Israel: The Embattled Ally - Nadav Safran (1981)

The Challenge of the Fedayeen and Israel's Response

Next to the challenge presented by the Egyptian war of attrition and the complications of Soviet intervention that developed from it, the most serious problem faced by Israel after the Six Day War was that presented by the Palestinian guerrillas or fedayeen, as they called themselves. (Fedayeen, more accurately fida'iyyun, means those who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their cause.)

The first fedayeen bands were organized by the Egyptian Intelligence from among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and were sent into Israel on sabotage and terror missions in 1955-1956. Their actions at the time contributed significantly to Israel's decision to go to war in 1956 and was the principal reason for its refusal to evacuate the Gaza Strip until it had obtained some international assurances that fedayeen action would not be renewed. For the next decade there was indeed nearly perfect quiet on that front, as Palestinian energies were channeled by the Egyptians into the formation of regular Palestinian army brigades that were held under tight control. In Syria, however, a new government that came to power in 1965, which believed that Israel could be defeated more readily by a guerrilla strategy than by regular war, gave its support to a small movement of fedayeen, al Fatah, and allowed it to sally from Syria's borders for sabotage action inside Israel. Israeli retaliations led to substantial border skirmishes and air battles with Syrian forces, which eventually led Egypt to make a demonstration of force in support of Syria that escalated into the Six Day War.

Although the Six Day War resulted in a crushing defeat for the armies of the Arab states that participated in it, the fedayeen, who had really provoked it, flourished as a result of it. The war turned them into the only remaining focal point for Arab resistance to Israel at a time of despair and brought to

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their ranks large numbers of recruits. It induced the governments of the defeated Arab states, eager to prevent Israel from consolidating its conquests, to give them a more or less free hand and provide them with bases and weapons. It opened for them vast sources of funds from oil-rich Arab states, eager to compensate through such support for their inaction during the war and their continuing cooperation with the American and British "imperialist" supporters of Israel. Above all, the war gave rise to an Israeli occupation of thickly inhabited Arab territories, which afforded what seemed like an opportunity for an effective guerrilla-type resistance even while providing a highly credible cause for it. Thus, within a short while, al Fatah itself grew rapidly and new organizations developed, and the fedayeen movement as a whole came to embrace many thousands of active, full-time, well-equipped, and well-provisioned partisans.

The fedayeen proclaimed their aim to be not merely the liberation of the territories conquered by Israel in the Six Day War but also the destruction of Israel and the liberation of all of Palestine. Just how they were going to accomplish this was the cause of a great deal of confusion and inconsistency in thought and action, which is partly the reason why their movement was badly divided. Some thought in an altogether nonrational way, which under the inspiration of Franz Fanon saw in violence and resistance a way for an inner psychological revolution that would somehow release the necessary and sufficient forces to accomplish liberation. Others thought in terms of guerrilla and popular liberation war on the analogy of Algeria, China, Cuba, or Vietnam, without regard to the fundamental differences between these situations and Israel's. They did not recognize; for example, that the geography and topography of the territory under Israeli control did not permit the setting up of any guerrilla base that could not be reached by Israeli forces; that the population of these territories (including Israel proper) consisted of a Jewish majority that militantly supported the authorities and an Arab minority whose total size was such (1.5 million including Israel's Arabs) that it could, in the most extreme case, be driven out from Palestine altogether; that the Jews did not depend on the Arabs in any significant way and had themselves nowhere to go; and so on. Still other fedayeen thought in terms of provoking Israel into additional wars with the Arab states in the full knowledge that it would win them, in order to cause it to expand and thus create the "proper" conditions for a war of popular liberation. These fedayeen made light of the possibility that the Arab governments might sooner fight them than become involved in another losing war with Israel, or that Israel might content itself, if it came to war, with destroying enemy forces, and expanding, if at all, only into strategically important but thinly inhabited areas. They overestimated the ability of the movement, riven with dissension and rivalries as it was, to manipulate the Arab states opportunistically for its purposes instead of being so manipulated by them. All these difficulties and deficiencies made the fedayeen's ultimate

268 I The Evolution of Israel

goal totally unrealistic, but that did not prevent them from presenting Israel with some formidable immediate problems.

As far as Israel was concerned, the fedayeen confronted it with two specific and related problems. The first was the potential ability of the fedayeen to exert pressure on it to quit the occupied territories without obtaining satisfactory settlement terms; the second was their ability to endanger its day-to-day current security, disrupt its orderly life, and weaken its people's morale through acts of sabotage and terror. In this respect, the Israeli evaluation of the fedayeen's role was symmetrical to the Egyptian view of it rather than to the fedayeen's view of their own function and capabilities.

With respect to the first problem, Israel's defense chiefs did not fear that the armed forces at their disposal might not be able physically to hold on to the occupied territories because of fedayeen action and fedayeen-instigated popular resistance. The entire population, fedayeen and all, could be driven out if worse came to worst. What the Israeli chiefs feared was that if resistance in the territories were to develop to an extent that required drastic measures to suppress it, there would be strong pressures within Israel itself to quit; and if these pressures did not suffice, there would be added heavy international political pressures. Since quitting under pressure could jeopardize Israel's long-term prospects of peace and security and would certainly leave unresolved the problem of current security even within the pre-1967 boundaries, it seemed essential to the men responsible for Israel's defense to avert this; and the way to avert this was to prevent the fedayeen from establishing themselves in the occupied areas and from arousing their population to effective, continuous resistance