From the 19th century to the Oslo Accords (1993–1995)
Read the introduction and part I here
The Second Arab–Israeli War – The Suez Crisis
Let’s examine the impact of the new world situation on the Arab–Israeli conflict.
First of all, the Zionist ruling class in Israel was forging a strategic alliance with the United States, which wanted Israel to serve as the gatekeeper of its interests in the Middle East.
With U.S. backing, Israel was arming itself and building a highly capable military. The state played a central role in the economy, which grew rapidly, while substantial social benefits were provided to the Jewish population. This state intervention was even presented as “socialist” by the Zionists of the so-called Labour Party (Mapai), which governed Israel until the mid-1970s.
Moreover, the Holocaust had deeply shaken Jews across the world, driving even more of them towards the newly created State of Israel, which promised to be a safe haven. Between 1948 and 1951, some 600,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, doubling its Jewish population to around 1.4 million.
Following the 1948–49 victory, the Zionist state passed a series of laws transferring the property of the Palestinian refugees of the Nakba to the Israeli state and its institutions. At the same time, about 400 villages abandoned by Palestinians were razed to the ground.
The Zionist leadership succeeded in achieving unprecedented national unity within Israeli society. The horrors of the Holocaust, the sense of being surrounded by a hostile Arab world, the extensive state benefits that ensured a high standard of living for Jewish citizens, and the absence of a mass, independent workers’ socialist party in Israel were the foundations on which the national unity and militarisation of Israeli society were built.
On the other hand, the Arab countries and their governments were still trying to recover from the defeat of 1949. The failure of the Arab regimes, the loss of most of Palestine, and the social ferment generated by the Colonial Revolution led to a series of left-wing military coups against the monarchies of the Arab world.
Egypt became one of the focal points of these developments. In 1952, the Free Officers movement overthrew Egypt’s pro-Western King Farouk. Gamal Abdel Nasser, an officer who had fought in 1948, emerged as a leading figure.
In 1953, Egypt was declared a republic, and in 1954 Nasser became the country’s president. Nasser’s programme was essentially one of pan-Arab nationalism which, in the context of the Cold War, took a left-wing, anti-imperialist direction.
Nasser began implementing extensive pro-people measures, nationalising many private companies and banks, and opposing Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. His policies significantly improved the living standards of the masses, earning him enormous popular support.
To counter pressure from the United States and Western imperialism, Nasser turned to the USSR, signing arms and military cooperation agreements. At the same time, Egypt became the first non-communist country to recognise the People’s Republic of China.
Nasser also offered assistance to nationalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in Arab countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Palestine. In 1961, Nasser played a central role in the Non-Aligned Movement, which brought together countries that were aligned with neither the US nor Soviet Russia, such as Tito’s Yugoslavia, Makarios’ Cyprus, Indira Gandhi’s India, and others.
However, Nasser was not a Marxist; he did not lead a workers’ revolutionary party and therefore did not proceed to overthrow capitalist economic and social relations, nor to abolish capitalist rule and build workers’ democracy and socialism. His left turn and rapprochement with the USSR were empirical moves within the specific international conditions of the Cold War. This policy, of course, made Nasser a “red rag” for the US.
After the defeat in 1949, the Palestinian fedayeen (guerrilla fighters) developed armed actions against Israel, with the support of Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
On 26 July 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, which until then had been under the control of Britain and France and was of strategic importance for international trade.
The nationalisation of Suez, Nasser’s pro-Soviet policy and his support for the Palestinian fedayeen were the reasons why Britain, France and Israel decided to react militarily.
Thus, on 29 October 1956, Israel invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian control since the 1948 war. On 31 October, France and Britain landed troops in the Egyptian port of Port Said with the aim of taking control of Suez and toppling Nasser from power.
The intervention by the British, French and Israelis did not have the approval of the US, which feared a disruption to the oil supplies to the West and a possible reaction from the USSR, which threatened military intervention. Under US pressure, a ceasefire was announced on 7 November, and on 22 December the withdrawal of British and French troops from Suez, and Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, began.
