Carving a Regional Niche, Acquiring International Character: Institutional Autonomy and Recognition through Conflict

To apply loosely to the PLO Theda Skocpol’s observation about Third World social revolutions in general, “these revolutions have happened in settings so penetrated by foreign influences—economic, military, and cultural—that social-revolutionary transformations have been as much about the definition of autonomous political identities on the international scene as they have been about forging new political ties between indigenous revolutionaries and their mass constituents.”^[16] War, arguably, played its most significant role in this context, because the construction of statist political institutions required attainment of a key attribute—autonomy—as well as a territorial base (however modest), and therefore necessarily placed the PLO in a position of direct contestation and negotiation with external actors and host states. Yet because this process also required attainment of a second key attribute—recognition—adopting the norms and “rules” of the dominant states system eventually became a more effective way of mobilizing external support than waging war, even if this imposed constraints on the use of violence and necessitated parallel changes in national objectives and internal political structure.^[17]

The importance of autonomy from, and recognition by, established state actors in determining the form and purpose of Palestinian political institutionalization was evident especially in the thinking of Fateh, the mainstream nationalist guerrilla group formed in 1958–59 that was to win lasting control of the PLO a decade later. Fateh’s founders were clear that recognition by others, attainment of internal unity, and assertion of a Palestinian national identity required an autonomous political entity with independent organizational structures. Indeed, they were convinced that the aftermath of al-nakba “would have been very different had the Palestinian leadership after 1948 continued to raise the banner of the government and entity.”^[18] The inability of the All-Palestine government (formed in the closing stages of the first Arab-Israeli war in October 1948) to assert itself in the face of the indifference of some Arab states and active obstruction by others had prevented the Palestinians from independently making decisions and had turned them into a “neglected mass.”^[19] From the outset Fateh argued that “the Palestinian entity is necessary in order to concentrate the efforts of our people and mobilize them” but believed equally that an entity could only come into being if a Palestinian vanguard imposed it on the Arab state system and forced recognition through armed revolution.^[20]

Yet the need for recognition imposed its own logic. Fateh initially adopted an ambivalent, and then openly hostile, attitude toward the PLO, which was seen upon its establishment in 1964 as an overly bureaucratic and obedient instrument in the hands of the Arab states, which had formed it “with the express purpose of pre-empting the revolutionary process among the Palestinians.”^[21] For this reason many in the ranks at first opposed taking over or preserving the PLO structure once this became possible after the resounding Arab defeat at Israeli hands in June 1967. However, the Fateh founders were also aware that “the PLO enjoyed Arab legitimacy, and this was important,” since it “embodied an official Arab commitment to the Palestinian people for the first time.”^[22] In any event, Fateh conducted a systematic takeover of the PLO and its constituent agencies and departments from 1968 onward, instituting what was to be a permanent symbiosis between itself and the latter’s statist structures, much like that in Arab and non-Arab states dominated by a single or governing party.

The central issue here is that war played a pivotal role in the PLO’s acquisition and maintenance of its institutional character, described by a senior official as “an ambition of all revolutions,” above all by enabling it to “exercise significant autonomy in the face of other centers of state power.”^[23] The foremost instance of this dynamic was the 1967 war, which, by weakening the Arab host governments politically and militarily, enabled the Fateh-dominated PLO not only to establish guerrilla sanctuaries in rural areas but also, critically, to acquire an extensive political and administrative presence in the capital cities and other urban centers of Jordan, Lebanon, and (albeit to a lesser degree) Syria in the next two years. The extraterritorial status of the PLO was, moreover, recognized officially by the host authorities in these countries and enshrined in a variety of formal treaties and secret memoranda. Conscious of the immense moral and material advantages conferred by its ability to openly mobilize and direct its mass base, the PLO also resorted to force on several occasions between November 1968 and May 1973 to defend the arrangements sanctifying its public presence in Jordan and Lebanon, and formed a fully fledged state-within-the-state to protect its various institutions and consolidate its international diplomatic status following the disintegration (to which it had contributed heavily) of the Lebanese state in 1975–76.

At the same time it is necessary to note the limits of war as an instrument of Palestinian institutional development. The events of June 1967 and the following decade explain the ability of the PLO to obtain considerable extraterritorial privileges and institutional autonomy in specific host countries, where it became part of domestic power struggles and social conflicts, but are insufficient to explain why it came to enjoy regional and international recognition on a scale unprecedented for a nonstate actor. Here the answer lies primarily in the nature of the regional and international systems of states rather in the role of war as such, although the latter acted repeatedly as a mechanism connecting attitudes and developments at these levels with Palestinian institution-building. For example, it is true that the military conflict of 1948 triggered the collapse of Palestinian national institutions, but the conflicting agendas of the main Arab states were a major contributory factor throughout the 1947–49 period, as they opposed successive Palestinian proposals for the establishment of an Arab government and state in mandate Palestine and then disbanded Palestinian irregular forces.^[24] Their rivalry moreover ensured the subsequent lack of all but the most nominal Palestinian representation in collective Arab fora, such as the League of Arab States, until the mid-1960s. The situation changed only when the escalation of inter-Arab rivalries made the Palestinian issue a potent “card” in regional politics from 1959 onward: it eventually became expedient to set up the PLO as a means of defusing the “Arab cold war” and deflecting the rising Palestinian nationalism that threatened an untimely war with Israel, a fear that PLO founder Ahmad Shuqayri and Fateh separately utilized to gain leverage and seek relative autonomy from the Arab states.

