Jewish states . . . in Palestine.” The numerous other diplomatic documents of the preceding decades spoke in similar terms. Insofar as anyone referred to “Palestinians,” the term simply meant those who dwelled in the territory called Palestine, Jews as well as Arabs, without any suggestion that these individuals constituted a distinct political or cultural community as is connoted by the word “nation.”
It was Zionism, itself—made to seem real and threatening by the Balfour Declaration—that stimulated the Arabs of Palestine to search for their own identity. They first turned their gaze northward. Palestine had been connected with, or part of Syria, virtually since its earliest identity in the form of the second century Roman province called Syria Palaestina. “When Amir Faysal established a government in Damascus in October 1918, the Palestinian Arabs’ aspirations focused on him,” writes Ann Mosely Lesch, coauthor of a Rand Corporation study of Palestinian nationalism. “An all-Palestine Conference in February 1919 . . . supported the inclusion of Palestine in an independent Syria.”3
Faysal’s ouster by France was not fatal to his ambitions for a throne—he went on to become king of Iraq—but it eliminated this option for the Palestinians. So, in 1921, local Arab notables formed an alternative program to present to London. It sought cancelation of the Balfour Declaration, an end to Jewish immigration, restoration of Ottoman law, and agreement that “Palestine not . . . be separated from the neighboring Arab states.”4 It also called for the election of a representative government in Palestine, but this was less an expression of national identity than simply a demand for self-rule within the jurisdiction designated as “Palestine” by the reigning powers. The essential sensibility was not Palestinian, per se, but rather the feeling, as the Rand study puts it, “that Palestine is essentially Arab and that it should be governed by Arabs.”5
The same sentiment motivated the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), which was formed in 1936 and led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council. Spearheading the Arab revolt against the Jews and British from 1936 to 1939, the AHC spoke in the name of the Arabs of Palestine but did not call itself “Palestinian.”
During the 1948 war over the birth of Israel, al-Husseini declared the formation of a government of all Palestine. But Alain Gresh, former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and a sympathetic authority on the Palestinian cause, observes that “this appears to have been much more an Egyptian maneuver intended to counter Hashemite designs [the Hashemites were the rulers of Transjordan] than a desire to nurture an embryo Palestinian government. This government was soon forgotten.”6
Egypt came away from the 1948 war occupying Gaza, which had been part of Palestine. In the 1950s, tiring of al-Husseini and his AHC, Nasser directed the creation of some new Palestinian offices. But “Nasser was . . . concerned not with forming a provisional government . . . of a future independent state . . . only with creating a sort of Palestinian body [as] the spokesman for Cairo’s policy,” explains another French specialist, cited by Gresh, who adds: “At this time, the question of the Palestinian people and its self-determination and independent struggle was not an issue either for Nasser or the Arab Higher Committee. This view was, with some nuances, shared by the Palestinians themselves.”7
This picture began to change in 1964 at the first Arab League summit meeting, convened in Cairo by Nasser, at which the decision was made to create the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO would eventually become the very embodiment of Palestinian national aspirations, but this is not how it began. As scholar Hussam Mohamed put it:
Regardless of the claim that the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 was necessary to fill a gap in the political life of the Palestinians, the new organization was the stepchild of inter-Arab rivalries and power politics. In fact, it was President Nasser of Egypt who, during the 1964 Arab Summit Conference, recommended the creation of the PLO, and nominated [Ahmad] Shuqairy to be its first chairman. . . . The . . . goals of the new Palestinian organization were simple: . . . to cater more to the interests of certain Arab states than to those of the Palestinian people.8
Ahmad Shuqairy was born in Lebanon but his family home was in the ancient city of Acre on the Mediterranean coast just north of Haifa. His father, As’ad, was an Ottoman official, cool to the cause of Arab, much less Palestinian independence.9 But, Ahmad made a career as an Arab spokesman. In the 1940s, he worked for al-Husseini’s AHC until becoming, in 1949, a member of Syria’s delegation to the United Nations. He followed that with seven years of service as assistant secretary-general of the Arab League and then several years back at the United Nations, this time representing Saudi Arabia until 1963, shortly before Nasser tabbed him to found the PLO.10 In short, he was the very personification of pan-Arabism.
Shuqairy was a man of bombast who won few admirers. Conor Cruise O’Brien, who represented Ireland in the United Nations during Shuqairy’s tenure there as the Saudi ambassador, preserves this memory:
All delegates are constrained in the General Assembly to become connoisseurs of windbags, and [Shuqairy] was, by common assent, the windbag’s windbag. He used to begin his oratorical set piece each year with the words: “I am honored to address the members of the United Nations”—pause for effect—“all [x] of them.” X always represented whatever the real current membership was, minus one. Israel was a non-nation.11
Years later, Yasser Arafat offered his take on Shuqairy to biographer Thomas Kiernan. “The appointment of [Shuqairy] to speak for the cause of liberation was a clear reflection of Nasser’s contempt for our cause. . . . It was obvious from the beginning that the PLO was to be nothing but . . . a tool of the Egyptians to keep us quiet.”12
Shuqairy personally crafted the Palestinian National Charter adopted in 1964. Abdallah Frangi, a Palestinian leader, calls it a landmark “which for the first time formulated the ideas of a Palestinian identity.”13 Nonetheless, its “most striking feature” to Gresh was “the absence of all reference to any sovereignty either of the Palestinian people or of the PLO, or to a Palestinian state.” Gresh attributes this in part to the pressures of Arab governments and in part to “Arab nationalism [which] was still heavily predominant.”14
But Arab nationalism, or pan-Arabism, soon had the stuffing knocked out of it by Israel in the 1967 war. When, on the morrow of the defeat, Nasser tendered his resignation, crowds gathered in Egyptian cities—whether spontaneously or orchestrated by his henchmen, most likely some of each—to demand he remain in office, which he did until dying of a heart attack in 1970. By then he had lost much of his stature, and the pan-Arab philosophy that he had championed was moribund.
Its demise made room for individual nationalisms, especially that of the Palestinians. Such a movement already existed in embryonic form. In the 1950s, in Egypt, a group of students with Palestinian backgrounds had begun to forge a path different from the one laid down by Nasser and the other Arab rulers. They were angry at the manipulation of the Palestinian issue by the Arab governments that, with the partial exception of Jordan, refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, preferring to keep them in UN-run camps as a symbol of the Arab cause. And yet these same governments seemed in no hurry to vindicate that cause by facing Israel on the battlefield. Thus, believing themselves to be the only ones who cared truly and deeply about Palestine, these young men formed tiny cells, determined to take the fight into their own hands.
In 1959, in Kuwait where many of them had migrated since its oil boom generated an abundance of jobs, several of these tiny groups came together to form the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Its initials, read backward, spelled the Arabic word for conquest: Al Fatah. They established a periodical, Filastinuna, meaning Our Palestine.15 When the PLO was founded five years later under Nasser’s aegis, Fatah viewed it as a rival.
Fatah’s leader was a thirty-year-old activist
