This chapter explores the impact of Palestinians on the 1967 War and vice versa, with a focus on the Palestinian national movement. Its main argument is that the descent into war was propelled not only by the conflict between Israel and Arab states but also by a multifaceted struggle among Palestinians and Arabs for control over mobilization for the Palestinian cause.

This struggle was defined by three overlapping realms of contestation: that among Arab states, between Palestinians and Arab states, and among Palestinians. During the years leading up to the war, Palestinian groups, principally Ahmed Shuqairi's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah movement, advanced competing claims to be the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. Yet their competition was also testimony to the ambiguous boundaries between the Palestinian national struggle and the larger Arab world. In developing their own conceptions of Palestinian nationalism, they were forced to address its relationship to the call for Arab unity. In vying for resources and power, they could not depend on Arab governments. These governments, themselves competing for stature and security in regional politics, in turn invoked the Palestinian cause as justification for attempts to dictate, restrict, or interfere in Palestinian mobilization. Aspirant Palestinian leaders thus positioned themselves in a matrix of opportunities and constraints constructed by rival Arab state interests. This positioning influenced the strategies that both Palestinian and Arab leaders pursued in the conflict with Israel. It was, therefore, a crucial piece of the story of the third Arab-Israeli war.

The Nakba destroyed Palestinians’ national life in nearly every respect. Villages were erased, homes and fields dispossessed, and families torn asunder. Decades of urban and commercial development were lost. The dispersion of refugees – 10 percent going to the East Bank of the Jordan, 39 percent to the West Bank, 26 percent to the Gaza Strip, 14 percent to Lebanon, 10 percent to Syria, and 1 percent to Egypt – left Palestinians a diasporic nation. The exodus of hundreds of thousands of people on foot with only the clothes on their backs began their descent into a day-to-day battle for subsistence.

Palestinian refugees insisted that they had fled temporarily under duress. In December 1948, United Nations Resolution 194 affirmed their right to return to their homes inside the new state of Israel. Arguing that returned refugees would constitute a fifth column, Israel sealed the borders. It appropriated the lands of nearly four hundred villages emptied during the war and established 186 Jewish settlements in their place. As years passed, refugees’ emergency tents evolved into 59 concrete refugee camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Some refugees attempted to infiltrate Israel to return to their homes, harvest crops, or smuggle goods. Infiltrations gradually became more political, resulting in hundreds of violent incidents from 1951 to 1955. Responding to these acts, Israeli forces carried out harsh reprisal raids causing deaths in the thousands. In the succeeding decades, Palestinians formed political groups and expanded cross-border operations as a strategy to revitalize the national movement. Their efforts eventually became embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

On September 28, 2000, Likud Party chairman Ariel Sharon, guarded by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, visited the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. What Israelis viewed as a domestic political challenge to Prime Minister Barak, Palestinians saw as an affront by the right-wing leader found to bear personal responsibility for the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. The following afternoon, Palestinians leaving prayers threw stones at Israeli police and worshipers at the Western Wall. Police charged the area. The subsequent confrontation left 70 police officers injured by Palestinian rock throwing, 6 Palestinians killed by Israeli gunfire, and more than 220 Palestinians wounded.

The next day, thousands demonstrated in areas where PA-controlled territory bordered Israeli military deployments throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. On the second day of the uprising, 12 Palestinians were killed and 500 injured; on the third day, 12 more Palestinians, 1 Palestinian citizen of Israel, and the first Israeli soldier were killed. It would later be reported that Israeli troops fired 1 million shots in those initial days, what a security official recognized as “a bullet for every child.” Palestinian casualties during the first three months nearly totaled those of the entire first year of the first Intifada. Beyond the numbers, some events became focal points, such as the killing of eight-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah in Gaza, which was caught on camera footage and viewed around the world.

Some have said that there was no Palestinian people before 1948, or even 1967. Under the Ottoman Empire, the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River spanned a number of administrative districts. Yet while there was no political unit called Palestine, the term had ancient roots. Writings of the people of the region testify to the sense that they held a unique place within the Arab world. Commercial, social, and cultural relations linked them to the rest of Greater Syria. Ethnic identity created feelings of an inextricable bond to other Arabic-speaking countries. A commitment to Islam fortified most people’s political allegiance to the Ottoman state. A minority in Ottoman Syria came to support Arab independence against the Young Turks’ imposition of Turkish nationalism. In the void created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the call for an independent Greater Syria became the dominant ideology. Nevertheless, European powers carved Arab lands into nation-states at the end of World War I and placed them under colonial trusteeships called “Mandates.” In each country, people formed movements to fight for national independence.

