Part 1 of this series outlined the history of the Zionist project from the late 19th century until the creation of Israel in 1948 with its attendant expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba. Part 2 discussed the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, its guerilla campaign of cross-border raids from Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and the blowback it received both from the Israelis and its Arab hosts. This phase took a decisive turn in 1982 when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, with massive loss of Lebanese and Palestinian lives, and the PLO was ejected from Lebanon. The Israelis were highly satisfied with what they had achieved with the Lebanese invasion, thinking they had dealt a decisive blow to Palestinian resistance. This wasn’t how it worked out, as Rashid Khalidi tells us. A modern David and Goliath With the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, the Palestinian cause appeared to have been gravely weakened, and Sharon seemed to have achieved all of his core objectives. Howeve
In Part 1 of this series I provided a quick precis of the emergence of Zionism and its adoption by the British in the administration of Palestine between the two World Wars, concluding with the Nakba – the ‘catastrophe’, in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from Palestine - and the creation of Israel in 1947-48. The Nakba initiated a period in which the primary locus of Palestinian activism was outside the country. The largest Palestinian populations were now refugees in the various Arab states – Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt (Gaza was at that point Egyptian territory) and to a lesser extent Libya, Syria and other Arab countries. They began to organise themselves both politically and militarily in these various nations. They used their communities in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, Jordanian-ruled West Bank and the south of Lebanon and Syria as staging-posts for cross-border raids, many of which targeted Israeli civilians. This led to savage and often disproportionate Israeli