Dictionary Of The Israeli - Palestinian Conflict: Culture, History And Politics

Dictionary

of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Dictionary of the Israelipalestinian Conflict Culture, History, and Politics VOLUME 1: A-J

MACMILLAN REFERENCE USA An Imprint of Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation

Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Culture, History, and Politics

Based on Shalom, Salam: Dictionnaire pour une meilleure approche du conflit israélopalestinien, by Claude Faure, ©Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2002. ©2005 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. Thomson and Star Logo are trademarks and Gale is a registered trademark used herein under license. For more information, contact Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems— without the written permission of the publisher. For permission to use material from this product, submit your request via Web at http://www.gale-edit.com/permissions, or you may download our Permissions Request form and submit your request by fax or mail to: Permissions Department Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Permissions Hotline: 248-699-8006 or 800-877-4253, ext. 8006 Fax: 248-699-8074 or 800-762-4058

Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgments constitute an extension of the copyright notice. While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Thomson Gale does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Thomson Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Faure, Claude. [Shalom, salam. English] Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict : culture, history and politics / by Claude Faure. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-02-865977-5 (set hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-02-865978-3 (vol 1)—ISBN 0-02-865979-1 (vol 2)—ISBN 0-02-865996-1 (e-book) 1. Israel—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 2. Jews—Politics and government— Encyclopedias. 3. Israel—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Arab-Israeli conflict— Encyclopedias. 5. Palestinian Arabs—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 6. Palestine—History—Encyclopedias. I. Title. JQ1830.A58F3813 2005 956.9405’03—dc22 2004018641

This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN 0-02-865996-1 Contact your Thomson Gale sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS Introduction

. . . . . . . . . . . . vii

VOLUME 1: A-J

. . . . . . . . . . . 1

Timeline of Modern Arab-Israeli History . . . 227 Timeline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Glossary

. . . . 237

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

VOLUME 2: K-Z . . . . . . . . . . 261 Timeline of Modern Arab-Israeli History . . . 485 Timeline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Glossary

. . . . 495

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 499

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 507

v

EDITORIAL & PRODUCTION STAFF Melissa Hill ADDITIONAL EDITING: Kristin Hart, Mark Mikula, Scot Peacock, Ken Wachsberger, Nicole Watkins, Jennifer Wisinski IMAGING: Lezlie Light, Mike Loguz, Christine O’Bryan IMAGE RESEARCH & ACQUISITIONS: Denay Wilding, Robyn V. Young WRITERS: Dorothy Bauhoff, Justine Ciovacco, Sylvia Engdahl, Marie Lazzari, Drew Silver COPYEDITORS: Jonathan Aretakis, Dorothy Bauhoff, Andrew Cunningham, Ellen Hawley, Malinda Mayer, Gina Misiroglu, Deirdre Pope, Lucia Vilankulu TIMELINE: Corrina Moss BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mary V. Dearborn CAPTION WRITER: Richard Slovak PROJECT EDITOR:

vi

Malinda Mayer, Gina Misiroglu ART DIRECTOR: Pamela A. E. Galbreath COMPOSITOR: Datapage Technologies International (St. Peters, Missouri) RIGHTS ACQUISITION MANAGEMENT: Margaret A. Chamberlain, Sheila Spencer MANAGER, COMPOSITION: Mary Beth Trimper ASSISTANT MANAGER, COMPOSITION: Evi Seoud MANUFACTURING: Wendy Blurton CONTENT CONSULTANTS: Neil Caplan, Humanities Department, Vanier College, Montreal; Rochelle Davis, Fellow, Introduction to the Humanities, Stanford University EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Hélène Potter PUBLISHER: Frank Menchaca PROOFREADERS:

INTRODUCTION The conflict that has pitted since 1948 the State of Israel against its Arab neighbors is the direct result of the decision by the United Nations to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, but the origins of the conflict have their roots in the history of the Middle East. When, on 2 November 1917, then-foreign-minister Lord Arthur James Balfour officially declared to Lord Edmond de Rothschild that Great Britain would look favorably upon the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, he made inevitable the conflict between Arabs and Jews that has lasted the better part of the 20th century and, in the early years of the 21st century, still shows no sign of resolution. Indeed, petroleum, East-West tensions, and, most enduring, the Palestinian people’s homelessness have hardened the roots of the conflict and turned the region into a battleground for international economic and political interests. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the oldest and most complex in the region. For many years it has had serious international repercussions. The five wars that were fought since 1948 involved, indirectly, the two superpowers, the United States and the then U.S.S.R. The 1978 peace accords between Israel and Egypt, the Palestinian-Israeli “Declaration of Principles” of 1993 (later known as Oslo I), and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty of 1994 are important milestones in the peace process, but the conflict goes on.

While one cannot affirm that the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States were caused by the situation in Israel and in the Occupied Territories, it nevertheless remains that stagnating Israeli-Palestinian negotiations may have nourished growing resentment—if not hatred—toward America and resulted in the birth and growth of extremist movements around the world and far beyond the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has touched and continues to affect masses of persons, famous and anonymous, and of all origins, professions, and ages. It has mobilized and still involves many countries outside the region, especially the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, as well as political organizations such as the United Nations, the European Community, and the Arab League. All these entities share humanitarian as well as strategic concerns, while they may disagree ideologically or on ways to end the conflict. The Middle East is a complicated region, where religions, politics, the past, the present, local and international interests, even water, are all intertwined issues. The cradle of the three major monotheistic religions that venerate the same prophets and claim the same holy places, this part of the world also holds natural resources and strategic access to Africa and Asia that only add to the complexity of the situation.

vii

INTRODUCTION

The dictionary is a tool to better understand this multi-faceted reality, unravel the many threads of its history, and penetrate the unique political characteristics of, and at play in, the region. Expanded, both in number of entries and in scope, from its original French version—Fayard’s Shalom, Salam, by Claude Faure, released in Paris in 2002—and entirely rewritten to answer appropriately the questions of English-reading audiences, the two-volume work offers 1140 cross-referenced definitions. Written with the non-specialist in mind, the Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict does not deliver a single point of view, nor does it develop an opinion-based analysis. The work gives voice to the many positions at play through the history of the political parties, the movements, organizations, individuals, wars, peace treaties, and news media that have shaped and been shaped by this fifty-year-old conflict. The detailed history of events, the contents of negotiations and agreements, the description and explanation of the many United Nations resolutions, and the detailed biographies that appear in this work make it a real tool for student and researcher alike. While the research for the dictionary carries it into 2004, the body of the work aims at providing as wide and deep a background to facilitate understanding of the issues at stake. The timeline of the conflict, which appears at the back of each volume, supports the fully

developed and cross-referenced entries. It goes back to the first Zionist Congress (1897) in Basel, Switzerland, and Theodor Herzl’s articulation of the long-held dream of a homeland for the Jews and on to the consequences of Israel’s decision to build a wall of separation from the occupied territories. Some 110 images and maps help the reader locate and visualize the lands as well as the people involved in the dispute. Rounded up with a bibliography designed to support the readers’ interest in further research, the Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provides an exhaustive, un-biased, and easily accessible body of knowledge on a complex and tragic reality. The efforts of many must be acknowledged: Mr. Claude Faure, who supplied the original idea and the first list of entries in this dictionary. Prof. Philip Mattar, who introduced us to Profs. Rochelle Davis and Neil Caplan, who provided patient guidance, deep knowledge and understanding of the history of the region, and the collegiality necessary to the redevelopment of a dictionary on such a sensitive topic. Their work was facilitated by the thoroughness of the research provided by Dorothy Bauhoff, Justine Ciovacco, Sylvia Engdahl, and Drew Silver, who rewrote and added to the original materials faithfully translated by Philip Beichtmann. Melissa Hill, project editor, deserves much credit for skillfully putting together a complicated project that needed to be done.

Hélène Potter 6 October 2004

viii

D i c t i o n a r y

o f

t h e

I s r a e l i - P a l e s t i n i a n

C o n f l i c t

A ABBA: Aramaic term meaning “father, my father.” Title conferred on bishops of the Eastern Church.

ABBAS: Name of Muhammad’s paternal uncle. Died in 652 or 653, when he was around eighty years old. The caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty are his descendants. SEE ALSO Caliph. ABBAS, MAHMUD RIDA (Abu Mazin; 1935– ): Palestinian political figure. Mahmud Abbas was born in 1935 in Safad, Mandatory Palestine. During the first Arab-Israel War in 1948, he fled to Syria, then joined the BaEath Party in 1954. Four years later Abbas moved to Qatar, where he worked for the ministry of education for ten years. After joining the Palestinian al-Fatah movement, he was sent to Jordan in 1961, in charge of information in the Palestinian community. After the Jordanian-Palestinian clashes of Black September 1970 he was expelled to Syria, where he joined a small Palestinian group, whose members included Issam Sartawi and SaEid Hamami, who favored the establishment of a dialogue with the Israelis. In 1971 he was elected to the Central Committee of al-Fatah and, the following year, to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1977 he traveled to Prague, where he met, discreetly, with representatives of the Israel Communist Party. In July 1978 he led the first al-

Fatah delegation to Moscow. While in Moscow he wrote a thesis on Zionism that earned him a doctorate in political science. Three years later Abbas joined the political department of the PLO, under the leadership of Faruq Qaddumi. He was in Tunis, in January 1983, at a meeting between Yasir Arafat and three Israeli figures: Mattityahu Peled, Uri Avnery, and Yaacov Arnon. The following September, at a meeting of the PLO’s executive committee, Abbas was reelected to the political department as director of domestic affairs. At the meeting, he proposed the idea of beginning a dialogue with Israel. In May 1988 he was named leader of the Palestinian delegation to the mixed Jordanian-Palestinian Committee for the Occupied Territories, replacing Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), assassinated the previous month by an Israeli commando. Six months later, on 16 November, after the announcement by the Palestine National Council (PNC) of the “creation of the Palestinian State,” Abbas supported the project of reform of the Palestinian Charter to include an official recognition of the State of Israel. In November of the following year he was appointed by Yasir Arafat to lead the Palestinian committee in charge of supervising the IsraeliArab peace negotiations. On 1 June 1992, while the leader of the PLO was hospitalized in Amman, he joined Faruq Qaddumi and Hani al-Hasan in the triumvirate appointed by Yasir Arafat to direct the PLO in the interim. In March 1993, Arafat placed Abbas

1

ABBASIDS

in charge of the secret negotiations with Israel in Oslo, Norway, which resulted, the following 13 September, in the signature of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP). In February 1994 he supported Faysal al-Husayni, who was advocating the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. Then, in disagreement with Arafat on certain points of the Israeli-Palestinian Agreement, Abbas announced his retirement from political life. In March 1995, having returned to the West Bank, Abbas was once more asked to lead the Palestinian committee in negotiations with Israel. On 22 May 1996, elected by the executive committee of the PLO to the post of secretary general, he became second in command after Arafat and as such his potential successor. Abbas presided over the Central Elections Committee during the campaign for the January 1996 elections. Between 1997 and 2000, he met often with Israeli, American, and Arab political figures, with whom he tried to advance the IsraeliPalestinian peace negotiations. In the middle of May 2001, in the context of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which had intensified in the Palestinian territories, he traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, with whom he discussed ways of implementing the cease-fire enjoined by the Mitchell Commission. Early in September 2001 he flew to Moscow, a few days after the visit of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. In April 2003 Arafat appointed Abbas to the newly created post of prime minister. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) had agreed to this move only under great pressure from the Americans and the Israelis, who were refusing to deal with Arafat. Abbas’s tenure was a constant power struggle with Arafat, chiefly over the many security services under Arafat’s personal control, though Abbas was also interior minister. As prime minister, Abbas reappointed Saib Erekat as negotiation minister; urged Israel to act on its commitment to the Road Map plan for peace, including an end to the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank; and urged the Israelis and Americans to end their boycott of Arafat. Israel criticized Abbas for his reluctance to use force against militant groups, especially HAMAS, against which Israel was conducting a campaign of assassinations. Abbas was widely regarded among Palestinians as being excessively conciliatory. Facing a noconfidence vote in the Palestine Legislative Council, Abbas resigned from his cabinet posts on 5 September 2003. The next day Israel attempted to assassinate Ahmad Yasin, the nominal leader of HAMAS.

2

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

In October 2004, as Arafat’s health declined, Abbas appeared to be in the best position to succeed Arafat. Returned to Arafat’s favor, he is believed to have been a more honest, if not effective, PNA prime minister than Ahmad Qurai, and had wide, if not deep support at least among the older generation in the PLO. Abbas is known to favor bringing HAMAS and Islamic Jihad into the mainstream of Palestinian politics, something that may not be attractive to those organizations as long as the PLO continues to meet aggressive Israeli policy with attempts to compromise. SEE ALSO Aqsa, Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Black September 1970; Erekat, Saib Muhammad; Fatah, al-; HAMAS; Husayni, Faysal al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman; Road Map (2002).

ABBASIDS: Second dynasty of Islamic caliphs (750– 1258 C.E.), founded by Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah, descendant of Abbas, uncle of the prophet Muhammad and victor over Marwan II at the Battle of the Zab River (Iraq) in 749. After they overturned the Umayyads, the Abbasids transferred their capital from Syria to Baghdad, which they made into a city of great splendor, enriched by Mediterranean and Far Eastern influences. Muslim theology and law made great strides under their reign. However, their farflung empire was diverse and Baghdad was far from the difficulties experienced by the provinces. The Abbasids ignored the growing power of certain governors, and a few regions even seceded. In 836, the capital of the caliphate was moved to Samarra, a city north of Baghdad. Troubles multiplied and decadence set in, and power had to be shared with the Iranian and the Turkish bureaucratic families. At the end of the tenth century, the Seljuk Turks seized power, leaving the Abbasid caliphs only the semblance of sovereignty. In 1258 the Mongols brought an end to the Abbasid dynasty, sacking Baghdad and its libraries. The survivors of Caliph Abdullah alMustaEsim’s family took refuge in Egypt, where the dynasty became extinct in 1517 with the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. SEE ALSO Abbas; Caliph; Ottomans; Seljuks; Umayyads.

ABBAYA: A cloak worn in different styles by men and women. It is commonly seen in black in the Persian Gulf states. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ABD AL-RAHIM, TAYYIB

ABD (pl. ibad): Arabic word meaning “servant, or slave.” Abd, followed by one of the ninety-nine names of God (e.g., Abd al-Rahman “the servant of the Merciful One”), is a common man’s name in Arabic.

ABD AL-HADI, AWNI (1889–1970): Palestinian political figure. Awni Abd al-Hadi was born in Nablus into a prominent landowning family and educated in Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris, where he attended the Sorbonne. A pan-Arab nationalist in Ottoman Palestine and Syria, he was a member of the Decentralization Party and helped organize the secret nationalist society al-Fatat (al-Jami Eya al-Arabiyya al-Fatat, the Young Arab Society, which later evolved into the Istiqlal [Independence] Party) in 1911 and the Arab Nationalist Congress in Paris in 1913. He was secretary to Amir Faysal ibn Hussein al-Hashem, who was then ruling Syria, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I and worked as an adviser to Faysal’s short-lived government, and then after the French expelled Faysal to that of his brother Abdullah I in Transjordan. He was elected to the Arab Executive, the leading Palestinian nationalist organization until 1934, at its congresses in 1922, 1923, and 1928. He favored dialogue with the British and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1930. In 1932, his attitude toward the British hardening, he helped to revive the Istiqlal Party as a Palestinian political party opposing British rule and Zionism. Abd al-Hadi became secretary general of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), formed in 1936 to coordinate the activities of the general strike called that spring, which developed into the Arab Revolt of 1936 through 1939. Deported in 1937 because of his work for the AHC, he remained in exile until 1941, although he was allowed to participate in the London Conference that produced the white paper of 1939. He was given a ministry in the All-Palestine Government formed in the Gaza Strip during the 1948 War but never served in the short-lived and hopeless enterprise. He was the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt from 1951 to 1955 and later a Jordanian government minister and a member of the Jordanian senate. He died in Cairo. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; All-Palestine Government; Arab Executive; Arab Higher Committee; Gaza Strip; Istiqlal, al-; Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939); White Papers on Palestine.

ABD AL-MAGUID, ESMAT (1924– ): Egyptian diplomat. Esmat Abd al-Maguid studied international law D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

in Paris and began his career in foreign affairs in 1950, becoming secretary to the Egyptian ambassador in London, a post that he held until 1954. Back in Cairo he became director (until 1957) of the Bureau of British Affairs in the Foreign Ministry. In this capacity he participated in negotiations on the evacuation of British troops from Egypt. From 1957 to 1961 he was a member of the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations in Geneva. Between 1961 and 1963 he held the position of deputy director of the Legislative Department of the Foreign Ministry, where he became one of the main collaborators of Muhammad Hafiz el-Ismail, vice minister of Foreign Affairs. Between 1963 and 1966 he was chargé d’affaires of the Egyptian embassy in Paris. He then became director of the Department of Cultural Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, and then spokesman for the Egyptian government. In June 1970, Abd al-Maguid was named Egyptian ambassador in Paris, replacing Muhammad Hafiz el-Ismail, who had become director of Egypt’s Intelligence Service. That November, Abd al-Maguid was appointed chargé d’affaires in the government of Mahmud Fawzi. In January 1972 he was named permanent representative of Egypt to the United Nations. On 16 July 1984, Abd al-Maguid was appointed minister of Foreign Affairs, replacing Kamal Hassan Ali, who had become prime minister. On 11 November 1986 Abd al-Maguid was promoted to vice prime minister, in charge of foreign affairs. As such he guided Egyptian diplomacy in its efforts to support the Palestinian cause. On 15 May 1991 he was elected general secretary of the Arab League, an election that marked the return of Egypt to a leadership position in the pan-Arab organization, from which it had been excluded since the Camp David Accords. He was replaced as director of the ministry of Foreign Affairs by Amr Mousa, who, ten years later, succeeded him as head of the Arab League. SEE ALSO Camp David Accords; League of Arab States; Mousa, Amr Muhammad.

ABD AL-NASIR, JAMAL SEE

Nasser, Gamal Abdel.

ABD AL-RAHIM, TAYYIB (Abu al-Tayyib; 1945– ): Palestinian political figure, born in 1945 in Palestine. Abd al-Rahim is a member of Yasir Arafat’s inner circle. A refugee in Egypt, he studied in Cairo, where, in the middle of the 1960s, he was president of the Palestinian Students Union. After earning a degree in economics, in 1969 he became responsible for information at Sawt Filastin (Voice of Palestine), the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

3

ABD AL-SHAFI, HAYDAR

Palestinian radio station in Cairo, and was its director from 1973 to 1978. He also participated in the editing of the magazine Al-Watan. After having joined the political department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he was named the organization’s ambassador to China. He was assigned to the Palestinian Mission at Cairo in 1985 and to Yugoslavia between 1987 and 1988. A member of the Palestine National Council (PNC) since 1977, he was elected to the Central Committee of al-Fatah and appointed al-Fatah’s representative on the Central Council of the PLO in August 1989. Abd al-Rahim was appointed PLO ambassador to Jordan the following November. In May 1994, in the context of the application of the Oslo Agreements, he became general secretary of the presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and in 1996 he was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir, al-Fatah; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority.

ABD AL-SHAFI, HAYDAR (1919– ): Palestinian political figure. Born in 1919 in Gaza, Palestine, Haydar Abd al-Shafi received a degree in surgery from the American University of Beirut. He became a doctor of medicine in 1945, after a number of stays in the United States. Close to the Communist Party, he was, in 1945, one of the rare Arabs who supported Resolution 181 of the United Nations on the partition of Palestine. Between 1952 and 1956 he headed the Palestinian Parliament of Gaza, then under Egyptian administration. In 1964, as a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), he was elected to the First Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Four years later he attempted, in vain, to restart the activity of the Gaza Parliament. Accused of anti-Israeli activities in 1970, he was expelled by Israeli authorities to Lebanon for a few months. From 1972 on, favorable to Resolution 242, he became one of the leaders of the nationalist Palestinians in the West Bank. In October of that year he participated in setting up, in the Gaza Strip, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, of which he assumed presidency in 1979. He was an opponent of the Camp David Accords and subsequent peace treaty. Beginning in July 1980 the Israeli authorities barred him, for a period of four years, from leaving Gaza City to go abroad. In 1983 he was elected to the Administrative Council of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. The Israeli police interrogated him a

4

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

number of times between 1988 and 1990; he was accused of being one of the leaders of the Intifada. During the Gulf War he opposed the PLO’s support for Iraq. In October 1991 he presided over the Palestinian delegation at the Mideast Peace Conference held in Madrid, where he was assisted by Faysal alHusayni, whose views on the Palestinian question he did not share. He resigned from the delegation in April 1993 but was persuaded to stay. In July 1993, he argued with Yasir Arafat over the concessions Arafat had made in the Oslo Accords concerning Israeli settlements. He was upset as well over Arafat’s having conducted the negotiations in secret. Critical of Arafat’s autocratic rule of the PLO, Abd al-Shafi demanded, in vain, the creation of a plural leadership. He resigned from the delegation after the Accords were made public. In May 1994 Abd al-Shafi refused to be part of the Palestinian Authority. In February 1996 he was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council with the largest vote of any candidate. He resigned his seat in March 1998 (having announced his decision the previous October)—despite the attempts of many deputies to change his mind—declaring that he could not support Arafat’s authoritarianism, which he believed was sabotaging the Council. In July 2002 Abd alShafi was one of the principal promoters, with Mustafa Barghuthi and Ibrahim Dakkak, of the Palestinian National Initiative, al-Mubadara, which calls for the formation of a “national emergency leadership,” democratic elections at all levels, and institutional reform to achieve Palestinian national rights and a “durable, just peace.” Considered a voice of public conscience by some, Haydar Abd al-Shafi is a “Palestinian from within” who enjoys the respect of the entire Palestinian population as well as the political class. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Camp David Accords; Intifada (1987–1993); Oslo Accords; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority.

ABD RABBO, YASIR (Muhammad Abu Bashir; 1944– ): Palestinian political figure. Yasir Abd Rabbo was born in 1944 at Hebron. After the War of 1967, he went to Cairo, where he pursued literary studies. As president of the General Union of Palestinian Students in Egypt, he was part of the team guiding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), along with George Habash and Nayif Hawatma. On 21 February 1969, following the congress of Amman, along with Hawatma, he quit the PFLP to found the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP), which was transformed later into T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ABDULLAH I IBN HUSSEIN

the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). As head of the cultural department of this movement and its assistant secretary general, in February 1973 he accompanied Yasir Arafat to Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In 1974 he was elected to the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in charge of the department of information. In 1988 Abd Rabbo participated in the dialogue between the PLO and the U.S. State Department, during which, according to the Americans, he showed himself to be an “open and constructive” interlocutor. In October 1989 he was in Cairo to attempt, by the intermediary of Egyptian authorities, to open a channel of negotiations with the Israelis. In 1990, favoring the policies of rapprochement with Israel recommended by Yasir Arafat, he found himself at loggerheads with Nayif Hawatma, who opposed this approach. In September 1991, with his two assistants, Salih RaDfat and Muhammad alLabadi, he quit the DFLP to found his own movement, the Palestinian Democratic Union (PDU), which supported the peace process started at the Madrid Conference in 1991. In May 1994 he became minister of information and culture in the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA), presided over by Arafat. In addition to his ministerial duties, Abd Rabbo remained one of the principal figures of the Palestinian delegations that were negotiating with Israel. In October 1998 he participated in the IsraeliPalestinian negotiations that were taking place at Wye Plantation in the United States. In November 1999 he served as head of the delegation responsible for negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian autonomous territories. In March 2000 he met with the U.S. mediator, Dennis Ross, and the head of the Israeli delegation, Oded Eran, in Washington, but in May of that year resigned from the negotiating team when he learned that Arafat had authorized secret Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Sweden without informing him. When Arafat reorganized the Palestinian Authority administration in 2002, Abd Rabbo refused an invitation to join, but he did accept the position of cabinet affairs minister in the government of Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas in April 2003. In 2001 Abd Rabbo was a signatory, along with Hanan Ashrawi, Yossi Beilin, Amos Oz, and a number of other prominent Palestinians and Israelis, to the Cairo Declaration of 2001, which called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and an end to bloodshed. He was the chief PalestinD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ian participant in the unofficial Palestinian-Israeli talks that produced the Geneva Peace Initiative, proposed in 2003 to replace the Oslo Accords as the basis for Palestinian-Israeli peace. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Beilin, Yossi; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Authority.

ABDULLAH I IBN HUSSEIN (King AbdEallah of Jordan): Second son of Amir Husayn ibn Ali al-Hashimi alSharif of Mecca, Abdullah ibn Husayn was born in 1882 in the Hijaz region of Arabia. During the First World War, his father, supported by Great Britain, incited the Arab tribes to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry MacMahon, persuaded Sharif Husayn to support the creation of a greater Arab kingdom under Hashimite authority. With the help of British captain T. E. Lawrence, Abdullah participated actively in combat and drove the Turks from Hijaz, in November 1917. But in June of the following year Abdullah was driven out of Hijaz by the Wahhabi forces of the al-SaEud family, equally supported by the British, obliging him to take refuge in Medina. In October 1918 Abdullah became king of Iraq while his brother, Faisal, was trying to become amir of Syria. In July 1920, the latter was driven from Damascus by the French. In fury, the Hashimite family considered raising troops for the reconquest of Syria. To placate Faisal, the British, at the Cairo Conference of March 1921, made him amir of Iraq, and Abdullah Amir of Transjordan, which was under their mandate. In May 1923, as amir, Abdullah proclaimed the independence of Transjordan. The following October, his father, Sharif Husayn, driven from Mecca by the Wahhabis, was obliged to seek exile in Cyprus. In February 1928, in the context of the application of the Balfour Declaration, a treaty between Transjordan and Britain stipulated the separation of Palestine from Transjordan. This decision aroused the anger of the Transjordanian tribes and caused conflicts with the British forces. In November 1929, while on a visit to Jerusalem, Abdullah ibn Husayn escaped an assassination attempt. During the Second World War, Transjordan supported the Allies against the Germans. On 22 March 1946, the British Mandate over Transjordan officially ended, and on 25 May, after the proclamation of the accession to rule of the Hashimite Kingdom by the Transjordanian Legislative Council, Abdullah was crowned king of Transjordan.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

5

ABDULLAH II IBN HUSSEIN

On 16 November 1947, while the creation of a Jewish state was the subject of intense international negotiations, Abdullah secretly received the envoy of the Jewish Agency, Golda Meir, who tried to convince him to accept guaranteeing the security of the Jewish entity in Palestine in exchange for control over the Arab portion of the country. On 15 May 1948, on the morrow of the creation of the State of Israel, Abdullah joined forces with the Arab countries that attacked the Israeli troops. His Arab Legion took control of the Arab section of Jerusalem. On 16 December, in spite of protests of the Arab League, he prepared to annex the West Bank, at the request of the Palestinian Congress installed in Amman. On 3 April 1949, by signing an armistice treaty with Israel, Abdullah’s kingdom gained control of the West Bank and the Arab part of Jerusalem. On 27 February he secretly signed a draft of an Israeli-Jordanian treaty with Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Accused by the Arab League of wanting to conclude a separate peace with Israel, he had to abandon this project. On 24 April 1950, after having discharged the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin alHusayni, Abdullah officially annexed the West Bank and proclaimed the creation of the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. A majority of Palestinians immediately accused him of trying to take over their country. On 15 February 1951, the Israeli and Jordanian governments concluded an agreement on measures to be taken to prevent any infiltration into Israel of Palestinian groups acting from Hashimite territory. The following 20 July, Abdullah ibn Husayn was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. Talal, Abdullah’s older son, was in bad health and held power for a few weeks only, leaving the throne to his son, Hussein, who would reign over Jordan for almost forty-eight years. SEE ALSO Balfour Declaration; Hussein ibn Talal; Jerusalem; Jewish Agency for Israel; League of Arab States; Meir, Golda; Wahhabis.

ABDULLAH II

IBN HUSSEIN (Abdullah II of Jordan; 1962– ): King of Jordan. The eldest son of King Hussein of Jordan and his British second wife, Princess Muna (Antoinette Avril Gardiner), Prince Abdullah ibn Hussein was born on 30 January 1962 and was Jordan’s crown prince from 1962 to 1965. However, in order to avoid a too-prolonged regency in case of premature death, the king designated his own brother, Hassan ibn Talal, as crown prince, on the condition that Abdullah would become crown prince in case of the accession of Hassan to the throne. In

6

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

KING OF JORDAN. ABDULLAH II IBN HUSSEIN, THE ELDEST SON OF KING HUSSEIN, CONTINUED HIS FATHER’S MODERATE POLICIES AND CLOSE TIES WITH THE UNITED STATES—DESPITE OPPOSITION TO THE 2003 WAR IN IRAQ—AFTER HE ACCEDED TO THE THRONE IN 1999, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-SEVEN. (© 2003 Landov LLC. All rights reserved)

1980, after studies in England and the United States, Abdullah enrolled in the British Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, then did graduate studies at Oxford. Upon his return to Jordan in 1984 he was assigned to the 40th Armored Brigade. He traveled the following year to the United States and France for military training. In 1986 he was assigned to a Jordanian helicopter platoon. In 1989, after new periods of military and college education in the United States and Great Britain, he was promoted to the rank of commander, then, in January 1993, to the rank of colonel. On 10 June Abdullah married Rania alYasin, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, with whom, a year later, he had his first child, Hussein. In November 1993, promoted to brigadier general, he took command of the Jordanian Special Forces, then three years later, of the Royal Jordanian Special Operation T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ABNA D AL-BALAD

Command (RJSOC), merging the Special Forces corps and those of the Royal Guard. On 2 May 1998 he was named major general. On 25 January 1999, upon his father’s return from a stay in the United States, where King Hussein had received treatment for cancer, Abdullah was made crown prince, replacing his uncle Hassan. After the death of his father on 7 February, Abdullah became king of Jordan, under the name of Abdullah II. He designated his brother Hamza—son of King Hussein and Queen Noor—as crown prince. To make himself known on the international political scene, Abdullah traveled extensively that summer, going to Europe, the United States, and Canada. On 26 July, on the morning of the funeral of the king of Morocco, where he also had an opportunity to meet with U.S. president Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, he paid a surprise visit to Damascus, where he was received by President Hafiz alAsad. On 5 September Abdullah signed an accord developed at Sharm al-Shaykh (Egypt) between Ehud Barak and Palestinian president Yasir Arafat. This agreement was thought to open the way to negotiations for a final peace settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. A few days later King Abdullah visited Kuwait, ending a period of chill in the relations between the two countries that had followed the Gulf War. On 1 November, after his first address to the Jordanian Parliament, Abdullah dedicated himself to pursuing his father’s work in favor of peace in the Middle East and a rapprochement with Arab “brother” nations. Domestically, after having warned off Islamist Jordanians opposed to peace with Israel, he announced his intention of continuing the process of democratization begun ten years earlier and to pursue the fight against corruption. On 25 November, in his speech opening the World Conference on Religion and Peace, which took place in Amman, he hardened his tone on Israel, declaring that the latter should renounce its territorial ambitions in the eastern sector of Jerusalem and accept the return of Palestinian refugees in order to attain a durable peace in the Middle East. On 22 August 2000 he made his first official visit to Tel Aviv, where he was received by Prime Minister Barak. Before his trip Abdullah had talked with Arafat and had reaffirmed to him Jordanian support for the Palestinian cause. The king implicitly gave his support to the U.S. campaign against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in 2002–2003, but opposed the war, refusing U.S. forces the use of Jordanian airspace. In June D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

2003 Abdullah hosted the Aqaba Summit, which was intended to work out the means of implementing the Road Map plan put forth that April by the so-called Quartet (United States, European Union, United Nations, Russia). Later the same month the king hosted an extraordinary “global reconciliation” meeting of the World Economic Forum, concerned mainly with the Middle East, at the Dead Sea resort of Southern Shuneh. He met privately with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel in March 2004 to discuss the problems with the “separation wall” Israel was building around Palestinian areas in the West Bank. Aside from his opposition to the wall as inflammatory, he was concerned that it would eventually cause a mass movement of new Palestinian refugees into Jordan, resulting in economic stress and upsetting the demographic balance between Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians, which already threatens Jordan’s political stability. After having canceled an earlier meeting with President George W. Bush to protest American support for Sharon’s latest plan for Gaza and the West Bank, Abdullah went to Washington in April 2004. There he was the chosen recipient of the president’s apology for the torture committed by U.S. forces against Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad. In May 2004 Abdullah again hosted an extraordinary meeting of the World Economic Forum. The circumstances of Abdullah’s rule have largely been shaped by the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories and by the U.S. “war on terror.” Concerned mainly with the survival of his regime and heavily dependent on aid from the West, he remains active in his attempts to encourage a political settlement for the Palestine-Israel issue while cooperating with the United States and preserving the peace with Israel. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Aqaba Summit; Bush, George W.; Iraq War; Sharm al-Shaykh Summits.

ABED RABBO, YASSER SEE

Abd Rabbo, Yasir Muhammad.

ABNAD AL-BALAD (“sons of the land,” in Arabic): Nationalist Movement of Israeli Arabs who insist they are part of the Palestinian People. Appearing at the beginning of 1970, the movement was started by Muhammad Kiwan in anticipation of the municipal elections in the village of Umm al-Fahm. Its principal leaders are Raja Ighbariyeh, Awad Abdul Fattah, and Ahmad Muhammad.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

7

ABRAHAM

ABRAHAM (Abram, Ab-Raham, “father of the multitude,” in Aramaic and in Hebrew; Sidna Ibrahim, Ibrahim al-Khalil, Abraham “close friend of God,” in Arabic): According to Biblical tradition Abraham is considered the first of the Jewish patriarchs to have revealed, in the nineteenth century B.C.E., the existence of One God. Therefore, according to the Bible, Abraham, son of Terah (Terakh), is descended from Shem, eldest son of Noah and of the line of Eber (Heber). A Chaldean (Mesopotamian) shepherd, Abraham left the city of Ur (Haran) under the prompting of God, leading his tribe to Canaan. According to a divine messenger, a “Promised Land” awaited him there, “between the river of Egypt and the great Euphrates,” where his tribe, chosen by God, would become a great nation. Abraham settled in Canaan for a time, but, because of the hostility of the Canaanites and difficulties feeding his tribe, he decided to go to Egypt. There, with the consent of his wife, Sarah, who was sterile, he had a son, Ishmael (Hebrew)/IsmaEil (Arabic), with Hagar, his Egyptian servant. Later, at the head of his tribe, he left Egypt to return to the land of Canaan where he settled in the forest of Mambreh, near the city of Hebron. There, his wife Sarah, who, meanwhile, miraculously had given him a son, Isaac (Itzhak, Hebrew; Ishaq, Arabic), asked him to renounce Ishmael. At that moment, God, testing his loyalty, commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. Before Abraham’s determination to obey the divine would lead him to accomplish this, God sent a sign to prevent the execution. Abraham decided then to sacrifice a lamb to the glory of God. After their death, Abraham and Sarah were buried in Hebron, and this city became a Jewish holy place, then a Christian and Muslim one. Traditionally described as the ancestor of the Arabs and the Jews, because he is the father of both Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham is a major personage in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions. The QurDan depicts him as one of the prophets, builder of the KaEba, and Muslims commemorate his willingness to sacrifice his son IsmaEil (instead of Isaac of the Biblical story) on the occasion of the festival of Id al-Adha. According to some historians, the words Abarama, Abirami (“love the father, loved by the father”), inscribed on the Ebla Tablets that predate the Biblical story, designate Abraham; while for others, many elements recounted in Genesis are difficult to place in the period when they were supposed to have occurred (around 1850 B.C.E.). SEE ALSO Arabs; Bible; Canaan; Hebron; Isaac; Ishmael; Jew; KaEba; Patriarchs.