Despite the military successes of Israel and its allies, the end of the war was recorded as a partial victory for Nasser, who gained even greater popular support among the Arab masses, both inside and outside Egypt. The current of pan-Arab nationalism was gaining strength.
The establishment of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
At the end of the 1950s, a small group of young Palestinians living in exile in Kuwait decided to found a new resistance organisation with the aim of liberating Palestine.
The organisation took the name Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement). Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (known as Abu Jihad) were two of its founding members. Fatah adopted armed guerrilla struggle as its method of resistance and was modelled on the liberation movements of Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam.
Fatah had a nationalist ideology and programme, aiming to unite all Palestinians, regardless of class divisions or political beliefs, in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the creation of a Palestinian state across the whole of historic Palestine, and the dissolution of the State of Israel. It saw this struggle as the duty of the Palestinians and the Arab peoples, and sought the support of the Arab regimes in the region.
Fatah gained its first supporters mainly among Palestinian refugees living in displacement in neighbouring Arab states. It built cells in Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc. In 1962 it secured Algerian support and in 1963 Syrian support, and set up fedayeen training bases in Jordan, where most of the Palestinian refugees lived.
On 1 January 1965, Fatah carried out its first armed operation against Israel by blowing up water infrastructure.
A little earlier, in May 1964, the first Palestinian National Congress convened in East Jerusalem with the support of the Arab states, which sought to control the Palestinian movement as they regarded Palestine as their own territory under Israeli occupation.
The first Palestinian National Congress decided to establish the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people and the organiser of the struggle for the liberation of the homeland. Former diplomat Ahmad al-Shuqairi was elected Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee. The Congress considered the establishment of the State of Israel to be invalid and sought its dissolution.
The “National Liberation Army of Palestine” was also established, with units created in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. In practice, these units were under the control of the Arab states in which they were based, not the PLO. Initially, the PLO was mainly an instrument of the Arab regimes and therefore not a very independent Palestinian organisation, while Fatah was critical of it.
The Six-Day War and the rise of the PLO
After 1965, relations between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states deteriorated rapidly. The Fatah fedayeen intensified their attacks against Israel, storming out of their bases in Jordan and with the support of Syria.
In November 1966, Syria, ruled by the left-wing nationalist Ba’ath Party, signed a joint defence agreement with Egypt. In April 1967, Syria and Israel came to the brink of war after army and air force skirmishes. King Hussein’s Jordan also signed a defence agreement with Egypt in May 1967, and allowed Iraqi military forces to enter its territory as part of the build-up of Arab forces in preparation for war against Israel.
Faced with this build-up, Israel did not wait for the Arab states to attack. On 5 June 1967, the Israeli air force launched a lightning strike against Egypt, destroying in one day more than 300 Egyptian aircraft, which did not even have time to take off. It then turned on Jordan, destroying the Jordanian air force as well.
At the same time, the Israeli army invaded and occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
The defeat of the Arab states in six days was crushing and humiliating. The State of Israel now occupied all the territory of historic Palestine that the Arab states had held since the 1948 war. These territories subsequently became known as the “occupied territories”.
The Six-Day War led to the flight of another 400,000 Palestinians, mainly from the West Bank, who crossed the Jordan River and settled in refugee camps in Jordan. The Zionist regime used its victory to promote Jewish settlements in the territories it had conquered in the war.
The humiliating defeat of the Arab states had a significant impact on the consciousness of the Palestinian masses. A growing number of Palestinian refugees concluded that they had to rely on their own forces for liberation, and thousands joined the various resistance organisations, the most important of which was Fatah.
The Palestinian masses, living in miserable conditions in the refugee camps, were radicalising to the left. In December 1967, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded. While it initially had a pan-Arab ideology, it soon turned to Maoist ideas and was modelled on the national liberation struggle in Vietnam.
The guerrilla movement was intensifying and the Palestinian resistance was growing stronger, which caused great concern to the reactionary Arab regimes. These regimes sought to control the Palestinian movement while also fearing for their own survival.
