Editing Palestine (section)

=====1967 Arab-Israeli War=====
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Six-Day war, or, in the Arab world, the June 1967 war, was another major turning point for Palestinian resistance. It marked the second major wave of Palestinian expulsion, the second part of the Nakba (''sensu stricto''), and the beginning of many different resistance groups founded in its aftermath. We here will cover the events which led to the war, its resolution, and afterwards the legacy it left to both Israel and Palestine moving forward.

By 1961 Syria broke away from the UAR led by Nasser, following a military coup. In 1964 Syria, still struggling internally, had a dispute with Israel over the rivers which flowed into the Sea of Galilee from Syria's Golan Heights territory. Israel was attempting to dig a canal which funneled this freshwater from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev Desert in the south. Syria disputed this exploitation of the water source, and moved to divert the upstream water away from the Sea of Galilee in 1964. Violent conflicts, though sparse, began in and around the northern DMZ that year.

In 1966, following the murder of a few IDF soldiers by the guerilla Fatah movement, Israeli forces raided the West Bank village of As Samu' in the largest military operation since 1956. They rounded up the locals, killed 18, injured over 100, and blew up dozens of homes.

By this point, Israel was on thin ice with its neighbors, and was still not welcome by the local populations. On May 13, 1967, the Soviet Union falsely warned Egypt that Israel was assembling its troops to invade Syria. Similarly, declassified CIA documents and then-Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban revealed that Israel lied about Egyptian troop concentration in order to secure U.S. diplomatic and military support for Israel and against Nasser. Under the Egyptian-Syrian defense treaty of 1955, both countries were obligated to protect each other in case of an attack on either. On May 16th, 1967, Nasser ordered the UN troops out of the Sinai, and-- to his surprise-- the UN completely withdrew. He threatened to obliterate Israel once and for all. Jordanian King Hussein joined the Egyptian-Syrian coalition against Israel, signing a mutual defense pact with Egypt and overseeing construction of the Syrian canal while the Egyptians amassed in the Sinai. Iraq soon followed Jordan in joining the coalition. Additionally, Nasser blocked Israeli shipping through the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. The superpowers repositioned their naval assets in the region that same week. 

On the eve of the 1967 attack, Israeli minister Yigal Allon wrote: “In … a new war, we must avoid the historic mistake of the War of Independence [1948] … and must not cease fighting until we achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel”. However, respective motives are debated even today.

Moshe Dayan, under Israel's third Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, led the Israeli forces as in the Suez crisis, and the Israeli air force prepared for intense fighting. The Egyptian air force sent patrols up to defend its airspace at dawn on June 5th, but left a gap in their timing which would cost them dearly. Eleven Egyptian air bases were destroyed in the Israeli morning assault, timed between patrol shifts and leaving the Egyptians scrambling and defenseless. 

Syria launched a sortie against oil refineries in Haifa, but were destroyed. Syrian airfields were flattened on the evening of June 5th. The Jordanian and Iraqi air forces were destroyed as well as they tried to move towards Israel. The Israeli air force then devoted itself to holding the Sinai to the south, the West Bank, and Golan Heights to the north. Following this, Egypt repositioned to attack. The Egyptians moved into the Gaza Strip and planned to meet Jordanian forces by cutting across and taking southern Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli forces sought to break through the flanks of the Egyptians. Ariel Sharon sent troops and helicopters for an assault on Egyptian positions. Fifteen-thousand Egyptian soldiers were killed in just four days. Many were captured, as well as hundreds of tanks and guns-- more than 80% of their equipment. By June 8th, Egypt was ready to accept a ceasefire. 

Jordan had multiple brigades in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with others in Samaria to the north. By the morning of June 6th, the Israeli Jerusalem brigade was at war over Jordanian-held East Jerusalem. By mid-day on June 7th, Israel had taken the Old City amid calls for a ceasefire by the UN, which Israeli representatives tried to delay in New York and Washington, D.C. The Israelis took Latrun from Egypt from their position at Lydda airport, and the major cities of Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, and Jericho in the West Bank were taken by Israel. Throughout the war, under orders from future fifth Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli forces expelled 10,000 Palestinian villagers, destroying the villages in what could only be described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas were among the most notable of targets; In the West Bank, the towns of Qalqilya and Tulkarem were deliberately and systematically erased. 12,000 Palestinians were expelled from Qalqilya alone as "punishment", according to Moshe Dayan's memoirs.