8

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ABRAHAM OFFERING UP HIS SON ISAAC. THIS COLOR LITHOGRAPH, C. 1860S, DEPICTS GOD’S TEST OF ABRAHAM’S LOYALTY, ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE. MUSLIMS BELIEVE IT IS ISMAEIL (ISHMAEL), THE FIRSTBORN SON OF IBRAHIM, WHOM THE TRADITIONAL ANCESTOR OF THE JEWS AND THE ARABS WAS WILLING TO SACRIFICE. (© Historical Picture Archive/Corbis)

ABRAMS, ELLIOTT (1948– ): Senior director for Near East and North African Affairs, U.S. National Security Council (2002– ). Educated at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School, Abrams first gained prominence when he served as U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights (1981–1985), then as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs (1985–1989). He was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony about his role in illicitly raising money for the Contras but pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information from Congress. He was pardoned, along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants, by President George H. W. Bush in 1992. In 2001 President George W. Bush nominated Abrams as senior director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations in the National Security Council, a post Abrams held until 2002, when he was appointed senior director for Near East and North African Affairs. Critics charged that Abrams lacked credentials for the position, arguing that he was choT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ABU AL-RAGHIB, ALI

ABU ALA SEE

Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman.

ABU AL-ABBAS SEE

Zaydan, Muhammad EAbbas.

ABU AL-HASAN SEE

ELLIOTT ABRAMS. PARDONED BY THE FIRST PRESIDENT BUSH FOR HIS ROLE IN THE IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR, ABRAMS BECAME A SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH ON THE MIDDLE EAST. CRITICS SAID HE WAS APPOINTED FOR HIS NEOCONSERVATIVE SUPPORT FOR

ISRAEL’S LIKUD GOVERNMENT.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

sen only because of his ideology (a criticism that had earlier been leveled when he served in the Reagan administration). He has not been known as an ArabIsraeli specialist but has been thought to favor Likud positions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. SEE ALSO

Bush, George H. W.; Bush, George W.;

Likud.

ABU (abu, abi): Arab term meaning “father of.” Many Arabs use this patronymic, which conveys respect, to indicate their status as the father of a first born or of their oldest son. To disguise their identity vis-à-vis the Israeli Security Services, Palestinians use this term to designate each other, even when the parties concerned are not fathers, as was the case with Yasir Arafat, called Abu Ammar. SEE ALSO

Arafat, Yasir.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Hasan, Hani, al-.

ABU AL-RAGHIB, ALI (1946– ): Jordanian political figure. Ali Abu al-Raghib was born in December 1946 in Amman to a wealthy Jordanian family. After earning a civil engineering degree in the United States, Abu al-Raghib was named director of projects at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, a post he held from 1967 to 1972. Next, he joined the private sector to head a construction company. In 1986 he was elected president of the Association of Jordanian Entrepreneurs; the following year he was elected councilman of the city of Amman. In 1989 he was elected president of the Higher Council of the Federation of Entrepreneurs of the Arab Council of Cooperation. Ali Abu al-Raghib was close to the Jordanian Arab National Democratic Alliance (JANDA); in June of 1991, then-Prime Minister Taher Masri named him director of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. On 21 November he became minister of Energy and Mining in the cabinet of Zayd bin Shakir, a post to which he was reappointed in May 1993. On 8 January 1995 he was named minister of Commerce and Industry in the bin Shakir government, an office he held until the government resigned in 1996. Elected deputy in 1997, he chaired the Commission on Finance and Economic Affairs of the Chamber of Deputies, playing an important role in the privatization program in Jordan and in finalizing an accord linking Jordan with the European Union. On 12 December 1999, King Abdullah II appointed him president of the Consultative Economic Council, in charge of supervising economic reforms, and in January 2000 he was placed in charge of creating a zone of economic expansion at Aqaba. On 18 June he became prime minister, replacing Abdul Raouf al-Rawabdeh. On 7 August 2001, while the alAqsa Intifada intensified in the Palestinian territories, he met with Yasir Arafat. On 25 October King Abdullah instructed Abu al-Raghib to initiate a ministerial reorganization aiming at the elimination of the Ministry of Information and its replacement by a “Supreme Council for Information,” the idea being to liberalize this economic sector. The king also asked Abu al-Raghib to accelerate the program of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

9

ABU AMMAR

economic and social reforms set in motion by the government. In October 2003, Abu al-Raghib was removed from office by the king after a long period of deteriorating relations with opposing political factions, particularly the Islamists, who complained of oppressive measures and government by decree. SEE ALSO Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Bin Shakir, Zayd; Rawabdeh, Abd al-Ra’uf al-.

ABU AMMAR SEE

Arafat, Yasir.

ABU AYAD SEE

Khalaf, Salah.

ABU HASAN SEE

Hasan, Hani al-.

ABUHATZEIRA, AHARON (1938–): Israeli politician and Knesset member. Born in Morocco, Aharon Abuhatzeira was first elected to the Knesset in 1974 as a member of the National Religious Party. He was reelected in 1977, serving as minister of religious affairs under Menachem Begin. In 1981 Abuhatzeira founded TAMI (TnuDat Masoret Israel), a political party that sought to advocate for Sephardic Jews, especially those from North Africa. He was elected to the Knesset in 1981 and in 1984 served as a TAMI member, then later joined the Likud and served as minister of labor, welfare, and immigration. SEE ALSO TAMI.

ABU BASHIR SEE

ABU IYAD

Abd Rabbo, Yasir.

SEE

Khalaf, Salah.

ABU DAUD SEE

ABU JIHAD

Odeh, Muhammad.

SEE

ABU DIS: Name of a suburban neighborhood (village) of East Jerusalem, mentioned frequently between 1995 and 1996 during the negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. The latter, firmly opposed to Jerusalem becoming the capital of an eventual Palestine State, suggested the city of Abu Dis as a solution. Subsequently, during the course of the intense negotiation that followed, the name of Abu Dis was mentioned regularly, but only to be immediately rejected by most Palestinians. On 9 April 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced his government’s intentions to annex Jewish neighborhoods in the eastern periphery of Jerusalem in exchange for the transfer of the administration of the localities of Anata and Abu Dis to the Palestinians. A few days later, facing Israeli opposition and the threat of resignation of the SHAS members in his government opposed to such a transfer, Barak rescinded his decision. On 15 May, by a margin of 58 votes for and 48 against, the Knesset approved the transfer to Palestinians of three localities close to Jerusalem, including Abu Dis. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Knesset; SHAS. ABUD IYAD SEE

10

ABU JIHAD SEE

Wazir, Khalil al-.

ABU KHALID SEE

Hawatma, Nayif.

ABU LUFT SEE

Qaddumi, Faruq.

ABU MAZIN SEE

Abbas, Mahmud Rida.

ABU MUSA SEE

Musa Muragha, SaEid.

ABU NIDAL SEE

Banna, Sabri al-.

ABU NIDAL GROUP SEE

Fatah Revolutionary Council.

ABU ODEH

Khalaf, Salah.

SEE

ABU FADIL SEE

Jibril, Ahmad.

ABU ODEH, ADNAN (Abu Udeh, Abu Oudeh, Abu Aoudeh; 1933– ): Jordanian political figure. Adnan

Dahlan, Muhammad. D I C T I O N A R Y

Abu Odeh, Adnan.

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ABU SHARIF, BASSAM

Abu Odeh was born in 1933 in Nablus, Mandatory Palestine. Following literature studies in Syria, he taught English in Jordan from 1951 to 1959, then in Kuwait from 1959 to 1964. Upon his return to Jordan in 1965, he joined the Jordanian intelligence service, the General Intelligence Department (GID) headed by Muhammad Rasoul Kilani. On 15 September 1970, when the regime of King Hussein of Jordan was threatened by a Palestinian revolt, Abu Odeh was named minister of culture and information in the new military government of General Daoud. In October 1972 he resigned from his post to become general secretary of the Arab National Union Party. In March 1973 he was named minister of culture and information again, replacing MaEan Abu Nawar, who had succeeded him at this post one year earlier. In September 1977 Abu Odeh represented Jordan at the Euro-Arab Conference in Paris. In March 1979 he assumed the functions of interim prime minister. In June he chaired a delegation appointed to raise funds for the inhabitants of territories occupied by Israel; Palestinian Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin) was a member of the delegation, and he and Abu Odeh later formed a friendship. In January 1984 Abu Odeh was named minister to the court, in charge of the Royal Cabinet. From then on, Abu Odeh became one of King Hussein of Jordan’s principal advisors. In November 1991 he resigned his position as advisor to the king and founded the Party for Progress and Justice in early 1992. A few weeks later, in April 1992, he was appointed Jordanian ambassador to the United Nations, participating as such in some of the negotiations in the Israeli-Arab peace process. In 1995, after having resigned this position, he remained in the United States as a senior fellow of the United States Institute of Peace (1995–1996) to study history and to write. In May 1998, upon his return to Jordan, he became a member of the Jordanian parliament. In early March 1999 he was appointed minister (chief) of the Royal Court and political advisor to the new king, Abdullah II of Jordan. That same year he published his book, Jordanians, Palestinians and the Hashimite Kingdom in the Middle East Peace Process, in which he discussed the injustices suffered by the Palestinians, notably in Jordan, creating a stir in Jordanian political circles. Since leaving his official post in 2000, Abu Odeh has written and consulted extensively on Palestinian-Israeli-Jordanian issues. He is a regular commentator for the Daily Star, a Lebanese English-language newspaper with an international readership. In March 2004 he was elected to the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

board of the International Crisis Group, an independent nongovernmental organization headquartered in Brussels. SEE ALSO Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Hussein ibn Talal.

ABU RAMI SEE

Rajub, Jibril.

ABU RASHID SEE

ShaEth, Nabil Ali Mohamed.

ABU RADUF SEE

B’seisso, Atef FaDiq.

ABU SAEID SEE

Hasan, Khalid al-.

ABU SHARIF, BASSAM (1946– ): Palestinian political leader, born in Jerusalem. In 1948, at the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bassam Abu Sharif became a refugee in Jordan. After secondary studies in Amman, he traveled to Lebanon to study chemistry at the American University of Beirut. When the Arab-Israel War broke out in June 1967, he returned to Jordan, where he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash and became associated with Ghassan Kanafani, spokesperson for the PFLP. In October 1970, after the bloody confrontations between the Jordanian Army and Palestinian splinter groups, Abu Sharif returned to Lebanon where, with Kanafani, he became one of the mainstays of the weekly al-Hadaf, a PFLP organ. On 8 July 1972 Kanafani was assassinated by the Israelis in a car explosion. On 25 July Abu Sharif escaped an attempt on his life that used a boobytrapped package, but he lost an eye and several fingers. Between 1973 and 1981 he pursued his activities in the PFLP, distancing himself increasingly from the line espoused by Habash. In 1982, when the war in Lebanon intensified, Yasir Arafat asked him to be his spokesperson. In July 1987 Abu Sharif was expelled from the PFLP. A member of the General Union of Writers and Journalists, he became Arafat’s media advisor and was sometimes the origin of unexpected press announcements that did not always reflect Arafat’s position; for example, in June 1988 an article advocating negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians was published in the American press, provoking anger in the radical wing of al-Fatah. That November he escaped another assassination attempt.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

11

ABU TAYYIB

In April 1990, shortly before the Gulf War, he supported Iraq. Between 1992 and 1993 he participated indirectly in the conversations that resulted in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accords of 13 September 1994, but by the autumn of 1994 he no longer appeared to be among Arafat’s close advisors. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Gulf War (1991); Habash, George; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ABU TAYYIB SEE

Natur, Mahmud Ahmad al-.

ABU ZAYYAD, ZAYYAD ALI KHALIL (1940– ): Palestinian political figure. Ali Abu Zayyad was born in 1940 in Azariya, near Jerusalem. After obtaining a degree in law from the University of Damascus in 1965, Abu Zayyad worked for the Jordanian department of immigration. He was associated with the newspaper Al Quds and edited the Hebrew-language edition of AlFajr from 1977 to 1983. In 1985 he joined a discussion group that had been started by some Palestinian figures who were favorable to a peace accord with Israel. In 1986 he founded a Hebrew-language bimonthly, Gesher (Bridge), intended for a Jewish Israeli readership. In February 1988, at the time of the visit of U.S. secretary of state George Shultz to Israel, Abu Zayyad was part of a Palestinian delegation received by Schultz. In 1990 he was interrogated a number of times by Israeli police, who were suspicious of his political activism. Abu Zayyad headed the advisory committee of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference of 1991 and participated in various IsraeliPalestinian negotiations. In 1993 he co-founded with Hillel Schenker the quarterly Israel-Palestine Journal and he remains its coeditor as of 2004. In January 1996, he was elected a deputy in the new Palestinian Legislative Council. In 1998 he joined the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Yasir Arafat, as minister without portfolio; he became minister for Jerusalem on the death of Faysal al-Husayni in May 2001 and remained in that position until the PA reorganization in 2002. SEE ALSO Husayni, Faysal al-; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council.

Hindi, Amin al-.

ACHILLE LAURO: Name of an Italian passenger-liner hijacked by a commando of the Palestine Liberation

12

ACRE (Akka, in Arabic; Akko, in Hebrew): Ancient name of the city of Saint-Jean d’Acre (Palestine). ACTION ORGANIZATION FOR THE LIBERATION OF PAL-

ABU ZUHAYR SEE

Front (PLF) on 8 October 1985 near Alexandria, Egypt. This operation was undertaken in reprisal for an Israeli raid carried out seven days previously on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis. The group, consisting of four persons and commanded by Majid al-Malki, was supervised externally by Khalid Abdul Rahim (Petros Floros, Hussein Khalid). During the operation, an American Jewish citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed by one of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the leader of the PLF, Muhammad Zaydan (Abu al-Abbas), who had arrived on the scene, ordered the commando to surrender to Egyptian authorities. In the night of 10–11 October, American fighter planes intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying members of the commando group and forced it to land at a North American Treaty Organization (NATO) base in Sicily. There, at the end of a face-to-face confrontation between the Italian police forces and the members of a special American unit, on a mission to capture the terrorists, the commando was arrested by the Italian police, while Zaydan was released and left Italy for Belgrade. On 14 October, the United States issued an international arrest warrant against Zaydan. Later a court in Genoa, Italy, sentenced the four hijackers to prison terms of four to nine years. In January 1986 Zaydan traveled to Iraq via Cairo, Egypt. On 2 July, the Genoa court sentenced the leader of the PLF, in absentia, to life imprisonment. The attorney general had asked for life imprisonment for the leader of the commando as well as for four other Palestinians who had supplied logistical help to the group. On 22 April 1987, Zaydan, as member of the executive committee of the PLO, participated in the Congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC) that was held in Algiers. Indignant, the United States protested officially to the Algerian authorities against his presence. Under American pressure, the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, demanded that Zaydan be expelled from the PLO. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Palestine Liberation Front (1977); Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ESTINE (Al-HayaDal-Amila li-Tahrir Filastin): A guerrilla organization created in 1968 by Issam Sartawi, a Palestinian cardiologist. After the 1967 Arab-Israel War, Sartawi returned to the Occupied Territories from the United States, where he had been living,

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AFESD

and joined al-Fatah, organizing a group to provide medical care to al-Fatah’s guerrilla fighters. After quarreling with Yasir Arafat, he and a handful of militants left al-Fatah and created the Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (AOLP), a guerrilla commando, which operated mainly in Jordan. In 1970 the AOLP was the only Palestinian group to support Gamal Abdel Nasser’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan, the U.S. proposal to implement United Nations Resolution 242, which would have returned captured land to Egypt and Jordan while ignoring Palestinian national interests. Expelled from Jordan after the Black September confrontations, the members of the AOLP took refuge in Beirut. Sartawi by now had come to favor establishing contacts with Israel, so as to find a solution to the Palestinian problem. Sartawi merged the AOLP into al-Fatah in July 1971 and went on to become an advisor to Arafat on American and European issues, eventually emerging as a leading advocate of mutual compromise with Israel. Sartawi was assassinated by agents of Abu Nidal in Lisbon in April 1983. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Sartawi, Issam.

of the month of February and the beginning of the month of March. Depending on whether one is or is not in a walled city, the Jewish feast of Purim is celebrated on the thirteenth or fourteenth of Adar. According to Biblical tradition, the seventh of Adar is the birthday of Moses. SEE ALSO Calendar, Jewish; Moses.

ADF SEE

ADHAN: The Islamic call to prayer; sometimes spelled azan in English transliterations of Arabic. AD HOC LIAISON COMMITTEE SEE

SEE

ed by God, is the ancestor of humanity. The myth of the first man created out of earth by a divinity is found in many Assyro-Babylonian texts. For numerous scholars the Hebrew term adam, from adama, “earth,” seems more a general word than a proper name. The Arabic term for human beings is bani adam, “the tribe of Adam.”

Local Aid Coordination Committee.

ADL SEE

ADAM: According to Biblical tradition, Adam, creat-

Local Aid Coordination Committee.

AD HOC LIAISON COMMITTEE ON AID TO THE PALESTINIANS

ADALAH (“Justice” in Arabic): An independent, nonprofit nongovernmental organization (NGO) providing legal services to Arab citizens of Israel. In its own words, it “works to protect human rights in general, and the rights of the Arab minority in particular.” On behalf of individuals, NGOs, and Arab institutions, it brings civil rights and civil liberties cases to Israeli courts, advocates legislation and advises Arab members of the Knesset, makes representations to the Israeli government, provides legal consultation, and works with international legal and human rights organizations. In addition, it publishes reports and trains lawyers and law students in human rights law. Located in the town of Shafa EAmr in Galilee, it was founded in 1996 by Hassan Jabareen (trained in law at American and Tel Aviv universities), who remains its director as of 2004.

Arab Deterrent Force.

BDnai BDrith.

ADMOR: Hebrew acronym for adonai morenu verabbenu (“our lord, our teacher, our guide”). Honorific title Hasidic Jews give their dynastic leaders.

ADNAN: Eponymous ancestor of the Arabs of the northern parts of the Arabian peninsula, among whom two groups may be distinguished: the RabiDa and the Mudar. Before Islam, most of the northern tribes were designated by the word “MaDad,” considered to be the name of one of the sons of Adnan, while in fact the Arabs seem to be rather descended from two eponymous ancestors: Qahtan, for the Arabs of the north, and Adnan for those of the south. ADONAÏ ELOHIM: “My Lord God,” in Hebrew. One of the names of God in the Torah. SEE ALSO Torah.

ADP SEE

Arab Democratic Party.

AEUC SEE

Council of Arab Economic Unity.

AFESD ADAR: Name of the sixth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development.

SEE

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

13

AFPPR

AFPPR Arab Front for Participation in the Palestine Revolution.

SEE

AFWAJ AL-MUQAWAMA AL-LUBNANIYA SEE

AMAL.

AGADAH SEE

Haggadah.

AGHA KHAN: Title given to the imam of the Nisarite (Druze) IsmaEili ShiEites.

AGHA, ZAKARIYA

AL- (Zakaria Agha, Zakariyya alAgha; 1942– ): Palestinian political figure. Born in 1942 at Khan Yunes in the Gaza Strip, Zakariya alAgha is a medical doctor by training. He was director of public relations at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, then department head at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza; and he has been president of the doctors’ union of Gaza since 1985. Close to the Palestinian Communist Party, al-Agha was imprisoned several times by the Israeli authorities between 1975 and 1988. In June 1989 he met with the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who was visiting Gaza. In November 1991 he was part of the Palestinian delegation to the peace conference in Madrid. During the Intifada of 1987– 1993 he played an important role in providing medical assistance to the wounded. A Palestinian from “inside” (one who remained in the territories while the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] leadership was in Jordan, Lebanon, or Tunisia) and a Yasir Arafat loyalist, he has been a member of al-Fatah’s Central Committee since 1989. In December 1993, Arafat named him al-Fatah representative for the Gaza Strip. He became head of al-Fatah high command in 1994. At the end of May 1994, when Palestinian autonomy was put into place, he joined the Palestinian Authority (PA) as minister of housing, serving until 1996, when he became head of the PLO’s Refugee Affairs Department and alFatah representative on the PLO executive committee. Al-Agha was the head of the Fatah delegation to the Palestinian all-party talks in Cairo in December 2003, aimed at reaching a united strategy against the Israelis. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-.

AGRANAT COMMISSION, ON ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1973): Established in November 1973 to investigate the reasons for Israel’s vulnerability to the surprise

14

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

attack by Syrian and Egyptian forces on 6 October, the commission, chaired by Chief Justice Simon Agranat, inquired into the responsibility of the Cabinet and the failures of military intelligence. Despite Israel’s ability to recoup militarily after the first few days of the war, the initial fighting had incurred heavy losses of manpower and matériel, and Israeli military intelligence was discredited for not having predicted the attack. In addition, the brief war shattered Israel’s belief that it was militarily invulnerable and hence its conviction that territories could be held indefinitely. The commission blamed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for its flawed assessment of Egyptian military prowess and recommended the removal of the chief of staff, the chief of intelligence, and other high-ranking officers. To the disappointment of many Israelis and the press, the commission called for the dismissal of David Elazar, chief of General Staff, and four other officers, but stopped short of judging Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, relegating that responsibility to the Knesset via a no-confidence vote and to the public via general elections. The commission’s report, issued in April 1974, did, however, lead to a major shake-up of the Labor government, the resignation of Prime Minister Meir, and a new cabinet led by Yitzhak Rabin in June 1974, and it was considered a factor in Labor’s defeat in the 1977 Knesset election. SEE ALSO

Agranat, Simon; Arab-Israel War

(1973).

AGRANAT, SIMON (1906–1992): Chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court (1965–1976). Born in Louisville, Kentucky, into a Zionist family, Simon Agranat attended the University of Chicago and its law school. He emigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1930, settling in Haifa and entering a private law practice. In 1940 he became the second Jewish magistrate in Haifa, served briefly as chief judge on the Haifa District Court, and was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1949. He became chief justice in 1965, retiring in 1976 at the mandatory age of 70. By introducing a “rights discourse” into Israel’s legal dialogue—attributed by many to his American background—Agranat is considered to have been instrumental in the development of a judicially protected rule of law and an independent judiciary, and to have thus enhanced the status of political and civil liberties in Israel. In the aftermath of the October 1973 (“Yom Kippur”) War, he chaired the Agranat Commission of Inquiry, which investigated the failure of Israeli intelligence to anticipate the surprise comT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AHL AL-ABA

bined attack by Syrian and Egyptian forces. Criticism of the commission’s 1974 report, which fell short of the expectations of many Israelis and much of the press, shadowed Agranat’s last two years as chief justice. He died in 1992. SEE ALSO Agranat Commission, on Arab-Israel War (1973); Arab-Israel War (1973).

AGUDAT ISRAEL (Hebrew, “Association of Israel”): A Jewish ultraorthodox movement founded in 1912 in Katowice, Poland, Agudat Israel was at first a conglomerate of currents, ranging from extreme hostility toward Zionism to a more or less explicit recognition of the religious value inherent in the nationalism advocated by the Zionists. In 1922 the Labor element of the movement seceded to found PoEalei Agudat Israel. Once it became a religious political party, Agudat Israel refused to join the Labor coalitions in power between 1953 and 1976. In 1977 the party decided to support Menachem Begin’s right-wing government, which enabled it to have a number of its demands met, all of them of a religious nature. In the elections of 1981, backed up financially by the Lubavitch movement, Agudat Israel won four seats in the Knesset. Two years later, a split in the party between Sephardi and Ashkenazi members gave rise to a new political formation, the SHAS (Sephardi Torah Guardians) Party. In 1988 a second splintering led to the creation of another religious party, Degel haTorah. In the December Knesset elections, Agudat Israel won five seats. With two other religious parties, SHAS and the National Religious Party, it joined the government coalition formed by the Likud and the Labor Party. In 1990 a third splintering of the party resulted in the creation of a new religious organization, Geulat Israel. In November, Agudat Israel joined the government of Yitzhak Shamir, thereby allowing him to consolidate his position in the Knesset with 64 seats of the 120. In exchange, Shamir committed his government to support various proposals in the Knesset for a stricter application of religious laws. However, in the elections of 1992, the party was able to keep only two seats. In the elections of May 1996, Agudat Israel joined the parliamentary group United Torah Judaism and successfully supported the candidacy of Benjamin Netanyahu. On 18 June, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed one of the principal leaders of Agudat Israel, Rabbi Menachem Porush, deputy minister for housing. As of 2004, the principal leaders of the party are Menachem Alter, Zeev Feldmann, Shlomo Grinberg, Schmuel Halpert, Menachem D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Porush, and Avraham Verdiger. In the 2003 elections, United Torah Judaism (the coalition of Agudat Israel and Degel ha-Torah) won five seats. SEE ALSO Degel ha-Torah; PoEalei Agudat Israel; SHAS; United Torah Judaism Party. AHALI, AL- (Arabic, “The People”): A Jordanian weekly of the Jordanian People’s Democratic Party, this publication speaks also for the Hashd Party, the Transjordanian branch of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Jordanian People’s Democratic Party.

AHC SEE

AHD,

Arab Higher Committee.

AL

SEE

Intiqad, al-.

AHDUT

HA-AVODA: A Jewish political organization created in the 1920s, and Marxist in tendency, this movement promoted the coming together of Jews from all over the world in a socialist state, extended by peaceful means over the totality of Greater Israel. In 1930 the movement merged with Ha-PoEel haTzaEir to give birth to the Israel workers’ party, MAPAI, led at the time by David Ben-Gurion. In the legislative elections of July 1955, the Ahdut ha-Avoda list won ten seats in the Knesset. In 1968 MAPAI, which comprised Ahdut ha-Avoda and RAFI, decided to merge to found the Israel Labor Party. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party; MAPAI; RAFI Party.

AHDUT LEMAEAN ALIYAH (“Union for Aliyah,” in Hebrew): Israeli political organization, created in April 1996 in anticipation of the May Knesset elections, when representatives and the prime minister were to be elected for the first time by universal suffrage. A party of immigrants, this organization was led by Ephraim Gur, a Likud deputy who had quit the Labor Party in June 1990, and by Yaacov Feitelson. This organization won no seats in the Knesset in the elections. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party; Knesset; Likud. AHL AL-ABA SEE

Ahl al-Beit.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

15

AHL AL-BEIT

AHL AL-BEIT (Ahl al-Bayt, “People of the House,” in Arabic): Arab term used to designate “those of the family of the prophet Muhammad,” that is, his daughter, Fatima, his son-in-law, Ali, and their two sons, Hasan and Hussein. This descent is also designated by the term Ahl al-Aba (“People of the Cloak”). SEE ALSO Ali; Fatima; Muhammad. AHL

AL-KITAB (“People of the Book,” in Arabic): Arab term used to designate those who practice a revealed religion (Judaism, Christianity, and later Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and even Buddhism) and who are accorded the status of dhimmi in a Muslim country. Christians and Jews enjoy a certain reciprocal respect, in the sense that each possesses a portion of the truth to which the three monotheistic religions lay claim. SEE ALSO Dhimmi.

AHLC SEE

Local Aid Coordination Committee.

AHRAM, AL- (The pyramids): The principal Egyptian Arabic newspaper, al-Ahram was started in 1876 by Syrian-Lebanese Christian immigrants to Egypt. Nationalized by the government in 1952, it became an official government newspaper. The first Egyptian editor, Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, assumed the directorship of the paper in 1957. Al-Ahram remains a pro-government newspaper, and has had both an English edition (al-Ahram) and a French edition (alAhram Hebdo) since 1994.

AIPAC SEE

American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

AISHA (EADisha): Daughter of Abu Bakr, Aisha was very young when she married Muhammad. After his death, she contested the designation of the Prophet’s successors and opposed Ali, Muhammad’s son-inlaw, to the point of provoking the rebellion of a group of Muslims against him. In 656, after being defeated at the “Battle of the Camel,” she was isolated from power. Respected by the Sunnis, Aisha is criticized by the ShiEites who reproach her for her opposition to Ali. SEE ALSO Ali; ShiEite; Sunni Islam. AJAMI: Arab term dating back to the Islamic Middle Ages that designates the “non-Arabs,” particularly from the east.

16

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

AJC SEE

American Jewish Congress.

AKHBAR, AL- (The News, in Arabic): Egyptian daily Arabic-language newspaper.

AKHBARI: Representative of a fundamentalist theological school, inspired by twelfth-century ImamiShiEism. Founded in the Middle Ages, it adheres strictly to the traditions of Hadith. SEE ALSO Hadith. AKHER KHABAR: Jordanian pro-Palestinian daily newspaper.

AKKAM SEE

Hakham.

ALAMI, MUSA AL- (1897–1984): Palestinian administrator and diplomat. Born in Jerusalem in 1897 into a prominent, wealthy landowning family, Musa alAlami came into contact with Palestinian nationalists in Damascus, where he was evading the Ottoman draft in 1917–1918. He studied law at Cambridge and in 1925 began working as a legal officer for the British administration in Mandatory Palestine. In 1932 he became private secretary to the high commissioner, whom he lobbied for the political rights and economic interests of the Arab population. He was among a number of prominent Palestinians who met with the Zionist leadership in 1934 and 1936, seeking to find grounds for a compromise; the Palestinian group concluded that no voluntary compromise was possible. Al-Alami was subsequently removed from his job and demoted, following pressure from the World Zionist Organization. In 1936 he publicly supported the General Strike, circulating a petition among Palestinian officials of the Mandatory government that called for limiting Jewish immigration and Zionist land purchases. In 1937 he was fired from the government and went into exile in Beirut, but he was forced by the French to leave for Baghdad in 1939. During this time he was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference, whose convening he had urged. He was allowed to return to Palestine in 1942. Al-Alami was the Palestinian delegate to the Alexandria conference at which the creation of the Arab League was agreed upon, and he became the Palestinian representative in the League when it was established in 1945. He headed the League’s Information Office in London from 1945 to 1949, and was T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ALBRIGHT, MADELEINE

also responsible for setting up the League’s Constructive Scheme, administered by the Arab Higher Committee, a fund that bought land to keep it from being sold to the Zionists and worked to improve conditions in Palestinian villages. After the 1948– 1949 War al-Alami returned from London, having lost his home and most of his property. He renamed the Constructive Scheme the Arab Development Society and used it to start a large farm near Jericho in the West Bank with an orphanage and vocational school for refugee children, which he continued to operate until his death in 1984. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; League of Arab States. MADELEINE ALBRIGHT. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON’S SECOND-TERM PALESTINIAN LEADER YASIR ARAFAT SPEAKS ON THE TELEPHONE WITH THE PRESIDENT IN SEPTEMBER 1999. ALBRIGHT’S MIDDLE EAST VISIT WAS PART OF HER EXTENSIVE

AL-AQSA INTIFADA SEE

SECRETARY OF STATE LISTENS IN AS

Aqsa Intifada, al-.

ALAWITE: According to some scholars, this term comes from the Arab word alawi, which means “descendant of Ali”; others contend that it comes from the Turkish alev, which means “flame.” The Alawite cult seems to be of remote IsmaEili origin, when in the ninth century the Abbasid Dynasty began to decline in Syria and southern Turkey. Its leader, Muhammad ibn Nusair al-Namir, was a Persian contemporary of the Eleventh ShiEite Imam, Hasan alAskari, preacher of an extremist faith in Ali. The Alawites, or Nusaris, practiced an initiatory religion that resembled early Gnostic Christianity and Babylonian rites. The Alawite calendar included Sunni, ShiEite, and Christian holidays. The Alawite faith was characterized by its secret nature: The basic tenets of the faith were in the keeping of a small group of the devout, belonging to the Majlis al-Shuyur (Community Council). Attached to a principle of the Trinity identical to that of Christianity, the Alawite faith identified each of its members with a heavenly body, such as the Sun or the Moon, or with an animal. Historically, the Alawites were divided into five sects—Khamaria, Shamsia, Ghabiya, Murchidiya, and Haidaria; and were grouped into six main tribes—Khayyatium, Shamsin, Raslan, Khalbiyya, Haddadium (Haddadin), and Matura-Nomilatia (Matawira). Treated for decades like traitors or apostates, the Alawite tribes went to live by themselves, isolated from the rest of Syria. They developed, accordingly, a systematic practice of hermeticism and of taqiya, which allowed them to say they were close to one or another current, so as to protect themselves from any inquisition, an attitude that engendered suspicion and incredulity in the Muslim community. In 1920 France, which had a mandate over Syria, deD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BUT ULTIMATELY UNSUCCESSFUL EFFORTS TO ACHIEVE A FINAL PEACE ACCORD BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE

PALESTINIANS. (© Reuters NewMedia

Inc./Corbis)

cided on the creation of an autonomous Alawite territory, and in 1952 the Islamic Jafarite Association gained the Alawites recognition by the Syrian state as ShiEite Muslims. SEE ALSO ShiEite; Taqiya.

ALBRIGHT, MADELEINE (1937– ): American political figure. Madeleine Korbel Albright was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. Her father, Joseph Korbel, was an eminent Czechoslovakian diplomat. Exiled to the United States in 1949, the family took up residence in Denver, where her father taught political science. A brilliant student, Albright was also developing into a militant Democrat. She taught International Relations for a time at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.). Between 1976 and 1978 she was an assistant to Democratic senator Edmund Muskie; then, from 1978 to 1981, she was a member of the National Security Council, headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. In 1984 she supported the vice-presidential campaign of Geraldine Ferraro. Between 1992 and 1994 she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. On 5 December 1996 Albright was named secretary of state in the administration of President Bill Clinton, replacing Warren Christopher, becoming the first woman ever to occupy the post. On 9 September 1997, she paid her first visit to the Middle East in an attempt to restart the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which had been stalled since the com-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

17

ALF

ing to power of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. From then on, she and assistant Dennis Ross worked on reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 23 October 1998, at Wye River, Maryland, she sponsored the signing by Yasir Arafat and Netanyahu of an accord on the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) from the West Bank. On 5 September 1999, after visiting Syria and Lebanon, she traveled to Sharm al-Shaykh, Egypt, where, with Egyptian president Husni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan, she initialed the Israeli-Palestinian Accord signed by Arafat and Ehud Barak. This agreement, which was reached in the context of the application of the Wye River Agreements, brought a successful conclusion to the many meetings she held, both in Washington and the Middle East. On 5 December 1999 Albright began another round of visits to the region, while the IsraeliPalestinian negotiations were once more stalled. After a visit to Damascus, she announced that Syrian-Israeli negotiations would resume shortly in Washington, specifying that this would not slow down the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 29 June 2000, after a two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, she won the participation of Israelis and Palestinians in a tripartite summit, organized by the United States, to restart the peace negotiation process, even though Prime Minister Barak no longer had a majority at the Knesset. The summit, held in July at Camp David, Maryland, ended in failure. That December—in the last days of the Clinton administration and during a time of continued political difficulty for Barak—the United States presented what became known as the “Clinton proposals” for renewal of the peace process. Since leaving her position as secretary of state, Albright has served on various boards promoting ethical foreign investment, was elected to the board of the New York Stock Exchange, and authored Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003). On 23 March 2004 she testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. SEE ALSO Camp David II Summit; Clinton, William Jefferson; Oslo Accords II ; Sharm alShaykh Summits.

Arab Liberation Front.

AL-FAJR SEE

18

Fajr, al-. D I C T I O N A R Y

ALGIERS DECLARATION SEE

Proclamation of the State of Palestine.

AL-HAQ SEE

Haq, al-.

ALI (c. 660–661): Fourth caliph (656–661). The son of Abu Talib, Ali was the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, whose daughter, Fatima, he married. Father of Hassan and Hussein—the only male descendants of the Prophet—Ali, according to some, should have succeeded Muhammad. After the death of Muhammad, Ali refused to recognize the election of Abu Bakr as caliph. It was only after the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman, that he became caliph himself, in 656. Under pressure from Aisha, the third wife of Muhammad, Governor Muawiyah, a relative of Uthman, denounced the succession, thus provoking an armed conflict. Arbitration resulted in Ali being declared in the wrong. He was assassinated by a Kharijite in the Great Mosque of Kufa, Iraq, in 661.The main schisms within Islam were born from these events. The ShiEites have become the partisans of Ali, and the Sunnis the heirs of Muawiyah, and later of the Umayyads. Ali’s tomb, in Najaf, Iraq, is a ShiEite pilgrimage site. SEE ALSO Kharijites; Muhammad; ShiEite.

ALI, NAJI AL- (1936 or 1937–1987): Palestinian political cartoonist. Naji al-Ali was born in 1936 or 1937 in the village of al-Shajara in the Galilee. His family fled Palestine in 1948, and he grew up in the Ayn alHilwa refugee camp in Sidon in southern Lebanon. He was frequently censored and jailed by Lebanese authorities between 1958 and 1963; he was encouraged by the Palestinian writer and journalist Ghassan

ALF SEE

ALGIERS ARAB SUMMITS: The Algerian capital has frequently welcomed Arab leaders for summits, in the course of which important decisions have been made. On 26 November 1973, meeting in Algiers following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the summit recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. On 7 June 1988, the special Arab League summit in Algiers expressed its support for the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. On 15 November 1988, at the congress of the Palestine National Council in the Algerian capital, Yasir Arafat proclaimed the State of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Palestine National Council.