The turning point in the mass growth of the fedayeen resistance movement came with the battle in the village of al-Karama. On 21 March 1968, powerful Israeli forces crossed the Jordan River and invaded Jordan in an attempt to crush the Fatah base in al-Karama. Fatah, supported by units of the Jordanian army, strongly defended the village, inflicting heavy casualties on the Israeli forces.
The heroism of the guerrillas increased the appeal of the resistance organisations, and many young Palestinians joined the ranks of Fatah and other groups.
In February 1969, at the 5th Palestinian National Congress held in Cairo, Fatah won a majority in the PLO, and Yasser Arafat was elected Chairman. The PLO became an umbrella organisation for all the resistance groups waging a guerrilla struggle, setting itself the goal of establishing a secular Palestinian state that would guarantee the democratic rights of all its citizens, regardless of religion or language.
Black September 1970
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 war and the battle of al-Karama, the PLO gained significant support among the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, who made up about half of the country’s population. The PLO’s armed fedayeen controlled the refugee camps in the capital, Amman, and other cities, creating a parallel authority to that of King Hussein.
The Jordanian masses were influenced by the radicalisation of the Palestinians, in an international context marked by revolutionary movements (most notably May ’68 and the Vietnam War). Their revolutionary mood was rising, turning them into a serious threat to the reactionary monarchical regime of King Hussein. Some factions within the PLO now spoke openly about the need to overthrow the monarchy, and twice King Hussein narrowly survived assassination attempts.
The polarisation reached a peak in July 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and King Hussein entered into discussions on a settlement of the Arab–Israeli conflict based on the plan presented by the United States — the Rogers Plan. Yasser Arafat and the PLO rejected the Rogers Plan and denounced both Nasser and Hussein.
As early as 1968, the PFLP, which was part of the PLO, had been hijacking Israeli and Western aircraft, directing them to various Arab states. Reacting to the Rogers Plan and demanding the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons, the PFLP carried out a spectacular triple hijacking between 6 and 9 September 1970.
Two American and one Swiss plane were seized by the PFLP and taken to Jordan. On September 12, after releasing the passengers, the PFLP blew up the three planes in a live television broadcast. The PFLP’s aim was to turn Amman into an “Arab Hanoi,” i.e. an external base for the PLO to escalate the war against Israel, along the lines of North Vietnam. Hussein appeared to have lost control of his country.
There was a revolutionary upheaval among the masses, and the PLO seemed to have sufficient social support to attempt to overthrow Hussein and take power in Jordan. However, the PLO leadership was reluctant to break ties with the Arab ruling classes, who were hostile to Palestinian radicalism and the independent movement of the poor masses. The PLO sought good relations with the Arab regimes from which it expected support for the national liberation struggle.
Thus, faced with the threat of being overthrown, Hussein announced martial law on September 16, 1970, and brought tanks into the Palestinian refugee camps and the working-class districts of Amman.
The USA and Israel mobilised military forces in support of Jordan but did not intervene directly. This tipped the balance in Hussein’s favour.
The battles in Amman and elsewhere lasted more than 10 days, during which the PLO camps were even bombarded with napalm and phosphorus bombs. More than 3,000 Palestinian fighters and civilians died in the massacre. On September 27, the PLO signed a truce with Hussein, while incidentally the next day Nasser died of a heart attack. Clashes between Palestinian fedayeen and the Jordanian army continued until July 1971, but the Palestinian resistance had suffered a heavy and bloody defeat at the hands of the “allied” Arab regime. As a result, the PLO left Jordan and moved its headquarters to Lebanon, followed by many thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Black September, as the Jordanian massacre came to be known, had a major impact on the development of the Palestinian movement.
The PLO lost the stable military and social base it had in Jordan, from which it could launch raids into the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. In addition, for the first time the Palestinian fedayeen suffered a heavy military defeat at the hands of an Arab country which, until then, had been considered an ally of the Palestinian struggle. After the events, the Jordanian regime opened channels of communication with the West and Israel.
In order to avenge the massacre and increase pressure on Western states, the PLO created (undercover) the “Black September” organisation, with the aim of carrying out armed attacks abroad. Terrorist acts in many countries were claimed in the name of Black September. At the same time, it developed relations with armed organisations in other countries such as the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany (Baader–Meinhof), the Japanese Red Army, etc.
