Denying Israel as a Sovereign Jewish State
The favorite term employed by those who would deny the Jewish people sovereignty over their ancestral homeland, Israel, was The Zionist Entity. That derogatory term was adopted in the mid-1950’s to delegitimize Israel even before the founding of the PLO in 1964. At the time Gaza was under Egyptian control and Judea and Samaria were under Jordanian rule.
Yet there were no mass demonstrations, no international campaigns, and no sustained demands from Yasser Arafat or his Arab allies for an independent Palestinian Arab state.
In fact, the political circumstances at the time made such a demand both feasible and straightforward. Egypt administered Gaza, while Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria in 1950. The Palestinian Arabs living in those territories were governed by fellow Arab states, shared their language and culture, and were not under Israeli sovereignty.
If the primary objective had been to establish a separate Palestinian Arab state, one would expect the Palestinian Arab national movement to have demanded an end to Egyptian and Jordanian rule and the creation of an independent Palestinian Arab government. And why did the Arab states that controlled Palestinian Arab territory between 1948 and 1967 not establish an independent Palestinian Arab state or pursue large-scale permanent integration of the refugees?
Because that was not their objective.
The PLO’s 1964 charter did not identify statehood in Judea, Samaria and Gaza as its immediate goal. Instead, it called for the “liberation” of what it erroneous described as Palestine—a territory that included the State of Israel itself. The objective was not partition, coexistence, or the creation of another Arab state alongside Israel. It was the elimination of Israel.
The demand for a Palestinian Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza became a central international issue only after 1967, when Israel captured those territories in the Six-Day War. The political geography had suddenly changed: territories that had previously been controlled by Egypt and Jordan were now under Israeli control. Only then did “occupation,” “self-determination,” and Palestinian Arab statehood in those specific territories become the dominant international narrative.
That raises an obvious question: If Palestinian Arab statehood in Judea, Samaria and Gaza was truly the central objective, why was there no serious effort to establish such a state when those territories were already under Arab control? Why did the Palestinian Arab national movement not demand independence from Egypt and Jordan?
The answer is revealing. Palestinian Arab nationalism became more sharply defined after 1967, when Israel’s control of the territories provided both a grievance and a specific territorial focus for the movement.
The inconvenient truth is that the original ideological struggle was not for a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel. It was for a Palestinian Arab state in place of Israel.