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ALIYAH

Kanafani after the latter discovered his drawings on the walls of a Lebanese jail cell in the late 1950s. AlAli studied art in Lebanon and Kuwait in the 1960s. He returned to Lebanon in the early 1970s, working as a political cartoonist for the Beirut newspaper AlSafir and contributing as well to the United Arab Emirates paper Al-Khalij. In 1983, after witnessing the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila camps in West Beirut, he felt his life was in danger, and he returned to Kuwait, where he worked for the newspaper AlQabas. He was expelled from Kuwait in 1985, due to pressure from the Saudi government, and moved to London, where he continued to contribute work to both Al-Qabas and Al-Khalij. Naji al-Ali was murdered in London in 1987 by persons unknown, though he had recently been warned by a friend within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that his life was in danger. At the time, he was the most successful political cartoonist in the Arab world. His work dealt sharply with the life of the common people and in particular with the Palestinian tragedy. He had no factional political affiliation and attacked not only Israel but Arab states and Palestinian institutions for a lack of humanity and the absence of democracy. Despite— or perhaps because of—his popularity, he had many powerful enemies. SEE ALSO Sabra and Shatila.

ALIDES SEE

Ali.

ALIGNMENT PARTY: Israeli political alliance. The Alignment existed from 1969 to 1984 as a combination of the Israel Workers’ Party (MAPAI) and the United Workers’ Party (MAPAM). The parties retained their independence but shared a common slate for elections to the Knesset, the Histadrut, and local government. SEE ALSO Histadrut; MAPAI; MAPAM.

ALIM (pl. ulama; ulemas): Arabic word designating a Muslim scholar.

ALIYAH (“Ascent,” in Hebrew): The term evokes the “return to roots” that every “believer” must accomplish, referring to the dispersion (diaspora) of the Jewish people in the year 135 C.E. By extension it designates Jewish emigration to the territory that would become, after 1948, the new State of Israel. The immigrants are called olim, and those who immigrated clandestinely ma Eapilim. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ALIYAH. JEWISH REFUGEES ARRIVE IN HAIFA, C. 1945. FROM 1881 UNTIL THE CREATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL IN 1948, JEWS RETURNED TO THEIR ANCIENT ROOTS IN SEVERAL WAVES OF IMMIGRA-

PALESTINE. IN LATER DECADES, ISRAEL BROUGHT IN OR WELYEMEN, ETHIOPIA, THE SOVIET UNION, AND ELSEWHERE, AS WELL AS JEWS IMMIGRATING INDIVIDUALLY. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis) TION TO

COMED LARGE GROUPS FROM IRAQ,

The first waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine took place in the fifteenth century, following persecution suffered by the Jews in Spain and Portugal. New waves of immigration took place between 1882 and 1890, 1904 and 1915, as well as between 1919 and 1923 from Central Europe, contributing to the development of colonies established in Palestine, conforming to the Zionist and socialist ideology advocated by the principal leaders of the international Jewish community. The victory of Nazism in Germany gave rise to a new mass exodus of persons, who sought to escape genocide more than to participate in the renewal of the Land of Zion, hence allowing a move from ideological Zionism to political Zionism. Toward the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, Israel organized several operations, named “Flying Carpet” and “Ezra and Nehamiah,” to bring in 120,000 Jews from Iraq, and several thousand others from Yemen and North Africa. During the 1970s and 1980s, the “Moses” and “Solomon” operations allowed almost 35,000 Ethiopian Jews to come to Israel. Finally, between 1989 and 1994, American-Soviet détente and the collapse of the So-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

19

ALIYAH UNION

viet Union led to the arrival in Israel of almost 500,000 Jews of Russian provenance. The word aliya is close in meaning to the Arab term Awliya. SEE ALSO Diaspora.

ALIYAH UNION SEE

Ahdut LemaEan Aliyah.

ALIYYINS: A group formed at the end of the 1950s by Muhammad Umran, the Aliyyins included Syrian personalities who later became pillars of the regime of Hafiz al-Asad. The name was chosen to reflect its membership of mostly Alawite, and the frequency of “Ali” as a given name among them. SEE ALSO Alawite; Asad, Hafiz al-. ALLAH (“God,” in Arabic): The root of the word Allah most likely comes from the Arabic ilah (God) and from the Aramaic alaha (the God). A word close to it, Al-lat, designates one of the Meccan divinities (Allat or Hobal) of the Thamuds, whose statue was set up in the KaEba with two other divinities, Al-Uzza and Manat. So “Allah” is just the Arabic name for God: Christians and Jews also use the word when speaking or writing Arabic to refer to the monotheistic deity they believe in. ALLENBY, EDMUND HENRY (1861–1936): English general. Edmund Allenby served first in Africa, notably against the Boers. In 1914, when World War I began, he took command of a cavalry division sent to France, then of the Fifth Corps and Third Army on the Somme. In June 1917 he took command of British forces on the Middle Eastern front. On 9 December in the same year he entered Jerusalem, with, among others, Captain T. E. Lawrence. In the following months, British troops defeated the TurkishGerman army of Palestine, notably at Meggido, which led to the capitulation of the Ottoman Empire on 30 October 1918. Named marshal in 1919, then high commissioner in Egypt, Edmund Allenby contributed to the elaboration of a treaty recognizing the independence of Egypt. SEE ALSO Lawrence, T. E. ALLIANCE FOR EQUALITY: A political movement created in April 1992 at a meeting of some 300 Jews and Palestinian Arabs assembled in Haifa, the Alliance for Equality later became part of the National Democratic Assembly (also known as the Democratic National Alliance [DNA]), a political party founded in 1996, representing primarily Palestinian Israelis. One

20

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

EDMUND ALLENBY. THE BRITISH COMMANDER OF THE EGYPTIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE ENTERED JERUSALEM IN DECEMBER 1917. THE QUICK CAPTURE OF THE CITY DEMORALIZED TURKISH FORCES AND PLAYED A ROLE IN THE BRITISH ASSUMPTION OF CONTROL OVER PALESTINE AFTER WORLD WAR I.

of its founders, Azmi Bishara, a scholar at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, was elected a member of the Knesset on the DNA ticket in 1996. SEE ALSO Bishara, Azmi; Democratic National Alliance.

ALLIANCE OF PALESTINIAN FORCES (APF): This Palestinian organization, founded in October 1993, united the Palestinian movements opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian accord signed on 13 September 1993. The APF, supported by Syria and based in Damascus, replaced de facto the Group of Ten and included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Liberation Front’s YaEqub faction, the PFLP-GC (General Command), al-Fatah-Intifada, SaEiqa, the PPSF–Abdul Majid faction, and the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ALL-PALESTINE GOVERNMENT

RPCP. The APF thereby became the successor of the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF). Confronted with the political divergences among its members and personnel, the APF proposed no program that could represent an alternative to the political program of Yasir Arafat. On 24 May 1995, this organization called in vain for a reinforcement and extension of the newly founded Palestine Unity Party in the hope of creating a movement of opposition in the Occupied Territories. On 3 November 1996, to spark the APF, HAMAS and Islamic Jihad proposed creating a new organization, the Front for Palestinian National Independence, or National Democratic and Islamic Front, that would exclude the DFLP and the PFLP, against which the two Islamic movements were in ideological opposition. APF unity was shaken in February 1997, when HAMAS, PFLP, and DFLP announced their decision to accept participation in the “national dialogue” proposed by Arafat, which resulted, nevertheless, in no agreement. In early June 1998, the APF leadership rejected Arafat’s proposal inviting some of its members into the Palestine Authority (PA). On 13 December 1998, following the Wye Plantation Accords, which it denounced, the APF called a congress in Damascus in the course of which members officially called for the election of a new Palestine National Council (PNC), as well as for the election of a new executive committee and a new Central Council of the PLO. Differences between the leaders of the DFLP and those of the PFLP-GC became apparent during the meeting. On 9 August the APF declared that it rejected all dialogue with the PA, which, in its view, had lost all legitimacy by renouncing the Palestinian National Charter. The APF has been largely unsuccessful in crafting a coordinated political strategy, and its support from Syria is largely rhetorical. SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Group of Ten; HAMAS; Islamic Jihad; Oslo Accords II; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ALLON, YIGAL (1918–1980): Israeli soldier, politician, deputy prime minister. Born Yigal Paicovitch in Kfar Tabor, Palestine, he attended Hebrew University, then studied at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. Beginning in 1937 he served in the Haganah. With Moshe Dayan, he helped create the Palmach, the Haganah’s commando unit, attaining the rank of commander in 1945. He Hebraized his name to Allon, meaning “oak,” in 1948 to signify the strength of his commitment to Israel. A member of the Knesset during Israel’s early years, Allon served as minister of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

labor from 1961 to 1967, then deputy prime minister from 1966 to 1974. A close adviser to Golda Meir, under whom he served from 1969 to 1974, he created what became known as the Allon Plan, which urged the annexation of the Gaza Strip by Israel and the return to Jordan of about 70 percent of the West Bank, while retaining for Israel the Jordan River valley as a security zone. Though the plan was neither formally adopted nor rejected, it has been cited as the inspiration for the idea of a belt of Jewish settlements along the Jordan. SEE ALSO Dayan, Moshe; Haganah; Meir, Golda.

ALLON PLAN: Named for its initiator, Yigal Allon (deputy prime minister of Israel, 1969–1974), the Allon Plan linked Israeli security to the development of Jewish civilian settlements. It proposed the creation of a line of agricultural settlements in the Jordan valley to ensure a defensible border between Israel and Jordan. The plan also called for the establishment of additional settlements around Jerusalem and close to the Green Line border as a method of ensuring future territorial changes that would favor Israel. It did not suggest settlement in the rest of the West Bank, already densely populated with Palestinians, which it suggested should become part of an autonomous area under Jordanian administration. Though considered a proposal for minimal settlement, the Allon Plan continues to be cited as the originator of settlement activity linked to Israeli defense and territorial concerns. SEE ALSO Allon, Yigal; Green Line; Jordan River.

ALL-PALESTINE GOVERNMENT: Approved on 21 September 1948 by the Arab League, the All-Palestine Government was formed by the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) during the 1948–1949 Arab-Israel War, at a time when most of Palestine was already lost. Though the AHC took it seriously, it was backed by Egypt primarily to counter the claim by King Abdullah I of Transjordan to be the true representative of the Palestinians. (Abdullah had concluded a secret agreement with the Jewish Agency in 1947 to split Palestine between them, under which he was to annex those parts not controlled by Israel.) Based in Gaza and entirely under the control of Egypt, the “government” was headed by the mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, as president and Ahmad Hilmi as prime minister. It lasted only a few weeks. Prior to the war in 1948, the mufti had rejected United Nations (UN) Resolution 181, which provided for partition, and had appealed to the Arab League several times to form a Palestinian govern-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

21

ALONI, SHULAMIT

ALL-PALESTINE “GOVERNMENT.” FOREIGN MINISTERS OF IRAQ, JORDAN, LEBANON, SYRIA, SAUDI ARABIA, AND EGYPT MEET IN CAIRO IN 1948. THE SHORT-LIVED ENTITY THAT THE ARAB LEAGUE CREATED, HEADED BY THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM BUT CONTROLLED BY EGYPT, EXISTED PRIMARILY TO COUNTER ANNEXATION CLAIMS BY THE KING OF TRANSJORDAN. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

ment that could claim all of Palestine after the British left in May 1948. Rivalries between Arab governments, pressure from the British, and the annexationist ambitions of Abdullah had long prevented any sort of unified Arab action on Palestine. Once the war began, the Israelis quickly gained control of even more territory than had been allotted to them in the partition plan, and the UN attempted to mediate a truce. In June the mediator, Count Bernadotte, recommended that the Arab areas be placed under the control—temporarily—of Abdullah. To forestall Abdullah’s annexation of these areas, the Arab League voted to create a civil administration for these areas, responsible directly to the League. The mufti rejected this, and the administration was never established. In September, after most of Palestine had been lost and the Arab states were seeking to withdraw their forces without outraging their own people, the League agreed to set up the All-Palestine Government, which claimed the right to rule all of Mandatory Palestine. It had no resources and no ter-

22

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ritory except for the parts of Gaza then under control of the Egyptian army. It immediately convened a national council and on 1 October issued a Declaration of Independence. Within a week the Egyptian government evacuated the All-Palestine Government to Cairo. No Arab government had recognized it until after it had been withdrawn from Gaza. Except for an office issuing passports to Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, it ceased to exist. It was officially closed by decree of the Egyptian government in 1959. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Arab Higher Committee; League of Arab States; Resolution 181.

ALONI, SHULAMIT (1929– ): Israeli politician and social activist. Born in Tel Aviv, Aloni served in the 1948 Arab-Israel War and later studied law at Hebrew University. During the 1950s and 1960s she became known as an advocate for civil and human rights and for the separation of religion from politics, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AMAL

ALTALENA. THE CARGO SHIP, WITH WHICH MENACHEM BEGIN’S IRGUN MOVEMENT SMUGGLED ARMS INTO PALESTINE IN VIOLATION OF AN ARAB-ISRAELI TRUCE, BURNS ON 29 JUNE 1948 AT TEL AVIV. DAVID BEN-GURION ORDERED THE PROVISIONAL ISRAELI GOVERNMENT’S ARTILLERY TO FIRE ON THE VESSEL. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ Corbis)

writing a weekly column and hosting a popular radio program. Aloni was elected to the Knesset in 1965 and served on various committees before being dropped from the Labor ticket in 1969. She established the Civil Rights movement in 1973 and was reelected to the Knesset, serving until 1999. Yitzhak Rabin appointed her minister of education in 1992, after her party joined with Shinui and MAPAM to form the Meretz Party. Still known as an activist for peace and civil rights, she was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement in 2000. SEE ALSO MAPAM; Shinui Party.

AL-QAEIDA SEE

Bin Ladin, Osama.

AL-SAEIQA SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

ALTALENA: Boat chartered by the nationalist Irgun movement, named in honor of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s literary pseudonym. On 20 June 1948, the vessel carried 940 volunteers en route to join the Israel Defense Force (IDF), the new Israel army, and several tons of arms recently purchased by the movement. The Altalena penetrated Israeli waters, off Tel Aviv. The ship arrived just hours after a truce between Arabs and Israelis had been implemented by D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

the United Nations. Each side had committed itself not to import arms during the truce. Under pressure from his men, Irgun leader Menachem Begin refused to deliver the weapons cargo to the IDF because, Begin claimed, the arms should go to the new Irgun recruits. David Ben-Gurion, head of the provisional Israeli government, disagreed. He ordered Begin’s arrest and the sinking of the Altalena. During the night of 21–22 June, Begin started unloading the boat near Kfar Vitkin. During the day, IDF troops surrounded and fired on the men of Irgun, killing six. Begin and his men reembarked on the Altalena, sailing toward Tel Aviv, where the beach was crowded with Irgun sympathizers. After a tense standoff of several hours between the men of the Altalena and Israeli troops, Ben-Gurion ordered the artillery to fire on the boat. The ship caught on fire and ten members of Irgun were killed. Begin and his men then surrendered. The Altalena incident was the source of the reciprocal hatred that marked the many years of confrontation between Begin and BenGurion on the Israeli political scene. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Irgun; Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev.

AMAL (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya, or the Lebanese Resistance Detachments; in Arabic, amal means “hope”): A Lebanese ShiEite militia, AMAL was officially created in July 1975 by Imam Musa Sadr. Sadr had founded the “Movement of the Disinherited” in 1974, and established AMAL as the armed branch of this organization. Inspired by the al-DaEwa movement, Musa Sadr advocated the establishment of an independent and democratic republic in Lebanon, one that would protect the interests of the Lebanese ShiEite community and support the struggle against Zionism. Despite this, AMAL did not engage in fighting at the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. As a result, it lost considerable support, to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and groups associated with the Lebanese National Movement. AMAL also endorsed Syrian intervention in 1976, which cost it more support. However, the mysterious disappearance of Musa Sadr while in Libya in 1978, which transformed him into a popular ShiEa symbol (analogous to the Hidden Imam), the success of the Iranian Revolution, and disillusionment with the PLO all contributed to a revival of AMAL’s support. In 1980 Nabi Berri, a lawyer and close associate of Musa Sadr, became leader of AMAL, which then became the chief ShiEa organization in the country and a major factional political and military force. Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

23

AMAN

1982, a scission appeared in the movement. Husayn al-Musawi, number two in the organization, founded the faction of “Islamic AMAL,” which was more radical and aggressive and which sent guerrilla fighters to oppose the Israeli invaders. Progressively, under the impulsion of Musawi and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, Iran attempted but failed to gain control over the entire AMAL movement. In February 1985 Berri, who in 1984 had agreed to participate in a national unity government as minister of justice and minister of state for South Lebanon, proclaimed himself “minister of national resistance” and supported sending anti-Israeli commandos to South Lebanon. In 1985 the Islamic faction of AMAL became part of the newly created Hizbullah. Thereafter AMAL, supported by Syria, and Hizbullah, supported by Iran, attempted to monopolize control over the Lebanese ShiEite community, with resulting periodic deadly confrontations between their partisans. Despite its formal commitment to the Palestinian cause, there was friction between AMAL and the PLO, and there was occasional fighting between them in South Lebanon. After the PLO had been removed to Tunisia and could no longer protect the refugees, AMAL attacked Palestinian camps in the so-called “War of the Camps” that lasted from 1985 to 1987. After the 1989 TaDif Accords and the 1990 victory of the Syrian-backed forces over the rightwing Maronite forces, the militias were disbanded (many of the remaining AMAL fighters were absorbed into the Lebanese Army). AMAL was transformed into a political movement, still with the backing of Damascus. After the 1992 elections Berri was elected speaker of the Parliament, a post he still held as of 2004, becoming thereby the principal leader of the Lebanese ShiEite community. In the 2000 elections AMAL made common cause with Hizbullah and between them won all the constituencies in South Lebanon. SEE ALSO Berri, Nabi; Hizbullah; Sadr, Musa al-; TaDif Accords.

AMAN (Agaf ModiDin): The intelligence division of the Israel Defense Force, Aman was created in 1948 under the name of Sherut ha-ModiDin. It was reorganized in 1953, when it was given its current name. The successive directors of Aman have been Israel Beeri (1948–1949), Chaïm Herzog (1949–1950), Benyamin Gibli (1950–1955), Yehoshafat Harkabi (1955–1959), Chaïm Herzog (1959–1961), Meir Amit (1962–1963), Aharon Yariv (1964–1972), Eliahu Zeira (1972–1974), Shlomo Gazit (1974–

24

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

1979), Yehoshua Saguy (1979–1983), Ehud Barak (1983–1985), Amnon Lipkin-Shahak (1986–1990), Uri Saguy (1990–1995), Moshe YaEalon (1995– 1998), Amos Malka (1998–2001), and Aharon ZeDevi-Farkash (2002– ). SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force.

AMBA (also rendered as anba or ampa): The Arabic version of the Coptic term apa, meaning “father” (from the same Semitic root as the Arabic and Hebrew abba). As a title it is given to the members of the hierarchy of the Coptic Church, including bishops, archbishops, and patriarchs. AM EHAD PARTY (One Nation): An Israeli electoral list, constituted in February 1999, on the initiative of union leaders of the left, anticipating the scheduled elections for the following May. As a result of the elections of 17 May, which saw the victory of the Laborite Ehud Barak as prime minister, this list won two seats in the Knesset, taken by Haim Katz and Amir Peretz. As a labor-oriented organization, it focuses on social welfare and issues related to employment. In the 2003 elections it received 2.8 percent of the vote (three seats in the Knesset).

AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (AIPAC): A Jewish-American association created in 1954 (originally the American Zionist Public Affairs Committee), AIPAC has become a powerful and influential interest group that lobbies the U.S. Congress for pro-Israel legislative initiatives. As a registered lobby, AIPAC is prohibited from directly contributing funds to political candidates; it does supply politicians and government officials with information on Israel and the Middle East. In 2004 the organization claimed 65,000 members and was considered one of the most effective lobbying groups in the United States.

AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE: A Jewish-American association founded in 1906, the American Jewish Committee defined its purpose as the defense of the civil and religious rights of Jews in the United States and around the world. Its goals also include “to strengthen the basic principles of pluralism around the world as the best defense against anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry; and to enhance the quality of American Jewish life by helping to ensure Jewish continuity and deepen ties between American and Israeli Jews.” By 2004 the organization had a membership of 100,000. It was headquartered in New York City, with regional offices across the UnitT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AMMAN ACCORDS

ed States and international offices in Europe and Israel. SEE ALSO American Jewish Congress.

AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS (AJC): A JewishAmerican association, the American Jewish Congress was initially created in 1918 to combat anti-Semitism and to address the problems facing Jews in Europe. It was formed after negotiation with the American Jewish Committee; proponents of an alternative organization took issue with the leadership of the Jewish American Committee, whom they perceived as representing only the wealthier sector of the JewishAmerican community. It was agreed that the Jewish American Congress would meet for one time only, with one-quarter of its representatives appointed by the American Jewish Committee and three-quarters elected by the Jewish-American community. The Jewish American Congress sent a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Following the conference, it was disbanded. In 1922 proponents of the AJC formed a second American Jewish Congress, this time as a permanent body. A membership-based organization, the new AJC used public campaigns to promote awareness of issues affecting Jews worldwide and to defend the civil and religious rights of Jews. The AJC, with headquarters in New York and an office in Jerusalem, had fifty thousand members in 2004. It continues to combat anti-Semitism and advocates for Israeli security and peaceful relations with Israel’s neighbors. SEE ALSO American Jewish Committee.

AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL: (AFSI) A Jewish American association promoting the development of Israeli-American relations in support of Israeli unity. AMF SEE

Arab Monetary Fund.

AMIR, YIGAL (1970– ): Convicted assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. Yigal Amir was born in 1970 to a Sephardic Yemenite family in Herzliya. He served in the Golani Brigade of the Israel Defense Force, then attended the law school of Bar-Ilan University. While a student there, Yigal was involved in right-wing demonstrations against the Oslo Accords. On 4 November 1995, following a demonstration in Tel Aviv in support of the peace process, Amir assassinated Prime Minister Rabin with three shots of a pistol. Apprehended at the scene of the crime, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In a later trial, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

he was also convicted of conspiring to commit the murder with his brother Hagai and his friend Dror Adani. Amir expressed no regret for the murder of Rabin, claiming he killed the prime minister to halt the peace process. SEE ALSO Bar-Ilan University; Rabin, Yitzhak.

AMIRAV, MOSHE: Israeli politician. Moshe Amirav was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, New York University, and the London School of Economics, where he earned a doctorate in political geography. From 1981 to 1986 he served as director general of the Israel Highway Safety Administration. A member of the Jerusalem City Council from 1989 to 1993, he served during that period as director of engineering, roads, and transport development for the city of Jerusalem. In 1987, while a member of the Likud Party, Amirav initiated a political dialogue with Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh that was criticized by both camps. In 2000, after the failed Camp David summit, Amirav was appointed adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, continuing to serve in that capacity until Barak left office in 2001. Amirav asserted that sovereignty over Jerusalem, particularly over the Temple Mount, had prevented the Israelis and Palestinians from reaching an agreement at Camp David. He proposed a plan (later described in his book The Palestinian Struggle over Jerusalem, 2002) to divide Jerusalem and to establish a “commonwealth of states” to govern the Temple Mount. In 2004 Amirav is a professor of political science and public policy at Haifa University and Beit Berl College. SEE ALSO Camp David II Summit.

AMISHAV (“My people return,” in Hebrew): Israeli association, created in the 1980s by Rabbi Eliahu Avihail. The purpose of the association is to search for the traces of the ten lost tribes of Israel dispersed in the world. AMITAÏ (“Citizens for Honest and Ethical Government,” in Hebrew): Israeli association created in 1990 for the purpose of exposing corruption in the Israeli political class. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, this organization works in collaboration with lawyers, journalists, and former members of the intelligence services or the police.

AMMAN ACCORDS SEE

Jordanian-Palestinian Accord.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

25

AMMAR BIN YASIR

AMMAR BIN YASIR (Ammar ibn Yaser): Companion of the Prophet Muhammad, supporter of Ali. He died in 657 C.E. at the Battle of Siffin, where, in spite of his advanced age (ninety-three years), he was in command of the Kufa infantry. SEE ALSO Ali; Muhammad. AMORA (“Speaker, interpreter,” in Hebrew): Designates sages, whether Babylonian or Palestinian, who participated in the writing of Torah commentaries (Mishna). SEE ALSO Torah.

ANG SEE

Fatah Revolutionary Council.

ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE

OF

SEE

INQUIRY: On 13

ANO

26

ANSAR ALLAH (“God’s auxiliary,” in Arabic): Paramilitary organization formed during the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975, in order to counter the influence of the troops of the Palestinian Fatah. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-. ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE

November 1945, after the end of World War II, Great Britain and the United States announced the formation of a commission in charge of examining the problem of European Jews and of Palestine. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, also known as the Singleton-Hutcheson Commission, first met in January 1946 in Washington, D.C., before traveling to Europe to visit the remains of concentration camps. It then moved to Cairo to conduct hearings with officials of the recently established Arab League, then to Palestine to meet with British military and civil administrators as well as representatives of the Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities. In April 1946 the committee released its report, recommending that 100,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe be authorized to enter Palestine, and calling for the annulment of the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations restricting Jewish purchase of Arab land. It also called for an indefinite extension of trusteeship, in effect an extension of the British Mandate. It recommended that “Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine” and that “Palestine shall be neither a Jewish nor an Arab state.” Shortly afterward, in the summer of 1946, the report was shelved; Britain backed away from adoption of the report, and the United States was unwilling to assist in its implementation. A year later, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) issued a recommendation to partition the disputed land. SEE ALSO League of Arab States.

SEE

ANSAR (Arabic, “auxiliary, partisan”): Originally signifying an inhabitant of Medina converted or rallied to the Prophet Muhammad, the term has been used since to designate supporters of the Islamic movement. It is also the name of Israeli detention centers for Palestinians, used during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, notorious as sites of torture.

Fatah Revolutionary Council. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

BDnai BDrith.

ANTISEMITISM: The term anti-Semitism was invented in 1879 by the anti-Jewish German pamphleteer, Wilhelm Marr. Today it refers to the social or even ideological behavior of hatred or rejection of Jews, whether defined as a racial or a religious group. Ancient texts proving the existence of anti-Semitism dating back to Antiquity have caused many scholars to study the deeper reasons of such comportment. The rigorous monotheism and alimentary rules of the Jews, limiting the possibilities for them to maintain full social relations with non-Jews, may have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitisim. Early Christian religious teachings blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus (deicide) and persisted to some extent despite the Vatican ruling, as late as 1965, that Jews were not to blame for Jesus’ death. Another Christian accusation was the infamous “blood libel,” in which Christians accused Jews of kidnapping a Christian child to obtain blood to bake unleavened bread (matzoh). This fabrication incited antiSemitism for centuries, resurfacing in recent times even in Islamic societies and on racist Internet web sites. Antisemitism has played a role in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, and the conflict itself has led to further entrenchment of anti-Jewish sentiment. Early Zionists linked the creation of an independent Jewish state to the persecution of Jews in Europe and elsewhere, while some Muslims depicted the establishment of the State of Israel as part of a global “Jewish conspiracy.” In 2002 and 2003 Egyptian and Lebanese television networks aired several historicalfiction series based on the theme of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. While the extent of contemporary T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AOUN, MICHEL

anti-Semitism in the Middle East is widely debated, there is a tendency among some Palestinian and Arab commentators to include anti-Semitic statements in their criticisms of Israeli policy or military actions. Other Palestinian leaders and intellectuals draw a careful distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. SEE ALSO Jew; Judaism.

ANTONIUS, GEORGE (1891–1942): Palestinian civil servant and intellectual of Lebanese Greek Orthodox background. Antonius was born in 1891 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was a successful businessman. He was educated at an elite Anglo-Egyptian private school and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in engineering in 1913. During World War I, Antonius worked in the British government censorship office in Alexandria, and he was a member of a literary and social circle that included, among others, E. M. Forster and Constantine Cavafy. From 1921 to 1930 Antonius worked for the education department of the British government of Palestine in Jerusalem. While there, he was assigned to assist British diplomats on a number of missions in Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt, for which he was awarded a CBE (commander of the British Empire). Though never ceasing to be an admirer of British and European culture, he became increasingly alienated from imperial rule and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. He resigned partly out of dissatisfaction with British favoritism toward the Zionist movement. While working as a Middle East expert for the Institute of Current World Affairs, a U.S. foundation, he cultivated many influential acquaintances in Palestine and elsewhere in the fields of politics, diplomacy, and journalism. He made himself known in the Palestinian community and became an informal advisor to the conservative nationalist leader, the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. In 1934 and 1936 he met with Zionist leaders in a failed attempt to convince them to work toward a shared Palestine. In 1936 he supported the Palestinian general strike that preceded the armed insurrection of 1936– 1939, and called for limits on Jewish immigration. Antonius was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1939 and afterward helped to persuade the British to include provisions regarding Jewish immigration and independence in the White Paper of 1939. He died in 1942. George Antonius is remembered primarily as the author of the classic The Arab Awakening, published in 1938. A study of the development of Arab nationD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

alism beginning in the late Ottoman period, it was the first and one of the most influential works on the subject. The work examined the events of World War I and the denial of self-determination by the British and French afterward, and analyzed the current situation in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. In it Antonius published for the first time the HusaynMcMahon Correspondence of 1915–1916—whose existence the British had denied—detailing British promises to Arab leaders. Antonius opposed the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and always hoped for a compromise by which the country could be shared peacefully. His book concludes with these words: “. . . the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population. . . . the logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.” SEE ALSO Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; White Papers on Palestine.

AOLP Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

AOUN, MICHEL (1935– ): Lebanese military and political figure. Michel Aoun was born in September 1935 at Haret Houreik to a lower middle class Maronite family. After choosing a military career in 1955, he began a period of training and study in France and the United States that lasted several years. Promoted to brigadier general at the beginning of 1984, he was named commander in chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces by President Amin Jumayyil in June of that year. This appointment was made during a time when the Lebanese Christian community had been weakened by years of civil war, and also by conflicts among its principal leaders. At forty-nine, Aoun thereby became the youngest commander of the army since Lebanon’s independence. As soon as he was appointed, Aoun attempted to assume the leadership of the Christian camp as well. On 22 September 1988, just before the end of his own term, President Jumayyil named him interim prime minister, provoking the anger of Muslim leaders, who demanded that the rule regarding the sharing of power between the Muslims and Christians be observed. Furthermore, then-prime minister Salim al-Hoss refused to resign. Opposed to the Syrian presence in Lebanon, Aoun declared a “war of liberation against the Syrian

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

27

APF

Aoun’s tenure. On 27 August, while he was being prosecuted by Lebanese authorities for “rebellion and usurpation of power,” Aoun was granted amnesty by President Ilyas al-Hirawi. Forced into exile, Aoun secretly left Lebanon on 29 August 1991, taking refuge in France, where he started an opposition group, the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). On 18 May 2000, while Israel was on the verge of a final withdrawal from South Lebanon, Aoun suggested that the international community oblige Syria to apply United Nations Resolution 520, requiring the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon. In 2003, while in France, Aoun agreed to run a candidate in a Lebanese parliamentary election, despite his previous position that no election in Lebanon was legitimate while Syrian influence prevailed. His candidate lost. As of 2003, Aoun remained in exile, continuing to critique the Lebanese government. SEE ALSO Hoss, Salim al-; Jumayyil, Amin; Lebanese Forces; Resolution 520; TaDif Accords. MICHEL AOUN. IN 1999, WHEN THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN, AOUN WAS LEBANON’S MILITARY COMMANDER, INTERIM PRIME MINISTER, AND SELF-PROCLAIMED PRESIDENT. THE MARONITE GENERAL’S WAR AGAINST SYRIAN OCCUPATION—AND A CHRISTIAN RIVAL— ENDED IN DEFEAT IN 1990 AND EXILE TO FRANCE. (AP/Wide World Photos)

APF SEE

APO SEE

occupiers” that raged between March and September of 1989, causing hundreds of deaths. In October, Aoun rejected the TaDif Accords, which, according to him, only sanctioned the presence of Syrian troops on Lebanese soil. On 7 November, contesting the legitimacy of René MuEawwad, elected president of the republic two days earlier, Aoun proclaimed himself “president of a free and sovereign Lebanon.” After MuEawwad was assassinated, Aoun also contested the election of his successor, Ilyas al-Hirawi. The new president then discharged Aoun from his posts of commander of the Lebanese army and interim prime minister. On 30 January 1990, General Aoun launched a military attack of some scope against Samir Geagea, his Christian rival and leader of the Lebanese Forces. The fighting among Christians lasted for a few weeks; 1,046 died and 2,800 were wounded. On 13 October, surrounded by Lebanese and Syrian forces, Aoun sought refuge in the French embassy at Beirut and asked for political asylum. On 19 April 1991, the Lebanese government officially ended General

28

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Alliance of Palestinian Forces.

Organization of Arab Palestine.

AQABA, GULF

OF: Only 170 kilometers (106 miles) long by 25 kilometers (16 miles) wide, the Gulf of Aqaba separates the Sinai Peninsula from the Arabian coast. Four countries share its northern section: Egypt controls the western shore; Saudi Arabia the eastern shore; Jordan possesses a 25-kilometer corridor along the Gulf in which is located the city of Aqaba (the country’s only maritime port); Israel has a 10-kilometer strip that includes the city of Eilat. The Gulf of Aqaba has always been, regionally, of strategic significance. Cargo through the port of Aqaba increased throughout the 1980s, partly as a result of development of the Jordanian port with aid from Iraq, to a high of 18.7 million tons in 1989. Cargo handling fell sharply (to 10 million tons) after the imposition of United Nations (UN) sanctions against Iraq in 1990. The lifting of UN sanctions in 2003 suggested that cargo shipment through the Gulf of Aqaba would again be on the rise.

AQABA SUMMIT: The Aqaba Summit of 4 June 2003, hosted by King Abdullah II of Jordan, was attended by Palestinian prime minister Mahmud Abbas, IsraeT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISRAEL

0

20

0

20

Wadi Ar ab

Ne g e v

a/Eme k Ara va

AQSA INTIFADA, AL-

40 mi.

JORDAN

40 km

Elat Aqaba

of Aq ab

a

Sinai
Peninsula

Gulf

E GY P T Mt. Sinai

SAUDI
ARABIA

l Gu

f of

ez Su N

Strait
of Têran

Red Sea

Gulf of Aqaba International border Peak City

li prime minister Ariel Sharon, and U.S. president George W. Bush. The summit was intended to begin implementation of the “Road Map” for peace, promoted by the Bush administration alongside the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union (the “Quartet”). The Road Map called for an end to the violence that had erupted in September 2000 (the al-Aqsa Intifada) and for negotiations toward the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005. At the summit’s end, both Abbas and Sharon pledged to implement the plan, with Sharon promising to begin removal of settlement outposts on the West Bank and Abbas calling for an end to violence. HAMAS immediately rejected Abbas’s request, and forty thousand Israeli settlers demonstrated against Sharon. Less than a week later, the suicide bombing of a bus in Jerusalem was followed by Israeli air strikes against HAMAS targets. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Bush, George W.; HAMAS; Sharon, Ariel.

AQEDAH (“binding”): Hebrew term that describes the episode when, according to Biblical tradition, Abraham agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac to God. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO

Abraham; Isaac.

AQSA, AL-: The name of the mosque (the Arabic term means “distant, extreme, furthest,”) atop Mount Moriah (known to Jews as the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. It is one of the two main structures in the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). The other is the Dome of the Rock, which encloses what Muslims believe is the site to which the Night Journey of the prophet Muhammad brought him, and from which he was taken to pray with the earlier prophets. The entire precinct is built upon what devout Jews believe to be the site of the Temple of Solomon and the ruins of the Second Temple, of which the Western Wall, or Kotel, is believed to be the remnant. SEE ALSO Moriah, Mount; Western Wall.

