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Israel Studies 9.1 (2004) 86-100



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The Palestinian Society in the Wake of the 1948 War:

From Social Fragmentation to Consolidation

The repercussions of the 1948 War between the Arab states and Israel created deep social, demographic, and political crises within Palestinian society: two major products of the war were the refugee problem and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Moreover, the Palestinians were left without responsible leadership that both the Palestinians and the Arab states could accept as representative. "Palestine," or "Filastin" as a geo-political entity vanished from the map of the Middle East. The Eastern part of Palestine, which was occupied by the Arab Legion, was formally annexed to TransJordan in April 1950 and called the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The other part of Palestine, which was occupied by Egypt, was not annexed to Egypt, but was called the Gaza Strip or officially "the Palestinian land under the control of the Egyptian Army."

At the Arab League Council in March 1959, Egypt initiated the notion of the revival of the Palestinian entity. In September 1963, the Arab League Council nominated Ahmad al-Shuqayri as Filastin representative at the Council instead of Ahmad Hilmi, who had died in June of that year. It was only in January 1964, however, that the first Arab summit's decisions on the Palestinian entity paved the way for Ahmad al-Shuqayri to establish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in June 1964. The PLO was designed to represent the Palestinians and symbolize their political-national issue rather than the Palestinian refugee problem.1

The year 1959 witnessed three important Palestinian phenomena. In October 1959, the organizational structure of the Fatah organization was established in a meeting of its founders.2 In the same year the organ of Fatah, the monthly Filastinuna, was published in Beirut and, in November, [End Page 86]


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Figure 1
The monthly Filastinuna, Beirut January 1960. [With eyes towards the plundered homeland]
[End Page 87]

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Figure 2
The monthly Filastinuna, Beirut August 1963
[End Page 88]

the General Union of the Palestinian Students was set up in Cairo. Six years later, on 1 January 1965, the Fatah organization embarked upon its "fida'i" activities against Israel, and additional "fida'i" organizations were established and joined the armed struggle. Thus the first half of the sixties witnessed a new phenomenon—the advent of the new Palestinian national movement led by a young nationalist leadership. In 1968 all of these organizations took over the Palestinian establishment (the PLO) and have been leading the Palestinian national movement ever since. But it was Fatah that became the "backbone" and leader of both the national movement and the Palestinian establishment—the PLO.

Western researchers, as well as Arab and Palestinian scholars who have studied the Palestinian national movement, tend to view the fifties as a period when Palestinian society was submerged in the doldrums. The middle sixties, however, were seen as the period of the Palestinian awakening, when national expressions acquired overt and tangible form.

Yehoshafat Harkabi, in his accomplished, scholarly, documented study "Haffalastinim: Metardima le-Hit'orerut," surveyed Palestinian writers' publications during the years 1961-1966, which discussed the Palestinian society in the wake of the 1948 catastrophe [al-Nakba]. Among the writers were Mustafa al-Dabbagh (who published his book in 1965), Niqola al-Dir (1964), Subhi Yasin (1964), Lutuf Ghantous (article, 1965), Walid al-Qamhawi (1962), Nasir al-Din al-Nashashibi (1962), and Naji 'Alush (1964).3 These writers, as Harkabi suggested, tried to answer the following questions: (a) What happened after 1949 to the group into which Palestinian society disintegrated and how did they develop socially and politically? (b) How did their mood change as years went by and their hopes and expectations were unfulfilled? (c) How did the Palestinians emerge as a political factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict? Harkabi summed up the answers of these writers as follows: "From October 1948 until the founding of the PLO in 1964, the voice...

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