The Palestinian national movement was the local manifestation of this Arab nationalist awakening. Its trajectory, however, was set apart due to its confrontation with another people’s claims to the same land. The Zionist movement, gaining strength after Theodor Herzl’s publication of The Jewish State, came to focus on the ancient Kingdom of Israel as the home for a modern Jewish state. On the eve of the first wave of Zionist-inspired immigration in 1882, the traditional, religious Jewish community in Palestine numbered about 24,000, or 5 percent of the population of 500,000. By the conclusion of the second wave in 1914, their number had grown to 85,000. Though most Arabs were unaffected by this development, some peasants and urban merchants felt their interests threatened. This led to written protestations against Jewish immigration and land purchases, and even a few violent clashes, as early as the 1880s and 1890s. Opposition to Zionism became more political and profuse with the lifting of press censorship in 1908. Newspapers warned that Zionism would render Arabs strangers in the land that they considered to be their patrimony. Palestine’s Arabs increasingly referred to themselves as “Palestinians” in that context. Feelings of alarm regarding Zionism intensified in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration announced that the British government “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” For the approximately 90 percent of the population that was Muslim or Christian Arab, this policy not only prejudiced their civil and religious rights. It also precluded their own political right to a national home.

Both activists who lead social movements and scholars who study them debate the relative effectiveness of nonviolent versus violent means of protest. This book asks a distinct question. It seeks to understand the conditions under which either form of protest is likely or probable. I propose the organizational mediation theory of protest as a framework for analyzing how movements’ internal relationships affect their strategic action. While many factors contribute to a movement’s use of violence, one predominant factor makes that use of nonviolent protest possible: the movement’s own cohesion. Cohesion is an organizational structure that obtains when the factors that generate cooperation among members outweigh those that propel competitive or antagonistic behavior. It can be measured by assessing the strength of a movement’s leadership, institutions, and collective purpose. When a movement is cohesive, it enjoys the organizational capacity to mobilize mass participation, contain disruptive dissent, and rein in violence driven by particularistic motives. In consequence, cohesion increases the possibility that a movement will use nonviolent protest. Inversely, when a movement is unable to centralize authority and institutionalize command and control, it easily becomes racked by divisions. Under conditions of fragmentation, a movement’s very organizational structure generates incentives for members to employ force and weakens constraints on its use. It enables the formation of radical splinter and semi-splinter groups, impedes the conclusion and implementation of ceasefires, and reduces the capacity for popular mobilization that is the hallmark of civil disobedience and direct action. Fragmentation thus increases the likelihood that a movement will use violent protest.

Analysis of nearly one hundred years in the history of the Palestinian national movement, as well as comparisons with national movements in South Africa and Northern Ireland, demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach. When the Palestinian movement used mass unarmed protest, such as during a general strike in the 1930s and the uprising of 1987, internal cohesion proved crucial. In those episodes, a legitimate leadership and grassroots institutional network helped people across social classes, religions, and regions participate in demonstrations, boycotts, and acts of noncooperation and disengagement from the state. While Palestinians did not use nonviolent protest to the exclusion of violence, a structure of coordination and cooperation enabled them to channel much of the will to rebel into unarmed activities and sustain them on a broad scale. Movement cohesion was also essential in facilitating diplomatic initiatives, be they pressure politics in the 1920s or peace negotiations in the 1990s. To the degree that leaders were able to manage fragmentation, they helped impede spoiler violence from derailing those nonviolent initiatives.

April 1936: Palestine erupts in revolt. For years, the indigenous Arabs of Palestine have engaged in pressure politics. Their goal is to convince Great Britain to abandon its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. After a decade of such protest fails to bear fruit, however, Palestinian Arabs launch a rebellion. The “Great Revolt” begins with broad-based participation in unarmed activities such as a general strike, popular demonstrations, and boycotts. Sporadic armed attacks become more frequent as rural bands carry out sniping and sabotage. The rebellion enters a hiatus and then becomes more dramatically and exclusively violent when it resumes in the fall of 1937. Rebel bands battle with British troops, and thousands die before the rebellion collapses into internecine fighting.

March 1988: The first Intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is in its third month. For weeks on end, Palestinian youths clash with Israeli troops by throwing stones, blocking roads, burning tires, and defying curfew. Each day registers acts of nonviolent protest, including sit-ins, boycotts, commercial strikes, refusal to pay taxes, mass resignation from Israeli institutions, and the organization of community-based alternatives. Women lead huge demonstrations on International Women’s Day. On “Land Day,” an annual protest against land confiscation, Palestinians inside Israel march in solidarity with the occupied territories. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been arrested, injured, or killed. Nonetheless, their use of lethal violence against Israel remains very limited.