AQSA INTIFADA, AL-: By 2000, virtually no progress had been made in negotiating a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians since the Oslo Accords and 1993 Declaration of Principles. During this time the Israelis continued to build new settlements and roads, confiscate land and water resources, and demolish homes in the territories ostensibly intended to be part of a Palestinian state. Over 200,000 Israeli settlers were in the territories by 2000, not including East Jerusalem and environs, and new construction was increasing each year. Despite the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continued to be controlled by Israel much as they had been under direct occupation. To many Palestinians, it came to seem that under the terms of the Oslo process the PA existed largely to suppress them on behalf of the Israelis, and to use their taxes and international aid to line the leadership’s pockets. Anger at the Israelis and frustration with the PA, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and other established groups continued to grow. In 1996, the situation in Hebron and Israel’s opening of a tunnel beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque occasioned the worst violence (four days of rioting, and fifty-eight Palestinians and fifteen Israelis killed) since the Intifada of 1987–1993. In May 2000, on the anniversary of the State of Israel’s foundation, during demonstrations in support of Palestinian prisoners, violence broke out in the West Bank during which four Palestinians were killed by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and hundreds were injured by rubber bullets and live ammunition. In July 2000 the last attempt to reach a “final status” agreement as called for under the 1993 accords failed at Camp David, mainly over the issue of Jerusalem, specifically, according to many Pales-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

29

AQSA MARTYRS BRIGADE, AL-

tinians, over the insistence of Prime Minister Ehud Barak—whose government had narrowly escaped losing power just before he left for Camp David—on maintaining Israeli sovereignty over the Haram alSharif (Temple Mount), an important Muslim religious site, which Jews believe to be the site where the temple once stood. As tensions grew, and as Barak’s government weakened, the head of the opposition Likud, Ariel Sharon, on 28 September 2000, visited the Haram al-Sharif with one thousand armed Israeli police. The visit was tied to Jewish extremists’ calls to destroy the mosque there and rebuild the temple. The next day, after midday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Haram, a large, angry protest demonstration took place. Israeli security forces responded with live ammunition, killing seven Palestinians. Demonstrations and spontaneous attacks followed, leading to street fighting and violent IDF responses all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was the beginning of the second Intifada, known as the alAqsa Intifada. An enduring image of the uprising was created on 30 September when the IDF shot and killed a twelve-year-old boy clinging to his wounded father at the base of a wall on a street in Gaza. The incident was videotaped and broadcast all over the world. On 12 October, after the lynching of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinians—an incident that followed the lynching of three Palestinians by Israeli settlers—the IDF bombarded PA headquarters in Ramallah and PLO offices in Gaza. On 16 October the United States sponsored a summit conference at Sharm el-Sheikh between Barak and Yasir Arafat, which accomplished little. That month Barak sealed the borders between Israel and the territories, cutting off trade. As happened during the first uprising, unified coordinating groups arose—the Popular Resistance Committees—which included representatives of various nationalist and Islamic groups. A young Palestinian leadership, mainly associated with al-Fatah— prominent among them was Marwan Barghuthi— formed a number of small groups, in particular the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Sabra and Shatila Martyrs Group, and the Popular Army Front–Return Battalions. These and similar formations are known as the tanzim (organization). In February 2001 Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister on a platform of increasing Israeli settlements and refusing to negotiate with the PLO. The result was greater violence, including organized armed attacks by the tanzim against Israeli military outposts and settlements (a major difference from the first Intifada), and more severe countermeasures,

30

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

including an Israeli policy of “targeted reprisals” (assassinations) against individuals declared responsible for attacks. Eventually the Israelis reoccupied the territories, in the process destroying large parts of Jenin, Ramallah, Rafah, Nablus, and other cities and refugee camps. Effectively, Israel and the Palestinians have been in a state of war since late 2000. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 2,683 Palestinians, 441 Israelis, and 17 foreign nationals had been killed as of 30 June 2004. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, al-; Barak, Ehud; Barghuthi, Marwan Hussein al-; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; Haram alSharif; Hebron; Intifada (1987–1993); Likud; Israel Defense Force; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine Authority; Sabra and Shatila; Sharon, Ariel; West Bank.

AQSA MARTYRS BRIGADE,

AL-: A Palestinian militia that emerged in the West Bank in October 2000, specifically in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, after the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada. Its members (numbers unknown) are believed to be mostly members of al-Fatah, and the group is assumed by some to be under its control, although neither al-Fatah nor Yasir Arafat has acknowledged it, and both have publicly opposed its actions. The group has taken responsibility for a number of attacks, including shootings and suicide bombings, against Israelis; at first the attacks were against soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories, but as the Intifada continued and Israeli tactics became more extreme and destructive (particularly in Jenin and Ramallah), civilians inside Israel were also targeted. The Israelis have accused the Fatah leader Marwan Barghuthi of being the Brigade’s leader. They arrested him in 2002, and in May 2004 he was convicted for several killings. It has been speculated that the reason the Brigades are allowed to operate is to ensure that someone connected to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is seen by the public to be making a forceful response to Israeli repression, so that the PLO might not lose political support to HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, groups that wish to establish an Islamic state. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Barghuthi, Marwan Hussein al-; Fatah, al-; HAMAS; Islamic Jihad.

ARAB ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS AND RENEWAL SEE

Arab Movement for Change.

ARAB COOPERATION COUNCIL (ACC): Organization founded in February 1989, uniting Iraq, Egypt, JorT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAB EXECUTIVE

dan, and Yemen. The ACC was destroyed by the Gulf War of 1991, in which members found themselves on opposite sides. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991).

ARAB DEMOCRATIC FRONT SEE

Arab Democratic Party.

ARAB DEMOCRATIC PARTY (ADP; Hizb al-Democrati al-Arabi; Mifleget Democratit Aravit): An Israeli Arab political entity, created in 1988 by Abdul Wahab Darawshe (former Labor member of Knesset), the ADP advocated the integration of Arabs in Israel, as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state. As a result of the elections of 1988, the party won a seat in the Knesset, filled by Darawshe. In the elections of June 1992, the ADP won two seats, filled by Darawshe and Talib al-Sanaa. In June 1993 Darawshe expressed his displeasure over the entry of the Arab member representing Meretz, Walid Tsadik, into the cabinet of Yitzhak Rabin. Darawshe thought the support of the ADP for the Labor Party should have allowed him to expect a portfolio. At the end of November, Darawshe threatened to withdraw his support from the Rabin government but, faced with the risk of ending the peace process by causing the fall of the cabinet of Yitzhak Rabin, he renounced his plan. In January 1994, the ADP proposed to the Knesset that the 1981 law on the annexation of the Golan Heights be abrogated. In September 1994 and February 1996, ADP members of Knesset served as secret envoys between the Israeli government and two Arab countries: Iraq and Yemen. During April 1996, anticipating Knesset elections, the ADP joined with the Israeli Islamic Movement (IIM) to form a common list, the United Arab List. As a result of the ballot, this bloc won four seats, of which three went to members of the ADP (Darawshe, al-Sanaa, and Tawfiq Khatib). In August 1997, for the first time since the creation of the State of Israel, a delegation of some thirty Israeli Arabs, including ADP members, visited Damascus, where they were welcomed by President Hafiz al-Asad. In the 1999 elections, the United Arab List won five seats in the Knesset, with 3.4 percent of the vote. In 2003, receiving only 2.1 percent of the vote, their representation was reduced to two seats. SEE ALSO Darawshe, Abdul Wahab; Israeli Islamic Movement; United Arab List. ARAB DETERRENT FORCE (ADF): Armed force constituted in fulfillment of the resolutions of the Riyadh D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Arab summit (16–18 October 1976) and of Cairo (25–26 October), both convoked for the purpose of ending the war in Lebanon. The Arab Deterrent Force, placed under the control of Lebanese president Elias Sarkis, was responsible for observance of the ceasefire in Lebanon, overseeing security, preserving the sovereignty of the country, and applying the Lebanese-Palestinian Cairo accords of 1969. Because Israel opposed the presence of Arab troops other than Lebanese beyond the Litani River, the ADF was deployed only up to the banks of the Zaharani River. A special fund for financing the ADF, made up of contributions from Arab League members, was set up, by vote, at the Cairo summit. On 6 February 1980, the Lebanese Council of Ministers asked that the ADF be relieved by the Lebanese army. When a withdrawal was announced there was an increase in tensions, which prompted the Lebanese leaders and the Syrians to extend its mandate. Between 6 and 7 March 1980, the ADF units withdrew from Beirut and its suburbs, replaced by the Lebanese army. In September 1982, at the request of the Lebanese president, the ADF mandate was not renewed, which ended its existence. SEE ALSO

League of Arab States.

ARAB EXECUTIVE: Palestinian nationalist umbrella group founded in 1920. It was formed at the third Arab Congress in Haifa with nine members and was expanded in 1928 to include forty-eight. It was primarily a conservative organization of the middle and landowning classes. Its leader, as president from 1920 to 1928 and chairman from 1928 to 1934, was Musa Kazim al-Husayni, a prominent member of a notable family and former mayor of Jerusalem. Through direct appeals to the British government and the League of Nations, the Arab Executive opposed the imposition of British rule, whose formal mandate (written by the British themselves) was founded on the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and accorded privileged status to the Zionists while denying the right to self-determination to the Palestinians (who were referred to in the Mandate only as “non-Jewish communities,” although they were 90 percent of the population in 1922). It failed, and the Mandate was officially instituted in 1923. Rallying public support, the committee was more successful in opposing British plans for a legislative council with limited powers and a disproportionately small number of seats allocated to Palestinians; accepting it would have meant accepting the legitimacy of the Zionist project. The failure to prevent the imposition of the Mandate, however, or to penetrate the indif-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

31

ARAB FUND FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

ference of the policy makers in the British government, caused dissension among Palestinians, and on the Arab Executive. In 1928 a sense of crisis grew as Zionist immigration and land purchases (often, it should be said, from members of the Arab Executive or interests with which they were associated) increased and Zionist economic power and organizations grew in strength. The Arab Executive tried to meet the problem by expanding the committee to include representatives of various factions and religious groups. Renewed discussions with British Mandatory officials, however, broke down at the time of the Western Wall disturbances in 1929. Investigations by two British commissions, the Shaw Commission and the Hope-Simpson Commission, into the causes of the violence resulted in an official report, the Passfield White Paper, which in 1930 recommended serious changes to recognize Palestinian rights and redress social and economic problems among Palestinians caused or exacerbated by Zionist activity. Private talks between the Jewish Agency and the British government increased Zionist political strength in Palestine, and the British government’s basic commitment to the “Jewish National Home” as part of the Mandate ensured that these recommendations were repudiated. This chain of events was the beginning of the radicalization of the Palestinian community’s opposition to the Zionist project and of the end of its support for the caution, moderation, and deference of the committee’s methods, which were those of the Ottoman-era politics in which its members had been schooled. Amid calls for strikes, boycotts, and other such actions, the Arab Executive was seen as increasingly old-fashioned and ineffectual, and it was not able to adapt to the changed conditions. Under pressure, it did sponsor a public demonstration in Haifa in October 1933, in which Musa Kazim al-Husayni was beaten by the police, but it fell apart not long after al-Husayni’s death (largely as a result of the beating) in March 1934; it held its last meeting that August. Its position as Palestinian nationalist umbrella group was filled in 1936 by the Arab Higher Committee. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; Balfour Declaration; British Mandate; Husayni, Musa Kazim al-; Jewish Agency for Israel; Western Wall Disturbances; White Papers on Palestine.

ARAB FUND FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (AFESD): An Arab regional financial organization participating in the financing of economic and

32

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

social development projects in the Arab world since 1968. The Arab funds provide subsidies (project loans) to governments, private and public organizations, and institutions. Projects of importance to the Arab world receive priority funding. Development projects include agriculture and rural development, infrastructure and transport, electricity, and water. The organization’s mandate is limited to supporting projects of Arab states. AFESD has twenty-two members, with headquarters located in Kuwait.

ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE (AHC): The Arab Higher Committee was created on 25 April 1936 in Mandatory Palestine by six leading Palestinian political parties to coordinate the general strike that had begun on 15 April. It was led by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, a member of a prominent Palestinian family, mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Supreme Muslim Council, and it became the chief Palestinian nationalist organization. Its goals were to boycott Jewish businesses, to end Zionist land purchases and Jewish immigration, and to replace British rule with an independent elected national legislature and government. The strike was staged in response to several events: the killing of the resistance leader Izz al-Din al-Qassam by the British; the discovery of clandestine arms shipments to Zionist groups; and a British proposal for a limited legislature in which the minority Zionist community would have been overrepresented. The strike led to an armed revolt, which was met with a military response by the Mandatory authorities. The committee called off the strike on 12 October 1936, and the British government agreed to investigate the causes of the disturbances. In June 1937 the Peel Commission recommended partition of Palestine between the Arab and Zionist communities, which the AHC rejected. Disputes between the parties represented on the committee led to a partial breakup in July, and after further guerrilla attacks the British outlawed the AHC on 1 October. Four of its members were arrested and deported to the Seychelles Islands, and the rest, including al-Husayni, escaped to neighboring Arab countries, from which they encouraged and attempted to direct the rebellion, which lasted until the spring of 1939. After the White Paper of May 1939 recommended limiting Jewish immigration, the AHC was legalized again. In November 1945 the committee, with alHusayni as its head, was reestablished under the auspices of the Arab League and was recognized by Britain as representing the Arabs of Palestine. Factional disputes, however, made it politically ineffecT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1967)

tive, and it broke into two competing groups. At its meeting in June 1946 at Bludan, Syria, the Arab League dissolved these two groups and established a new AHC, under the leadership of al-Husayni, which it then recognized as the official representative organization of the Palestinians. King Abdullah I of Transjordan, however, who wished to annex much of Palestine to his kingdom and who was secretly cooperating with the Zionists, worked within the League to undermine it. The AHC rejected the partition plan adopted in United Nations Resolution 181 in 1947, and it also rejected the recommendations of the United Nations mediator, Count Bernadotte, in June 1948. In September 1948, with the 1948–1949 War all but lost, the AHC, with the approval of the League, founded the so-called All-Palestine Government in Gaza, which lasted little more than two weeks. It was the last attempt at serious activity by the committee. The AHC continued to exist in name only until the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; All-Palestine Government; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; League of Arab States; Resolution 181.

ARAB ISLAMIC LIBERAL PARTY (HAQ): Name of a Palestinian movement, founded in January 1994 by members of al-Fatah who wanted to counter the radical positions of HAMAS. Its program was “upholding liberal concepts of Islam, linked with Arab ideas, so as to fight religious extremism; the struggle against Zionism, in order to create a Palestinian state that would cohabit with the Hebrew state.” In 2004, the HAQ, whose headquarters are located in Jerusalem, is led by Muhammad Said Burani and Khayr Kilani. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-. ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1948): The first conflict between Arab states and the new State of Israel, the ArabIsrael War began as a civil conflict between Palestinian Jews and Arabs following the announcement of the United Nations (UN) plan of November 1947 to partition the country into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international enclave in greater Jerusalem. Palestinian Arabs were incensed by the plan, which they considered a violation of their right to self-determination. Palestinian Arab demonstrations against the partition plan and Jewish celebrations in support of it soon erupted into violence, and within a few days armed groups were battling across the country. Arabs attacked Jewish settlements and institutional targets such as the headquarters of the Jewish Agency. Jewish attacks against Palestinians, inD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

cluding the raid on Dayr Yasin, caused a mass flight and the military expulsion of Arab Palestinians from areas seized by Jewish forces. By the end of the British Mandate in May 1948, when British forces left Palestine, Jewish forces had already seized most of the territory allotted to them by the UN partition plan, as well as additional areas. Israel declared independence on 15 May 1948, and the struggle became an international conflict involving the new Jewish state and the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, with some involvement by Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Despite the appointment of Amir Abdullah of Transjordan as commander-in-chief, the Arab forces lacked a coordinated military plan and were for the most part poorly trained. By June 1948 both sides accepted a twenty-eight-day truce ordered by the United Nations Security Council, which went into effect on 10 June. Fighting resumed on 8 July, with Israeli forces taking Arab areas such as Nazareth in Galilee. A second truce of 19 July was broken when Israel tried to break the Egyptian blockade of the Negev. Israel captured Beersheba in October, and by the end of the year Egypt’s forces were being isolated and subdued. On 5 January 1949, Egypt agreed to the UN Security Council’s request for armistice negotiations, which began on 13 January at Rhodes. The General Armistice was signed on 24 February 1949; an armistice with Lebanon was signed on 23 March, with Jordan on 3 April, and with Syria on 20 July. Iraq did not participate in armistice talks. The agreements established frontiers that remained in effect until the Arab-Israel War of 1967. Israeli territory increased from the 5,400 square miles proposed in the UN partition plan to 8,000 square miles. Over 4,500 Israeli soldiers and 2,000 civilians were killed in the fighting. Among the Arab regular armies, 2,000 soldiers died. Some estimates place Palestinian deaths as high as 13,000. A large number of Palestinians fled the country; the United Nations estimated the number of Palestinian refugees at over 700,000, over half the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine. Called the nakba, or “disaster,” by the Palestinians, the loss of the war and the establishment of the State of Israel set in motion a long-term, costly conflict that has yet defied resolution as of 2004. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Dayr Yasin; General Armistice Agreements; Nakba, al-.

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1967) (5 June–10 June 1967): Third major Israeli-Arab war, after the War of 1948 (Israel’s “War of Independence”; the nakba, or “di-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

33

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1967)

CAPTURED TERRITORY. THE MAPS SHOW (LEFT) ISRAEL AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRIES BEFORE THE JUNE 1967 WAR AND (RIGHT) THE LARGE AMOUNT OF TERRITORY THAT ISRAEL TOOK CONTROL OF DURING THE SIX DAYS OF FIGHTING. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

saster,” to Palestinians) and the Suez-Sinai War of 1956. On 25 January 1967, the Israeli-Syrian mixed armistice commission convened, after an eight-year hiatus, and published a communiqué according to which the two parties had reached an agreement meant to prevent any hostile or aggressive action. On 7 April, in reprisal for Syrian artillery barrages on kibbutzim in the north of Galilee, Israeli planes conducted a raid on the Golan, in the course of which six Syrian MiGs were downed. On 13 May, Soviet intelligence informed Cairo and Damascus that the Israelis were massing troops on the Syrian frontier. In the context of the Egyptian-Syrian defense pact, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to mobilize his army. The following day, several Egyptian units left Cairo for the Sinai. On 15 May, the anniversary date of the founding of Israel, the general staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) put on an impressive military parade. The day after, Syrian and Egyptian forces were put on high alert. On 19 May, at the request of the Egyptian government, the United Nations (UN) withdrew its troops, on duty since the end of the Suez-Sinai War

34

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

of 1956, from Sinai and the Gaza Strip. On 20 May, Israel mobilized a part of its reserves. The next day, Egypt banned Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran, leading to a protest on the part of the United States, which declared the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba illegal. With tension between Egypt and Israel at its apogee, on 25 May, Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian army divisions approached their respective frontiers with Israel. On 30 May, before the cameras of Egyptian television, King Hussein of Jordan signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt, according to which the Jordanian army would pass under Egyptian command in case of war. On 2 June, faced with Arab military preparations openly aimed at the Jewish state, Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol ceded the portfolio of defense to Moshe Dayan. The next day, France and the United States decreed an embargo on arms shipments to the Middle East. On 4 June, Iraq joined the Syrian-Jordanian-Egyptian military alliance. On the morning of 5 June 1967, Yitzhak Rabin, army chief-of-staff of the IDF, flanked by Generals Ezer Weizman and Haim Bar-Lev, unleashed a simultaneous attack against Egypt and Jordan. In a few T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1973)

hours, Israeli aircraft annihilated practically all of the Egyptian air force, surprised on the ground, and 416 Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian planes were destroyed. Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Yemen, in solidarity with the Arab countries, declared war on Israel. Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, and Sudan broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, then with Great Britain. On 6 June, the U.S. ship Liberty was attacked by the Israelis, who claimed they had mistaken it for an Egyptian craft. Believing this to be Soviet aggression, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S. fleet on high alert, while the U.S. Sixth Fleet approached the combat zone. On the same day, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. The next day, concluding its takeover of the West Bank, which had been under Jordanian control since 1948, Israeli troops, under the command of General Uzi Narkiss, penetrated into East Jerusalem. On the Egyptian front, Israeli troops were closing in on the Suez Canal. On 8 June, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution, again insisting on an immediate cease-fire. The Soviet Union and countries in its orbit, with the exception of Rumania, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Israel then attacked and captured the Golan region, and on 10 June, Syria accepted a cease-fire. Movements of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, misinterpreted by the Soviet general staff, led to a state of high tension between Washington and Moscow, but this scare ended after only a few hours. The Israeli army had defeated the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies in six days, Israel more than tripling its territorial area by the occupation of the West Bank (which included East Jerusalem), a part of the Golan Heights, the Sinai Desert, and the Gaza Strip. Israeli military leaders judged now that they had acquired the strategic “depth” necessary to assure the security of Israel, while the ultra-orthodox movements perceived the victory of the IDF as the messianic expression of political Judaism. On 12 June, in the army’s orders of the day, the chief-ofstaff, Yitzhak Rabin, saluted the “unification and liberation of Jerusalem,” and celebrated the victory of the “sons of light” over those who “wanted to cover the country with darkness.” On 14 June, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 237, recommending Israel respect international conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war and the protection of civilians in time of war. On 19 June, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson proposed a peace plan for the Middle East. Four days later, after his meeting with Johnson, Soviet prime minister Alexis Kosygin published a communiqué backing a peace D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

plan in the Middle East, specifying that the “rapid withdrawal of Israeli troops is the key to the reestablishment of peace.” On 27 June, the Israeli Knesset voted to annex the Arab part of Jerusalem. On 29 August, the leaders of Arab states, meeting in Khartoum, reaffirmed their will to continue the war against Israel with statements such as “no to peace, no to negotiations, no to recognition of Israel.” The oil-producing states decided to aid Egypt financially. On 22 November, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 242, requiring Israel to evacuate the occupied territories, in exchange for a cessation of the state of belligerence. SEE ALSO Egypt; Golan Heights; Hussein ibn Talal; Jordan; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Resolution 237; Resolution 242; Suez Crisis; Syria.

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1973) (6 October–24 October 1973): Fourth major Arab-Israel war. On 12 September 1973, Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat received King Hussein of Jordan and Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad. During their conversations, an Egyptian-Syrian-Jordanian alliance was sealed. The next day, Israeli and Syrian fighters engaged in aerial combat, in the course of which thirteen Syrian planes were downed. On 3 October, during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, reserve officers in the Syrian army were called up, and two days later, reserve units were mobilized. On 6 October, while the Jewish state was celebrating the religious holiday of Yom Kippur, the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and attacked the Israeli troops stationed along the Bar-Lev Line, along the canal, the frontier between Israel and Egypt since the Arab-Israel War of June 1967. The Syrian army, for its part, retook control of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since June 1967. A part of the Israeli air force was rapidly destroyed by Soviet missiles that had been supplied to the Arab armies. For four days Israel seemed in danger of a military defeat. Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan and the army general staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), commanded by General David (“Dado”) Elazar, seconded by General Aharon Yariv, decided to launch a counterattack simultaneously on the Golan and the Egyptian front. Despite belonging to the SyrianEgyptian military pact, Jordan did not participate in the fighting, which allowed Israel to focus its efforts on fighting only on two fronts. On 12 October, the Soviet Union established an airlift to send supplies to Syria and Egypt. The next day, the U.S. Sixth Fleet, in turn, started an airlift to Israel. On the Syrian front, the IDF advanced, while in the Sinai Desert,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

35

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1973)

QUNAYTRA. THE TOWN IN THE GOLAN HEIGHTS, WHICH ISRAEL OCCUPIED AFTER THE ARAB-ISRAEL WAR OF 1967, IS MOSTLY IN RUINS SINCE 1973 WAR, WHEN IT RETURNED TO SYRIAN CONTROL. THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY CONDEMNED ISRAEL FOR DESTROYING THE TOWN BEFORE ABANDONING IT. SYRIA REFUSED TO REBUILD AND REOCCUPY QUNAYTRA. (AP/Wide World Photos)

THE

Egyptian and Israeli forces were engaged in a faceoff. On 13 October, some Jordanian-Palestinian reinforcements arrived on the Syrian front, backed up by “Arab international brigades,” formed of Moroccan and Iraqi soldiers. The following day, the Egyptian Second and Third Armies launched a large offensive in the Sinai, engaging in a gigantic tank battle against the Israeli forces. On 16 October, much to the surprise of the Israeli general staff, General Ariel Sharon succeeded in establishing a beachhead on the western bank of the Suez Canal. In Washington and Moscow, serious negotiations were begun to establish a cease-fire, while the U.S. and Soviet airlifts intensified. The following day, the tank battle in the Sinai was at its apogee. The Syrian forces on the Syrian-Israeli front launched a counterattack, while the Arab oil-exporting countries announced a progressive reduction of their exports “until the territories occupied by Israel are liberated and the Palestinian people regains its rights.” On 19 October, U.S. president Richard M. Nixon asked Congress to accord a supplementary $2

36

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

billion in aid to Israel. The following day, Libya, Algeria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia declared an embargo on oil to the United States and the Netherlands. In the Golan, Israeli troops retook control over some of the terrain, while in the Sinai the Egyptian armies found themselves surrounded by the armored units of the IDF. On 21 October, after many hours of intense fighting, the Israeli “Golani” brigade pushed through the last of the Syrian resistance, taking control of Mount Hermon. On 22 October, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 338, calling for an immediate cease-fire and the application of Resolution 242, and for “negotiations . . . between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” The next day, in spite of the cease-fire demanded by the United Nations, Israeli troops advanced on both sides of the Suez Canal, definitively cutting the Egyptian Third Army from its rear. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 339, demanding the immediate end of hostilities and the return of the warring parties to the positions they ocT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1982)

cupied previously. Between 23 and 24 October, a series of misunderstandings between Moscow and Washington created a risk of confrontation between the superpowers, as had occurred in 1967. On 24 October, the second UN cease-fire was finally implemented. Three days later, the first international observers arrived in Egypt. During the night of 27 to 28 October, Israeli and Egyptian officers met at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road, so as to agree on conditions for safe conduct of the Egyptian Third Army, trapped in Sinai. On 6 November, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger arrived in Cairo, where a resumption of U.S-Egyptian diplomatic relations, interrupted since 1967, was announced. On 11 November 1973, at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road, Israelis and Egyptians signed a cease-fire, calling for disengagement and separation of their forces. Israeli general Aharon Yariv and Egyptian general Muhammad Gamassi signed this document, as well as the commander-in-chief of the United Nations forces, Ensio Siilasvuo. On 26 November, Algerian president Houari Boumédienne convened an Arab summit in Algiers, after which, two days later, the Arab countries recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), over Jordanian objections, as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. On 21 December, a Middle East peace conference opened in Geneva, chaired by the UN and co-chaired by the United States and the Soviet Union. On 18 January 1974, the Israeli army chief-ofstaff, David Elazar, and General Muhammad Gamassi signed an accord stipulating the withdrawal of Israeli forces, within forty days, to approximately 30 kilometers east of the Suez Canal. Five days later, the IDF started to withdraw from the western bank of the canal. On 29 April, when sporadic fighting had broken out again in the Golan Heights, Kissinger began a new series of diplomatic visits in order to obtain the adherence of Syria to the peace plan. On 31 May, at Geneva, the Syrians and Israelis signed an accord of “limited” disengagement of their forces. Israel accepted evacuating the pocket in the Golan it had occupied in October 1973, during the recent war, but refused to cede the territories it had occupied in 1967. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and her defense minister Moshe Dayan resigned following the report of the Agranat Commission, established to probe the reasons for Israel’s vulnerability to surprise attack. The report blamed the IDF’s mistaken assessment of Egyptian military strength and recommended the removal of the chief of staff and other highranking officers. A new cabinet was formed, led by Yitzhak Rabin, in June 1974. Debate continued in IsD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

rael over whether failures in political and military leadership had allowed the Arab armies to surprise the Jewish state and unleash a conflict that caused nearly 2,800 deaths in the ranks of the IDF. SEE ALSO Agranat Commission, on Arab-Israel War (1973); Asad, Hafiz al-; Dayan, Moshe; Hussein ibn Talal; Meir, Golda; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sadat, Anwar al-.

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1982): On 4 June 1982, in reprisal for the attack against Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador in London, Israeli aviation bombarded a number of Palestinian military bases in Lebanon. The assassination attempt, however, has been widely considered a pretext for invasion, as the attacker belonged to the Abu Nidal group, which opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and PLO members were reportedly on the hit list as well. Israel wished to destroy the infrastructure and leadership of the PLO and to install in Lebanon a government led by the Phalange Party (predominantly Maronite Christian), which had allied itself with Israel. On 6 June the general staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), headed by General Raphael Eitan and overseen by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, received the green light from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to unleash the “Peace in Galilee” Operation. The invasion of Lebanon, the fifth major Israeli-Arab war, aimed at the definitive neutralization of the Palestinian military bases that had been established there. During this period, Lebanon was in the throes of a civil war, in which Palestinians and Syrians played an active role, while Israel was backing the Phalange. After brushing aside the “blue helmets” (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL), the IDF neutralized a part of the Syrian air force that had intervened. On 11 June a Syrian-Israeli cease-fire was signed. Two days later, Israeli forces linked up with the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia. The IDF began a siege of West Beirut, where the Palestinians, supported by the forces of the Lebanese National Movement, were dug in. The pro-Iranian Guardians of the Revolution took up positions in the Baquaa Valley to battle with the Israeli troops. On 3 July nearly 100,000 Israelis demonstrated in Jerusalem for peace. On 11 July the Soviet Union proposed a peace plan for Lebanon. On 25 July, in a document passed to U.S. congressman Paul McCloskey, Yasir Arafat, the head of the PLO, affirmed that he was ready to accept all UN resolutions concerning the Palestine question. On 7 August, U.S. mediator Philip Habib announced the conclusion of an accord al-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

37

ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (1982)

INVASION OF LEBANON. ISRAELI TROOPS MOVE INTO DAMOUR, LEBANON, IN JUNE 1982, NEAR THE START OF THE INVASION. THE ISRAELIS PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION AND PLACE LEBANON UNDER THE CONTROL OF MARONITES, BUT THE OPERATION HAD SEVERE LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES. (© Webistan/Corbis)

TRIED TO DESTROY THE ENTRENCHED

lowing the militiamen of the PLO to leave Beirut under the protection of an international contingent. On 23 August, Bashir Jumayyil, the leader of the Phalange and head of Christian forces, was elected president of Lebanon. Six days later, in the framework of the evacuation of the Palestinians from Beirut, Israel lifted its siege of the Lebanese capital. On 30 August, under the protection of a French-Italian force, Yasir Arafat and his partisans left Beirut for Tunis. By 1 September about 14,420 PLO fighters and officials had left West Beirut, and about 3,000 Syrian troops were withdrawn. The same day, U.S. president Ronald Reagan proposed a peace plan. On 9 September, in the course of an Arab League summit in Fes, the Arab states proposed a plan to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict (the Fes Plan). On 14 September, President Jumayyil was assassinated. The IDF entered Beirut once again, in violation of the truce agreement, claiming it was needed to prevent disorder. From 16 to 18 September, the IDF, under Sharon and Eitan, approved the entry of

38

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Phalange forces into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. While Israeli soldiers looked on, the Lebanese Christian militia massacred Palestinian refugees; estimates put the numbers between 800 and 1,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, mostly women, children, and older men. At Tel Aviv, 400,000 people demonstrated against this carnage and against the Israeli presence in Lebanon. The United States decided to cut off assistance for the construction of the Israeli bomber, Lavi. On 29 September the IDF withdrew from West Beirut, falling back to the south of Lebanon, being replaced in the Lebanese capital by an international military force. On 8 February 1983 the Israeli Kahan Commission, charged with inquiring into the Sabra and Shatila massacres, found that Israeli officials were indirectly responsible for the atrocities. An international commission chaired by Sean MacBride charged that Israel was directly responsible because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power and because the IDF had facilitated an ally’s activities in the camps. Despite T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAB MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE

the findings of both commissions, no one was prosecuted. Defense Minister Sharon resigned, to be replaced by Moshe Arens, but remained in the cabinet. On 17 May, the Israelis and Lebanese signed a peace treaty, rejected by Syria. On 23 October in Beirut, two attacks against the buildings where French and U.S. military were housed caused, respectively, 58 and 241 deaths. On 2 November, Yasir Arafat and his last followers fell back on Tripoli, in the north of Lebanon. On 20 December, the head of the PLO and his partisans left Lebanon definitively, to go to Tunisia. On 7 March 1984, under Syrian pressure, the Israeli-Lebanese accord of 17 May of the preceding year was abrogated by Lebanese president Amin Jumayyil. On 4 April, at the behest of Israel, Antoine Lahad, a Maronite and former general of the Lebanese army, took command of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), charged with security in the south of Lebanon. On 13 September, Labor Party leader Shimon Peres became prime minister of Israel, and Yitzhak Rabin was named defense minister. On 15 January 1985 the Israeli National Unity government announced a plan for a staged withdrawal of IDF troops from South Lebanon, with the exception of a six-mile strip along the Lebanese-Israeli frontier. Called a “security zone,” this Lebanese territory was placed under the military command of the SLA of General Lahad, charged with countering the antiIsraeli actions of the Lebanese Hizbullah; nearly 1,200 Israeli soldiers were assigned to accompany the SLA. Sixteen years later, on 1 April 1998, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu published a communiqué proposing a negotiated military withdrawal from Lebanon, based on UN Security Council Resolution 425. Finally, under the government of Ehud Barak, the Israeli army left Lebanon on 24 May 2000. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Israel Defense Force; Jumayyil, Amin; Jumayyil, Bashir; Lahad, Antoine; Palestine Liberation Organization; Phalange; Resolution 425; Sabra and Shatila; Sharon, Ariel; South Lebanon Army.

ARAB LEAGUE SEE

League of Arab States.

ARAB LIBERATION FRONT (ALF; in Arabic, Jabhat alTahrir al-Arabiya): A Palestinian movement, the Arab Liberation Front was founded in February 1969 by the Iraqi BaEth Party to counter the influence of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

the Syrian BaEth Party’s al-SaEiqa faction. Founded through the initiative of EAbd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali and Abd al-Rahim Ahmad, the ALF—whose slogan was “revolutionary armed struggle to liberate Arab Palestine with Arab blood”—upheld the Palestinian cause in terms of pan-Arabism. ALF forged an alliance with the Command of the Palestinian Armed Struggle (CPAS) in July 1969, then joined with the IPCFL (Islamic-Progressive Common Force of Lebanon) and, between 1974 and 1979, with the Rejection Front. In June 1991 the death of its principal leader, Abd al-Rahim Ahmad, led to a schism in the movement between pro-Iraqi and pro-Arafat currents. Advocating the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, the leadership of the ALF opposed the Israeli-Palestinian accord of September 1993 (though it remained in the Palestine Liberation Organization), which prompted the formation of a proArafat faction, taking the name of ALF–General Command. The ALF, backed by Iraq and Sudan, was, at least until the Iraq War of 2003–2004, headquartered in Baghdad, where its main function was to distribute funds to the families of Palestinian “martyrs.” Its principal leaders have been Zayd Haydar, Munif al-Razzaz, and EAbd al-Wahhab alKayyali in the 1970s, Abd al-Rahim Ahmad (1970s– 1991), and Mahmud IsmaDil Rakad Salem. Salem was captured by Israeli forces in 2002. SEE ALSO Rejection Front.

ARAB MONETARY FUND: Regional organization composed of members of the Arab League. It was founded in 1976 to regulate exchange rates and coordinate monetary policies among members; to promote trade and capital movement between member states; to promote the development of capital markets; and to prepare the development of a common Arab currency. It is based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. SEE ALSO League of Arab States.