On June 9th, Israel began its assault on the Syrian Golan Heights in the north, capturing it on June 10th, and coming within staggering distance of Syria's capital, Damascus. The UN assisted in peace negotiations; Israel signed a ceasefire with Egypt on June 9th and Syria on June 11th.
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The Israelis demolished the entire Mughrabi quarter of East Jerusalem on June 11th, which stood for 770 years prior. That night, the homes of over 100 Palestinian families, as well as the two mosques in the Mughrabi quarter, were destroyed using bombs and bulldozers in order to make an easily accessible plaza for Jewish worshippers in front of the (Western) Wailing Wall. The neighborhood was built by al-Malik, son of the Ayyubid Sultan Saladin as a Muslim waqf (an inalienable charitable trust under Islamic law). 

Many Palestinian refugees fled to Jordan across the river with very few personal belongings. The Israelis annexed Golan Heights and much of the West Bank, which eventually was reduced to its modern state of various disparate enclaves ("Bantustan-ization"). However, they refused to withdrawal from the Sinai-- instead, they planted secret weapons caches and mapped the territory, and soon after Egypt began a war of attrition against the Israeli invasion. Israeli shelling led to exorbitant civilian deaths in Ismalia, Port Said, and Suez, the lattermost almost completely destroyed. 

Prior to all this, in 1964 the Arab League convened in Cairo for its first summit, during which it authorized the creation of an authority representing the Palestinian Arab population, an umbrella organization of Palestinian groups called the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The Palestinian National Council met for the first time in Jerusalem on May 28th, 1964, and the PLO was formalized on June 2nd, 1964 with its stated goals being Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine. That same year, the PLO authored a National Covenant to formalize their ideological line, which was later revised and replaced in 1968. 

The Soviet Union slowly recognized the PLO and its efforts viz. national liberation in the late 1960s. By 1974 the USSR supported the establishment of a Palestinian state and in 1978 recognized the PLO as the sole representatives of the Palestinian people.

The PLO is a united front of various groups who, at least nominally, act on behalf of the Palestinian people. They saw the 1948 war as an unsettled matter, and in the context of the popular Arab sentiments of anger and distrust which followed the Crusades, as well as both inter-imperialist (world) wars, these groups were founded. The umbrella includes eight groups during various periods, but they were founded with only a few. 

Here were will briefly discuss the origins and lineage of various prominent factions of the PLO. These groups were mainly founded after and/or influenced by the 1967 war.

Fatah is the most notorious and most powerful of the PLO factions. It is a secular nationalist organization first established by Yasser Arafat, a prominent leader of the Palestinian (Arab) community and its mass of refugees, in 1959. They were at first advocates of armed struggle, and in the mid-1950s were only a revolutionary mass movement which had no formal political hegemony or representation. Fatah participated in diplomacy with Israel and its allies, including via the Oslo Accords, and seeks a two-state solution along 1967 borders with absolute right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. In 1988, after renouncing terrorism, the party was taken off the US list terror organizations.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded in 1967 in the aftermath of the Six-Day war. George Habash, the main founder of four, was a Palestinian Orthodox Christian, a physician, and a member of Fatah until the Six-Day war. Habash wanted Fatah to take a stance more cooperative with Marxist-Leninism, and split to form the PFLP after the Six-Day war. Thus, they became Fatah's main opposition in the PLO. The PFLP was originally supported by the Soviet Union and some of its allies. Habash's co-founders are also important figures in Palestinian politics: Wadi Haddad, Nayef Hawatmeh, and Amhad Jabril. The PFLP opposes the PA and participation in its government, but has done so since 2006. The party opposes a two-state solution and instead calls for a democratic secular state to be won in historic Palestine through armed struggle. They are opposed to any kind of ethnonational or theocratic rule. It is listed as a terrorist organization by the US and EU. In their founding document (11 December 1967) and ''Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine'' (1969) they are very explicit; their enemies are Israel, the World Zionist Movement, World Imperialism, and "Arab reaction represented by feudalism and capitalism"-- not Jews. The PFLP bases it's political analysis on class, not race or religion.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was a group which split from the PFLP in 1969, but retained its membership in the PLO. Nayef Hawatmeh is its founder (along with Yasser Abed Rabbo) and current leader. It is a Maoist party which organizes the National Resistance Brigades. Their founding goal is to "create a people's democratic Palestine, where Arabs and Jews would live without discrimination, a state without classes and national oppression, a state which allows Arabs and Jews to develop their national culture." The DFLP is based in Damascus, Syria and was initially supported by the Soviet Union, Syria, and others.

