Independence and Catastrophe

Part 2: The Long Fuse (1949–1967)

The third installment of a series on the history of Israel and Palestine. This part covers the tense, violent interlude between the war that created Israel and the war that transformed the region, the years in which an organized Palestinian national movement was born and the fuse to 1967 was slowly lit.

Where we left off

The 1948 war ended not in peace but in armistice. Israel emerged sovereign and victorious, holding 78% of former Mandate Palestine. The West Bank and East Jerusalem fell under Jordanian control, the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control, and no Arab Palestinian state came into being. Some 700,000 Palestinians had become stateless refugees; about 150,000 Arabs remained inside Israel as a wary minority. Two peoples now nursed opposite memories of the same year (Independence and Nakba) and the questions the war left open would keep the region primed to explode. This part covers the eighteen years the fuse took to burn down.

An armistice, not a peace

It is important to understand what the 1949 armistice was, and was not. It stopped the shooting between armies. It did not end the conflict, settle any borders, or produce a single Arab state willing to recognize Israel’s existence. The Arab world’s official position, sustained for decades, was that Israel was an illegitimate colonial implant that would eventually be undone. Israel, for its part, had a state to consolidate: it was absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants (Holocaust survivors from Europe and the great wave of Jews expelled from Arab lands) and doubling its Jewish population within a few years. The borders were quiet in the sense that no war was being fought, and tense in the sense that everyone expected the next one.

Along those borders, a low-grade conflict simmered from the start, and its source was the refugees.

Infiltration, fedayeen, and reprisal

The 700,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948 had not gone far. Many sat in refugee camps just across the new armistice lines, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, often within sight of the villages and fields they had lost. It is worth dwelling on that human detail: people who could stand at a fence and see, in the distance, the very homes they had fled, the orchards they had tended, the towns where their parents were buried, close enough to see, forbidden to enter. Whole families lived in tents and then in cinderblock rows, stateless, jobless, and stripped of the land that had been their livelihood and their identity, sustained by UN rations and the fading hope of return. Out of that specific agony (proximity without access, loss without acknowledgment) grew much of what followed. In the early 1950s, thousands began crossing back over the lines. At first, most of this “infiltration” was not military at all: refugees slipping home to reclaim belongings, harvest crops from their old fields, visit relatives, or simply return. Some crossings were for theft or smuggling; a smaller number were for armed attacks.

Israel treated all infiltration as a mortal threat and responded with a hard-line policy of reprisal raids, striking across the border in retaliation, aiming to force the Arab governments to police their own territory and to deter future crossings by making the cost unbearable. The armed Palestinian raiders came to be known as fedayeen (“those who sacrifice themselves”), and by the mid-1950s Egypt was actively organizing and sponsoring fedayeen units from Gaza to raid into Israel.

The reprisal policy produced its own atrocities. In 1953 the Israeli army created a special commando force, Unit 101, commanded by a young, aggressive officer named Ariel Sharon, a name that will recur throughout this series. In October 1953, in reprisal for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two children, Unit 101 raided the West Bank village of Qibya (then under Jordanian control) and blew up dozens of houses, killing around 69 villagers, many of them women and children who had hidden inside as the buildings were demolished on top of them. The raid drew international condemnation, including from Israel’s own allies. It set a template (a Palestinian or Arab attack, a disproportionate Israeli reprisal, further escalation) that would recur for the next seventy years.

The cycle of raid and reprisal steadily raised tensions between Israel and Egypt in particular, and helped set the stage for the first full war since 1948.

Enter Nasser

The most consequential new figure of this era was not Israeli or Palestinian but Egyptian. In 1952, a group of nationalist army officers overthrew Egypt’s corrupt, British-aligned monarchy. Within two years, one of them, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had emerged as Egypt’s leader, and quickly became the towering figure of the entire Arab world.

Nasser was the champion of Pan-Arabism: the electrifying idea that the Arab peoples, divided by borders drawn by European colonizers, were really one nation that should unite, throw off Western domination, and reclaim its dignity. To millions of Arabs, Nasser was a hero who stood up to the old imperial powers. To Israel, he was a mortal enemy who spoke openly of erasing the Jewish state, sponsored fedayeen raids from Gaza, and was building up the region’s most powerful Arab army with Soviet-bloc weapons. His radio station, “Voice of the Arabs,” broadcast his defiance across the region.

In July 1956, Nasser did something that changed everything: he nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital waterway through Egypt that had been controlled by Britain and France. It was a bold assertion of Egyptian sovereignty and a direct challenge to the two fading European empires.

The 1956 Suez War

What followed was a strange, revealing episode. Britain and France, humiliated and desperate to reverse the nationalization, secretly conspired with Israel to attack Egypt. The plan, agreed in secret talks in France (the Protocol of Sèvres), was theatrical: Israel would invade Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Britain and France would then intervene as pretend “peacekeepers” to seize the canal zone, posing as neutral parties separating the combatants.

