|7]]. “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,” May 14, 1948, http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20establishment%20of%20state%20of%20israel.aspx. [[#conclu.html#note444|8]]. Zeev Sternhell, “En Israël pousse un racisme proche du nazisme à ses débuts,” ''Le Monde'', February 20, 2018, 22, my translation. [[#conclu.html#note445|9]]. For a lucid analysis of the law, see Hassan Jabareen and Suhad Bishara, “The Jewish Nation-State Law: Antecedents and Constitutional Implications,” ''Journal of Palestine Studies'', 48, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 46–55. For its text, see pages 44–45, and for a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court on the subject of the law by Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, see 56–57. [[#conclu.html#note446|10]]. Revital Hovel, “Justice Minister: Israel Must Keep Jewish Majority Even at the Expense of Human Rights,” ''Haaretz'', February 13, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/justice-minister-israel-s-jewish-majority-trumps-than-human-rights-1.5811106. [[#conclu.html#note447|11]]. Ibid. See also Ravit Hecht, “The Lawmaker Who Thinks Israel Is Deceiving the Palestinians: No One Is Going to Give Them a State,” ''Haaretz Weekend'', October 28, 2017, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-lawmaker-who-thinks-israel-is-deceiving-the-palestinians-1.5460676. [[#conclu.html#note448|12]]. Sternhell, “En Israël pousse un racisme proche du nazisme à ses débuts.” [[#conclu.html#note449|13]]. Israeli planes have at different times bombed Tunis, Cairo, Khartoum, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad, several of them repeatedly, and several of them recently. [[#conclu.html#note450|14]]. This is a central argument of my book, ''Palestinian Identity'', in line with theses put forth by several of the most respected writers on nationalism including Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner. [[#conclu.html#note451|15]]. Ernest Gellner, ''Nations and Nationalism'' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 48–49. [[#conclu.html#note452|16]]. Peter Beaumont, “Trump’s Ambassador to Israel Refers to ‘Alleged Occupation’ of Palestinian Territories,” ''Guardian'', September 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/01/trump-ambassador-israel-david-friedman-alleged-occupation-palestinian-territories; Nathan Guttman, “US Ambassador to Israel Asked State Department to Stop Using the Word ‘Occupation’,” ''The Forward'', December 26, 2017, https://forward.com/fast-forward/390857/us-ambassador-to-israel-asked-state-dept-to-stop-using-the-word-occupation/; David Halbfinger, “US Ambassador Says Israel Has Right to Annex Parts of West Bank,” ''New York Times'', June 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/world/middleeast/israel-west-bank-david-friedman.html. [[#conclu.html#note453|17]]. Ruth Eglash, “Top Trump Adviser Says Settlements Are Not an Obstacle to Peace,” ''Washington Post'', November 10, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/top-trump-adviser-says-israeli-settlements-are-not-an-obstacle-to-peace/2016/11/10/8837b472-5c81-49a3-947c-ba6a47c4bc2f_story.html; Piotr Smolar, “Washington ouvrira son ambassade à Jerusalem en mai,” ''Le Monde'', February 25–26, 2018, 4. [[#conclu.html#note454|18]]. Jonathan Swan, “Kushner, For First Time, Claims He Never Discussed Security Clearance with Trump,” Axios, June 3, 2019, https://www.axios.com/jared-kushner-security-clearance-donald-trump-f7706db1-a978-42ec-90db-c2787f19cef3.html. [[#conclu.html#note455|19]]. “Palestine Chief Negotiator Reveals Details of Trump Peace Plan,” ''Middle East Monitor'', January 22, 2018, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180122-palestine-chief-negotiator-reveals-details-of-trump-peace-plan/. [[#conclu.html#note456|20]]. Jonathan Ferziger and Peter Waldman, “How Do Israel’s Tech Firms Do Business in Saudi Arabia? Very Quietly,” ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', February 2, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-02/how-do-israel-s-tech-firms-do-business-in-saudi-arabia-very-quietly. [[#conclu.html#note457|21]]. Julien Boissou, “Analyse: L’Inde s’implante au Moyen-Orient,” ''Le Monde'', February 27, 2018, 21. [[#conclu.html#note458|22]]. “2016 Arab Opinion Index: Executive Summary,” Arab Center Washington, DC, April 12, 2017, http://arabcenterdc.org/survey/arab-opinion-index-2016. [[#conclu.html#note459|23]]. This is the core thesis of my book ''Brokers of Deceit''. == ACKNOWLEDGMENTS == I owe a conscious or unconscious debt to all of those many people through whose experiences I have tried to tell the story of this century of war on Palestine. Reading or hearing their words is what brought me to write this book in this form. In it, I have tried to convey voices that have gone largely unheard in the confusing dissonance surrounding the question of Palestine. In a previous book, I thanked my three aunts, ‘Anbara Salam