The June 67 War (Setback) and the Redefinition of Palestine

Before the Israeli aggression on June 5 of 1967, which led to the loss of the rest of Palestine (the West Bank and Jerusalem, which were under Jordanian rule, and the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian administration, in addition to Sinai and the Syrian Golan); any talk about Palestine referred to the Mandate Palestine between the sea and the river, including the Palestine that has been under Zionist occupation since the Nakba. The concept of "Israel" was limited to the entity that occupies the lands of 1948 only.

The discourse, literature, and objectives of the Palestinian revolution that began before the setback, as well as all the Arabic talks and slogans; spoke of liberating all of Palestine within its historic borders. At that time, there was no mention – as there is today – of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or on the 1967 borders; because these lands were already under Arab rule and administration, except for UN Resolution 181 of 1947 which stipulated the division of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the latter being non-divided over an area of 45% of Palestine.

Following the June 67 war, UN Security Council Resolution 242 was issued, which called for Israel's withdrawal from territories occupied in the war and for a just solution to the refugee issue. The resolution did not mention the word "Palestine" or "Palestinians," but was addressed to Israel and the Arab states participating in the war (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) and did not address the partition resolution, and when it spoke about the refugees, it did not specify Palestinian refugees but rather referred to refugees in general.

The June 67 war posed significant challenges to the relatively new Palestinian Liberation Organization (founded in 1964); on one hand, its popularity increased among Palestinians and Arabs, support for the armed struggle grew, and thousands of Palestinians, Arabs, and people from other nationalities flocked to engage in guerrilla work through the revolution's bases in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. However, on the other hand, the setback and the defeat of the Arab armies were a shock to the Palestinian revolution that was promoting the idea that the revolution and the Palestinian people are the vanguard of the nation and the Arab armies for the liberation of Palestine; how could liberation be achieved when these armies were defeated in six days!

From here, some Palestinian leaders began silently thinking about seeking political solutions and gradually retracting from what was written in the Palestinian National Charter. The first step was in 1971 when the organization proposed the idea of a "democratic secular state" in all of historical Palestine between the sea and the river, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews could coexist without discrimination; however, Israel rejected the idea, as did radical Palestinian factions.

The October 1973 war came as an Egyptian and Syrian attempt, not to liberate Palestine, but to regain their territories occupied in 67. Despite the valiant effort of the Arab armies and Arab volunteers, Syria did not manage to fully recover the Golan, while Egypt regained Sinai after arduous negotiations sponsored by Washington, specifically by its Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. These negotiations culminated in the signing of a peace treaty with Israel (Camp David) and the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, while the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan remained under occupation.

The October war also led the Palestinian leadership to reevaluate its goals and strategy; if Syria failed to recover its territories, and Egypt failed to recover Sinai entirely during the war and entered negotiations with Israel that led to its recognition, how would the organization achieve its goal of liberating Palestine? This led to a shift in the agenda in the phased program of 1974 (the ten-point program) that spoke of a fixed strategic goal of liberating all of Palestine, and a phased goal represented by acceptance of "authority over any inch of land that is liberated or given to us." The organization also retracted its claim that armed struggle was the only way to liberate Palestine, to adopt the formulation that armed and political negotiation efforts go hand in hand. This was the beginning of thinking about pursuing a political settlement and a new definition of Palestine's geography and the relationship with Israelis, a thought that was accompanied initially by the Egyptian stance and then by Crown Prince Fahd's initiative in 1981 at the Fez summit in Morocco, which evolved into the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, leading to the Madrid Conference in 1991 and Oslo in 1993.

In my opinion, due to the Palestinian leadership's early awareness of the overall Arab situation, apart from the slogans raised by the regimes and repeated in their summits, the Palestinian leadership was prepared for a political settlement and the search for middle-ground solutions even before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Thus, the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip or on the 67 borders was born with the June setback, which has now been 59 years ago.