In October 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai and swept toward the canal. Britain and France launched their intervention on cue. Militarily, it worked: Israel overran the Sinai, and the Europeans took the canal zone. Politically, it was a disaster for the invaders. The United States, under President Eisenhower, was furious at not being consulted and at the naked colonialism of the operation, and in a rare moment of Cold War alignment, joined the Soviet Union in demanding a withdrawal. Under intense American and Soviet pressure, Britain, France, and Israel all pulled back.

Israel withdrew from the Sinai by March 1957, but extracted two gains: a UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) was stationed in the Sinai to keep Egypt and Israel apart, and the Straits of Tiran (Israel’s shipping outlet to the Red Sea, which Egypt had blockaded) were reopened. Both of these would matter enormously eleven years later.

The war’s biggest winner, paradoxically, was the man who had lost it on the battlefield. Nasser had been militarily defeated but emerged politically triumphant: the Arab leader who had faced down Britain, France, and Israel and forced them to retreat. His prestige across the Arab world soared. In 1958 Egypt and Syria even briefly merged into a single country, the United Arab Republic, before it fell apart in 1961, a short-lived experiment in the Pan-Arab dream.

The Suez episode is worth pausing on, because it is one of the clearest windows in the whole story onto whose interests actually drove events. Look at what the 1956 war was about: not the Palestinians, who barely featured, but a waterway and the fading power of empires. Britain and France went to war to reclaim control of a canal (an imperial and economic asset) and to punish a leader who had defied them. Israel joined to strike a dangerous enemy and reopen its shipping. And the outcome was dictated not by any of the three combatants but by the two superpowers over their heads: the United States and the Soviet Union, for once aligned, simply ordered the operation reversed, and it was. The message was unmistakable: the age of the old European empires was ending, and the Middle East’s fate would now be arbitrated in Washington and Moscow. The Cold War had arrived as the organizing force of the region, and both Israel and the Arab states would increasingly become clients seeking superpower patrons, weapons, and protection. The peoples of the land were, as ever, downstream of decisions made far away. This same superpower arbitration would return, with opposite sympathies, to end the war of 1973.

The Palestinians inside Israel

While all this played out along the borders, a different and quieter drama unfolded inside Israel itself. The roughly 150,000 Palestinian Arabs who had remained within the armistice lines became citizens of Israel: they could vote, and they held Israeli passports. But from 1948 until 1966 they lived under a military government: a regime of permits, curfews, travel restrictions, and surveillance that governed where they could work, move, and live, and that facilitated the confiscation of much of their land. They were citizens in law and suspects in practice: an Arab minority inside a state defined as Jewish and locked in conflict with the Arab world around it.

The tension of that position produced its own tragedy. In October 1956, on the eve of the Suez War, Israeli border police shot and killed 49 Arab citizens, including women and children, in the village of Kafr Qasim, for violating a curfew that had been imposed so suddenly that many of the victims, returning from working in the fields, did not even know it existed. The Kafr Qasim massacre became a foundational grievance for Palestinian citizens of Israel, though the subsequent trial did establish an important principle in Israeli law: that soldiers have a duty to disobey a “manifestly illegal” order.

The military government over Israel’s Arab citizens was finally lifted in 1966. Their descendants (today about a fifth of Israel’s population, often called Arab Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel) remain a distinct community holding a complicated dual identity, formal citizens of a state at war with their own people.

The birth of the Palestinian national movement

For the first fifteen years after 1948, the Palestinians had little agency of their own. Their cause was carried (or, they increasingly felt, exploited) by the Arab states, above all Nasser’s Egypt, which spoke of liberating Palestine but subordinated it to their own rivalries and agendas. The Palestinians themselves, scattered and stateless, had no independent political voice.

That began to change in this period, along two tracks.

The first track was top-down. In 1964, at an Arab League summit in Cairo, the Arab states created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with a founding leader named Ahmad Shukeiri. But this original PLO was essentially a creature of the Arab governments, a way for them to be seen championing the Palestinian cause while keeping it firmly under their own control. It had little independence and less credibility with ordinary Palestinians.

The second track was bottom-up, and far more important. In the late 1950s, a group of young Palestinian exiles (many of them working in the Gulf, several having studied in Cairo) founded an underground movement called Fatah. Its guiding figure was an engineer named Yasser Arafat, working alongside comrades like Khalil al-Wazir (known as Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad). Fatah’s core conviction broke sharply with the Nasserist consensus: the Palestinians, it insisted, could not wait for the Arab states to liberate Palestine for them. They had to take up armed struggle themselves, immediately, and drag the Arab world along behind them. Fatah launched its first armed raid into Israel on the first day of 1965, a small, militarily insignificant sabotage attempt against Israel’s national water system, but a symbolic declaration that the Palestinians had become actors in their own cause.

