Suppressing Internal Armed Resistance

At the same time, Israeli forces were vigorously stamping out military challenges within the Palestinian enclave itself. As Serbia discovered in Kosovo during 1998, a state cannot legitimately claim a monopoly over organized violence if it loses empirical sovereignty. After 1967, therefore, Israeli attempts to suppress armed Palestinian resistance from within the West Bank and Gaza became crucial to the Israeli control efforts, as well as becoming a vital way station on the road to Palestinian ghetto formation.

In summer 1967, Fatah leader Yasser Arafat infiltrated the West Bank, hoping to organize an internal armed insurgency. Arafat and his colleagues traveled the West Bank for months, and although they did recruit some willing supporters, their campaign largely failed.^[16] Local Palestinian elites feared Israeli and Jordanian reprisals, and the guerrillas' support within the broader Arab world was weak. Israel's counterinsurgency apparatus, led by its internal security services (known then as the Shin Bet, or Sherutei Bitachon), was also tremendously effective. Together, these factors militated against a successful armed insurgency, and by 1971, Israel had effectively eliminated all serious external and internal armed challenges to its rule, wedging the Palestinian enclave firmly within its walls. As Black and Morris explain,

[Israel's] sealing of the border with Jordan meant that the West Bank was almost completely cut off from the outside world; its population—a large part of the Palestinian people—isolated and controlled by their occupier. There were no "no-go" areas for the Israelis, no "liberated zones" where resistance could flourish.… This [Israeli] success prevented the Palestinians from launching a people's war at the very moment that their ideology required it.

As a result, they note, the Palestinian occupied territories "never became Algeria or Vietnam."^[17] Although these models had originally inspired the Palestinian guerrilla movement, circumstances militated against their Middle Eastern application. Israel had cut Palestine off from the outside world and Palestinian insurgents were unable to mount an effective armed challenge from within. The West Bank and Gaza were not formally part of Israel; increasingly, however, they were being drawn into the state as subordinate members of the Israeli polity.