ARAB MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE (Arabic: al-Haraka alArabiya lil-Taghyeer; Hebrew: ha-Tnua ha-Aravit leHitDhadshut): An Israeli Arab political bloc, the Arab Movement was created on 27 March 1996 by Ahmad Tibi, anticipating the Knesset elections of the following May. Ambitious to become the leader of the Israeli Arab camp, Tibi attempted to constitute a common list with two other parties, the HADASH, a party of the left, and the Arab Democratic Party (ADP), whose head, Abdul Wahab Darawshe, was a staunch opponent of Tibi. After the collapse of these negotiations, Tibi changed the name of his bloc to

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

39

ARAB NAME

the Arab Alliance for Progress and Renewal, hoping thereby to obtain the adherence of some members of the ADP and the Israeli Islamic Movement. Finally, on 21 May, Tibi withdrew his candidacy in the Knesset elections, calling on his partisans to vote for the Israel Labor Party. In the 1999 elections, Tibi ran again and was elected for what again became known as the Arab Movement for Change. In the 2001 elections, the AMC had two members, including Tibi. In 2002 Tibi and Azmi Bishara of the Democratic National Alliance (Balad) were prohibited from running in the next election on the grounds that they had supported “terrorists” by denouncing the Israeli assault on Jenin that spring; the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban shortly before the election in January 2003. The AMC ran in alliance with HADASH; the two parties won three seats, including one for Tibi and the AMC. SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Bishara, Azmi; Darawshe, Abdul Wahab; Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Israeli Islamic Movement.

ARAB NAME: In the Arab tradition—used by Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Arab world—a person’s name contains his or her patrilineal genealogy. In other words, the person’s given name is followed by that of his or her father and his father and his father, and so on. This list can often be ended with a family, tribal, or clan name or a nisba, a designation of the place the person is originally from. The ibn or bin (son of) or bint (daughter of) is part of this tradition. Palestinian political figure Hanan Ashrawi provides an example of the lineage revealed by the Arab name: “Hanan Daud Khalil Mikhail (Awwad)Ashrawi is my personal and collective narrative. I am Tenderness, the daughter of David, who is the son of Khalil (Abraham) from the family of Michael (also the name of an ancestor), which is of the clan of Awwad (the one who inevitably returns), which is one of the original seven clans who are the descendants of the seven founding fathers of the town [of Ramallah].”

ARAB NATIONALIST MOVEMENT (ANM; in Arabic, Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab): A political movement, the Arab Nationalist Movement was created at the beginning of the 1950s at the American University of Beirut. Its founders, among whom were George Habash and Hani al-Hindi, advocated an independent, regional Arab nationalism, socialist in ideology. In 1967, following the Arab defeat in the 1967 War, the ANM was dissolved, giving rise to the Popular

40

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), led by Habash. SEE ALSO Habash, George; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ARAB ORGANIZATION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS: Independent Arab international human rights organization, founded in Cyprus in 1983. The Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) seeks to defend the rights of individuals in the Arab world; endeavors, “regardless of political considerations, to obtain release of detained or imprisoned persons, and [seeks] relief and assistance for persons whose freedom is restricted in any way or who are subject to coercion of any kind because of their beliefs and political convictions, or for reasons of race, sex, colour, or language; protest[s] in cases where a fair trial is not guaranteed; provide[s] legal assistance where necessary and possible; call[s] for improvements in conditions of prisoners of conscience; work[s] for amnesty of persons sentenced for political reasons.” It offers both legal and financial assistance to families. It is a membership organization and is funded by contributions. The AOHR is affiliated with other nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists, Middle East Watch, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Its headquarters are in Cairo, Egypt. Its web site is available at www.aohr.org.

ARAB ORGANIZATION FOR THE RIGHTS OF MAN SEE

Haq, al-.

ARAB ORGANIZATION OF 15 MAY: Palestinian movement, created in November 1978, following a splinter in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations (PFLP-SO) that was provoked by Hussein al-Omari (Abu Ibrahim) after the death of Wadi Haddad. The name of this organization alludes to 15 May 1948, date of the start of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, following the creation of the State of Israel. Backed by Iraq, this movement proposed “pursuing the fight against imperialism, capitalism and Zionism.” Responsible for many attacks in the early 1980s, the AO-15 May (or Abu Ibrahim Group) stopped practically all activities toward the end of 1984. Specializing in actions involving booby-trapped briefcases, it was redoubtable for the technical expertise of its operatives. Some of its members joined the al-Fatah of Yasir Arafat, others the Fatah-Intifada of Abu Mussa. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAD, RON

SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Intifada (1987–1993); Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ARAB PALESTINE ORGANIZATION SEE

Organization of Arab Palestine.

ARABS: A Semitic language–speaking people who originated in the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs are referred to in inscriptions of other Middle Eastern cultures as early as the eighth century B.C.E. The word “Arab” may come from Araba, a little territory in the southern Hijaz, or from a Semitic root connoting nomadism. Pre-Islamic (to mid-seventh century C.E.) Arabs were adherents of various animistic or idolatrous cults, as well as of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. Starting in the eighth century C.E., successive Arab conquests incorporated most of Western Asia and North Africa, as well as Spain, Sicily, and parts of France, spreading Islam and absorbing indigenous peoples and languages. The Arabs became the teachers of the West, their mastery of astronomy, geography, medicine, and mathematics allowing Europeans to educate themselves in these domains. During almost six centuries, Arab supremacy in scientific, cultural, and political domains made Arabic the most widespread lingua franca in the world. The Arab empire disintegrated progressively, with the establishment of small independent kingdoms and with the advent of the Turkish Seljuks, who weakened the power of Baghdad. Three centuries later, the Mongols put an end to the Abbasid Caliphate. The Arab-language peoples entered then a period of decline until a movement of renaissance (al-Nahda) arose in the nineteenth century. This consciousness had already begun stirring at the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, which made the Arab world aware of the military and technological power of Europe. Reverting to themes that had been current in the thirteenth century, some Arab thinkers thought of an Islamic renaissance as a necessary return to sources. The Arab language, spoken in all Arab countries, though with regional dialects, became the focus of a polemic on Arab identity, culture, and history. After World War II, pro-independence Arab movements succeeded in prevailing politically, giving birth to new independent states. Today the term “Arab” refers (with a few exceptions) to the peoples of the Arabic-speaking countries, whatever their ethnic origins, and to the Arabs of the diaspora, mainly in Europe and North America. There are twenty-two D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

OLD AND NEW. A BEDOUIN MAN RIDES ON A CAMEL WHILE USING A MOBILE TELEPHONE IN ISRAEL IN 1994. EVEN PEOPLE AS FAR REMOVED FROM THE MODERN WORLD AS THESE NOMADIC ARAB DESERT DWELLERS HAVE FOUND THEIR TRADITIONAL LIFESTYLES INCREASINGLY ALTERED BY TECHNOLOGY. (© Moshe Shai/Corbis)

states in the League of Arab States, with an estimated 290 million inhabitants. SEE ALSO Abbasids; Islam; League of Arab States; Seljuks.

ARAB UNION PARTY: A party formed by Mustafa Khamis in 1996 when he broke from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC). Khamis supported the policies of Yasir Arafat. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ARAD, RON: Israeli soldier, born in 1958, who disappeared on 16 October 1986, during an air raid on South Lebanon, when his plane was shot down east of Sayda. He succeeded in ejecting and was taken prisoner by men belonging to the Amal ShiEite Movement. Despite rumors over the years that he is

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

41

ARAFAT, YASIR

alive, all trace of him has been lost. He has been reported to be held in Lebanon, by the Hizbullah, or in Iran. Campaigns on his behalf are regularly organized in Israel and Israel’s intelligence services have been assigned the mission of finding Arad’s place of detention. The kidnapping of Mustafa Dirani, one of the leaders of the AMAL Movement, by an Israeli command on 21 May 1994, aimed at finding out what happened to the Israeli pilot. Additionally, secret emissaries have often attempted to obtain information from the Iranian authorities about the missing airman. SEE ALSO AMAL; Hizbullah; South Lebanon.

ARAFAT, YASIR (1929–2004): Chairman of al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and president of the Palestinian Authority. Yasir Arafat was born on 24 August 1929 in Jerusalem, Cairo, or the Gaza Strip, depending on which biography is consulted. (Arafat’s full given name is Muhammad Abd al-RaDuf al-Arafat al-Qudwa; “Yasir” is a childhood nickname. He is widely known as al-lkhityar, “the Old Man.”) His father was a merchant from Gaza and belonged to the Qudwa family, a branch of the Hussayni clan. Bereft of his mother when he was four years old, Arafat was raised in Jerusalem by his maternal uncle, Salim Abu SaDid. Six years later he returned to Cairo to live with his father, who had married an Egyptian. While a student he joined the Union of Palestinian Students. In June 1948, during the first conflict between the forces of the new State of Israel and the Arab armies, he joined the ranks of Palestinian groups in Gaza, where he played a modest role. Back in Egypt after the Arab defeat, he became in 1952 secretary general of the Union of Palestinian Students for Egypt and Gaza. In that context, he became friendly with Khalil al-Wazir, Khalid al-Hasan, and Salah Khalaf. Along with these men, who had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat participated in the creation of the newspaper The Voice of Palestine. In 1955 he earned a degree in civil engineering from Cairo University, and was inducted into the Egyptian army in 1956 for the duration of the Suez War. Arafat left Egypt the following year for Kuwait, where he first worked for the Kuwaiti government and later established a construction business, all the while continuing to militate for the Palestinian cause. In December 1959, with al-Wazir, al-Hasan, Khalaf, and Faruq Qaddumi, he founded the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, al-Fatah, whose doctrine called for the liberation of Palestine

42

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

YASIR ARAFAT. THE HEAD OF THE PLO SINCE 1969 AND PRESIDENT PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY SINCE 1996, ARAFAT SURVIVED NUMEROUS MILITARY AND DIPLOMATIC FAILURES. HE WAS AWARDED A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE IN 1995, BUT ISRAELI ATTACKS IN RESPONSE TO THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA MADE HIM ESSENTIALLY A PRISONER IN HIS MUCH-REDUCED COMPOUND IN RAMALLAH. (AP/ Wide World Photos) OF THE

as distinct from Arab unity, the ostensible goal of the Arab states. In 1962, as soon as Algeria was independent, Arafat initiated contacts with the leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who became supporters of al-Fatah. After much internal debate, al-Fatah on 1 January 1965 mounted its first (failed) attack inside Israel, carried out by al-Asifa (Fatah’s military arm) led by Arafat under the nom de guerre of Abu Ammar (“[Father of] the Builder”). In 1966, with the cooperation of the Syrian government, al-Fatah launched some small-scale guerrilla attacks into Israel from that country, but Arafat was impatient with the restraints put on him by the Syrians, who jailed him at one point. The defeat of the Arab countries in the war of June 1967 led many Palestinians to join the ranks of al-Fatah. The success of the fida Diyyun (along with the Jordanian army) in T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARAFAT, YASIR

containing Israeli troops on 21 March 1968 at Karameh (Jordan) made Arafat the uncontested leader of the Palestinian resistance. On 4 February 1969, Arafat was elected president of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In October 1970, he became an undesirable in Jordan after the attempt to take power by the principal factions of the Palestinian resistance and the massacres of the Palestinians by Jordanian forces (Black September). Arafat established himself in Lebanon, where he continued his struggle against Israel. On 26 October 1974 the Arab League, at its summit in Rabat (Morocco), proclaimed the PLO “the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” On the following 13 November, invited by the United Nations to speak before the General Assembly, he was acclaimed by the delegates, except for the Israeli representatives, to whom he remarked: “I come carrying an olive branch and the rifle of a fighter for liberty; do not let the branch fall from my hand!” Established in Lebanon for almost fifteen years, the Palestinian resistance would come to constitute a veritable “state within a state,” discomfiting the Lebanese and Syrians as much as the Israelis. On 6 June 1982 the Israeli army launched a vast offensive against the Palestinians in Lebanon (Operation “Peace for Galilee”). After a number of confrontations with the Israelis— as well as with Lebanese militias, the Syrians, and other Palestinian factions—and abandoned on all sides, Arafat left Lebanon for the first time on 30 August 1982. In March 1983, he presided over the Second Session of the Seventh Summit of Non-aligned Countries, which was held in New Delhi, India. At the meeting he also held discussions with Syrian president Hafiz el-Asad, with whom relations had been cold since Arafat’s departure from Lebanon. After the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, he returned to Lebanon to stand by his supporters who had remained behind. Weakened militarily, and under powerful international pressure, Arafat agreed to leave Lebanon definitively with the PLO (20 December 1983), and to establish himself in Tunisia. But, in spite of the military defeat he had just suffered and his distance from the Israeli front, Arafat won a diplomatic victory through the approval of his action by the international community. Indeed, even before he left Lebanon, the Congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC), meeting in Algiers in February 1983, reelected him president of the executive committee of the PLO. The fact that elements of the Palestine movement belonged to the Socialist International D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

(SI) allowed the head of the PLO to broach a new diplomatic offensive, centered on the idea of the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation. On 1 October 1985, Arafat narrowly escaped death when his headquarters in Tunis was bombed by Israeli planes. In April 1988, while the Intifada persisted in the occupied territories, the assassination of Khalid al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), one of his close collaborators, in charge of operations in the occupied territories, isolated him further from the daily life of the Palestinians “from inside.” On 15 November 1988, at Arafat’s urging, the PNC, meeting in Algiers, issued a Proclamation of the State of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital, and elected Arafat its president. This proclamation was, in part, an attempt by Arafat to gain control of the Intifada. The PNC also voted a reform of the PLO charter, renouncing the use of terror and recognizing United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338 as a basis for an international peace conference. On 13 December 1988, Arafat gave a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, convening in Geneva, Switzerland, especially to hear him, in which he confirmed the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist and declared its renunciation of terrorism. These moves put the PLO in compliance with American conditions for discussions, which Arafat wanted, and the United States was prompted to call for a “substantive dialogue” with the PLO. By the beginning of 1990, opposition in the Palestinian movement between the “technocrats” in Tunis and the Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank had reached a boiling point. On 12 August 1990, ten days after Iraq invaded Kuwait—and in spite of the opposition of a majority of the members of al-Fatah and of the executive committee of the PLO—Arafat decided to support Iraq. In just a few days, the PLO and its leader lost the approval of the international community, as well as the financial backing of the Gulf countries. In January 1991, the assassination of his friend Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), in charge of security for al-Fatah, by a member of the Abu Nidal Group, increased this isolation. That October, the Madrid Peace Conference, under the sponsorship of the United States and the Soviet Union, encouraged Arafat to look for a compromise with Israel. Between 21 and 25 March 1992, at the meeting of the Revolutionary Council of al-Fatah in Tunis, Arafat faced severe criticism of his leadership. On 7 April the airplane in which he was traveling crashed in the Libyan desert. Found safe and sound, he was hospitalized in Amman, where he designated a triumvirate composed of Faruq Qaddumi, Khalid

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

43

ARAFAT, YASIR

al-Hasan, and Mahmud Abbas to lead the PLO in the interim. Emerging unhurt from this accident, Arafat strengthened his position as uncontested leader of the PLO. After the Israeli elections of June 1992 in which a Labor government headed by Yitzhak Rabin was returned, Arafat authorized secret talks with the Israelis, which were held in Norway. In February 1993 the formal negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords began; Arafat also kept these secret from most of the PLO leadership. The chief negotiator was Mahmud Abbas. During that spring, finding himself once more severely criticized by his closest collaborators, he was saved from discredit by the intensification of the Intifada in the occupied territories. On 9 September 1993, after months of secret negotiations, Arafat won one of his greatest political victories, recognition of the PLO by Israel, with the signature in Washington, D.C., on 13 September, of an IsraeliPalestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP) on provisional autonomy for the Palestinian territories. On this occasion, Arafat and Rabin exchanged a “historic” televised handshake before the entire world. On 4 May 1994, in Cairo, the two men signed an agreement on the application of Palestinian autonomy. On 1 July, Arafat left Tunis to settle in Gaza, from where he would direct the setting up of the provisional autonomy of the Palestinian territories, guaranteed by the Oslo Accords. That 14 October, together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize. In the spring of 1995, Arafat launched an appeal for national dialogue, in a vain effort to gain the support of all the Palestinian factions for the application of the Oslo Accords. On 20 January 1996, with more than 80 percent of the votes, Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which would be responsible for administering the partial autonomy of the Palestinian territories. The results of these elections strengthened his position in the context of negotiations with Israel on the final status of the territories. In May 1996, the coming to power in Israel of the leader of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, an opponent of the Oslo Accords, led to a stalling of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a period of several months. On 4 May 1999, in the middle of another Israeli election campaign, Arafat refrained from proclaiming the creation of a Palestinian state, as the Oslo Accords entitled him to do, to avoid encouraging the reelection of the leader of Likud. The failure on the ground of these agreements affected his credibility in the Palestinian population, particularly among the young of al-Fatah.

44

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

On 22 March 2000, Arafat welcomed Pope John Paul II, on pilgrimage to Bethlehem. During the course of the spring and the summer, he traveled to Europe and Asia, around the Middle East, and into Africa. In July, under the sponsorship of the United States, he participated in a mini-summit with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak (at Camp David), a meeting that was in principle aimed at coming to an agreement on the final status of the occupied territories. The conversations were interrupted because of the obstacle constituted by the question of Jerusalem. The following September, Arafat refrained once more from proclaiming the creation of the Palestinian State, this time not to hamper the actions of the leader of the Israeli government, whose political situation was very fragile. In September 2000 the al-Aqsa Intifada began. In January 2001, as it intensified and as both the Barak government and the Clinton administration were in their last days, Arafat accepted an invitation to travel to Washington for negotiations aimed at restarting the peace process. These also failed. A few weeks later, the coming to power of Ariel Sharon in Israel and the determination of young Palestinians to continue the Intifada once more blocked the situation. On 15 October 2001, a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States, while the Intifada was continuing in the occupied territories, Arafat went to London, where he talked with British prime minister Tony Blair, who reaffirmed his support for a “viable Palestinian state.” Referring to the American strikes in Afghanistan, the president of the Palestinian Authority declared that they were caused by “a war against terror and not by a war against Arabs, Muslims, or Islam.” Divided between the opinions he had expressed publicly and his need for Western backing of the Palestinian cause, Arafat lent his support to the United States for its military operation against the Taliban. At the beginning of December 2001, as the terrorist acts of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad against Israel were intensifying, Arafat was obliged to withdraw into his offices at Ramallah. The Israeli government decided to isolate him from his popular base by launching military attacks against the political structures of the Palestinian Authority as well as the economic infrastructure of the West Bank and Gaza. With the anti-Israel attacks continuing, the United States lent its support to the government of Ariel Sharon, while threatening to close the PLO offices in Washington. Arafat has essentially been a prisoner in his Ramallah compound (much reduced by Israeli attacks) ever since. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ARENS, MOSHE

In mid-October 2004, Arafat’s health, which had been slowly deteriorating for some time, became markedly worse. Increasingly weak with an unknown illness, on 29 October he was allowed to leave his compound in Ramallah for the first time since the Israeli assault in 2002 to seek medical help. Helicoptered by the Jordanian government to a waiting plane sent for him by French president Jacques Chirac, he was taken to a military hospital outside Paris specializing in blood disorders. The cause of his illness remained unknown in early November when he lapsed into a coma. He died on 11 November. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Barak, Ehud; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Hasan, Khalid al-; Intifada (1987– 1993); Khalaf, Salah; Madrid Conference; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Qaddumi, Faruq; Sharon, Ariel; Suez Crisis; Wazir, Khalil al-.

ARAMAIC: Northern Semitic language spoken mainly during antiquity. A language close to Hebrew and Phoenician, Aramaic also resembled Arabic. In its beginnings Aramaic was the language of nomadic tribes—referred to in Akkadian texts under the name of Ahlamou as early as the fourteenth century B.C.E.—who lived in Upper Mesopotamia, then in the territories of contemporary Syria and Lebanon. By the tenth century B.C.E., the Aramaeans had started creating small states, Bit-Adini and Damascus among them, which came into conflict with the Israelites and the Assyrians. In the third century C.E. Aramaic divided into two dialects: Eastern, or Syriac; and Western Aramaic, or the language of the Targum. Aramaic was spoken and written up to the seventh century C.E., when the Aramaeans were conquered and deported by the Arabs. According to Biblical tradition, Shem’s son Aram is the eponymous ancestor of the Aramaeans.

ARCHAEOLOGY: Since the nineteenth century, Palestinian archeology has been one of the major preoccupations of Jews, anxious to find in recent discoveries evidence to confirm Biblical writings. Jews and Muslims alike expect to find an answer to the question: “Who are the real inheritors of the Land of Palestine?” Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, archaeological discoveries have been thought by some to grant preemptory rights to descendants of the Biblical Hebrews over the Promised Land. Therefore, archaeology, considered a kind of national sport in Israel, has become a priority issue in national D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

THE SCROLL OF THE RULE. THESE FRAGMENTS—PART OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS—WERE WRITTEN IN ARAMAIC, WHICH SERVED AS A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR PEOPLES THROUGHOUT THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST (AMONG MANY OTHERS, IT WAS THE LANGUAGE OF JESUS). WITH THE RISE OF ISLAM, IT WAS SUPPLANTED BY ARABIC, THOUGH MODERN FORMS OF ARAMAIC ARE STILL IN USE TODAY. (© West Semitic Research/Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation/Corbis)

politics—both on the Israeli and on the Palestinian side—and, therefore, also plays an important role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. SEE ALSO Hebrew.

ARD

AL-MUQADDASA, AL-: Arabic term meaning “Holy Land” and used to designate Palestine.

ARENS, MOSHE (1925–): Israeli politician and cabinet minister. Born in Lithuania in 1925, Moshe Arens immigrated to the United States in 1939, then to Israel in 1948. He studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Arens was a professor of aeronautical engineering at Haifa University from 1959 to 1961, then served as vice president for engineering at Israeli Aircraft Industries from 1962 until 1971. First elected to the Knesset in 1974, he served as chairman of the foreign affairs and security committee from 1977 to 1982 and was considered a hawk regarding Israeli security. Arens served as ambassador to the United States from 1982 to 1983, then returned to Israel to replace Ariel Sharon as defense minister. In the National Unity government (1984–1986) Arens served as minister without portfolio, then from 1988 to 1990 was foreign minister. In 1990 he was again appointed minister of defense, serving until 1992, at

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

45

ARIF, ARIF AL-

Museum. He died in Jerusalem in 1973. Al-Arif was the author of a number of important histories, including TaDrikh Bir al-SabDa wa QabaDiliha (History of Beersheba and its tribes, 1934), TaDrikh Ghaza (History of Gaza, 1934), al-Mufassal fi TaDrikh alQuds (History of Jerusalem, 1934) and the sevenvolume TaDrikh al-Nakba (History of the disaster, 1956–1962).

ARIHA: Arabic name of the city of Jericho. SEE ALSO

Jericho.

ARKAN: Arabic term designating the five obligations (pillars) of the Muslim religion: profession of faith (shahada), prayer (salat), alms (zakat), fasting (ramadan), and pilgrimage (hajj). ASABIYA: The phenomenon of social solidarity in the Arab or Muslim community.

ASAD, BASHSHAR

MOSHE ARENS. A MEMBER OF THE ISRAELI KNESSET STARTING IN 1977, THE HAWKISH ARENS SERVED IN MANY GOVERNMENT POSTS SINCE THEN, INCLUDING AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES AND MINISTER OF DEFENSE.

which time he retired from political life. Arens returned to politics in 1999, serving once more as defense minister until 2002.

ARIF, ARIF AL- (1892–1973): Palestinian journalist, bureaucrat, and historian. Born in Jerusalem in 1892 and educated in Istanbul, Arif al-Arif worked briefly in the Ottoman foreign ministry. He served in the Ottoman army in World War I and was a prisoner of war in Siberia for two years. Arif returned to Jerusalem after the war and became editor of the Arab nationalist newspaper, Suriya al-Janubiyya, where he advocated Palestinian union with Syria. Sentenced to prison by the British in 1920, he went into exile in Syria and later Transjordan. After being pardoned, he became a civil administrator under the Mandate government and held a number of posts in Palestine and Transjordan. In 1948 the Transjordan government of King Abdullah I made him military governor of Ramallah in the West Bank, and from 1949 to 1955 he was mayor of East Jerusalem. In 1967 he became the director of the Palestinian Archaeological

46

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

AL- (1965– ): President of Syria since July 2000. The younger son of Hafiz al-Asad, Bashshar al-Asad was born 11 September 1965 in Damascus. After graduating from the College of Medicine of Damascus University in 1988, he practiced at the Military Hospital of Tekrin until 1992, when he left for Britain to pursue advanced studies in ophthalmology. On 21 January 1994, his older brother Basil, presumed successor of President Hafiz al-Asad, was killed in an automobile accident. At the request of his father, Bashshar returned to Syria. He joined the army as a medical officer with the rank of captain, but soon renounced his career in medicine to undergo military staff and command training in preparation to succeed his father. He became a major in 1995, a lieutenant colonel on graduating the general staff school in 1997, and a full colonel in 1999 when he became a brigade commander in the elite Republican Guard. He became chairman of the Syrian Information Technology Company, from which position he introduced personal computers, the Internet, and cell phones into Syria. During the last two years of Hafiz al-Asad’s life, when his health was failing, “Dr. Bashshar,” as he was known, was increasingly involved in political decision making. He was given responsibility for the Lebanese and Golan Heights issues, the latter the principal obstacle to Syrian-Israeli peace, and he moved, with his father’s help, to neutralize political support for his uncle, Hafiz al-Asad’s brother RifEat, a major political figure who commanded the loyalty of many within the regime. (On 8 February 1998,

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ASAD, HAFIZ AL-

BASHSHAR AL-ASAD. THE BAETH PARTY LEADER AND COMMANDERIN-CHIEF OF THE SYRIAN ARMED FORCES SUCCEEDED HIS FATHER, HAFIZ AL-ASAD, AS PRESIDENT OF SYRIA IN JULY 2000, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-FOUR. SINCE THEN, HE HAS INSTITUTED LIMITED ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND SOCIAL REFORMS IN HIS COUNTRY. (AP/Wide World Photos)

Hafiz al-Asad abolished the office of vice president, which RifEat had held.) At the same time Bashshar launched a campaign against corruption aimed at certain powerful figures. In late 1999 Bashshar alAsad undertook a visit to a number of Gulf states and to France, in an effort to become better known on the international scene. On 10 June 2000, the day Hafiz al-Asad died, Parliament reduced from 40 to 34 years the minimum age for the highest office, thereby making possible Bashshar al-Asad’s presidency. The next day he was promoted to lieutenant general and named commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and on 20 June he became secretary general of the BaEth Party. On 27 June, seventeen days after the death of his father, Bashshar al-Asad was designated unanimously by the People’s Assembly as candidate for the presidency of the Republic. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

On 11 July, with more than 97 percent of the votes, he became president. Desiring to undertake a liberalization of Syrian society without, in so doing, renouncing the attainments of the past, he surrounded himself with advisors of his generation, some of whom had ties to his own family, while others were close collaborators of his father. In the first year of his rule he began an ambitious program of economic and administrative reform and a limited program of political and social liberalization: He suspended emergency laws, released some political prisoners, lightened censorship, allowed the creation of independent political parties and newspapers, and generally ruled Syria with a lighter hand than his father. He has since felt it necessary to be more cautious about alienating the “old guard” in the party and the military. He has made efforts to reinforce Syria’s ties with its Arab neighbors, notably Iraq (before the U.S.-Iraq war of 2003), Iran, and the Gulf states, and has made a number of foreign visits, including one to France in June 2001. Bashshar al-Asad has been less inclined to interfere in Lebanon, although Syrian troops remain, and he continues to support the Lebanese Hizbullah, a major Lebanese religious movement/militia/political party regarded by Washington as a terrorist organization. Since the September 2001 attacks on the United States, his regime has supplied useful intelligence information to Washington but opposed the war in Iraq. Syrian relations with Israel have been frozen since the failure of the Wye negotiations and the radicalization of Israeli and American policies toward the Palestinians. SEE ALSO Asad, Hafiz al-; BaEth; Syria.

ASAD, HAFIZ AL- (1930–2000): Syrian military figure and head of state, born in October 1930 at Khardaha, an Alawite fief in the north of Syria. Hafiz al-Asad joined the BaEth Party in 1948. Three years later, after having been president of the Congress of the Syrian Student Union, he entered the Homs Military School where he became friends with Mustafa Tlas, Muhammad Omran, and Saleh Jedid, with whom he formed a clandestine BaEth Party cell. He graduated a fighter pilot and continued his training in the USSR and Egypt. He was promoted to the rank of general in 1963. On 2 December 1964, a year after the BaEth Party had taken power in Syria, he became commander of the Syrian Air Force, and he was later elected to the leadership of the National BaEth Party. In February 1966, while his friends Nur al-Din al-Atasi and Saleh Jedid were in power, al-Asad became defense minister. His chief of staff was his

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

47

ASAD, HAFIZ AL-

friend General Tlas. Distancing himself from Jedid’s political positions, al-Asad, as the leader of the “military” branch of the BaEth Party, supported a pragmatic kind of socialism. On 7 September 1966, backed up by his brother RifEat, commander of an armored division, and by General Tlas, he thwarted a coup attempt organized by Selim Hatoum. On 24 December al-Asad narrowly escaped an attempt on his life. At the end of the War of 1967, the Israeli Army occupation of the Golan Heights caused a faction in the Syrian Army. Hafiz al-Asad began to broadcast his opposition to the government. Even though a new government had been in power for only a few months, on 20 September 1970 he refused to supply air cover to Syrian armored units that were attempting to come to the rescue of Palestinians who were confronted by Jordanian forces. On 13 November of the same year, he took power through force following the resignation of the Syrian government. Two days later, Ahmed Khatib became president of the Syrian state, and he named al-Asad prime minister. In February 1971, he was appointed to the People’s Council and became secretary general of the BaEth Party. On 12 March, he was elected president of the Arab Republic of Syria. To lead his country al-Asad would depend on the army, the security services, the BaEth Party, the Alawite community, and his family clan. He named his brother, RifEat, head of the Brigades for the Defense of the Revolution, responsible for the security of the regime. The economic policies that President Asad started carrying out involved nationalizations tinged with realistic socialism, while striving in vain to achieve strategic military parity with Israel. Between 1972 and 1977 he attempted to reestablish relations with Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In October 1973, he backed Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in beginning the war with Israel (known as the 1973 War or the Yom Kippur War), which ended with Israel consolidating its occupation of the Golan Heights. In June 1976, as the civil war just broke out in Lebanon, the intervention of the Syrian Army in that country was approved by the Arab Summit of Cairo. Such support conferred upon al-Asad the right to interfere in Lebanese affairs. In December 1977, he joined the ranks of the Refusal Front, opposed to the Egyptian initiative for peace with Israel. In October 1980, two years after his reelection as president, he signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union. In January of 1982 Syrian Intelligence thwarted a coup attempt organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. RifEat al-Asad led a merciless repression, causing more than twenty thousand

48

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

deaths. In November 1983 health problems momentarily removed Hafiz al-Asad from leadership of the country. Government continuity was assured by a triumvirate that included RifEat, who tried to seize power. Back in office, Hafiz al-Asad disbanded a number of associations, including Al-Murtada, led by his other brother, Jamil, and he reorganized the command of the special forces, headed by RifEat, whom he forced into exile in France in 1984. In February 1985, Hafiz al-Asad was reelected president of Syria. Henceforward, he pushed his elder son, Basil, to take a prominent place on the political scene, so as to assure his succession. At the same time he undertook a series of political and economic reforms to help make the country more stable and also for the purpose of obtaining developmental aid from the West. In 1990–1991, in the context of the Gulf War, the participation of Syria in the antiIraq coalition allowed him to consolidate his place as necessary interlocutor in the Middle East. In November 1991, he accepted an invitation to participate in a peace conference, organized at Madrid. However, his ideas of a global peace, based on the restitution of the territories occupied by Israel, collided with Israeli intransigence. In September 1993, alAsad denounced the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (signed in Washington), arguing that peace with Israel could only be realized in the context of a global agreement with all concerned Arab countries. In 1994, after the accidental death of Basil, he decided to impose his second son, Bashshar al-Asad, as his successor at the head of the country. On 10 September, two days after Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin proposed a “partial” withdrawal from the Golan Heights, al-Asad affirmed that his country was ready to accept “the objective imperatives of peace” in the Middle East, all the while reiterating his insistence on a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. The following October, he received a visit from American president Bill Clinton. Between 1995 and 1997, in an effort to consolidate the future power base for his son, al-Asad proceeded to make new appointments to various ministries. In April 1996, after Israel launched its operation “Grapes of Wrath,” he became the principal interlocutor in the negotiations that resulted in a cease-fire between Hizbullah and Israel. On 3 June, he traveled to Egypt, where he met with President Mubarak, at the same time that the leader of Likud had come to power in Israel. On 3 August he received King Hussein of Jordan, making official the restart of Syrian-Jordanian relations that had been interrupted after the peace agreement was signed two T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ASHRAWI, HANAN DAOUDA

years earlier between Jordan and Israel. On 31 July 1997, as regional tension ran high due to the stalling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Hafiz al-Asad made an official visit to Tehran, for the purpose of reinforcing Iranian-Syrian cooperation. On 8 February 1998, in the context of his succession, he signed a decree abolishing the office of vice president, which had been filled by RifEat, thus eliminating the potential for a sudden change of regime. On 11 February 1999, as sole candidate to his own succession, he was reelected for a fifth seven-year term. On 5 July, he traveled to Moscow to negotiate new arms contracts for Syria with the Russian authorities. On 25 March 2000, he went to Geneva, where he met with President Clinton, with whom he discussed the Israeli-Arab peace process. On 10 June 2000, Hafiz al-Asad died following a reign of thirty years over an exceptionally stable but economically fragile Syria. On 11 July, Bashshar succeeded him as leader of the Syrian State. SEE ALSO Alawite; Arab-Israel War (1967); ArabIsrael War (1973); Golan Heights; Grapes of Wrath Operation; Gulf War (1991); Hizbullah; Muslim Brotherhood; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sadat, Anwar al-; Tlas, Mustafa.

ASFUR, HASAN (1950– ): Palestinian political figure. Hasan Asfur was born in 1950 at Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He studied agriculture in Baghdad, where he earned an engineering degree. Later he went to Moscow to study Marxist philosophy. After the Arab-Israel War of 1967 (“Six-Day War”), he took refuge in Jordan, where he joined the Palestinian Communist Party. In 1979 he rejoined the ranks of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon and became a member of al-Fatah. Forced to leave by the Israeli invasion of June 1982, he took refuge in Syria for two years. In 1984 Asfur became a member of the Palestinian leadership, headquartered in Tunis, where he was associated with the economic section of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), directed by Ahmad Qurai (Abu Ala). A few years later Asfur was part of the group responsible for negotiations with Israel and participated, alongside Mahmud Abbas, in the secret Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Oslo, which led to the Israeli-Palestinian agreements signed on 13 September 1993, in Washington, D.C. In June 1994 he was expelled from the Central Committee of the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), after having been named as head of the department responsible for negotiations with Israel. On 1 July of that year, in the framework of the application of autonomy in Palestinian territories, Asfur left Tunis for D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Gaza, where he became part of Yasir Arafat’s entourage. In August 1998 he was named minister without portfolio of the Palestinian Authority (PA), responsible for relations with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and in July 1999 minister for NGO Affairs. This position was eliminated in June 2002 when the cabinet was reorganized, but Asfur remained as the head of the PA Commission on NGO Affairs. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Fatah, al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman.

