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Chapter 1 No One Heard Our Screams or Our Suffering In the spring of 1967, Lyndon Johnson was agonizing over the escalating war in South East Asia. It had been nearly two years since he announced the fateful decision to commit U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam in order to defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting to liberate South Vietnam and unify it with the Communist North. Johnson, who had assumed office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and went on to a landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, saw his presidency destroyed by an intractable guerrilla war in the jungles of Vietnam. But by the spring of 1967 he was becoming concerned about a guerrilla war in the deserts of the Middle East and the possibility of a conventional war between Israel and the Arab states encircling it. Palestinian guerrillas were regularly conducting guerrilla raids against Israel from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In May, the Egyptian president mobilized Egyptian forces, expelled the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in the Sinai Peninsula, and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. ‘‘The danger implicit in every border incident in the Middle East,’’ Johnson wrote after leaving office, ‘‘was not merely war between Israelis and Arabs but an ultimate confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.’’ Johnson urged restraint on Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, but the president understood that the Egyptian provocations constituted a cause for war: ‘‘I used all the energy and experience I could muster to prevent war. But I was not too hopeful.’’1 Under the exigent circumstances, to ask for Israel’s forbearance was to ask for too much. On the morning of 5 June, Israel launched a massive preemptive strike against the Egyptian air force, destroying virtually all its Sovietmade combat aircraft on the ground. Over the next six days Israeli troops engaged Arab armies on three fronts. By the time the Israelis complied with UN Security Council Resolution 242 demanding an end to the fighting on 10 June, Israeli forces had occupied Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza strip, Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, and Jordanian territory on the West Bank and Jerusalem, giving No One Heard Our Screams or Our Suffering 9 Israel sovereignty over the site of its ancient Temple and one of Islam’s holiest places, the Al-Aksa Mosque.2 The Israeli victory in the Six Day War demoralized the Arab states, but it radicalized the Palestinian national movement and marked the onset of an era of terrorism directed against Israel, moderate Arab states and, inevitably, Europe and the Unites States. By the time Johnson left office in January 1969, Palestinian terrorists had launched a full-scale assault on civilian aviation intended to compel the world to consider the plight of the Palestinian people. Origins Palestinians refer to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as alnakba , the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced as result of the creation of the Jewish state, the ensuing war between the Arabs and Israelis, and an Israeli policy of expulsion.3 As Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—toiled to build a viable democratic state, the Palestinians chafed under Israeli occupation or languished in sprawling refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or in the émigré communities throughout the Middle East. In the decades after the founding of Israel, and especially after the Arab’s ignominious defeat in the Six Day War, thousands of Palestinians rushed to become fedayeen—‘‘men of sacrifice’’ in Arabic—in the ranks of several guerrilla organizations later affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization . Founded in 1964, the PLO came to be identified with Yasser Arafat, its perennial chairman, and associated with the international terrorism committed under the banner of Palestinian nationalism after the Six Day War. The reality is more complex. Arafat actually resisted leading his guerrilla movement fully into the PLO until 1969, five years after its creation, when he was in a position to dominate it. By then another Palestinian organization had already committed the first acts of international terrorism. Born in Cairo in August 1929 to Palestinian parents as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Raouf Arafat, Yasser Arafat would emerge as the acclaimed leader of the Palestinians before his fortieth birthday. Yet he lived only briefly in Palestine in the mid-1930s, as a young child when his father sent him to live with...

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