The latter example, moreover, shows that it was the threat of war, rather than its actual conduct or material results in the first instance, that was most potent in Palestinian hands. This potency was due to the tendency of the Arab states system to balance politics and mutual intervention and to the power of symbolic competitions based on shared norms among its members.^[25] It was this that imbued the PLO with an influence far exceeding its physical capabilities after the 1967 war and, in following years, magnified the coercive power that the PLO could bring to bear in Jordan and Lebanon by mobilizing wider Arab backing for its extraterritorial status. The same characteristics could also render the PLO vulnerable to challenges from internal opponents who had outside backing—witness Syrian and Libyan support for the rebellion that split Fateh and the PLO in 1983. But more generally these characteristics enabled the PLO to mobilize regional resources and alliances to protect its institutional autonomy from external rivals—witness Arab support during the 1970 conflict in Jordan (extending to military intervention in the case of Syria) and Egyptian and Iraqi logistic backing against the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976. Cold war politics further magnified the PLO’s manipulative capability as a convergence of interest emerged in the 1970s with Soviet policy objectives in the Third World.^[26] Indeed it can be argued, as Frantz Fanon did with regard to the Algerian war of independence, that the Palestinian armed struggle only had a serious impact and that the PLO was only able to win external recognition (at least from one superpower camp) in an environment in which international contradictions were “sufficiently distinct.”^[27]

Contradictions in the regional and international systems did not privilege war as a mechanism of political change, however, even though it provided the opportunity for ideological and programmatic changes. It was quite the reverse, as the evolution of PLO national objectives and strategies in the 1970s suggests. Thus the defeat of the guerrilla movement in Jordan in 1970–71 contributed to the mainstream PLO leadership’s pragmatic shift from its objective of liberating the whole of mandate Palestine by force to the more modest goal of setting up a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by negotiation. In much the same way, the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 provided the PLO with a critical political moment in which to develop a credible diplomatic option, based on the justifiable calculation that it was in the interest of the major regional and international powers to settle the conflict. In both instances the first need was to consolidate PLO standing in the Arab states system: having faced several challenges to its status as Palestinian national representative after the expulsion from Jordan, it won decisive Arab confirmation (and defeated the Jordanian political challenge conclusively) following the October war. This was the basis for securing the second need: Arab diplomatic and strategic support, greatly enhanced by the war and use of the “oil weapon,” was critical in mobilizing international support for the Palestinians, leading over the next year to PLO membership in the Non-Aligned Movement and Islamic Conference Organization, observer status at the UN and Organization of African Unity, and official recognition from the Soviet bloc and other socialist countries.

The PLO could, and did, continue to use military means to advance its national agenda, but this occurred increasingly within a referential framework provided by the international state system. Even the use of terror in 1968–73, counterproductive as it was in terms of alienating Western public and government opinion, proved in the long run to have demonstrated the necessity of addressing the Palestinians as a distinct and separate strand in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the PLO also increasingly utilized more conventional military means to assert its political status and uphold its statist character. The transformation of its guerrilla forces after 1971 into semiconventional units with regular training, command and logistics structures, and heavy weaponry was as much a reflection of this concern (“soldiers, not bandits or terrorists”) as was the provision of a guard of honor for foreign dignitaries visiting PLO headquarters in Beirut up to 1982. The PLO meanwhile cemented its diplomatic gains in some instances by supplying arms, training, and combat personnel to Arab and Third World countries or Soviet allies—such as Libya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua—and in others gave military assistance to domestic opponents of governments deemed hostile—such as Pahlevi Iran—as a means of pressure. Conflict could also be used to engage outside powers in support of the PLO’s political and diplomatic agenda: its military policy during the Israeli siege of Beirut in summer 1982 was calibrated to the diplomatic rewards it expected, and succeeded in prompting active Franco-Egyptian diplomacy on its behalf at the UN, while later its pursuit of the bitter “camps war” with the Lebanese shi‘a Amal militia in 1985–88 helped it restore relations with certain Arab states and the USSR.^[28]

The above account indicates that two, contradictory dynamics were in operation even as the PLO gained the autonomy and recognition it sought (both externally and internally). First, the fact that the PLO was obliged to observe certain norms (above all, that of sovereignty) in order to gain membership of the Arab states system, and to moderate its goals and means in the conflict with Israel in order to gain acceptance from the international community, demonstrates the limits of war as a means of acquiring recognition in the international system, at least so long as war does not come with exclusive control over territory and population. Indeed, the more noticeable trend was the substitution, by the mid-1970s, of the discourse of “guerrilla warfare” and “people’s war” with a terminology drawn directly from United Nations resolutions that spoke of “legitimate” and “inalienable” Palestinian rights, including especially that of self-determination.

Second, and conversely, the quest for recognition could work to opposite effect. Important as Western acceptance was, the PLO’s constant concern to combat any challenge to its status as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians and its determination, to that end, to secure the loyalty of its mass constituency and internal opposition, at times required it to adopt political stances (such as refusing to acknowledge unconditionally Israel’s right to exist) or military tactics (such as Fateh’s foray into international terrorism in 1971–73 and its “suicide” raids against Israeli civilian targets in 1974–78) that severely damaged or even derailed its diplomacy. Yet the overall trend was toward a redefinition of national goals and therefore, implicitly, of political constituency, culminating ultimately in the PLO-Israel Oslo Accords of September 1993. The ability of the Fateh-dominated mainstream PLO leadership to conduct this protracted transition, despite the deep rifts it produced and the fundamental challenges it posed to national identification, testifies to the durability of the political structures and practices developed over the preceding three decades of conflict.