ASHKENAZI: Name used in the Bible to designate Noah’s great grandson, and subsequently, in Talmudic writings, Germania, or more exactly, Lotharingia (modern Lorraine). By extension, this term designates a Jew from a European country, principally central Europe. First inhabiting Flanders and the Rhine Valley, the Ashkenazi Jews emigrated progressively toward eastern Europe, in particular toward Poland. The difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, other than their geographic origin, is based mainly on their pronunciation of Hebrew, on their utilization of different forms of a separate language, Yiddish, and in their liturgical rituals and songs. In most countries where there is a Jewish community, there are Ashkenazi synagogues and Sephardic synagogues. The Ashkenazim have become the dominant ethno-cultural group of modern Judaism, and it is they who have propagated the ideals of Zionism. The first waves of immigration into Palestine were comprised mainly of Ashkenazim. One of the main causes for dissension among Israelis is the opposition that exists between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, the latter reproaching the former their control of the country. SEE ALSO Sephardim. ASHRAWI, HANAN DAOUDA (1949– ): Palestinian academic and political figure. Hanan Ashrawi was born in 1949 in Ramallah. After studying at the American University in Beirut and completing a Ph.D. in the United States, she became a professor of English literature and dean of the Faculty of Letters of Birzeit University (West Bank). In 1970 she founded a support group for Palestinians faced with difficulties with the Israeli administration. Her name became widely known in April 1988, after she participated in a televised debate on the situation in the occupied territories. Because of her opinions and her supposed affiliation with al-Fatah, Ashrawi was questioned several times by Israeli authorities. On 8 May 1991,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

49

ASHURA

HANAN DAOUDA ASHRAWI. THE PALESTINIAN ACTIVIST, WHO WAS PALESTINIAN LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL IN 1996, HAS SPOKEN OUT WIDELY ON HUMAN RIGHTS, EDUCATION, AND OTHER ISSUES AS THEY AFFECT PALESTINIANS. (AP/Wide World Photos)

FIRST ELECTED TO THE

she and Faysal al-Husayni met with Douglas Hurd, British secretary of the Foreign Office. The following September she became spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the peace process, specifically in charge of relations with Israel. In this capacity, she participated in the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, and in the negotiations that followed. On 8 August 1993, along with Faysal al-Husayni and Saib Erekat—who were also opposed to Yasir Arafat’s strategy—she threatened to quit her position on the Palestinian delegation. In September, after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP), she carried out her threat and pledged to devote herself to the defense of human rights in the Palestinian territories. In May 1994 Ashrawi declined Arafat’s offer to join the Palestinian Authority (PA). The following month she founded the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights (PICCR). On 20 January 1996, with the first universal-suffrage Palestinian elections in the autonomous territories, she won a seat as Jerusalem representative on the new Palestinian Legislative Council, where she became president of the Political Committee. The following

50

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

June, she accepted the portfolio of higher education on the PA. That October, she petitioned European countries to assume a more active role in the peace process in the Middle East. In February 1997, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded her the PalestineHamshari Prize for her book Palestine Israel: Peace Seen from Inside. On 6 August 1998, after being named minister of tourism and archeology despite her wish to keep the portfolio of higher education, she quit the PA. Before resigning, she presided over the Bethlehem 2000 Committee. In 1999, after having retaken her seat on the Palestinian Legislative Council, she started a campaign for “institutional, structural, and political” reform. In parallel, she created a platform designed to promote dialogue between Palestinians and the international community (MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy). In July 2001, at the request of Amr Musa, the secretary general of the League of Arab States, Ashwari accepted the post of information counselor to the organization, one of the new positions created by the League to be held by influential Arab figures. SEE ALSO Erekat, Saib Muhammad; Husayni, Faysal al-; League of Arab States; Palestinian Authority.

ASHURA: Muslim holiday celebrating the tenth day of the Islamic year (the tenth of Moharram) to commemorate the death of Husayn, grandson of Prophet Muhammad. On this occasion the ShiEa devote themselves to acts of repentance, while the Sunnis celebrate this anniversary with joy, because for the latter this festival coincides with the meeting of Adam and Eve and the end of the Deluge. At the time of the beginning of Islam, this day was marked by a fast, inspired by Jewish traditions. SEE ALSO ShiEite; Sunni Islam. ASIFA, AL- (“The Storm”): The military branch of alFatah. SEE ALSO

Fatah, al-.

ASKIN, AVIGDOR SEE

Kach Party.

ASLAN, ALI SHAKER (1936– ): Syrian Alawite, born in 1936 in the Ladhiqiyah region. Ali Aslan chose a military career when he was twenty years old. Trained at the Military Academy of Homs (Syria), he T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ASSOCIATION OF FORTY

of the Central Committee of the BaEth Party, with a reputation for intelligence, Ali Aslan was a powerful member of the BaEth “old guard” and a member of the inner circle of President Hafiz al-Asad. After alAsad’s death in June 2000, Aslan was retained in his post by al-Asad’s son and successor, Bashshar alAsad. In January 2002, he was retired as part of the younger Asad’s program of reform. SEE ALSO Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; BaEth; Jumayyil, Bashir; Shihabi, Hikmat al-.

SELF-FLAGELLATION RITUAL. A SHIEITE MUSLIM IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, WHIPS HIS BACK WITH KNIVES ATTACHED TO CHAINS AS AN ACT OF REPENTANCE ON THE HOLIEST DAY FOR SHIEITES, ASHURA, THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF HUSAYN, GRANDSON OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD. (AP/Wide World Photos)

ASSASSINS: Possibly from the Arabic hashshasheen, designating a smoker of hemp (hashish, in Arabic). This name was given in the Middle Ages by the European Crusaders to adepts of the Nizari branch of the IsmaEili sect settled in the Syrian mountains. The members of this ShiEite sect swore absolute obedience to their leader, Rashid al-Din Sinan, called “The Old Man of the Mountain,” who led a revolt against Seljuk power in 1090. This secret society, created by Hasan al-Sabah, included a special group composed of fida Di, who are alleged to have used hashish as a stimulant during incantatory rituals or for the accomplishment of dangerous missions. SEE ALSO Ismaili; Seljuks. ASSEFAT HA-NIVHRARIM SEE

VaEad LeuDmi.

ASSOCIATION FOR ISLAMIC LIBERATION studied also in the Soviet Union. In October 1966, he was appointed commander of the Syrian Infantry Eighth Brigade. In November 1970, he supported the military coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power in Syria. In 1973, he was designated leader of the First and Fifth Divisions. Two years later, he became chief of the “operations” bureau of the Syrian Army General Staff. From 1976 to 1979, he was in charge of the Syrian contingent based in Lebanon, supervising the “hundred days war” against the Christian militia of Bashir Jumayyil. Aslan was one of the principal Syrian interlocutors with the Soviet defense minister. In July 1984, promoted to lieutenant general, he was appointed commander of the Army Second Corps. In 1989 he was named assistant chief of staff of the Syrian Army. After he assumed this post, he was considered the true “operational boss” of the Syrian Army. In July 1998, he became army chief of staff, replacing General Hikmat al-Shihabi, who retired after twenty-four years in this position. A member D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

Islamic Liberation Organization.

ASSOCIATION OF FORTY: Civic association, founded in 1988, that represents “unrecognized” Palestinian villages in Israel. Unrecognized villages are those the Israeli government does not recognize as legal, even though most of them existed before the establishment of the State of Israel. The government refers to them as “scattered settlements.” They lack all basic services and infrastructure, including access roads, water, sewage, electricity, schools, and municipal services. The government has classified them all as “agricultural land”; it has no development planned for them and all construction is illegal. When the inhabitants (who are all Israeli citizens) have attempted to create infrastructure or services for themselves, the government has responded with demolitions and evacuation orders; the residents are considered to have “stolen land from the state.” A 1988 survey found 32 unrecognized villages in the north and 117 in the south, largely in the Negev, with a total population of about 75,000. The Association of Forty,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

51

ASSYRIANS

founded by a group of residents of the villages (and a number of their Jewish Israeli neighbors), attempts to achieve recognition of these places, to promote the provision of basic services, and to claim full citizenship rights for their inhabitants. They do this through providing legal services, through parliamentary lobbying, and through organizing activities to protest government land confiscations. The association has also helped initiate and plan projects to pave roads and connect villages to water, electricity, and telephone networks, and it has established health clinics and kindergartens. It attempts to publicize the problem of the unrecognized villages through exhibitions and local and international conferences. The association publishes a monthly newspaper, Sawt alQura (Voice of the villages). The association is a member of al-Ittijah and has worked with other nongovernmental organizations. The association maintains a web site at www.assoc40.0rg. SEE ALSO Ittijah.

ASSYRIANS: Name of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization (1800–600 B.C.E.), also attributed in the nineteenth century to Nestorian Christians living notably in Iraq and Turkey and having Aramaic as their native and liturgical language. Having been subjected to the same genocidal policies as the Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire, numbers of them fled to Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, particularly Jerusalem. The Assyrians in Jerusalem (Syriani, in Arabic) have their own church and have enjoyed a longstanding community there.

posed to the policies of then-prime minister and leader of the party, Benjamin Netanyahu. Officially formed on 11 January 1998, its major leader has been Roni Milo, flanked officially by Beni Begin, Limor Livnat, Dan Meridor, Ron Peer, and Ehud Olmert. The organization’s ambition was to become a centrist party. The announcement in December 1998 of early general elections did not allow this project to be realized, since some of its members chose to join the ranks of the new Center Party or to create their own. SEE ALSO Center Party; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin.

AUDEH, MUHAMMAD DAOUD SEE

Odeh, Muhammad.

AV: Eleventh month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of July and the beginning of August. The destruction of the Temple of Solomon is commemorated on the ninth of Av (Tish Da b-Av). SEE ALSO Hebrew Calendar.

AVANT-GARDE OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR OF LIBERATION SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

AVANT-GARDE ORGANIZATION OF POPULAR WAR OF LIBERATION SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

AVANT-GARDES OF THE CONQUEST ATERET COHANIM (“Priests’ Crowns,” in Hebrew): Israeli association (as well as a yeshiva) created in 1978, politically close to the far right, that upholds the Jewishness of the Arab section of Jerusalem. It is supported by the American association Hashavat Yerushalaim. Since the end of the 1980s, Ateret Cohanim has been buying up numerous buildings in this part of the city, through financing provided by the American billionaire Irving Moskowitz. The association also promotes the project of reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple on Haram al-Sharif, which would involve destroying the mosques that are there. SEE ALSO Haram al-Sharif; Jerusalem.

ATID (“future,” in Hebrew): Israeli political organization whose creation was announced on 28 November 1997 by several Likud members who were op-

52

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE

Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

AVNERY, URI (1923– ): Israeli writer, politician, and peace activist. Born in 1923 as Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany, Avnery immigrated to Mandatory Palestine when he was ten years old. He joined the Irgun ZvaDi LeDumi in 1938 but left several years later, opposing its anti-Arab ideology. He fought in the Arab-Israel War of 1948, and later wrote two successful books that were critical of the war. Avnery owned and edited the controversial magazine ha-Olam ha-Zeh. In 1965 he established a political party named after the magazine, winning two seats in the Knesset. He served in the Knesset for ten successive years, except for one term. Following the Arab-Israel War of 1967, Avnery became a prominent leader of the peace movement. He has advocated recognition of the Palestine LiberT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

AZHAR, AL-

ation Organization (PLO) and the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. In defiance of Israel’s ban, he met with PLO representatives (with SaEid Hamami in London, then Issam Sartawi in Paris) and then with Yasir Arafat. After the Oslo Accords (1993), Avnery founded Gush Shalom (Bloc for Peace). The group campaigns for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, dismantling of Jewish settlements there, and the creation of “two states for two nations.” Avnery writes a newspaper column and maintains a web site called “Avnery News.” SEE ALSO Oslo Accords; Sartawi, Issam.

AVODA ZARA (“idolatry,” in Hebrew): Idolatry is considered one of the most serious sins in Jewish religious law. AWDAH, AL- (Arabic, “return”): A term often used by Palestinians as a sign of defiance and hope. There is an al-Awdah mosque in the refugee camp at Rafah, and an al-Awdah hospital in the refugee camp at Jabaliya, both in the Gaza Strip. In January 1992, during the first Intifada, more than 400 alleged sympathizers of HAMAS were expelled by Israel from the occupied territories to the no-man’s land beyond the Lebanese border. The Israelis assumed they would proceed into Lebanon and exile, but instead they set up a camp in full view of the world’s media and stayed there for months. They named their camp “alAwdah.” A U.S.-based activist group that advocates for Palestinian rights is called Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition. SEE ALSO HAMAS; Intifada (1987–1993). AWDAH, AL- (The return): Palestinian weekly magazine, published in East Jerusalem, started in 1982, politically close to the PLO. Run by Raymonda Tawil, who has also headed the Palestinian Press Agency (PPA) and whose daughter, Suha, is married to Yasir Arafat, this newspaper has been the object of much censure by the Israeli authorities. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Palestine Liberation Organization; Tawil, Raymonda Hawa.

AWILIYA: Plural of the Arabic word wali, which means “friend, dear one.” As a Wali Allah, someone is a companion of God. The term has come to designate a saint or holy man. The large number of tombs of awliya in Palestine (e.g., Nabi Rubin) have become an important part of folk religion. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

AYAT (Aya, “divine sign,” in Arabic): The verses of the QurDan.

AYATOLLAH (“designated by God,” in Arabic): High-

est rank in the ShiEite hierarchy, which itself is commanded by the Great Ayatollah (Ayatollah Uzma).

AYN EL-HILWAH (Ein el-Helweh): A camp for Palestinian refugees in South Lebanon, located 3 kilometers east of the coastal city of Sidon (Sayda). Set up in 1949 by the International Red Cross following the first Palestinian exodus, it became one of the largest and most populated of the Palestinian camps. Until 1952, housing was in tents; then, fabric was replaced with concrete buildings, transforming the camp into a true city. From 1970 on, Ayn el-Hilwah has been one of the most important bastions of Palestinian resistance in Lebanon, and diverse organizations rub shoulders there, some of which are opposed to the peace process. Camp security is the responsibility of Palestinian groups themselves. SEE ALSO South Lebanon.

AYN JALUT: Locality near contemporary Nazareth where, in September 1260, a battle took place that allowed the Mamluks of Egypt to repulse a Mongol army. SEE ALSO Mamluks. AYYAM, AL- (The days): Palestinian daily newspaper, published in Ramallah, considered the mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority. SEE ALSO Palestinian Authority.

AZHAR, AL- (“The Brilliant” or “Resplendent,” in Arabic): This name is given to the Great Mosque, opened in Cairo in 972, which has since become one of the most important centers of Islamic teaching. In 988 a college was started there to propagate the faith among the Egyptian population. In 1005, the teaching program expanded to include philosophy, astronomy, and chemistry, which enhanced its reputation. In the twelfth century the Mamluks came to power in Egypt and created a university at the mosque for the purpose of training ulema. Al-Azhar served as the main college for religious education among Palestinians, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1961, President Gamal Abdel Nasser transformed the religious college into a multidisciplinary university. Directed by the Great Imam Muhammad Sayed Tantaoui in 2004, Al-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

53

AZYME

Azhar Mosque is the home of a university with fiftytwo schools that welcome almost 140,000 students. SEE ALSO Mamluks.

AZYME Unleavened bread (matzah): Used in the Jewish diet.

54

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

B BAAL (Semitic, ba’al; “master, lord”): Main Canaanite divinity, whose cult is that of fertility, similar to the goddess Astarte (Ashtart, Asherah, Tanit), thought of as the wife of Baal and called also Baalat. Mountain, storm, and rain god for the Phoenicians, Baal represented a great danger for the Israelite head priests and their religion because many of their coreligionists were drawn to his cult. For example, Jews worshipped (especially at Sichem) another Canaanite divinity, Baal Berith (in Hebrew, “master of the covenant”), who presided over compacts between families and individuals. Between 860 and 853 B.C.E., the king of Israel, Ahab, and his wife Jezebel worshipped the god Baal. The main center of the Baal cult was in the Lebanese city of Baalbek. The term baal is used in the Bible to designate false gods. BAB: Arab word meaning “door.” In early ShiEism this name was given to the highest ranked of the disciples of an Imam. SEE ALSO Imam. BABISM SEE

BahaDi.

BADR OPERATION: Military operation launched on 6 October 1973 by Egypt and Syria against Israel. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973).

BAGHDAD PACT: A U.S.-sponsored Cold War cooperation accord, the Baghdad Pact was signed on 4 February 1955 at Baghdad between Iraq and Turkey, later joined by other states, such as Great Britain, on 4 April; Pakistan, on 1 July; and Iran, on 23 October. The resulting security organization, officially instituted 15 April 1955, was called the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO). The Baghdad Pact was preceded by the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO), created in 1950 as the “supreme allied command in the Middle East” and comprising the United States, Great Britain, France, and Turkey. This organization eventually failed because of the refusal of Egypt to join. MEDO was headquartered in the Suez Canal Zone, then controlled by Britain; later, President Gamal Abdel Nasser was determined to keep Egypt nonaligned in the Cold War. A U.S.Pakistani defense accord had been signed in May 1950, and Turkey had joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in May 1951. After the disintegration of MEDO, the United States turned toward Iraq and Turkey, but was unable to obtain the adhesion of Syria, Lebanon, or Jordan. A bilateral accord was signed on 2 April 1954 between Turkey and Pakistan, and the Baghdad Pact followed the next year. On 16 April 1955 the Soviet Union published a communiqué denouncing the Baghdad Pact, which it deemed “aggressive.” On 27 September, the Soviet Union, with Czechoslovakia as intermediary, decid-

55

BAGOT, JOHN

belonging to the Arab League, passed a resolution stating that the Middle East should not become part of the quarrel between the United States and the Soviet Union. In March 1959 Iraq formally withdrew from the Baghdad Pact; METO was formally replaced on 19 August 1959 by the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Iran repudiated CENTO after the Islamic Revolution, withdrawing in March 1979; Pakistan also withdrew, and the organization was dissolved in September of that year. SEE ALSO Middle East Defense Organization.

BAGOT, JOHN SEE

BAAL WITH A LANCE. THE IMAGE REPRESENTS THE PRIMARY CANAANITE DIVINITY; HIS FERTILITY CULT ATTRACTED MANY ANCIENT ISRAELITES, INCLUDING

KING AHAB AND HIS WIFE JEZEBEL.

(© Gianni Dagli

Orti/Corbis)

ed to deliver Soviet armament to Egypt. On 11 February 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the United Nations General Assembly by insisting on a debate on the “danger to peace posed by the U.S. initiative in its foreign policy in the Middle East.” On 7 March, the U.S. Congress gave President Dwight D. Eisenhower the right to “use the armed forces” on behalf of any Middle East nation which “asked for help against armed aggression from a country controlled by international Communism.” On 19 June, meeting in Ankara, the Iraqi, Iranian, and Turkish prime ministers agreed on a statement that “the policy of President Eisenhower towards the Middle East comports a recognition of the danger posed by Communist aggression and subversion in the area.” On 14 July 1958, a coup d’état having overthrown the Iraqi monarchy, the previous accords were rejected by the new government. On 21 August, the United Nations General Assembly, acting on a proposal of countries

56

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Glubb, John Bagot.

BAHADI: Muslim sect, originated in the nineteenth century from a scission that appeared in Twelver Islam, whose credo it is that all religions come from the same divine source. In 1844, in Persia, Mirza Ali Muhammad (called el-Bab), who represented himself as “the door” (bab, in Arabic) of divine truth, was recognized by his followers as the Mahdi (Messiah). He was executed by the Persian authorities in 1850, but one of his disciples, Mirza Hosayn Ali Nuri (Baha Dullah), took up his message in The Very Holy Book (Kitab-I-Aqdas). In the letters of invitation that he sent to the principal leaders of European states, Nuri invited them to join with him to “establish universal religion and peace.” Later, expelled from Persia, Mirza Hosayn Ali Nuri took refuge in Acre (Palestine), where he died on 29 May 1892. His son, AbduDl-Baha (Abbas Efendi), succeeded him as the head of the movement until his death in 1921. BahaDism venerates all the prophets of the great religions and preaches a syncretic religion, which has spread widely, especially to the United States and India. The BahaDi religion enjoys a presence in Israel and its world headquarters is in Haifa, where its founder is buried. The BahaDi calendar is based on the solar year and includes nineteen months of nineteen days each. The BahaDi celebrate their new year (Nowrouz) on 21 March. SEE ALSO Mahdi; Messiah. BAHURIM: Hebrew term meaning “Yeshiva students.” SEE ALSO

Yeshiva.

BAKER PLAN: A five-point plan, presented in November 1989 by U.S. secretary of state James Baker, in an attempt to facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. In September, Egypt and Israel had discussed several T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BALFOUR DECLARATION

JAMES BAKER. THE U.S.

SECRETARY OF STATE UNDER THE FIRST

PRESIDENT BUSH PROPOSED A FIVE-POINT PLAN IN 1989

FOR DIALOGUE BE-

TWEEN ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN DELEGATIONS, BUT THE NEW ISRAELI GOVERNMENT OF PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK SHAMIR REJECTED THE INITIATIVE IN MID-1990. (© Dick Moreno/Corbis)

peace proposals that foundered over the issue of participation by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Baker’s five-point plan proposed that an Israeli delegation conduct a dialogue with a Palestinian delegation in Cairo; that Egypt consult with the Palestinians on all aspects of the dialogue; that Israel attend the dialogue only after a satisfactory list of Palestinians had been established; that Israel’s participation would be based on its 14 May initiative regarding elections and negotiations concerning the West Bank and Gaza; and that the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt, and the United States meet to facilitate the process. Israel’s National Unity government fell in March 1990 in a vote of no confidence precipitated by disagreement over the Baker initiative. In June 1990, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir formed a new government, which rejected the Baker Plan. SEE ALSO

Gaza Strip; West Bank.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BALAD SEE

Democratic National Alliance.

BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES (1848–1930): British political figure, born in Scotland. Elected as a Conservative deputy in 1874, his political beginnings were facilitated by family connections with Lord Salisbury, who entrusted him with the office for Ireland from 1887 to 1892. Leader of the Conservatives in the House of Commons, he was prime minister between 1902 and 1905. In 1917 he was named foreign minister. On 2 November of the same year he wrote a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, representing the Jewish Community of Great Britain, in which he proposed the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, in the name of His Majesty’s government.

BALFOUR DECLARATION: A letter dated 2 November 1917, the Balfour Declaration was sent by Lord Ar-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

57

BANDUNG CONFERENCE

the support of British and American Jews, thereby gaining Jewish money for Britain’s war effort and benefiting from Jewish pressure on the United States to enter the war. In addition, Liberals like Balfour believed that the West had allowed historical injustices against the Jews and should now assist them, and prominent Jewish intellectuals in Britain were advocating for a Jewish State. The Balfour policy had long-term consequences, particularly for the Palestinians, who in 1917 formed 90 percent of the population but were mentioned only as “non-Jewish communities” in the declaration. British political support allowed the rapid growth of Jewish immigration to Palestine (from a Jewish population of 50,000 in 1917 to over 600,000 in 1947) and ultimately paved the way for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the departure of about 726,000 Palestinians. SEE ALSO Balfour, Arthur James; British Mandate; Diaspora.

BANDUNG CONFERENCE: Afro-Asiatic conference of

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. IN 1917, THE BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY BALFOUR DECLARATION—EXPRESSING HIS GOVERNMENT’S SUPPORT FOR THE CREATION OF A JEWISH NATIONAL HOMELAND IN PALESTINE (WHICH BECAME A BRITISH MANDATE AFTER WORLD WAR I). WROTE A HISTORIC LETTER—SUBSEQUENTLY KNOWN AS THE

thur Balfour, British minister of foreign affairs, to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a Zionist philanthropist and one of the drafters of the declaration, following its revision and approval by the British war cabinet. It stated: “It is my great pleasure to express to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy for the Jewish Zionists’ aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet—‘His Majesty’s Government looks favorably on the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people, and will apply all its efforts towards facilitating the realization of this objective, with it being clearly understood that nothing should be done that will prejudice either the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities existing in Palestine, or the rights and political status that Jews are accorded in other countries.’—I would be thankful to you for bringing this declaration to the attention of the Zionist Federation.” The Balfour Declaration was motivated by a number of factors. The British cabinet hoped to win

58

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

nonaligned countries that took place in Bandung (Indonesia) between 17 and 24 April 1955. This conference marked the political birth of the Third World. Point number two of the final communiqué, affirming the right of people to decide for themselves, treated the Palestinian question in the following terms: “Considering the tension existing in the Middle East, tension that has been caused by the situation in Palestine, and considering the danger this tension constitutes for world peace, the Asiatic and African Conference declares its support for the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and demands the application of the United Nations resolutions on Palestine and the realization of a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem.”

BANNA, HASSAN AL- (1906–1949): Egyptian activist, born in 1906 near Alexandria, and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (Society of Muslim Brothers), he entered a mystic brotherhood at the age of thirteen. In 1922, when Egypt had just obtained a limited independence from England, he matriculated at a school for primary teachers. In September 1927 he became an instructor at a primary school in Ismailia, the home of the Suez Canal Company and a town with many foreign residents. He spoke publicly against foreign, liberal ways and in March 1928 he started the first chapter of the Society of Muslim Brothers, which advocated establishing a religious state in Egypt. Twenty years later he was supervising some 2,000 chapters of this fraternity all over Egypt, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BANNA, SABRI AL-

and the distribution of the society’s publication all over the Islamic world. After World War II the society established a militia, which participated in the Arab-Israel War of 1948–1949, and committed a number of assassinations and other acts of violence against the Egyptian government. The government banned the Brotherhood in December 1948; the society assassinated the minister who had banned it. Hasan al-Banna was killed by the police a few weeks later, on 12 February 1949. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Muslim Brotherhood.

BANNA, SABRI AL- (Abu Nidal; 1939–2002?): Terrorist, born in Palestine. Sabri al-Banna came from a wealthy Jaffa family that, in 1948, at the time of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, sought refuge in the Gaza Strip and later went to Nablus in the West Bank. In 1955, he went to Egypt to study to be a technician but never completed his secondary education. He joined the BaEth Party in Jordan in the mid-1950s and later worked in Saudi Arabia but was expelled in 1967. After the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War of June 1967, he joined Yasir Arafat’s al-Fatah, where he was associated with the security services, directed by Salah Khalaf. In 1970, after a stay in Khartoum, Sudan, he became al-Fatah representative in Iraq. In 1974, after the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War of 1973, he opposed the “realist” policy of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and was expelled from Fatah. With the help of Iraq (for whose intelligence service he had been working), he created his own movement. At first called Political Committee for the Palestinian Revolution, this group took the name of Fatah Revolutionary Council (Fatah RC). Supported by Baghdad, the Fatah RC worked for the Iraqi BaEthists in their feud with the Syrian BaEthists. It also advocated extreme escalation in the struggle against Israel, and by November had begun carrying out a significant number of attacks directed against Israelis and Westerners as well as against Palestinians it considered too moderate. In claiming credit for these actions, the movement used sometimes the names Black June or Arab Revolutionary Brigades. Between 1982 and 1987, Abu Nidal organized many terrorist actions, including assassinations and some spectacular mass murders in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Vienna, Istanbul, and elsewhere. In 1982, the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London became the pretext for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year (the Israelis publicly blamed the PLO). In 1983, Baghdad, needing American help in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ABU NIDAL. UNDER THIS NOM DE GUERRE, THE FOUNDER OF A BREAKAWAY ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO VIOLENT ACTION CARRIED OUT MASS MURDERS, ASSASSINATIONS, AND OTHER TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST ISRAEL AND ITS PERCEIVED SUPPORTERS IN MANY PARTS OF

EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST, ESPECIALLY DURING THE 1980S. HE LATER DIED IN IRAQ UNDER QUESTIONABLE CIRCUMSTANCES. (© Reuters NewMedia Inc./Corbis)

fighting the Iran-Iraq War, officially withdrew its support and asked Abu Nidal to leave the country. He went to Syria, which used him to apply pressure on Jordan to keep it from helping the PLO open a dialogue with the United States and Israel. In 1985, with the support of Libya, he tried but failed to forge an alliance with the Fatah-Intifada that would have constituted an opposition front capable of competing with the Fatah of Yasir Arafat. Syria expelled Abu Nidal in 1986, after which he was received by Colonel Qaddafi in Libya. In 1988, after the Iran-Iraq War, he returned to Baghdad, all the while maintaining a strategic base in Libya. In the summer of 1989, relations with the PLO broke down irremediably, leading to a wave of assassinations involving his associates and those of Yasir Arafat. In

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

59

BAQDASH, KHALID

1990, some members of his movement contested his authority and created a faction called Fatah Revolutionary Council–Emergency Command. There followed a succession of internal executions. In January 1991, obliged once more to leave Iraq, Abu Nidal moved to Lebanon, then to Libya. Rejecting the Israeli-Arab peace process delineated by the Madrid Conference of 1991 (without proposing any alternative), Abu Nidal found himself isolated within the Palestinian resistance. In July 1998, weakened by illness and by the maneuvering of his entourage, which aimed at taking over his movement, he left Libya to seek medical care in Egypt. In 1999, Abu Nidal returned to Baghdad. He is reported to have died in August 2002, either a suicide (officially) or at the hands of the Iraqi security services. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); BaEth; Fatah, al-; Fatah-Intifada; Fatah Revolutionary Council; Fatah Revolutionary Council–Emergency Command; Gaza Strip; Iran Iraq War; Khalaf, Salah; Palestine Liberation Organization.

BAQDASH, KHALID (1912– ): Syrian political figure, born to a Kurdish family in Damascus. Khalid Baqdash joined the National Bloc, the main Syrian nationalist organization, in 1929. Later he became a member of the Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, climbing rapidly to a position of leadership. Having been arrested a number of times by the French authorities, who had a mandate over Syria, Baqdash left Syria for the Soviet Union, where he enrolled in a school that trained party cadres. In 1935, he led the delegation of the Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party to the Seventh Comintern Congress, in Moscow. The following year, the victory of the Popular Front in France allowed him to return to Syria and play an important role in political life there. In 1937, he became secretary general of the Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, replacing FuDad Shemli. For two years the Communist Party expanded rapidly in Syria and Lebanon, until the fall of the Popular Front, which led to the interdiction of the party. Baqdash reappeared on the political scene in 1941, with the arrival in Syria of the Free French Forces, whom he joined in the fight against fascism. Baqdash acquired international stature after the war. In 1948, he became the Cominform delegate for the Middle East while the Communist Party was banned again in post-independence Syria. The military regimes that followed each other in Damascus strengthened the position of the Syrian Communist Party. Baqdash won a seat in the 1954 elections,

60

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

thereby becoming Syria’s first Communist representative. He quickly became one of his country’s principal political figures. In 1958, after the creation of the Syrian-Egyptian union, he strongly opposed “the Nasserian protection.” A ban on political parties forced him to leave Syria for an exile of eight years in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. The strengthening of the left wing of the BaEth Party, which had come to power in 1966, allowed him to return to Syria once more, where from then on he played only a secondary role while supporting the regime. In 1972, accused of having concentrated too much power in his hands, his became a minority voice in the political bureau, and two years later he was no longer part of the leadership of the Syrian Communist Party. SEE ALSO BaEth; Syria.

BAR: Aramaic word meaning “son of.” SEE ALSO

Ibn.

BARAK, EHUD (1942– ): Israeli military and political figure; prime minister of Israel (1999–2001). Born Ehud Brog in 1942 in Mandatory Palestine, Barak grew up in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Sharon and entered the Israeli Army in 1959. Awarded lieutenant’s stripes in 1962, he went on to take commando training in France in 1964. Barak participated in the ArabIsrael War of June 1967 in an armored intelligence unit. Between 1970 and 1973 he commanded the Sayeret Matkal, a unit within the General Staff responsible for special operations. In that capacity, he commanded the neutralizing, on 8 May 1972, of a Palestinian commando unit that had taken over a Sabena airplane and its passengers at Tel Aviv airport. Other members of his group were Benjamin Netanyahu, future prime minister, and Dani Yatom, future head of Mossad. On the night of 9–10 April 1973, in Beirut, Barak participated in the “Springtime of the Young” operation, conducted in collaboration with Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, whose objective was the elimination of Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arafat was absent from his supposed location, but three important Palestinian leaders were killed instead. The following July, Barak joined the General Staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). He participated in the Arab-Israel War of 1973 at the head of a tank battalion. In October 1974, he joined Aman as deputy-director of military intelligence. In this capacity he participated, in July 1976, in the operation against the terrorists who had hijacked an Air France airliner to Entebbe, Uganda. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BARAK, EHUD

rior in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. On 23 November 1995, after the assassination of the prime minister, he took over the post of foreign minister in the government of Shimon Peres, a position he retained until May 1996, when the Likud Party came to power. Barak won the leadership of the Labor Party, taking it away from his rival, Shimon Peres, on 3 June 1997. In his capacity as the new Labor Party leader, Barak affirmed that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state, on the condition that the latter be demilitarized and federated with Jordan. According to him, Israel’s security did not depend only on its military strength, but also on its economy, prosperity, and national cohesion.

EHUD BARAK. AFTER THREE DECADES IN THE ISRAELI MILITARY, INCLUDING COUNTERTERRORISM OPERATIONS AND HIGH-LEVEL PLANNING, BARAK SHIFTED TO POLITICS AND SERVED AS PRIME MINISTER FROM 1999 TO 2001. THE FAILURE OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE SUMMIT AT CAMP DAVID IN MID-2000, HOWEVER, SOON ENDED HIS POLITICAL CAREER. (© Corbis Images)

Promoted to general at the age of thirty-nine, Barak was appointed head of the planning department of the IDF General Staff in 1982. From April 1983 to September 1985, he headed Aman, where he was replaced, at the end of his command, by his friend Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. Between September 1985 and January 1987, Barak was in command of Israel’s central military region. In February 1987, then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed Barak assistant to the army chief of staff, General Dan Shomron. As such, he was involved in the operation that led to the assassination in 1988 of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), the second in command of the PLO. On 1 April 1991, Barak was named army chief of staff of the IDF. General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak became his deputy and then replaced him when, in January 1995, Barak resigned from the army to devote himself to politics. On 16 July 1995, Barak joined the Labor Party; two days later, he was appointed minister of the inteD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In January 1999, in preparation for early general elections scheduled to take place the following May, the Labor Party chose him as its candidate for the post of prime minister, against his adversary from Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak put together an electoral list called United Israel (Israel Ahat), with David Levy’s Gesher Party and Rabbi Yehuda Amital’s Meimad organization. On 17 May, Barak was elected prime minister with 56 percent of the votes cast, against 43 percent for Netanyahu. Barak paid homage to Yitzhak Rabin in his acceptance speech, and then went on to declare: “We expect peace to come not from weakness, but from strength and from a feeling of security; peace will not come at the cost of security, but it is peace that brings security.” He promised also to come to a final agreement with the Palestinians, while conserving the unity of Jerusalem and keeping most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty. On 6 July 1999, he introduced his government to the Knesset. A unity cabinet, it included 18 members from 8 different political parties. Barak won a vote of confidence with 75 deputies voting for, 29 against, 11 abstentions, and 5 absences. In his inaugural speech, he declared himself determined to take all possible steps to conclude a definitive Israeli-Arab peace, referring to United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338. On his first official trip abroad, Barak met the principal participants in the peace process, including U.S. president Bill Clinton, Palestinian president Yasir Arafat, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah II ibn Hussein of Jordan. While in Washington, Barak said that he expected to reach a definitive peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors within fifteen months. On 5 September, at Sharm elSheikh, Egypt, Barak and Arafat signed an accord that was intended to open the way to negotiations on a definitive peace settlement between Palestinians and Israelis. During the ceremony, presided over by

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

61

BARAKA

Husni Mubarak, Barak again paid homage to former Israeli prime minister Rabin, and made an appeal to Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad to resume peace negotiations with Israel. On 15 December, Barak returned to Washington, where he met officially with Syrian foreign minister Faruq al-Shara to discuss the resumption of the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations that had been frozen since the spring of 1996. On 1 March 2000, Barak suffered his first political reversal when the Knesset adopted the draft of a law aimed at establishing a mandatory enlarged majority in any referendum on a peace agreement with Syria. In April of the same year, he informed the United Nations of Israel’s intention to withdraw its troops from South Lebanon before 7 July. On 1 June, while he was attending a ceremony marking the conquest of the Arab part of Jerusalem by Israeli troops, he confirmed his determination to defend the unity of the Holy City, an “inseparable part of the sovereign territory of Israel.” On 7 June, he suffered a repudiation by the Knesset, which agreed to hold early general elections, by a vote of 61 in favor and 48 against. Three of the six parties belonging to Barak’s governing coalition voted with the opposition. A month later, as Barak was scheduled to leave for Camp David to participate in an Israeli-Palestinian peace summit, the political crisis intensified with the resignation of six of his ministers, who were opposed to the concessions he was about to make to the Palestinians. On 2 August, Foreign Minister David Levy also resigned, confirming the widespread disappointment at the failure of Camp David II to result in a political breakthrough. On 19 December, after having failed to convince Likud to participate in a government of “national emergency,” Ehud Barak submitted his resignation to President Moshe Katsav. The February 2001 elections brought Likud leader Ariel Sharon to power. That same month, Barak announced his retirement from the political scene and his resignation from the leadership of the Labor Party. He began a business career, though his frequent commentary on political matters led some to speculate that he might eventually return to politics. SEE ALSO Camp David II Summit; Labor Party; Likud; Resolution 242; Resolution 338.