Water, in fact, was one of the era’s flashpoints. Israel had built a National Water Carrier to pump water from the Sea of Galilee to its arid south, and the Arab states, meeting in summit, plotted to divert the Jordan River’s headwaters to deny Israel the water, leading to armed clashes over the diversion works. These low-level confrontations, together with escalating Fatah and fedayeen raids and heavy Israeli reprisals (such as a large 1966 raid on the West Bank village of Samu, then under Jordanian rule), kept the borders inflamed.

Fatah would soon take over the PLO entirely and make it the true vehicle of Palestinian nationalism, but that story belongs to the years after 1967. On the eve of that war, the Palestinian national movement was newly born, militant, and still overshadowed by Nasser and the Arab states.

The slide to war

By the spring of 1967, the region was a tinderbox, and a series of miscalculations lit it.

Border clashes between Israel and Syria had been intensifying, including a large aerial battle in April 1967 in which Israel shot down several Syrian jets. Then the Soviet Union fed Egypt false intelligence claiming that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an invasion. Nasser, the self-appointed leader of the Arab world, could not be seen to stand aside while an Arab state was threatened, and he responded with a cascade of dramatic moves.

He ordered the UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) out of the Sinai, and it left. He poured the Egyptian army into the Sinai, right up to Israel’s border. And in May 1967 he closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping once again, an act Israel had declared, ever since 1957, that it would treat as a legitimate cause for war. Jordan’s King Hussein, swept up in the surge of Arab war fever, flew to Cairo and signed a mutual defense pact placing his army under Egyptian command. Across the Arab world, crowds and broadcasters spoke openly and jubilantly of the coming destruction of Israel.

Whether Nasser actually intended to start a war or was bluffing for prestige is debated to this day. But from Israel’s vantage point, it faced encircling Arab armies, a closed waterway, and a chorus of annihilationist rhetoric, with the memory of the Holocaust two decades behind it. After weeks of unbearable tension (remembered in Israel as the “waiting period”), Israel decided to strike first.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, it did. What happened next would redraw the map of the Middle East, put another million Palestinians under Israeli rule, and shape the conflict straight through to the present day. That is where Part 3 begins.

Disputed points in this era

• Infiltration’s nature. How much of the early-1950s cross-border infiltration was innocent (refugees returning, farming, smuggling) versus militant is debated; historians like Benny Morris document that it was mostly non-military at first, which bears on how the reprisal policy is judged.
• Qibya’s intent. Israel initially claimed the Qibya deaths were accidental, with villagers unknowingly hiding in houses being demolished; critics regard the scale as evidence of a deliberately punitive massacre. The death toll (~69) is well established.
• Did Nasser intend war in 1967? A genuine and unresolved historical question. Some argue he was bluffing for Arab prestige and did not expect or want full war; others that his actions made war inevitable regardless of intent. Israel’s decision to strike is generally analyzed as a preemptive war, though whether it was strictly “preventive” or truly forced is argued.
• The PLO’s early legitimacy. How much the 1964 PLO represented Palestinians versus served as a tool of Arab states is a matter of interpretation; most historians treat the pre-1968 PLO as largely the latter.

Who’s who

Gamal Abdel Nasser: Egypt’s leader from the mid-1950s; champion of Pan-Arabism and the dominant Arab figure of the era; a mortal rhetorical enemy of Israel.

Yasser Arafat: Co-founder and leader of Fatah; the man who would come to personify the Palestinian national movement for the next four decades.

Fatah: The Palestinian nationalist movement founded by Arafat and others in the late 1950s, committed to independent armed struggle; it would soon dominate the PLO.

Ariel Sharon: Commander of Israel’s Unit 101 and its reprisal raids (including Qibya); a future general, defense minister, and prime minister.

Ahmad Shukeiri: First chairman of the PLO, created by the Arab League in 1964.

PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization): Umbrella body for Palestinian nationalism, founded 1964; initially controlled by the Arab states.

Fedayeen: Palestinian armed raiders who crossed into Israel; increasingly organized and state-sponsored through the 1950s.

Pan-Arabism: The movement, embodied by Nasser, for unity among the Arab peoples against Western domination.

Unit 101: Israel’s special reprisal-raid commando force, led by Sharon.

Qibya massacre (1953): Israeli reprisal raid on a West Bank village that killed around 69 people.

Kafr Qasim massacre (1956): Killing of 49 Arab citizens of Israel for breaching a curfew they were unaware of; a founding grievance for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Suez War (1956): The Israeli–British–French attack on Nasser’s Egypt; a military success but political defeat for the invaders, and a triumph for Nasser’s prestige.

Straits of Tiran: Israel’s Red Sea shipping route; its closure by Egypt was a trigger for war in both 1956 and 1967.

UNEF: The UN peacekeeping force stationed in the Sinai after 1956, whose expulsion in 1967 helped precipitate the Six-Day War.

Next: Part 3: Six Days and Fifty Years (1967). The war that lasted less than a week and shaped everything that followed: Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights; the beginning of the occupation; Resolution 242 and the “land for peace” formula; the Arab “three no’s”; and the birth of the settlement movement.