al-Khalidi, Fatima al-Khalidi Salam and Wahidi al-Khalidi, for providing me with living images drawn from their memories of the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Although as I worked on this book I deeply regretted that I was no longer able to consult any of them, or my mother, Selwa Jeha al-Khalidi, and father, Ismail Raghib al-Khalidi, about the events they lived through, I had them all constantly in mind as I wrote it. Even when I do not quote them directly, all of them are present in its pages. Each in her or his own way taught me something about the past and how it forms part of the present. Fortunately, among those I could consult and profit from were my cousin, Professor Walid Ahmad Samih Khalidi, on whose prodigious memory I called repeatedly in thinking about this topic (and on whose pioneering scholarship I relied throughout the book), my cousin Leila Husayn al-Khalidi al-Husayni, and friends, colleagues, and comrades from Beirut days too numerous to name. I owe a debt I cannot repay to the many people with whom I have discussed the subject matter of this book, or who have inspired me to write it. My son Ismail first persuaded me that this was a worthwhile project, and helped to shape its form at the outset. This book would probably not exist but for his initial contributions. For years before I started writing it, Nawaf Salam constantly urged me to write a history of Palestine that would be accessible to uninformed readers. I hope that what follows meets his expectations. While working on this project, I consulted many colleagues and friends who provided invaluable help, some of whom read sections of the book, and all of whom deserve my special appreciation. Among them were Bashir Abu-Manneh, Suad Amiri, Seth Anziska, Qais al-Awqati, Remi Brulin, Musa Budeiri, Leena Dallasheh, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Samer Ghaddar, Magda Ghanma, Amira Hass, Nubar Hovsepian, Rafiq Husayni, Amy Kaplan, Ahmad Khalidi, Hasan Khalidi, Raja Khalidi, Barnett Rubin, Stuart Schaar, May Seikaly, Avi Shlaim, Ramzi Tadros, Salim Tamari, Naomi Wallace, John Whitbeck, and Susan Ziadeh. I also must thank those who helped me with my research. They include Jeanette Seraphim, librarian at the Institute for Palestine Studies, Yasmeen Abdel Majeed, Dr. Nili Belkind, Linda Butler, Leshasharee Amore Carter, Andrew Victor Hinton, Sean McManus, Patricia Morel, Khadr Salameh, Malek Sharif, and Yair Svorai. I have presented parts of this book to audiences at a variety of venues on four continents, and have benefited greatly from their comments and insights. These include the Duke University Middle East Center, the Center for Palestine Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies, Brown University, Yale University, the Kevorkian Middle East Center at New York University, Princeton University, the Centro d’Estudios Arabes at the University of Santiago, the Issam Fares Center for Public Policy at the American University of Beirut, the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, the Columbia Global Center in Amman, the Harvard Club of New York, and the United Nations Committee on the Unalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. My deepest gratitude is due to those who read the entire book, first among them Tarif Khalidi, who in carefully scrutinizing the entire manuscript brought his vast expertise to bear, and thereby saved me from many errors. In helping to improve the book, Tarif did once again what he has done for many decades: provided me with invariably good advice. My old friend Jim Chandler again applied his sharp eye to improving my prose and sharpening my arguments. My harshest critic, my wife Mona, not only tolerated my many extended absences and my frequent absent-mindedness with exemplary forbearance while I was researching and writing this book, but also used her unmatched editorial skills to clarify my writing and limit my propensity for repetition. Our two daughters, Dr. Lamya Khalidi and Dima Khalidi, Esq., added their sharp critical sense to that of their mother, as did their brother Ismail, seasoned with their customary levity. My agent, George Lucas, was invaluable in helping to provide the project with its current form at an early stage, and in introducing me to Sara Bershtel and Riva Hocherman at Metropolitan Books. Riva did far more than what a good editor normally does: as she has with so many others, she shared with me her matchless expertise, while helping to give this book the shape and form that it now has, restructuring it and improving it immensely. I owe her a great debt of gratitude. I could not have written this book without all of this invaluable support, but it goes without saying that the responsibility for its contents is mine alone. [http://bit.ly/ProfNews [[File:images/pub.jpg|Profile Books]]] [http://bit.ly/ProfNews Join our mailing list for book news, competitions and extracts from Profile Books.]
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