BARAKA: Arabic word designating the attribute of holiness and power of benediction belonging to a saint or to a sheik of a fraternity, which is transmitted to his descendants in a chain of succession, silsilat al-baraka. The Muslim believer can obtain this attribute by visiting a holy place or a maqam. For Jews,

62

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

berakhah is the generic name of all kinds of blessings, whether of human or divine origin.

BARGHUTHI,

MARWAN (Barghouthi, Bargouti; 1959– ): Palestinian political leader. Born in 1959 in Ramallah (West Bank), Marwan Barghuthi holds a degree in history and political science from Bir Zeit University. He joined al-Fatah at the beginning of the 1980s, along with others of the Palestinian student movement in the Occupied Territories. Barghuthi was arrested and imprisoned several times by Israeli authorities. A professor of history at Bir Zeit University, in the West Bank, he was one of the main leaders in the Ramallah region of the first Intifada, and he was expelled by Israeli authorities in September 1990. Having taken refuge in Jordan, he was very active in the Association of Palestinian Deportees, and he wrote articles for the local press. During his stay in Amman, he maintained some contacts with the local representatives of HAMAS, such as Muhammad Nazal and Ibrahim Ghoshe. On 5 April 1994, Barghuthi was included in a group of fifty expelled Palestinians who were allowed to return to the Occupied Territories, and he regained his teaching position at Bir Zeit University. A month later, he was elected secretary general of alFatah for the West Bank and became an important link between Yasir Arafat and young Palestinians, who tended to be rather hostile to the conciliatory strategies they thought Arafat was advocating toward Israel. A few months later, Barghuthi joined the Revolutionary Council of al-Fatah. In February 1996, elected as representative of Ramallah, he became a member of the new Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Beginning at that time, he attempted to lead a “reformist” current within al-Fatah, thereby finding himself in opposition to Hussein al-Sheikh, who supported Arafat’s policies. In October of the same year, Barghuthi was part of the PLC delegation received by the Knesset, on the invitation of the Israeli Communist Party, HADASH. In June 1999, displeased with the confrontations between young alFatah adherents and the Palestinian police, Arafat threatened to remove Barghuthi from his position in al-Fatah. In October 2000, at the time of the IsraeliPalestinian clashes in the autonomous territories, Barghuthi appeared to be one of the principal catalysts of the revolt. The beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada propelled him into the forefront, and he was regarded by the Israelis as the leader of the Tanzim, an armed group linked to al-Fatah. On 6 August 2001, while the growing number of Palestinian attacks re-

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BAR-LEV, HAIM

sulted in some severe Israeli reprisal operations in the Palestinian territories, he made an appeal for the creation of a Palestinian government of national unity. On 23 September, the Israeli authorities put out an arrest warrant for Barghuthi, for “participation in terrorist activities.” In 2002 he was arrested and in May 2004 was convicted in a public trial, whose authority over him he denied. Considered a reformer within al-Fatah, Barghuthi was a supporter of Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Barghuthi is popular, especially since his widely admired defiance toward the Israelis during his trial, and has sometimes been mentioned as a possible successor to Arafat. This would be possible only if the Israelis could be convinced to release him, an improbable eventuality without conditions to which the Palestinians would be unlikely to agree. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Tanzim, al-.

BARGHUTHI, MUSTAFA (1954– ): Palestinian physician and human rights activist. Mustafa Barghuthi, a medical doctor trained in Moscow, was for some years a member of the Palestinian People’s Party and director of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, which has provided health care for 100,000 Palestinians living in rural areas of the Occupied Territories. As of 2004, he is the director of the Health, Development, Information, and Policy Institute in Ramallah, an independent nongovernmental organization established in 1989 to improve the status of Palestinian health care through research, planning, and development. It has also become an advocacy organization for better public policy in regard to such groups as women, children, and the disabled. It provides information and training programs in health care, development policy, and system management. It also publishes the Palestine Monitor, an important source of news on political and human rights issues. Barghuthi was one of the principal promoters, with Haydar Abd al-Shafi and Ibrahim Dakkak, of the Palestinian National Initiative (alMubadara), an organization that seeks to mobilize Palestinian society for the formation of a “national emergency leadership,” democratic elections at all levels, and institutional reform to achieve Palestinian national rights and a “durable, just peace.” SEE ALSO Abd al-Shafi, Haydar; Palestinian People’s Party. BAR-GIORA: Secret organization, constituted in 1907 in Jaffa, Palestine, by a group of Jewish immigrants originally from the Ukrainian city of Gomel. Its prinD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

cipal leaders were David Ben-Gurion and Izhak BenZvi. After organizing a self-defense group, the leaders of Bar-Giora decided to form a veritable army, capable of defending the whole Jewish community in Palestine. This new organization took the name of Hashomer (the Guardian). Through it the leaders of Bar-Giora went on to inculcate a socialist ideology and a feeling of national pride in new immigrants. They called themselves Halutzim (“pioneers”). SEE ALSO

Ben-Gurion, David.

BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY: Orthodox university located in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Founded in 1955, it was the first religious institution of higher learning established in Israel. In 2003 it had an enrollment of 32,000 students, including those studying at five regional colleges. The university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in liberal arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. The curriculum includes required courses in religious studies. Yigal Amir, the zealot who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, was a law student there. For some time thereafter, the university wrestled with a tarnished international reputation as a place that fosters and encourages religious and political extremism. SEE ALSO

Rabin, Yitzhak.

BAR-LEV, HAIM (1924–1994): Israeli general and politician. Haim Bar-Lev was born in Vienna, grew up in Yugoslavia, and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1939. He joined the Palmach (the first and elite military group within the Haganah) in 1942 and commanded a battalion in the Arab-Israel War of 1948. Bar-Lev remained in the army, commanding an armored brigade in the Arab-Israel War of 1956, and in 1957 becoming chief of the Armored Corps. After studying economics and business at Columbia University in New York from 1961 to 1963, he returned to Israel. He became chief of military operations in 1964, deputy chief of staff in 1967, and chief of staff in 1968. From 1968 to 1970, Bar-Lev led the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in the war of attrition against Egypt. The Bar-Lev Line, Israel’s line of defense along the Suez Canal, was named for him. BarLev retired from the IDF in 1972, then was elected to the Knesset in 1973 and served as minister of commerce and industry until 1977. He was minister of police from 1984 until 1988, then served as Israeli ambassador to the Russian Federation from 1992 until his death in 1994.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

63

BARNAWI, FATIMA AL-

BARNAWI, FATIMA

AL- (Birnaoui, Fatma; 1942– ): Palestinian militant, active in al-Fatah. Fatima alBarnawi was born in 1942 in Palestine and trained to be a nurse. She was arrested in 1967 by the Israeli police for participation in an anti-Israeli attack and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was released ten years later and banished to Jordan, where she joined al-Fatah. Barnawi followed Yasir Arafat to Tunisia, after the Palestinian forces were expelled from Lebanon. In July 1994, when the Palestinian Authority was organized, Arafat appointed Barnawi head of the Policewomen, the women’s unit of the civil police force (al-Shurta al-NisaDiyeh), which had about 300 members. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-.

BASSIOUNI, MUHAMMAD ABDUL AZIZ (1937– ): Egyptian military and diplomatic figure. Between 1968 and 1976, Muhammad Bassiouni was a military attaché in Syria. In 1979 he retired from twenty-six years of service with the rank of general and joined the ministry of foreign affairs. First assigned to Tehran, Iran, where he witnessed the fall of the shah in 1980, he was sent to Israel, where he was chargé d’affaires at the Egyptian Embassy. In 1982 he replaced the head of the Egyptian Mission in Tel Aviv, who was recalled to Cairo after the massacres of Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. On 12 September 1986, Bassiouni was named Egyptian ambassador to Israel. In November 2000 he was recalled in protest over the Israeli response to the alAqsa Intifada and is now serving in the Egyptian legislature. SEE ALSO Sabra and Shatila.

BAETH (Arab Socialist BaEth Party): Political party created on 7 April 1947 in Damascus by Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian, and Salah alBitar. Part of the Arab Renaissance movement born in the 1930s, the BaEth was also inspired by radical socialism. In March 1954, this organization combined with the Arab Socialist Party of Akram alHourani (Hawrani). With its vision of a union of all the Arab states combining into a single nation, the BaEth ideology spread to Jordan, Iraq, Libya, and Aden. Because of its support of some local rebellions, the BaEth was banned in the countries concerned. In March 1954, the movement took advantage of the fall of the Shishakli regime in Syria to get eighteen of its members into parliament, including Akram alHourani, who became president of the Syrian National Assembly the following year. In February

64

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

1958, the BaEthists in Syria advocated the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR), which united Egypt and Syria. The president of the UAR was Gamal Abdel Nasser and the vice president was Akram al-Hourani. In December 1959, disappointed with Nasser’s politics, the Syrian BaEthists broke with him, advocating the secession of Syria from Egypt, which took place in February 1961. On 8 March 1963, a coup d’état carried out by “independent officers” still supporting union with Egypt brought the BaEth to power in Syria. A month earlier, the BaEth had carried out the same action in Iraq, overthrowing the Qassem government. The Syrian BaEth Party split into two currents: One, socialist and anti-Nasserian, was led by alHourani; the other, essentially nationalist, was led by Michel Aflaq. In April 1963, the Tripartite Union was proclaimed, uniting Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. In 1964, a reformist current emerged, consisting essentially of violently anticommunist and old guard military. In March 1969, the Syrian army denounced the proSoviet policies of the government. On 13 November, General Hafiz al-Asad took power in Syria and immediately undertook a reorganization of the party, becoming its secretary general in the elections of February 1971. The following year, six political parties joined with the BaEth in a coalition, the National Progressive Front (NPF). The BaEth Party became one of the principal pillars of the regime of President Hafiz al-Asad. On 18 June 2000, after he died, his son and successor, Bashshar al-Asad, was elected secretary general of the BaEth Party. Twelve new members were elected to its command, including Prime Minister Muhammad Miro and Foreign Affairs Minister Faruk al-Shara. Among those leaving were Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam and Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas. Members of the command also were members of the Central Committee, which comprised many army and security service leaders. Among them were loyal friends of the new Syrian president, such as his brother, Maher al-Asad, head of the Presidential Guard; General Safi, commander of the Syrian Brigade in Lebanon; Colonel Tlas, son of General Mustafa Tlas; and General Aslan, army chief of staff. The BaEth is also known as the Arab Reform Movement, the Resurgence Movement, and the Socialist Party of Arab Resurrection. SEE ALSO Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Nasser, Gamal Abdel.

BATIN: Arab term used to signify the esoteric and hidden side of things, in contrast to the word dhahir. By extension, this word is used to mean that it is not T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BEGIN, MENACHEM

enough simply to observe religious rules outwardly, but one must be utterly sincere in one’s faith in order to be a true Muslim.

BATINIANS: Name used in the Middle Ages to designate Ismaili ShiDites. SEE ALSO Ismaili.

BAYAH: Arab term to used to designate the oath of allegiance sworn by believers to the Prophet Muhammad or his successor(s). By extension, it means the obedience of subjects to their king. SEE ALSO Muhammad.

closest advisors of the new Egyptian head of state. In 1983, he headed the Egyptian delegation to the United Nations. In this capacity, al-Baz participated in numerous negotiations touching on sensitive issues, such as the Palestinian question, Sudan, and Islamic terrorism. In August 2001, during the intensification of the Intifada in the Occupied Territories, he traveled to Washington to discuss possible ways of restarting the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which had been stalled for several months. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Mubarak, Husni; Nasser, Gamal Abdel.

BEDOUIN (al-Bad’n and al-ruhhal): Arab word for “desert nomads.”

BAYT (Bait, Beit, Beth): Arab word meaning “house, city, place.” Also exists in Hebrew, as “Beit.” BAYT AL-ATIQ (“ancient place or house,” in Arabic): One of the honorific names of Mecca. SEE ALSO Mecca.

BAYT

AL-HARAM (“sacred city,” in Arabic): One of the honorific names of Mecca. SEE ALSO Mecca.

BAYT ALLAH (“house of God,” in Arabic): One of the honorific names of Mecca. SEE ALSO Mecca.

BAYT AL-MAQDIS (“holy house,” in Arabic): One of the honorific names for Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Jerusalem. BAYT LAHM SEE

BEGIN, MENACHEM (1913–1992): Israeli political fig-

Bethlehem.

BAZ, OSAMA AL- (1931– ): Egyptian political figure, born in Cairo. With law degrees from the University of Cairo and Harvard, Osama al-Baz became a public prosecutor in 1953. Two years later he joined the Egyptian ministry of foreign affairs. In 1958 he became director of the cabinet of Sami Sharaf, who was responsible for the security of then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In March 1975, while Husni Mubarak was vice president, he was named director of the cabinet of the foreign minister, and then first undersecretary of state in the foreign ministry. In November 1977, as a member of the presidential cabinet, he was director of political affairs. In October 1981, after Mubarak came to power, al-Baz became one of the D I C T I O N A R Y

BEERSHEBA: In Hebrew called BDer Sheva, and in Arabic, Bir al-Sabi, the city of Beersheba is located in the northern Negev. In Biblical times Beersheba marked Palestine’s southern limit. The Ottoman Empire made it the administrative center for the Bedouin tribes of the Negev in 1901. After creation of the State of Israel in 1948, new immigrants expanded its population. One of Israel’s largest cities, it is an industrial center for porcelain, chemicals, and textiles. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is located there, as is the Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. In 2002 the population was estimated at 182,000. On 31 August 2004 two Palestinian suicide bombers detonated explosives on two municipal buses in Beersheba, leaving sixteen Israelis dead and over eighty wounded. This first suicide bombing in Beersheba, located near the southern edge of Israel’s planned but unfinished security barrier, raised concerns about a possible shift in location for Palestinian militant activity to southern Israel.

O F

T H E

ure, prime minister of Israel (1977–1983). Menachem Begin was born in 1913 in Poland. Trained as a lawyer, he attracted notice at the World Congress of Betar (1938) in Warsaw, Poland, for his oratorical skills. Begin went to Palestine in 1942 with the Free Polish Army, from which he was demobilized at the end of that year. In December 1943 he took command of the extremist group, Irgun ZvaDi LeDumi (IZL). Until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Irgun was engaged in a campaign of attacks against British officials and institutions as well as Arabs in Palestine. The Irgun was responsible for, among others, the attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which caused 91 deaths, and the massacre of some 100 inhabitants of the Arab village of Deir Yasin.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

65

BEGIN, MENACHEM

going mostly to Labor. In April 1965, Begin decided to ally his party with the Liberal Party, forming the Gahal parliamentary group, which accounted for twenty-six members of parliament. On 1 June, just before the Arab-Israel War of 1967, he joined the Labor government of Levi Eshkol as minister without portfolio. After the war, Begin left the government, while a few Gahal members stayed on until August 1970, when Prime Minister Golda Meir accepted the American Rogers Plan, which provided for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. During the spring of 1973, with Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, he formed Likud, a new parliamentary block of the right. Leader of the right since 1948, Begin led Likud to parliamentary victory in May 1977—ending thirty years of Labor hegemony—and became prime minister.

MENACHEM BEGIN. HEAD OF THE NATIONALIST AND VIOLENT IRGUN 1940S. HE FOUNDED TWO RIGHT-WING POLITICAL PARTIES, HERUT (IN 1948) AND LIKUD (IN 1973), AND WAS ISRAEL’S FIRST NON-LABOR PRIME MINISTER, FROM 1977 TO 1983. HIS LEGACY INCLUDED A HISTORIC PEACE TREATY WITH PRESIDENT ANWAR ALSADAT OF EGYPT—AS WELL AS AN INVASION OF LEBANON AND SUPPORT FOR ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES. (©

IN THE

Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

On 2 June 1948, after the creation of the State of Israel, Begin proclaimed the allegiance of the Irgun to the new Jewish state, which allowed his militants to join the new Israeli army, the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Nevertheless, on 21 June, Begin refused to surrender to the latter a shipment of arms belonging to his movement. Prime Minister David BenGurion ordered cannons to be fired on the Altalena, the ship that was transporting the arms. This incident formed the basis of an undying hatred between the two men. In the autumn of 1948, after his movement had been disbanded, Begin founded the ultranationalist party Herut, advocate of a “Greater Israel.” In the first Israeli parliamentary elections, in January 1949, Herut obtained fourteen seats in the Knesset. In the 1950s, after losing six of these seats, the leaders of Herut tried to capture the Sephardi vote, which was

66

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

As soon as Begin took office, he initiated secret negotiations with Egypt that eventually led to the Camp David Summit of September 1978 and a peace treaty in March 1979. At the same time, Begin advocated the development of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. On 14 August 1977 he decided to extend Israeli jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In December 1977 he stated he was in favor of administrative autonomy for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while firmly insisting on Israeli sovereignty in these territories. With Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Begin took a series of steps toward reconciliation with his Arab neighbors. As a result, Begin’s position weakened within his own party, as well as within the Likud parliamentary bloc. In November 1977, Begin was host to Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat on the latter’s extraordinary visit to Israel. On 17 September 1978, the Camp David Accords were signed. On 26 March 1979, Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt, the first one concluded between Israel and an Arab country. On 27 October 1979, Begin, together with President Sadat, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. There was, however, a wave of international protests when Begin pressured the Knesset, in July 1980, into adopting a law that decreed Jerusalem “the eternal capital of Israel.” That same month, after Likud narrowly won the parliamentary elections, Begin started his second term as prime minister of a government of national unity. Toughening his policies, he annexed the Golan Heights in December 1981; then on 6 June 1982, under pressure from Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, he gave the green light to the invasion of Lebanon (called Operation Peace for Galilee). The massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila by the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BEILIN, YOSSI

Lebanese Phalange militia, while the IDF looked on, stirred up national and international protest. On 19 September 1983, weakened physically by illness and politically damaged by economic difficulties and by the Lebanese crisis, Begin resigned his post as prime minister and leader of Herut, replaced in both of these functions by his friend Yitzhak Shamir. From that moment until his death on 9 March 1992, Begin remained out of the public eye. SEE ALSO Altalena; Arab-Israel War (1982); Camp David Accords; Dayan, Moshe; Herut Party; Irgun; Meir, Golda; Sabra and Shatila; Sadat, Anwar al-; Shamir, Yitzhak.

years later, elected a member of Knesset, he became deputy minister of finance and the economy in the national unity government of Yitzhak Shamir, a position he kept until 1990. In June of 1992, the Labor Party emerged a victor in the Knesset elections, and Beilin was reelected. In July he was named deputy minister of foreign affairs in the government of Yitzhak Rabin, Peres holding the title of foreign minister. With the support of the latter, Beilin undertook secret negotiations with the Palestinians that led to the signing of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement (the Oslo Accords), in Washington, D.C., on 13 September 1993.

BEGIN, ZE’EV BENJAMIN (Benny) (1943– ): Israeli politician. The son of the late prime minister Menachem Begin, Benjamin “Benny” Begin was born in Jerusalem in 1943. He was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then at Colorado State University, where he received a doctoral degree in geology. He served in the Armored Corps from 1960 to 1963 and later volunteered for additional military service (1975–1976). Begin worked as a geologist for the Geological Survey of Israel (1965–1988), heading the environmental and mapping divisions. In 1989 he was appointed head of the research institute of the College of Judea and Samaria. Begin was a member of the Knesset from 1988 to 1999. A member of the Likud Party, he served on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, for which he chaired a subcommittee on national defense. He served briefly (June 1996–January 1997) as minister of science.

On 18 July 1995, Beilin was named minister of economy and planning in the Rabin government. That November, after Rabin’s assassination, Beilin stayed on in the government led by Peres, but as minister without portfolio, responsible for the peace process. In May 1996, the Labor Party suffered a serious setback in the Knesset elections, losing to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. In December, Beilin announced his candidacy for the leadership of the Labor Party, running against Ehud Barak, who won the election to this post. Beilin came in second with 29 percent of the votes. Between 1996 and 1998 he took numerous steps to restart the peace process that had been stalled since Netanyahu had come to power. During Labor’s electoral campaign of May 1999, Beilin was in charge of contacts with the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. On 6 July, after the electoral victory of the Left, he became minister of justice in the Barak government.

BEILIN, YOSSI (1948– ): Israeli political figure. Yossi Beilin was born in 1948 in Israel. Between 1969 and 1977, he worked as a journalist at the leftist daily, Davar. During this time he earned a degree in Hebrew literature and a doctorate in political science. In 1977 he joined the Israel Labor Party, where he became one of the main advisors of Shimon Peres. Four years later, he became spokesperson of the Labor Party, a post he kept for almost three years. Within the party he belonged to the leftist current that promoted the struggle against social inequality, supported the opening of a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and advocated the creation of an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian economic confederation. Between 1984 and 1986, Beilin was government secretary in the cabinet of Peres. In 1986, when a new prime minister came in, as specified in the agreement between Labor and Likud, Beilin was named director general of the foreign ministry, headed by Peres. Two D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

On 11 July 2000, Beilin was part of the Israeli delegation at the Camp David negotiations with the Palestinians. On 21 July, during these discussions, he publicly denounced the “myth of a united Jerusalem recognized as capital of Israel” by the international community. In December, he went to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II ibn Hussein, with whom he discussed ways of rekindling the peace process. Following the disappointment caused by Barak’s defeat by Ariel Sharon in the election for prime minister in February 2001, Beilin became active in the opposition to the new Likud policies. He participated that summer in a demonstration in Tel Aviv protesting the military escalation engineered by the Sharon government in an attempt to suppress the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories. Later that summer Beilin traveled to Egypt, where he met with Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher, with whom he discussed the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Along with Palestinian Yasir Abd Rabbo, Beilin led the group of Palestinians and Israelis that created the Geneva

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

67

BEIT

Peace Initiative of 2003, an unofficial proposal for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. SEE ALSO Abd Rabbo, Yasir; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003; Oslo Accords.

BEIT SEE

Bayt.

BEIT AL-MAQDESS SEE

Bayt al-Maqdis.

BEIT DIN (beth din; “house of the law,” in Hebrew): Rabbinical tribunal.

BEN-AMI, SHLOMO (1943– ): Israeli political figure. Born in 1943 in Morocco, Shlomo Ben-Ami emigrated to Israel in 1955. After earning degrees in history and literature, he became a professor at Tel Aviv University. In 1976 he became director of the Officers’ Training College at the Israel Defense Force Military School. Between 1980 and 1982 he taught at Oxford University. After returning to Israel he was named, in 1987, Israel’s ambassador to Spain. In October 1991, Ben-Ami was part of the Israeli delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference held in Madrid, Spain. He resigned his post as ambassador a short while later to return to Israel, where he taught history once more. As a Labor Party candidate, Ben-Ami won a seat in the May 1996 elections to the Knesset. On 7 February 1997, he announced he would run against Ehud Barak for the position of secretary general of the party. Barak won. Within the Labor Party, BenAmi was considered one of the leaders of the moderate wing, approving the creation of a Palestinian state. On 7 July 1999, he joined the Barak government as minister for internal security. In May 2000 he engaged in secret conversations with Palestinian leaders in an effort to prepare for the IsraeliPalestinian negotiations that were to take place the following month at Camp David. On 10 August, as Barak’s cabinet stood weakened by the resignation of a number of his ministers, Ben-Ami was appointed foreign minister for a period of three months, replacing David Levy, while still keeping his portfolio as minister for internal security. At the end of the same month, he began a European tour in connection with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a definitive peace. On 26 September 2000, Ben-Ami participated in a secret meeting in Washington, D.C., with Palestinian leaders. Under the guidance of U.S. emissary Dennis Ross, this meeting lasted three days but failed

68

to conclude in an agreement to restart the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Ben-Ami resigned his ministerial functions in March 2001, after Barak was defeated by Likud leader Ariel Sharon. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Camp David II Summit; Israel Labor Party; Ross, Dennis B.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

BEN ELIEZER, BENYAMIN (1936– ): Israeli military and political figure, also known as Fouad, born in Iraq. After immigrating to Israel in 1949, Benyamin ben Eliezer joined the Israeli Army in 1955, intending to make a career in the military. Attached to an elite unit, he participated in military operations in the 1956 Suez-Sinai War and in the Arab-Israel War of June 1967. In March 1978, he commanded one of the larger units participating in the invasion of South Lebanon, which was in reprisal for an attack near Tel Aviv by a Palestinian commando from Lebanon. Between 1978 and 1981 he was in command of the central military region of Israel. In 1983, Ben Eliezer became coordinator of Israeli activities in the Occupied Territories. In 1984, having retired with the rank of general, he joined the centrist party, Yad, created by Ezer Weizman. Elected to the Knesset that same year, he became a member of the foreign affairs and defense committee, where he advocated dialogue with the Arabs and territorial compromise with the Palestinians. In 1988, along with Weizman, he joined the ranks of the Labor Party and was elected to the Knesset. In February 1992, in the context of the IsraeliArab peace process, which had started at the time of the Madrid Conference, Ben Eliezer came out against the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. That July, he participated actively in the election campaign of the Labor candidate, Yitzhak Rabin. On 11 July, he was named minister of housing and social development in the Rabin government. On 4 March 1993, he held an informational conference for ambassadors from the European Union, during which he stated his support for the principle of a “united Jerusalem, as capital of Israel; and of the Jordan Valley, as a natural security frontier,” thereby confirming his support of the “hawk” camp of the Labor Party. He survived the cabinet reshuffle of May 1993, keeping his post of minister of housing. He traveled discreetly to Tunis in early December, where he met with Palestine Liberation Organization leaders. At the same time, Rabin entrusted him with secret missions to certain Iraqi leaders. During the summer of 1995, his name was cited in the press in connection with massacres of Arab soldiers perpetrated by an Israeli unit to which he belonged during T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BEN-GURION, DAVID

the fighting in the 1956 Sinai-Suez War and 1967 Arab-Israel War. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, Ben Eliezer remained minister of housing in the new cabinet headed by Shimon Peres. In February 1996, he took over the Labor Party’s electoral campaign in preparation for the elections to be held the following May, when the prime minister and Knesset members were to be chosen for the first time by separate ballot. The vote gave thirty-four seats to the Labor Party and twentytwo to Likud, whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was elected prime minister. Ben Eliezer won reelection, thereby consolidating his position in the Labor Party. On 17 May 1999, Labor Party leader Ehud Barak was elected prime minister. That July Ben Eliezer was appointed minister of communications. In February 2001, in anticipation of the upcoming election of a new prime minister, he declared himself in favor of the participation of Labor in a government of national unity, even if the latter included movements of the extreme right. The following March, Ben Eliezer and six other Labor members, including Peres, joined the cabinet of Ariel Sharon. He took on the ministry of defense. When the Intifada intensified in the Occupied Territories, he approved of and supported the reprisal operations ordered by Sharon. In September of that same year, Ben Eliezer was defeated in the election for the post of secretary general of the Labor Party by Avraham Burg, whom he accused of electoral fraud. In late December, after months of legal proceedings and battles, Ben Eliezer was elected secretary general of the Israel Labor Party in a vote where participation was very low. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Barak, Ehud; Madrid Conference; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; Suez Crisis; Weizman, Ezer; Yad.

BEN-GURION, DAVID (Born Gruen, Gryn; 1886– 1973): Israeli political figure, born in Plonsk, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1905, David Ben-Gurion joined the ranks of the Zionist-Socialist movement, Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), of which he became the leader. He moved to Palestine in 1906. Deported by the Turkish authorities in 1915, he came to the United States where, as a spokesperson for Zionism, he attempted to unify the diverse socialist tendencies of the movement. Back in Palestine in 1920, he continued his work of unifying the diverse labor movements. In 1921, along with Golda Meir and Izhak Ben-Zvi, he created the Workers’ Union, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Histadrut, of which he became the secretary general. In 1930, he participated in the foundation of the Zionist Workers Party, MAPAI, and became its head. On 24 July 1933, Ben-Gurion became director of the political department of the Jewish Agency, the administrative link between the Jewish community and British authorities, who had a mandate over Palestine. In 1934, MAPAI won 42.3 percent of the votes in the Elected Assembly of the Yishuv (Jewish community of Palestine), thereby becoming its principal political bloc. In liaison with Chaim Weizmann, Ben-Gurion intensified his activities within the Jewish Agency. In October 1944, confronted by the decision of the British to stop all Jewish immigration by the end of the year, Ben-Gurion decided, in his capacity as president of the Jewish Agency, to cease all collaboration with the British authorities. Although determined to fight for the Zionist cause, he was opposed to the extremist methods of certain Jewish militias. On 14 May 1948, a few hours before the expiration of the British Mandate, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel, and he became its prime minister and defense minister. In this capacity, he supervised the defense of the State of Israel during the first Israeli-Arab War of 1948–49. After the Knesset elections of February 1949, MAPAI was confirmed as the leading political party of Israel, with 46 seats out of the 120. On 14 December 1949, BenGurion announced the transfer of the Israeli capital to Jerusalem. In 1951, in spite of the disapproval of his entourage and of a majority of political figures, he decided to strengthen ties between Israel and the Germany of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, thereby obtaining financial and technical aid as indemnification for Nazi crimes. In 1953, leaving his post to Moshe Sharett, he resigned from the government to retire to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. In February 1955, he reassumed the post of defense minister, and in November he again became prime minister. In October 1956, backed by France and Great Britain, BenGurion made the decision to involve his country in the Suez-Sinai War. The failure of this expedition, for reasons having to do with the international political situation, persuaded him to strengthen the Israeli Army and to initiate secret contacts with certain Arab leaders. On 31 January 1959, the findings of the commission of inquiry on the Lavon Affair having led to his resignation from the government, BenGurion was obliged also to leave his post as secretary general of Histadrut. Knesset elections held in 1961 showed a weakening of his party, but he succeeded,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

69

BEN SHAKIR, ZAYD

DAVID BEN-GURION. A ZIONIST LEADER EVEN BEFORE HE IMMIGRATED TO PALESTINE IN 1906, BEN-GURION (CENTER) SHAPED THE DEVELOPMENT, CREATION, AND EARLY YEARS OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE. HE WAS ISRAEL’S FIRST PRIME MINISTER AND DEFENSE MINISTER, FROM 1948 TO 1953, AND RETURNED TO POWER FROM 1955 TO 1963. IN THIS PICTURE, HE IS SHOWN REVIEWING THE TROOPS WITH GENERAL MOSHE DAYAN. (© Photograph by Hans Pinn. Government Press Office [GPO] of Israel)

on 1 November 1961, in forming a new government that, in spite of the weakness of its parliamentary base, showed itself to be fairly stable. On 16 June 1963, a scission in MAPAI, caused in part by the Lavon Affair, led him to resign suddenly, after having designated Levi Eshkol as his successor. In spite of his retirement from government, Ben-Gurion remained the principal leader of his party, supported by such rising stars of MAPAI as Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan. In November 1964, he resigned from the central committee of MAPAI to create a new political organization, the RAFI Party, which led to his being expelled from MAPAI. From 1965 to 1969 he occupied a seat in the Knesset. In 1968, RAFI united with MAPAI and Ahdut ha-Avoda to form the Israeli Labor Party. In the parliamentary elections of 1969, Ben-Gurion headed a “state list” that won only four seats in the Knesset. Ben-Gurion retired from the Knesset in 1970 and moved back to his kibbutz,

70

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

where he died. He is considered the founder of the State of Israel. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avoda; Dayan, Moshe; Histadrut; Israel Labor Party; Jewish Agency for Israel; Lavon Affair; MAPAI; Meir, Golda; Peres, Shimon; RAFI Party; Weizmann, Chaim; Zionism.

BEN SHAKIR, ZAYD (Zeid Ben Shaker, 1934– ): Jordanian military figure, related to a cousin of King Abdullah of Jordan. With degrees from Sandhurst Military Academy (England) and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Zayd Ben Shakir was named commander of the Jordanian Sixth Armored Brigade (1966). He participated in the Arab-Israel War of 1967 and a year later in the battle of al-Karameh, where he helped the Fedayeen against the Israelis. He was called back to Jordan from London by King Hussein in the autumn of T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BERNADOTTE, FOLKE

1968 to help the government deal with the deteriorating situation inside the kingdom. In September 1970, he directed operations against Palestinian groups who were trying to take power (Black September). In 1972, he was named army chief of staff, then in 1976 commander-in-chief of the Jordanian armed forces. Promoted to marshal in 1987, he resigned from the army and, the following year, became head of the royal house and counselor for military affairs to King Hussein. In 1989, he was named prime minister and defense minister. During his mandate, legislative elections took place in Jordan for the first time in twenty-two years. He resigned his post in 1990 but assumed it again in November 1991, remaining prime minister until May 1993. On 5 January 1995, he was named head of the Jordanian government for the third time before being replaced by Abdul Karim Kabariti in February 1996. SEE ALSO Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Arab-Israel War (1967); Black September 1970.

BEN-ZVI, IZHAK (1884–1963): Zionist leader, second president of Israel (1952–1963). Born in Poltava, Ukraine, in 1884, Izhak Ben-Zvi was involved in the Zionist movement from an early age. He was one of the founders of the PoEalei Ziyyon Party in Palestine, editing the party’s newspaper and opening a small school in Jerusalem. In 1908 Ben-Zvi went to Constantinople with his friend David Ben-Gurion to study law; at the outbreak of World War I they returned to Palestine but were expelled by Ottoman authorities. They immigrated to the United States, where they lectured in support of the Zionist movement. Ben-Zvi returned to Palestine as a soldier in the Jewish Legion. He maintained a commitment to Labor Zionism throughout his political career, eventually providing a link between British authorities and Labor Zionist leadership. He was elected to the Jerusalem municipality several times and served as a member, and later chair, of the VaEad LeDumi (National Council). Ben-Zvi served as president of Israel from 1952 until his death in 1963. SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David.

BERLIN SUMMIT: At a meeting in Berlin on 26 March 1999, the member countries of the European Union published a text on Israeli-Palestinian relations, according to which the European Union: “1) Reaffirms its support for a negotiated solution, reflecting the principle of ‘exchange of the territories against peace’ and guaranteeing the collective and individual security of the Israeli and Palestinian people; welcomes in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

this context the decision of the Palestinian National Council nullifying the particulars of their charter that called for the destruction of Israel, while reaffirming their commitment to live in peace with Israel; is concerned by the current impasse in the peace process, calling on all parties to apply fully and immediately the Wye River memorandum. 2) Calls on the parties to reaffirm their commitment to the basic principles established in the framework of Madrid, Oslo, and subsequent agreements, in accord with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338; urges the parties to agree on an extension of the interim period, as was established in the Oslo accord. 3) Calls for, in particular, a prompt restart of negotiations on final status in the upcoming months on an accelerated basis, which should lead to a rapid settlement, not be prolonged indefinitely; expresses its conviction that it should be possible to conclude the negotiations within a year’s time, while declaring its willingness to facilitate these negotiations. 4) Urges the parties to refrain from activities that anticipate the result of these negotiations on a final status, or any activities contrary to international law, including any settlement activity, and to eliminate provocation and violence. 5) Reaffirms the permanent and unrestricted right of the Palestinians to selfdetermination, including the option of a state; desires the prompt respect of this right; calls on the parties to make an effort of good will to find a negotiated solution based on existing accords, without prejudice to this right, which is not subject to cancellation; expresses its conviction that the creation of a viable and peaceful democratic Palestinian state, based on existing accords and through negotiations, would be the best guarantee of Israel’s security and the acceptance of Israel as an equal partner in the region; declares its willingness to consider recognizing a Palestinian state, when the time comes, on the basis of the above-mentioned principles. 6) Calls for a prompt restart of negotiations on the Syrian and Lebanese wings of the peace process, resulting in an application of Security Council Resolutions 242, 338, and 425.” SEE ALSO Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Resolution 242; Resolution 338.

BERNADOTTE, FOLKE (1895–1948): Nephew of King Gustave V of Sweden, Count Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg was born in Stockholm. At the beginning of 1945, as president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte succeeded in negotiating with the German authorities for the liberation of almost 30,000

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

71

BERRI, NABI

prisoners from concentration camps. On 28 April, he participated in negotiations that concluded in the surrender of Germany. On 29 May 1948, in the framework of the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and of the fighting that erupted upon the proclamation of the creation of the State of Israel, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly designated him as mediator in Palestine, to be assisted by Ralph S. Bunche. Bernadotte obtained a truce in IsraeliArab fighting, and on 28 June he proposed a plan suggesting the constitution of a federated “Greater Palestine” incorporating the West Bank and including two autonomous states, one Jewish and the other Arab. His project reduced the portion allowed to Jews in the UN plan of November 1947. Rejected by both parties, this proposition led to a resumption of combat. On 16 September 1948, Count Bernadotte’s “Progress Report” to the United Nations advocated the “right to return” of Arabs who had been expelled from their land and the establishment of an international status for Jerusalem, which provoked the anger of Jewish extremists. The next day, along with one of his assistants, the French Colonel André Pierre Sérot, he was assassinated by Meshulam Makover and other members of the Stern Gang (LEHI). On 18 September, nearly 200 members of or sympathizers with this small group were arrested. Two days later, both the Stern Gang and Irgun were banned.