In September 1972, during the Munich Olympics, Black September launched an attack on the Israeli sports delegation, aiming to kidnap Israeli athletes and exchange them for imprisoned Palestinians. The whole operation ended in bloodshed: in the end, 11 Israeli athletes, 3 Palestinians, and 1 German police officer were killed.
After the expulsion from Jordan, Lebanon became the base from which the PLO continued its guerrilla warfare against Israel. At the same time, the PLO also maintained significant forces in Syria. However, Lebanon was a country in a fragile state, with major internal ethnic and religious conflicts that were exploited by external powers to serve their own interests.
Internal polarisation, combined with the intervention of imperialism and Israel, led Lebanon into a bloody civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990.
The PLO and the Palestinian refugees living in Beirut and in the south of the country had a major influence on the balance of power, and thus became part of the civil war. Meanwhile, in 1973, the fourth Arab–Israeli war, the so-called Yom Kippur War, broke out.
The Yom Kippur War – 1973
In the Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Between 1969 and 1970, Nasser waged a war of “attrition” with Israel along the Suez Canal, which formed the border between the two countries. He also prepared for a new war, in response to the defeat in ’67.
After Nasser’s death on 28 September 1970, Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt. In Syria, the pro-Soviet dictator Hafez al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party were in power. Both regimes wanted to regain the territory lost in the 1967 war and strengthen their position in the broader balance of power in the Middle East.
Thus, on October 6, 1973, they launched a coordinated attack against Israel on the day of the great Jewish religious holiday of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). In parallel with the attack, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Arab countries imposed an embargo on oil exports to American companies and reduced exports to Europe by 5% each month. This move triggered the first international oil crisis.
In the first days of the war, the two Arab armies achieved significant successes on the battlefield. However, very quickly Israel managed to halt the advance and went on the counter-attack, seizing even more territory than it had before. The Soviet Union, fearful of losing the Suez Canal, threatened military intervention in favour of Egypt and Syria. Before the start of the war, there were about 20,000 Soviet military personnel in Egypt.
The two superpowers of the time feared that the war could spiral out of control and turn into a global conflict, at a time when Israel was threatening to use its nuclear weapons. Faced with the threat of nuclear conflict, the USSR and the US came to an agreement, and as a result the UN Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution on 22 October. On 28 October the final ceasefire was signed.
The end of the Fourth Arab–Israeli War found Syria back on its pre-war borders and Egypt gradually regaining part of the territory it had lost in ’67, including the Suez Canal. Israel was technically the winner of the conflict, but its prestige had been damaged.
After the defeat in the Yom Kippur War, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat began a gradual change of strategy, seeking a permanent agreement with Israel and a rapprochement with the US. In December of the same year, the Geneva Conference was held under the auspices of the US and the USSR. Egypt, Jordan and Israel took part in the conference. Syria refused to participate and the PLO was not invited.
Negotiations between Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and US President Jimmy Carter culminated in the Camp David Accords in September 1978.
The fourth military defeat of the Arab states by Israel also influenced the strategy of Arafat and the majority of the PLO. The PLO continued the guerrilla struggle but at the same time began making overtures to the West, increasingly seeking recognition by international organisations and the USA.
In June 1974, at the 12th Palestinian National Congress, the majority of the PLO adopted the “Ten Point Programme,” which left open the possibility of liberating part—rather than all—of historic Palestine, and thus implicitly recognised the existence of the State of Israel.
In November 1974, the UN General Assembly recognised the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, independence, and national sovereignty. The UN granted the PLO observer status at the General Assembly and recognised it as the representative of the Palestinian people. On 13 November 1974, Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in what he presented as recognition of the PLO by the “international community.” Wearing his gun holster, he famously declared:
“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
This gradual change of strategy and the “Ten Point Programme” were not accepted by the PLO as a whole, leading to internal fragmentation. In October 1974, the Rejectionist Front (opposed to the Ten Point Programme) was formed, including the PFLP and other PLO factions, supported by the Syrian and Libyan regimes. The confrontation between the Rejectionist Front and the majority of the PLO under Arafat turned violent, with assassinations of PLO officials loyal to Arafat carried out by Rejectionist Front militants.
