Yasser Arafat and the Official Recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization "We must remember that the main enemy of the Palestinian people, now and forever, is Israel. This is a truth that must never leave our minds." --- Palestinian Authority Justice Minister Freih Abu Middein, speaking at Al Azhar University in Gaza. (Al-Nahar, 11 April 1995; The Jerusalem Post, 17 April 1995) As expressed in the above quote, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 sparked much resentment from nearby Arab states, which immediately waged war against the new nation. As a result, a severe refugee problem was created among the Palestinians that had been living in and near the territories that were taken over by Israel. An estimated 726,000 Palestinians were displaced; some were forced to other Arab states in the Middle East, while others were confined to refugee camps in Israel. In the mid-1950s, Arafat and several Palestinian Arab associates formed a movement known as Fatah, dedicated to reclaiming Palestine for the Palestinians. It quickly became the largest and most popular Palestinian organization mostly due to the fact that it did not define a distinct ideology, and kept a rather vague and unspecified platform in order to avoid too close an identification with any one particular Arab country. Fatah and other splinter sects eventually operated under an umbrella organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization, formed in 1964. Arafat, as a member of the Husseini family, had a niche of credibility, an advantage that allowed him to quickly generate a loyal following (Bickerton 147). Running Fatah became Arafat's full-time occupation, and by 1965 the organization was launching guerrilla raids and terrorist attacks into Israel. The PLOs Tumultuous Beginning As Israel emerged victorious in the Six-Day War of 1967, and captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Israeli-...
