336 • 18 WAR AND THE QUEST FOR PEACEEast history had the Arabs living in Palestine sought or gained status as a
separate and independent state. Quite the contrary, the Arabs of that region
had usually chosen, if indeed they could exercise any choice at all, to claim a
major identity: Muslim, Arab, or Greater Syrian. Before Israel's rebirth, Jews
and foreigners often used the term Palestinian to denote the inhabitants of
Palestine, but rarely had Arabs themselves used that label. Between 1948 and
1967, the Arabs from Palestine, especially the refugees in neighboring coun¬
tries, had been the most ardent backers of pan-Arabism. They hoped to end
all distinctions between them and the other Arabs whose aid they sought.
But Palestinians, because of their shared experiences and ideas, did
come to see themselves as a people and then as a nation, just as surely as
Eastern Europe's Jews had turned into Zionists in the early twentieth cen¬
tury. According to the Palestinians' view of their own past, the Jewish set¬
tlers in Palestine shunned the local Arabs before Israel attained statehood,
expelled them during the 1948 war, and then refused to let them return to
what had become Israel. The other Arab states would not, could not, and
indeed should not have absorbed them. No country wanted them. But
these refugees did not want to see themselves or to be seen by others as ob¬
jects of pity, wards of the UN Relief and Works Agency, or causes of em¬
barrassment to other Arabs. After the 1967 war revealed the inadequacy of
the Arab states' armies, the Palestinians decided it was time to declare
themselves a nation, get their own arms, train themselves to fight, and re¬
gain their lands, which the Arab armies had lost.
As a result of the war, therefore, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
set up in 1964 at the behest of the Arab governments, emerged as a militant
group. The older leaders, notably the loquacious Shuqayri, gave way to
younger ones who, though no less determined to wipe out Israel, knew bet¬
ter how to use the Western media to publicize their cause. It was easy to get
support from the communist bloc, but the PLO wanted to win public opin¬
ion in Western Europe and North America over to the Palestinian cause. To
do this, they could no longer call for Israel's destruction and the Jewish
bloodbath or mass exodus that would most likely ensue. Rather, they pro¬
posed to redeem what had been Palestine up to 1948 from the "false ideol¬
ogy" of Zionism, a colonialist dogma that debased the Jewish faith and
oppressed the Muslim and Christian Arabs who had formerly constituted
most of Palestine's population. Israel's leaders were likened to those of the
white settlers of Rhodesia and South Africa. Palestinians viewed their
fidaiyin, whom the Israelis called terrorists, as freedom fighters, like the Al¬
gerian National Liberation Front under French rule or the Partisans during
the Nazi occupation of France. The PLO also retained its covenant calling