The Lebanese Civil War
Lebanon was—and remains—a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, French imperialists and reactionary Arab regimes exploited and fuelled Lebanon’s ethnic and religious divisions for their own interests. Western imperialism backed the Maronite Christians, who formed the wealthiest and most powerful section of the ruling class, and sought to maintain their control over Lebanon’s Muslims and Druze, the majority of whom were poor.
The events of Black September in Jordan, as mentioned above, led to the relocation of the PLO headquarters, along with thousands of fedayeen and Palestinian refugees, to Beirut and South Lebanon. The dynamics of internal social polarisation and religious/nationalist divisions culminated in the outbreak of civil war in April 1975. The PLO became involved, fighting on the side of an alliance of mainly Muslims and Druze with leftist leanings. On the other side stood an alliance of Maronite Catholic Christians, led by the extreme right-wing Phalange Party (Kataeb), which had paramilitary battalions under its command and was inspired by the rise of fascism in Europe.
Israel saw the Lebanese Civil War as an opportunity to crush the Palestinian resistance and the PLO, and therefore sided with the Phalangists.
The war began on 13 April 1975, when Phalangist gunmen murdered 30 Palestinians on a bus outside Beirut. In May 1976, the Syrian army invaded northern Lebanon and clashed with Palestinian fighters of the PLO. It was the second time—after Jordan—that an Arab state fought against Palestinian rebels. In August 1976, the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Beirut fell after a seven-month siege by the Phalangists, leaving over 2,000 Palestinians dead, most of them women and children.
Meanwhile, inside Israel, Palestinian opposition was growing against the forced expropriation of land belonging to Arab citizens of Israel. The Committee for the Defence of Arab Land, formed in January 1976, organised mass protests and demonstrations. On 30 March 1976 it called a general strike involving Palestinians in the West Bank and Lebanon. The State of Israel violently suppressed these demonstrations, killing six unarmed Palestinians and injuring over 100. Since then, Palestinians have commemorated 30 March each year as “Land Day.”
In 1977, the right-wing Likud party won elections in Israel for the first time since the founding of the state in 1948. The Likud government, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin — leader of the Zionist Irgun militia, which committed ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in 1947–48 — and Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, was even more aggressive than the previous “Labour” governments. Likud promoted settlements in order to make the occupation irreversible. Begin saw the Lebanese Civil War as an opportunity to definitively crush the Palestinian resistance and drive the PLO out of Lebanon, from where the Palestinian fedayeen continued to launch attacks against Israel.
Between 1975 and 1978 the PLO carried out a series of attacks, including inside Tel Aviv. Following one such operation, Israel invaded South Lebanon in March 1978 but soon withdrew, while the Palestinian fedayeen maintained their forces. Their strength was estimated at between 15,000 and 18,000 fighters.
In September 1978, Egypt and Israel signed an agreement at Camp David in the US, brokered by President Jimmy Carter. Egypt became the first Arab state to recognise the State of Israel, and Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, which it had occupied since 1967. Having thus secured its southern border, Israel turned its attention to Lebanon in order to eliminate the PLO.
On 6 June 1982, Israel launched a much larger invasion of Lebanon, code-named “Peace for Galilee.” The Israeli army advanced to Beirut and for more than three months laid siege to and continuously bombed Palestinian refugee camps. In the first two weeks of the invasion, at least 14,000 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army.
After fierce fighting, the PLO was forced to withdraw almost entirely from Lebanon, retaining only small forces. In August 1982, around 14,000 PLO fighters boarded ships and evacuated Beirut under the supervision of an international military force of French, Italian, and American troops. Yasser Arafat left Beirut and moved the PLO headquarters to Tunisia.
