Righteous Victims by Benny Morris

Author:Benny Morris [Morris, Benny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-78805-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the crushing of the Arab armies in June 1967 reenergized the Palestinian people and put the Palestinian problem back on the international agenda. An issue dead for close to twenty years had suddenly come alive; it was kept alive, and the Palestinian people were mobilized and motivated, by dint of the unremitting guerrilla/terrorist activities against Israel. A desperate people both rediscovered its identity and found a means of expressing its political will through violence. Palestinian guerrilla warfare across the Jordan River and over the Lebanese-Israeli frontier may have been of no more than nuisance value, militarily speaking. But it gave Jerusalem and the world no respite and in various ways kept the Arab states, generally unenthusiastic about doing battle with Israel, mobilized in varying degrees behind the Palestinian cause.

Until 1987 Israel proved easily able to control the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza. But it could not staunch either their nationalism or international pressures to alleviate their plight. At the same time, controlling the territories subverted Israel’s democratic and legal norms and increasingly fissured society along bitter fault lines. An ever more militant, annexationist, racist right wing came to the fore and increasingly determined government policy and behavior.

Ultimately, the thrust of Israeli policy and the weight of the occupier’s boot were to give rise among the conquered population to powerful fundamentalist Muslim currents—in various ways mirroring developments among Israel’s Jews—which were subsequently to mount serious challenges to moderate opinions and parties. To some degree, the growth of Palestinian guerrilla and terrorist activity against Israel was a response not just to the occupation, which involved daily humiliation of the population by the occupiers, but also to the annexationist spirit that had laid hold of the Israeli polity. It was understood that Israel was not going to release its grip on the territories unless it was forced to. And if attacking Israelis in the occupied territories or in Israel proper grew more difficult, then Palestinians were just going to have to find more vulnerable targets farther afield.

In retrospect, the various Palestinian campaigns from the late 1960s through the 1980s outside the Middle East had a dual and contradictory effect. They put the “Palestinian problem” on the world agenda while substantially undermining world sympathy for the Palestinian cause; the terrorist outrages were both useful and important to the cause while at the same time putting it into disrepute.

The mainstream bodies—the PLO and Fatah—were aware of this. Sometimes they distanced themselves from the outrages and claimed to have had no part in them—while clandestinely organizing them, such as the Black September operations of 1971–73. At other times they renounced international terrorism in principle and as policy, while periodically mounting individual terrorist acts to achieve specific objectives. Usually such attacks were carried out by nonmainstream PLO groups, and could subsequently be disavowed by the leadership. Without doubt, Arafat recognized the value of the terrorist splinter groups; they could be relied upon both

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