Rabbo, who founded the DFLP, later split to found the Palestinian Democratic Union (FIDA). They are a minor group in the PLO which supports the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The Palestinian People's Party (PPP) was originally called the Palestinian Communist Party. It was founded in 1919, but after the war of 1948, the original party was dissolved and its members in the West Bank joined the Jordanian Communist Party. They re-established the Palestinian Communist Party in February 1982, just months before the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, when the Soviet Union fell, they changed their name to the PPP. The PPP constitutes a minor bloc in the PLO, which they joined in 1987.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Central Command (PFLP-GC) is another offshoot of the PFLP. Founded by Ahmad Jibril in 1968, The PFLP-GC took a clear pro-Syrian stance in addition to its Marxist-Leninist line. They are opposed to peace with Israel and are designated a terrorist group by the US and EU, sharing the PFLP's vision for a secular democratic state across the region.

The Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) was originally the Palestinian Popular Struggle Organization (PPSO), founded in the 1967 by Bahjat Abu Garbieh, a former Ba'athist. Closely linked to Fatah, they became officially partnered with Arafat in 1971. In 1973, the PPSF split from Fatah and Arafat, rejecting the Ten Point Program of 1974 and subsequently leaving the PLO. Their Secretary-General Samir Ghawshah later elected to rejoin the PLO, accept the Oslo Accords, and form the PA. This led to a split within the PPSF, spawning another organization under the same name in 1991, which rejected the PLO and PA but takes part in military exercises and operations led by the PLO. Their armed wing, formed in 2008, is the Palestinian Popular Jihad Brigades.

Rejecting the Ten Point Program, aligning itself with Fatah, and rejecting the Wadi Haddad faction which carried out the Dawson's Fields plane hijackings, the PFLP split again during its Congress in 1972. The PFLP renounced the use of plane-hijackings, stated that the Haddad gang's adventurism gave King Hussein pretext for war on the PLO, condemned them as a "right-wing" element with ties to Egyptian, Jordanian, and Iraqi intelligence, based on intelligence provided by the Syrian Mukhaberat. Wadi Haddad, an agent of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service (Mukhaberat), formed the PFLP-EO (External Operations) and continued carrying out terror attacks. 

Syrian intelligence supported the PFLP's "Leftist faction", instigating another split. The Revolutionary PFLP (PRFLP) split because George Habash retained contacts with Haddad. The Syrian Mukhaberat disliked Habash for this reason, helping to set up the PRFLP. In the midst of all these splits from the PFLP, their spokesman, the author and artist Ghassan Kanafani, was killed by the Mossad, who accused him of orchestrating Haddad's attacks. 

The defeat of June 1967, also called the "Naksa" or "setback", changed the mass-sociopolitical state of Arab nations. Arab nationalism began to wane among the masses as a sort of "renaissence" period, and soon new-Islamic and other forms of resistance to the unipolar order emerged. The Arab populations of each respective country took on revolutionary attitudes, including Palestine, as evidenced by the founding of the many PLO factions and other resistance groups in its wake. Syria continued to be plagued by civil war, coups, and general factional and religious violence until the former general and Prime Minister Hafez al-Assad (father of Bashar) secured the Presidency in a bloodless Ba'athist coup in 1970, bringing with his administration statecraftsmanship and administrative security; the Jordanian monarchy carried on but was soon faced with violent opposition from the PLO, culminating in Black September of 1970 and leading to the PLO's expulsion to Syria and Lebanon the following year; Soon Lebanon would succumb to civil war, while Egypt under Sadat began to establish diplomatic relations with Israel and took kindly to Western influence.