A few days after the withdrawal of the PLO fedayeen from Beirut, the Phalangists — with the help of the Israeli army and under the supervision of Ariel Sharon, later Prime Minister of Israel — committed one of the greatest massacres against the Palestinian people. On 16 September 1982, armed Phalangists stormed the Beirut district of Sabra and the Shatila refugee camp, which was surrounded by the Israeli army, and massacred more than 3,000 Palestinian civilians — women, elderly men, and children.
Ariel Sharon and the Zionists believed that by expelling the PLO from Lebanon they had achieved a crushing victory over the Palestinian resistance. In reality, however, they were laying the foundations for the creation of a new opponent—Hezbollah.
Hezbollah was an Islamic organisation based in southern Lebanon, where the majority population were Shiites, who were facing constant Israeli attacks as well as poverty and exclusion within their own country.
Hezbollah was financed and armed by the Khomeini Islamic regime, established after the 1979 revolution in Iran. From the outset, Khomeini’s Iran turned against the United States and Israel—countries that had actively supported the Shah’s dictatorial regime, which was overthrown in 1979.
Hezbollah built a massive social base by initially creating a social safety net for poor Lebanese Shiites. From the early 1980s, it turned to armed struggle and acts of individual terrorism.
In 1982–83, it carried out the first suicide attacks (unprecedented at the time), using cars filled with explosives that rammed into buildings housing American and French military personnel in Beirut, killing over 300 people.
At its peak, before the recent (2024) Israeli attack, Hezbollah was a very well-equipped and formidable military force. It claimed to have 100,000 fighters, while US intelligence estimated the number at around 45,000. In 2006, it confronted the Israeli army—when it attempted to invade southern Lebanon—and forced it to retreat. In addition to Iran, it was supported by the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Hezbollah controlled southern Lebanon and, beyond being a military power, also held political influence, participating in both parliament and the government.
After the defeat in Beirut in 1982, Arafat and the majority of the PLO leadership sought rapprochement with the Jordanian monarchy and began discussing the plan presented by the US Reagan administration to resolve the Palestinian question. This shift was causing a new, even deeper, schism within Fatah itself. Abu Musa, a senior Fatah official and organiser of the Beirut defence, rejected this tactic and founded Fatah–Intifada (Fatah–Uprising), which was supported and armed by the Syrian regime.
Fatah–Intifada entered into armed conflict with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah in May 1983. The Assad government declared Arafat persona non grata and expelled him from Damascus. At the same time, in December 1983, the last 4,000 Palestinian Fatah loyalists were forced to leave Lebanon, which was largely under Syrian occupation.
The End of a Historical Cycle
The expulsion of the PLO and Arafat from Lebanon and Syria marked a turning point for the Palestinian resistance.
Thirty-five years had passed since the Nakba. In those decades, Arab states had come into military conflict with Israel four times but failed to bring independence and freedom to the Palestinian people. As a result, some of the regimes began changing their strategy and sought understanding with Israel, abandoning the Palestinian people.
As mentioned above, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed unilateral agreements with Israeli Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the late 1970s. The agreements provided for Palestinian autonomy in the territories occupied in 1967 and a long, gradual transition to some form of state.
In addition to Egypt’s rapprochement with Israel, Jordan (in 1970) and later Syria (in 1983) came into military conflict with the PLO and committed massacres and persecutions against the Palestinians.
The expectations that Palestinian liberation and the return of refugees could be achieved with the support of the Arab regimes, the national unity of all Arabs, the backing of the USSR, and the guerrilla struggle of the PLO had been dashed.
Despite the four Arab-Israeli wars, despite the heroic struggle of tens of thousands of Palestinians who took up arms, and despite countless sacrifices and victims, national independence, the overthrow of oppression, and the return of the refugees had not been achieved.
These deadlocks would soon lead to a new path: a mass uprising of Palestinians living in the territories occupied by Israel. In December 1987, the first Intifada broke out.
A few years later, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell—a turning point that triggered the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and the restoration of capitalism in these countries (1989–1991). Despite the mass uprising of the Intifada, Arafat and the PLO leadership around him turned toward Western imperialism, a process that would culminate in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995.
During the first Intifada, a new political organization in the Palestinian resistance, Hamas, was founded and rapidly gained mass support.