BERRI, NABI (1938– ): Lebanese political figure. A

ShiEite Muslim, Nabi Mustafa Berri was born in 1938 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, into a family of merchants originally from Tibnin in southern Lebanon. Berri’s family returned to Lebanon in 1948, and in 1963 he was elected president of the Student Union at the Lebanese University of Beirut, where the BaEth Party held a majority. Between 1964 and 1965 he studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris, then settled in Detroit. In 1972 he returned to Sierra Leone, then back to Lebanon, where he started practicing law. In 1973 Berri joined the ranks of the Movement of the Disinherited, founded by Imam Musa Sadr, where he advocated an alliance with Syria. During the summer of 1975, while the civil war that was to last for fifteen years was just starting, he joined with Musa Sadr in creating the AMAL militia, whose purpose was the defense of the ShiEa community against the attacks from other Lebanese militias. Between 1975 and 1978 he represented the pro-Syrian current of the movement and, taking the side of Damascus, participated in the overthrow of alliances that had been formed between AMAL and the Palestinian

72

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

NABI MUSTAFA BERRI. THE LEBANESE COFOUNDER OF THE AMAL MI1975, BERRI ADVOCATED AN ALLIANCE WITH SYRIA AND OPPOSED BOTH THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF SOUTH LEBANON AND THE INFLUENCE OF PALESTINIAN GROUPS IN HIS COUNTRY. HE SERVED IN MINISTERIAL POSTS AND BECAME THE PRESIDENT OF THE LEBANESE PARLIAMENT IN 1992. (AP/Wide World Photos)

LITIA IN

movements. In April 1980, two years after the mysterious disappearance of Musa Sadr in Libya, Berri succeeded Husayn al-Husayni, who had run AMAL in the interim. In June 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an Islamic current appeared in the movement, which Berri fought until there was a break that gave rise to Hizbullah. In February 1984 the conflict pitting the ShiEite and Druze communities against President Amin Jumayyil propelled Berri to a prominent place on the political scene, and he became one of Lebanon’s “warlords.” That summer he joined the national unity government led by Rashid Karame, in the capacity of minister of state and minister of justice for South Lebanon, while advocating an alliance with the Syrians. On 6 October, he accompanied the Lebanese prime minister to the United Nations to plead the cause of South Lebanon. On 6 February 1985, Berri declared himself to be “minister of national resistance” and supported sending anti-Israeli commandos to South Lebanon. From then on, in an effort to counter the influence of Hizbullah, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BETHLEHEM UNIVERSITY

he committed AMAL to resistance to the Israeli occupier. On 27 March 1989, Berri was reelected president of AMAL. That November, as a supporter of the TaDif Accords that had just been signed, he was appointed minister of housing, electricity, and hydraulic power in the cabinet of national unity led by Salim al-Hoss. A fervent partisan of Syria, he opposed the “war of liberation” that General Michel Aoun had just launched that December against the Syrian forces in Lebanon. Aoun’s Maronite forces were defeated in October 1990, effectively ending the civil war, and the militias were disbanded. AMAL became a political movement. On 31 August 1991, along with Muhammad Beydoun, housing minister and AMAL member, Berri threatened to resign from the government in protest against a visit Lebanese prime minister Omar Karame had just paid to Libya, where Imam Musa Sadr had disappeared in 1978. On 20 October 1992, Berri was elected president of the Lebanese Parliament, with 105 of the 125 votes that were cast. He was reelected to this post four years later, and again in 2000, after legislative elections saw the victory of Rafiq Hariri. SEE ALSO AMAL; Arab-Israel War (1982); ShiEite.

BETA ISRAEL (beth-Israel; “of the house of Israel,” in Hebrew): The various tribes of Israel dispersed all over the world. BETAR (B’rith Trumpeldor): Jewish extremist movement founded in 1923 by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Riga, Latvia, for the training of the future cadres of revisionist Zionism. Betar’s program was built around an intense political and paramilitary education. Once transformed into a veritable militia, the movement was integrated into the Herut Party of Menachem Begin. Betar is likewise the name of the fortress from which Bar Kochba directed the revolt against the Roman legions in Palestine, in 135 C.E. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Herut; Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev.

BETHLEHEM (Bayt Lahm): An Arab city in the West Bank, Bethlehem is located five and a half miles (eight kilometers) south of Jerusalem. According to the Gospels, it was the birthplace of Jesus. In the fourth century, Constantine built the Basilica of the Nativity there, over the grotto that is traditionally considered the site of Jesus’ birth. Since then, the church has become a place of Christian pilgrimage. It is situated near the tomb of Rachel, a Jewish holy place. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Bethlehem had a population that was mostly Christian until 1948. In 1944 its population was less than 9,000; in 1948 it was 14,000; by 2003 it was estimated to be 27,000, about half Christian and half Muslim. An additional 25,000 people live in the adjacent towns of Bayt Jala and Bayt Sahur. Three nearby refugee camps established in 1948—Dheisheh, Aida, and Bayt Jibrin—are home to another 20,000 people. Bethlehem is also the site of Bethlehem University, a Roman Catholic institution that was founded as a secondary school in 1893 and became a university in 1973. Bethlehem is located in a Palestinian autonomous zone, under the Oslo Accords. In April and May 2002, the Church of the Nativity was the site of a five-week-long siege by Israeli forces who were seeking to apprehend a group of militants they accused of being terrorists, who had taken refuge there from the Israel Defense Force (IDF). The incident ended with a deal that allowed the men to leave the country. In June, like other West Bank cities, Bethlehem was reoccupied by the Israelis and placed under military control, with 24-hour curfews. Although Bethlehem is a regional center of trade, its local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, which has been greatly reduced since 2001 by the ongoing alAqsa Intifada and Israeli military activity. When the Israeli separation wall is completed, it will run just to the north of Bethlehem, cutting the city off from Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Bethlehem University; Oslo Accords.

BETHLEHEM UNIVERSITY: Founded in 1973, Bethlehem University is a Roman Catholic, Vaticansponsored Palestinian university, created in cooperation with the De La Salle Brothers, a religious order that has established schools in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and other countries. In 2002 the university had an enrollment of more than two thousand students (of whom 70 percent were Muslim), with faculties in art, business administration, education, nursing, science, and hotel management. It also housed a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biotechnology Center and an environmental research facility. The university was closed by Israeli military authorities from 1987–1990, during the first Intifada. In April and May 2002, during the the al-Aqsa Intifada, the university was shut down several times as Israeli forces entered Bethlehem and besieged the Church of the Nativity in pursuit of Palestinian militants who had taken refuge there. In June, the Israelis re-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

73

BEVIN, ERNEST

BETHLEHEM. IN THE PLACE WHERE THE BIBLE SAYS JESUS WAS BORN, NOW AN ARAB TOWN IN THE WEST BANK JUST A FEW MILES OUTSIDE JERUSALEM, AN ISRAELI TANK AND ARMORED VEHICLE PATROL PAUL VI STREET IN EARLY 2002. (AP/Wide World Photos)

occupied the city, and the university was shut down until the military occupation ended a year later. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Bethlehem; Intifada (1987–1993).

BEVIN, ERNEST (1881–1951): British political figure. Ernest Bevin’s career started at a young age in the union movement, where he demonstrated his organizational skills, in particular during a stevedore strike in 1920. In 1937 he became chairman of the general council of Trades Union Congress. In 1940 he was elected to the House of Commons and joined a government coalition formed by Winston Churchill, as minister of labor and national service. He participated in the Potsdam Conference (July– August 1945). The Labor election victory in 1945 allowed him to become secretary of state for foreign affairs, in charge, among other matters, of the Palestine dossier.

74

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Bevin played an active role in the formation of British policy concerning Palestine, and it was he who announced in November 1945 the formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, composed of six prominent Americans and six prominent Britons. Bevin pursued a policy that followed the one outlined in the British White Paper of 1939, restricting the number of Jewish immigrants from Europe to Palestine. The committee’s report, issued in April 1946, recommended the authorization of the immigration of 100,000 European Jews and the annulment of land regulations restricting Jewish purchase of Arab land. Despite British pledges to adopt the committee’s recommendations if they were unanimous, within a few months Britain backed away from adopting the report. In April 1947, Bevin announced that the British government had decided to lay the Palestine problem before the United Nations. An antisemitic comment regarding Jews “always wanting to push to the head of the queue” has been said to reveal his purported impaT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLE

sibility of resigning should Netanyahu be found guilty. On 15 April, the Israeli police recommended indictment of the prime minister, his justice minister, and others for “abuse of confidence and prevarication.” Deri’s indictment was also recommended, for “blackmail.” On 20 April, the charges against the Israeli prime minister and his close associates were dismissed and on 15 June the Israeli Supreme Court declined to prosecute Netanyahu, for “lack of proof.” SEE ALSO Deri, Arye; Netanyahu, Benjamin; SHAS.

ERNEST BEVIN. A LONGTIME BRITISH LABOR LEADER, BEVIN WAS THE COUNTRY’S SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS AFTER WORLD WAR II. IN THAT POST, HE TRIED TO SLOW THE PACE OF POSTWAR JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO PALESTINE AND THEN TURNED OVER THE FATE OF THE BRITISH MANDATE TO THE UNITED NATIONS.

tience with Zionist pressure for postwar immigration. In March 1951, his health declining, Bevin resigned his position. He died a month later. SEE ALSO White Papers on Palestine.

BIBIGATE: Political scandal uncovered in 1997 that touched Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, known as Bibi. On 10 January 1997, Israeli lawyer Roni Bar-On was appointed legal adviser to the government. Two days later, under pressure from political figures, he resigned. On 22 January, Israeli television’s channel 1 revealed that Arye Deri, head of the ultra-orthodox party SHAS, had threatened Netanyahu that his party would vote against the 15 January 1997 Hebron Protocol unless he named Roni Bar-On as legal adviser. According to the television report, Deri hoped that with this appointment he would obtain clemency from the ministry of justice in an affair that had been under investigation for several months. The scandal made headlines in all Israeli newspapers and led to a judicial inquiry that created the Bibigate scandal, the first time in the history of Israel that a prime minister was investigated by his own police. Several cabinet members raised the posD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BIBLE (from the Greek biblia, meaning “books”): Ensemble of writings presented as being divinely inspired. The Hebrew Bible (TaNaKh, in Hebrew) is comprised of three sections: Torah (Pentateuch), NeviDim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Holy Writings). Originating with Moses in the desert around the thirteenth century B.C.E., the Bible developed in Palestine principally through oral transmission, in tandem with the evolution of the Jewish people. It began with the creation of the world, and went on to recount relations between God and humankind. Considered the book of the people of Israel, the Bible designated, by extension, the written law of the Jewish people. This sacred work included, among others, the Book of Joshua, which told the story of the conquest of Canaan; that of Samuel, which recounted the history of the Hebrew people up to the time they came to be ruled by royalty; and the Book of Kings, which recalled the history of the Kingdom of Solomon and the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E. The Hebrew Bible corresponds to the Old Testament of the Christians, the latter not recognizing the same texts as the Jews. Most of the Bible was composed in Hebrew, with some passages in Aramaic. In many of its stories, Biblical literature is based on real material elements, though the marvelous sometimes prevails. For example, the episode of Moses and the burning bush could be a description of fraxinella, a desert plant that bursts into flame easily in very hot weather. Likewise the tale of the “plagues,” visited on the Egyptians because of the refusal of Pharaoh to allow the Hebrews to leave, could be a description of natural events. The Zionist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which sought to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, drew upon the Biblical notion of Eretz Yisrael, the “Promised Land” pledged by God to his chosen people. Adherents of the Greater Land of Israel movement, founded after the Arab-Israel War of 1967, who op-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

75

BILADI, BILADI

pose ceding sovereignty of Occupied Territories, base their conception of Eretz Yisrael on the definition of a Biblical Promised Land. SEE ALSO Eretz Yisrael. BILADI, BILADI (My country, my country): The Palestinian national anthem, by Ibrahim Hefeth Touqan, Muhammad Salim Flayfel, and Ahmad Salim Flayfel.

BILU: Acronym for Beit Ya’acov Lekhou Venelekha (House of Jacob, let us arise and go!, in Hebrew). First modern Jewish movement for the agricultural colonizing of Palestine, founded in Kharkov in 1882. By extension, the plural, biluim, designated the first Jewish colonists, of Russian origin, who settled in Palestine.

LADIN, OSAMA (Usama bin Ladin, ibn Laden; 1957– ): Saudi Islamist militant, born in Saudi Arabia to one of the richest families in the kingdom, owners of an important conglomerate of construction companies. At the beginning of the 1980s, after studies in economics and theology that put him in contact with various Islamic groups, Osama bin Laden joined the ranks of the Islamic Legion, which had been formed by Prince Turki ibn Abdelaziz Faisal, head of Saudi security services. This small group was concerned with helping the Afghan people in their struggle against the Soviet Army. Prince Turki was also one of the leaders of the World Islamic League. Bin Laden created al-QaEida in 1986 with Ayman al-Zawahri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, under the cover of the Islamic Salvation Foundation. In the organization, bin Laden was responsible for recruiting, financing, and arming volunteers from different Arab countries. In Peshawar, Pakistan, he benefited indirectly from the material help that the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was providing to the Afghan rebels, which was being delivered through the Pakistani special services, or ISI. In 1991, having been back in Saudi Arabia for a year, he openly expressed his opposition to the proAmerican policies of the Saudi rulers, thereby identifying with the fundamentalism espoused by Sheikhs Sfar al-Hawli and Salman al-Awdah, founders of the Islamic Resurgence Movement. At the time of the Gulf War, he accused the Saudi regime of having “profaned the land of Islam” by welcoming U.S. troops there. In the autumn of 1991, he decided on exile in Sudan, where he created a number of commercial enterprises, from which a share of the profits went

BIN

76

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

OSAMA MUHAMMAD

LADIN. THE MOST PROMINENT ISLAMIST (SHOWN IN A 1998 PHOTOGRAPH), HE COFOUNDED AL-QAEIDA IN 1986 AND LED IT INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. STARTING IN THE MID-1990S, HE APPROVED OR INSPIRED NUMEROUS ATTACKS ON AMERICAN AND ALLIED TARGETS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA, AND EUROPE, THE MOST SPECTACULAR AND DEADLY OF WHICH WAS THE BOMBING OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK AND THE PENTAGON IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001. (AP/Wide World Photos) BIN

MILITANT OF HIS ERA

to finance Islamic Jihad through the Sudanese Islamic al-Shamal Bank, in which he was a major stockholder. In 1992, he was suspected of supporting the militias that were harassing American troops in Somalia. Two years later, in April 1994, he was officially stripped of Saudi nationality. In the summer of 1996 he was suspected of having financed two antiAmerican attacks in Saudi Arabia: that of 13 November, in Riyad, on a building where American advisors were staying, and that of 27 June, in Khobar, against a U.S. military base. In autumn 1996, he left Khartoum under pressure from Sudanese authorities, first going to Pakistan, then to Afghanistan, where he became a mainstay of the Taliban regime. On 23 February 1998, at Peshawar, with several leaders of the Jihad, he established the World Islamic Front for T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIRKAT MOSHE

Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, a sort of federated movement of extremist groups. On 6 June, in an interview given to the American network ABC, he upheld the start of an open war against Americans, who, he specified, “whether civilian or military, are all targets of a fatwa.” On the following 7 August, a double attack against the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, cost the lives of 258 people, including 12 Americans. U.S. intelligence agencies accused bin Laden of having ordered these attacks. On 20 August, in spite of missile strikes against camps at Khost, in the Afghan province of Paktia, which were thought to be harboring his followers, the Americans failed to dislodge him. An international hunt was initiated for networks that he was believed to control. In September, one of his financiers, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a Sudanese national, was arrested in Bavaria, Germany. In October 1999, the U.S. government requested bin Laden’s extradition from the Afghan government, which was led by the Taliban and underwritten by Saudi Arabia. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) offered a reward of $5 million for his capture. On 17 February 2001, fourteen of his partisans were indicted for terrorist activities by the Jordanian authorities. On 5 February a trial of four men accused of belonging to his network and of being responsible for terrorist actions on American soil opened in New York City. On 13 September, two days after the suicide attack on the New York World Trade Center and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., which caused several thousand deaths, the FBI, suspecting bin Laden of being responsible, renewed its offer of $5 million for his capture. The next day, with the support of Congress, the Bush administration started to prepare a military operation directed against the Taliban regime in Kabul. On 18 September, the United Nations Security Council demanded “the immediate and unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden” from the Afghan government. On 19 September the council of Afghan ulemas asked him to leave Afghanistan of his own accord. On 23 September, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell announced that the United States was ready to offer a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture. On 25 September, Saudi Arabia broke off diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime. Three days later, Saudi Arabia authorized the United States to use its military bases in the operation against Afghanistan. On 7 October, Operation Enduring Freedom started with the first U.S. aerial strikes on Afghanistan. Bin Laden went into the mountains on the Pakistan border that fall. He escaped a major American assault on an al-QaDida base at Tora Bora in December and D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

could not be located, although he was seen thereafter on several videotaped messages that he sent to Arabic-language broadcasters. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991); International Islamic Front; Islamic Jihad; World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders; Zawahri, Ayman Muhammad al-. BIN SHAKIR, ZAYD (Zeid Ben Shaker; 1934– ): Jordanian military figure, a distant cousin and childhood friend of King Hussein of Jordan. Born in September 1934, Zayd bin Shakir earned degrees from Sandhurst Military Academy (England) and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was named commander of the Jordanian 6th Armored Brigade in 1966. He participated in the Arab-Israel War of 1967, then, a year later, in the battle of al-Karameh, where he helped the Fedayeen against the Israelis. He was called back to Jordan from London by King Hussein in the autumn of 1968 to help the government in dealing with the deteriorating situation within the kingdom. In September 1970, bin Shakir directed operations against Palestinian groups who were trying to take power (“Black September”). In 1972 he was named army chief of staff, then in 1976 commander-in-chief of the Jordanian Armed Forces. Promoted to marshal in 1987, bin Shakir resigned from the army and, the following year, became head of the royal court and counselor to King Hussein for military affairs. In 1989 he was named prime minister and defense minister. During his mandate, legislative elections took place in Jordan for the first time in twenty-two years. He resigned his post in 1990, but assumed it again in November 1991, remaining prime minister until May 1993. On 5 January 1995 he was named head of the Jordanian government for the third time, before being replaced by Abdul Karim Kabariti in February 1996. On bin Shakir’s retirement, King Hussein awarded him the title of prince. Since the accession in 1999 of King Abdullah II ibn Hussein, who served under him in the army, bin Shakir has been an informal advisor to the king. SEE ALSO Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Hussein ibn Talal.

BIO SEE

League of Arab States.

BIRKAT MOSHE: Israeli Religious College in Maale Adoumim that since 1993 has been training the new

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

77

BIR ZEIT UNIVERSITY

generation of “religious warriors” ready to sacrifice their lives in defense of Israel. Most of these students, a majority of whom are right wing, wound up in elite units of the Israel Defense Force. One of the college deans, Nahum Rabinovitch, was among the rabbis who in 1994 authored an appeal to Israeli soldiers for disobedience in the event the Israeli Army was ordered to withdraw from the Occupied Territories. SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force.

BIR ZEIT UNIVERSITY: Palestinian university located near the town of Birzeit, south of Ramallah, about twelve miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. Founded in 1924 as an elementary school for girls, it became a secondary school for boys and girls in 1930. In the 1950s and 1960s postsecondary courses were added and the school became exclusively a two-year postsecondary institution in 1967. In 1975 it became a four-year undergraduate university. Graduate programs were first introduced in 1977. Because of its location and circumstances, the Bir Zeit student body (now about 6,000) has always been highly active in Palestinian politics and anti-Israeli resistance. Student groups affiliated with Palestine Liberation Organization member groups such as Fatah have claimed the loyalties of many students. An Islamist current has also appeared, as it has in the larger society. Israeli authorities have regarded the campus as a dangerous center of militant activity and have shut the school down numerous times since 1973. In 1974 the president of the university, Hanna Nasir, was deported and not allowed to return until 1993, after the Oslo Accords. In the 1990s the university suffered from strict Israeli censorship and foreign faculty members were required to sign loyalty oaths, resulting in some deportations. During the first Intifada, Bir Zeit remained closed from 1988 to 1992, and during the al-Aqsa Intifada classes continue to be disrupted by closures, curfews, and Israeli military activity. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Fatah, al-; Intifada (1987–1993); Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; West Bank.

BISHARA, AZMI (Beshara, Bichara; 1956– ): Palestinian Israeli. Born in 1956 in Nazareth, the son of a union leader, Azmi Bishara joined the leftist party HADASH while he was a student at Hebrew University. In 1974 he created the National Committee of Arab High School Students. In 1985 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin. He went on to become a professor at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, where he

78

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

taught philosophy and political history. Between 1988 and 1991 he was also associated with the Van Leer Institute, a prestigious research center in Jerusalem. Running on the HADASH list in the parliamentary elections of 29 May 1991, Bishara won a seat in the Knesset. In April 1992, advocating equality between Jews and Arabs, he founded a movement called the Alliance for Equality. He was reelected in May 1996, running again on the HADASH list, which won five seats in the Knesset. At the end of the following December, he announced he would run for the post of prime minister in the 2000 elections. The first Arab candidate for the post, Bishara ran against Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Mordechai, and Benny Begin. He also headed the electoral list of his party, Balad (National Democratic Assembly), with Ahmad Tibi of the Arab Movement for Change (AMC) in second place. The main themes of his campaign were “identity” demands of the Arab Israelis who wanted to be better integrated into Israeli society. But on 14 May, just before the vote in the general elections, Bishara withdrew his candidacy for the post of prime minister, urging his supporters to cast their ballots for the Israel Labor Party. Balad won two seats in the Knesset, one of which was allotted to Bishara. In November 2000 he went to Damascus, where he held talks with President Bashshar al-Asad. One of the results of this visit was the organization of a trip that allowed Arab-Israeli families to see their relatives who were refugees in Syria. In June 2001 the Knesset opened an inquiry about Bishara, following remarks he had made that were thought to be antiIsraeli, on the occasion of Syrian president Hafiz alAsad’s death. Two months later the same charges were leveled against another Arab-Israeli representative in the Knesset, Taleb al-Sanaa. On 7 November 2001 the Knesset lifted the parliamentary immunity of Azmi Bishara, accusing him of incitement to terrorism and organizing travel to Syria, a country at war with Israel. In 2002 Bishara and Ahmad Tibi were barred from running in the next election on the grounds that they had supported “terrorists” by denouncing the Israeli assault on Jenin that spring, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban shortly before the election in January 2003. Both Tibi and Bishara were returned to the Knesset. SEE ALSO Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Tibi, Ahmad.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BLACK SEPTEMBER ORGANIZATION

BITAHON (“security,” in Hebrew): Generic term used to describe a permanent preoccupation of Israelis, who fear for their lives and the survival of the State of Israel. More existential than physical, this malaise is still widespread in Israeli society, in spite of the Israeli-Arab peace process begun in 1991. BLACK HAND SEE

Qassam, Izz al-Din al-.

BLACK JUNE SEE

Fatah Revolutionary Council.

BLACK PANTHERS: Name of an armed branch of alFatah. SEE ALSO

Fatah, al-.

BLACK PANTHERS: Israeli political and protest movement created in the 1970s by the leaders of the Sephardi community in their struggle for equal rights. Working against the Laborites, in power since 1948, their activity enabled the advent to power of Menachem Begin and the Likud Party in 1977. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Sephardim. BLACK SEPTEMBER 13 BRIGADES: A Palestinian movement, the Black September 13 Brigades was created on 27 October 1993 by Lieutenant Colonel Munir Hasan al-Maqdah, al-Fatah military commander at the Ain al-Hilwa (Lebanon) camp, who opposed the Israeli-Palestinian accord of the preceding 13 September. The principal cause of his opposition was the exclusion, from this accord, of the question of the refugees from 1948. While the Alliance of Palestine Forces (APF) made efforts to rally al-Maqdah to its cause, the latter, on his side, tried vainly to obtain the backing of important al-Fatah leaders, such as the brothers Hani and Khalid al-Hasan. The principal members of this movement, in addition to Maqdah, were Abu Khalid al-Arkoub, Jamal Qudsi, and Ali Hussein Fahoud. Black September 13, with the Lebanese Hizbullah, carried out attacks against Israeli forces in south Lebanon in 1995. Since then, Maqdah has been involved in supporting the Hizbullah and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Though effectively out of PLO or al-Fatah control since 1993, Maqdah was not formally relieved of his position as al-Fatah commander at Ain al-Hilwa until June 2003. SEE ALSO Ayn el-Hilwah; Fatah, al-; Hasan, Hani al-; Hasan, Khalid al-. BLACK SEPTEMBER 1970: Name given by the Palestinians to the events of September 1970 in Jordan, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

when the fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were attacked by the Jordanian army. In ten days of bloody fighting, more than 4,000 people died. Black September was the result of a series of events that began with the defeat of the Arab armies in the Arab-Israel War of 1967, which discredited all Arab governments and particularly disillusioned the Palestinians. The occupation by Israel of the West Bank, which had previously been controlled by Jordan, caused more than 250,000 Palestinians (many already displaced by the 1948-1949 War) to flee to Jordan, and it deprived both them and Jordan of the benefits of the West Bank economy, causing a recession. There was then extensive growth in Jordan of Palestinian organizations and institutions, both social and military, amounting almost to a separate government. The Jordanian government at this point was too weak to prevent this, and there was already hostility to the Jordanian royal house by certain Palestinian movements, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), many of whose members were of Jordanian origin. In 1970, during the war of attrition, Egypt’s unsuccessful campaign to drive Israel back from the Suez Canal, U.S. secretary of state William Rogers, who had proposed the rejected Rogers Plan in 1969, offered a modified proposal calling for a ninety-day truce while a cease-fire between Israel and the Arab states was negotiated by United Nations mediator Gunnar Jarring. This was accepted by Egypt, Jordan, and Israel—and unanimously opposed by the PLO. The cease-fire took effect on 7 August. On 16 September 1970, King Hussein formed a military government, and the following day, the Jordanian army undertook its campaign of violent repression of the Palestinians, which lasted until a truce was negotiated by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Fighting broke out again in July 1971; after the Jordanians suppressed it, they expelled the Palestinian organizations from the country en masse. These organizations regrouped in Lebanon. SEE ALSO Hussein ibn Talal; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Palestine Liberation Organization; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Rogers Plan.

BLACK SEPTEMBER ORGANIZATION: A Palestinian terrorist splinter group, the Black September Organization was formed with the more or less tacit cooperation of the leadership of al-Fatah, after the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance fighters from Jordan in July 1971. This expulsion followed their defeat in the virtual civil war that started in “Black September”

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

79

BLUE LINE

1970. The group’s purpose was to avenge the fida Diyyun killed during the fighting and to convince Palestinians that a serious fight could be made against their enemies, including Arab governments. The founders of this group, members of al-Fatah, were Muhammad al-Najjar (Abu Yussef), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Ali Hasan Salameh (Abu Hasan), and Mohammed Daud Odeh (Abu Daud). On 28 November 1971 a commando of the Black September assassinated the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tall, on a visit to Cairo. This was the group’s first operation. The following 15 December, it mounted an attack on the Jordanian ambassador to Great Britain, who was seriously wounded. On 5 September 1972, Black September executed a dramatic operation at the Olympic Games in Munich, taking Israeli athletes hostage and demanding the release of 236 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. After Israeli authorities refused to yield to the blackmail, the German police intervened to try to free the hostages. In the course of the assault, five terrorists and eleven Israeli athletes were killed. A few days later, the Israeli prime minister ordered Mossad to eliminate all the Palestinians who, directly or indirectly, participated in the operation. On 25 January 1973, in Madrid, a commando of Black September assassinated Baruch Cohen, a member of Israeli special services. The following March, eight members of Black September occupied the embassy of Saudi Arabia, in Khartoum, taking five diplomats hostage, including two Americans and one Belgian. The terrorists demanded the liberation of some fifteen Palestinians imprisoned in Jordan, among whom was Mohammed Daud Odeh, arrested a few days earlier while preparing an attack against King Hussein of Jordan. They also demanded the liberation of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. Two days later, having killed the ambassador of the United States, Cleo Noel, the Belgian chargé d’affaires, Guy Eid, and the head of the section of U.S. interests in Sudan, George Curtis Moore, the eight hostage takers surrendered to the Sudanese police. This operation led to a chill in the relations of certain Arab countries with the Palestinian movement and also blocked the attempts Yasir Arafat was making to approach the Americans and the Europeans. Concurrently, between November 1972 and June 1973, in reprisal for the Munich bloodbath, seven Palestinian leaders believed by the Israelis to be part of Black September were assassinated by the Israeli Mossad. During July 1973, the Mossad team that was assigned this mission killed a Moroccan

80

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

waiter in Norway, having confused him with Ali Hasan Salameh. At the year’s end, after Arafat decided to dissolve Black September, Salah Khalaf took it over, for the purpose of moving its members into the various security services under his charge. In the spring of 1974 a new unit, Force 17, was formed, to assure the personal security of Arafat and to carry out certain missions. It was placed under the command of Ali Hasan Salameh, who appealed to former members of Black September to help organize Force 17. During the following month of October, although the group had been theoretically dissolved, a Black September commando was arrested by the Moroccan police, suspected of preparing an attack on King Hussein of Jordan at the Arab summit that was to be held in Rabat. This arrest led to tension in the relations between the king of Morocco and Arafat. After the effective dissolution of Black September, some members of the group joined al-Fatah security services, directed by Salah Khalaf, and others joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations (PFLP–SO) of WadiD Haddad. Between 1975 and 1978, Ali Hasan al-Salama, nicknamed the “Red Prince,” served as liaison to the CIA agent in Beirut, Robert Ames. Thereby the Palestinian organization was able to transmit information to the U.S. intelligence services, in the interests of the security of U.S. citizens in Lebanon. On 22 January, al-Salama was killed in Beirut, in a car bombing carried out by Mossad, with the complicity of Sylvia Raphael, who was supposed to have lured the Red Prince into the trap. Six years later, she was assassinated by a Force 17 commando. SEE ALSO Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Mossad.

BLUE LINE: Geographic line marking the frontier between Lebanon and Israel, fixed by the terms of the armistice signed between these two countries on 23 March 1949. This frontier was confirmed by the United Nations in May 2000, after the definitive withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon. The Shebaa Farms area, which is claimed by Lebanon, remains occupied by Israel pending a settlement with Syria over the Golan Heights. B’NAI AKIVA (Bene Akiva, Bnei Akiba): Israel youth association, affiliated with the National Religious Party. B’NAI BRAK: City in the Tel Aviv suburbs, which, along with Jerusalem, has become one of the princiT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BOUTROS-GHALI, BOUTROS

pal Jewish ultra-Orthodox centers. It is the capital of the haredim and has the largest yeshivot; life there is markedly removed from the secular world. SEE ALSO Haredi; Ultra Orthodox; Yeshiva.

B’NAI B’RITH (Bene Berith, “sons of the covenant,” in Hebrew): Association founded in 1843 in the United States for the purpose of helping new Jewish immigrants. In time, B’nai B’rith turned to the defense of human rights and the struggle against antisemitism and racism. In 1913, its leaders formed the Anti-Defamation League, whose goal was to protect the rights and status of Jews as well as to develop inter-confessional relations. Having become a group with considerable influence, B’nai B’rith is one of the nongovernmental organizations represented at the United Nations, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the European Council.

BOUEIZ, FARES NOUHAD (1955– ): Lebanese political figure. Fares Boueiz was born in 1955 in Lebanon into a Maronite family of distinction. Very early on, he became active in the ranks of the National Unity Party of Raymond Eddé. In November 1989 his father-in-law, Elias Hrawi, president of the Republic of Lebanon, appointed him special counselor to the presidency. In this capacity he traveled frequently to Damascus, where he established good relations with the Syrian leaders. In December he was named foreign minister in the government of Omar Karamé; then in June 1991, he was appointed to parliament as a replacement for a deputy from Kesrouan who had died. In October 1991 he led the Lebanese delegation to the Madrid Conference on the Middle East. On 27 August 1992, along with other ministers, Boueiz opposed the holding of legislative elections, which were nevertheless held, although characterized by a high rate of abstention. After his reelection as deputy, he was once more named foreign minister in October 1992 in the government of Rafiq al-Hariri. The cabinet reshuffle of 25 May 1995 left him at his post. Boueiz left the government in November 1998, after the resignation of the Hariri cabinet. In June 2003, with Rafiq al-Hariri once again prime minister (since 2000), Bouiez was appointed minister of environment. SEE ALSO Eddé, Raymond; Hariri, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-.

BOUTROS-GHALI, BOUTROS (1922– ): Egyptian political figure. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in NoD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BOUTROS BOUTROS-GHALI. AN EGYPTIAN OFFICIAL WHO SUPPORTED PRESIDENT ANWAR AL-SADAT’S EFFORTS TOWARD PEACE WITH ISRAEL IN THE LATE 1970S, HE BECAME SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN 1992 AND SERVED UNTIL THE UNITED STATES IN 1995 OPPOSED A SECOND TERM FOR HIM. (AP/Wide World Photos)

vember 1922 in Cairo to an old Coptic family that produced several highly placed officials in the Egyptian state. His grandfather, Boutros Pasha, prime minister between 1908 and 1910, was assassinated by an Egyptian nationalist who blamed him for the abandonment of Sudan to England (1899). After brilliant studies in law and economics in Cairo and Paris, Boutros-Ghali embarked on a career in journalism and university teaching. Between 1953 and 1977 he was professor of political science at Cairo University. At the same time, he was doing research at the International Law Academy, in The Hague, Holland. As a visiting professor, he taught at many European, African, and Arab universities. He was also responsible for editing a political and economics magazine, al-Ahram al-Iqtisadi (Economic alAhram), associated with the Egyptian newspaper alAhram.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

81

BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL OFFICE

Backing the policy adopted by President Anwar al-Sadat, Boutros-Ghali joined the Arab Socialist Union, becoming a member of its political bureau. On 27 October 1977 he was named minister without portfolio. That November, when both the foreign affairs minister and the minister of state for foreign affairs resigned in protest against President Sadat’s upcoming trip to Israel, Boutros-Ghali was named interim foreign minister. In this capacity, two days later, he accompanied Sadat on his historic visit to Jerusalem. On 24 December, just before EgyptianIsraeli peace parleys were to begin, he was named minister of state for foreign affairs, becoming thereby the principal deputy to the new foreign minister, Muhammad Ibrahim Kamel. During the following months, Boutros-Ghali visited a number of foreign leaders, particularly in nonaligned countries, to obtain their support for Sadat’s initiative. In September 1978, at the time of the Camp David negotiations, he was again named interim foreign minister, following Kamel’s resignation. He retained his post in the February 1979 cabinet reshuffle that saw Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil take on the portfolio of foreign minister. At the time of the implementation of the Camp David Accords, Boutros-Ghali participated in various delegations responsible for negotiating specifics, in particular those relating to the Palestinian territories. He was named president of the Egyptian committee responsible for the normalization of Egyptian-Israeli relations. Parallel to his actions conducted in the context of the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, Boutros-Ghali played a key role in promoting the development of relations between Egypt with African countries. On 5 September 1985 he was confirmed in his post as Egypt’s minister of state for foreign affairs. On 1 January 1992 he took office as secretary general of the United Nations, replacing Javier Perez de Cuellar. His attempt to win a second five-year term was vetoed by the United States in 1995. SEE ALSO Camp David Accords; Sadat, Anwar al-.

BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL OFFICE SEE

League of Arab States.

BRIGADES OF THE PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD SEE

Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

BRITISH MANDATE: Following the Allied defeat of the Ottoman army in 1918 and the Paris Peace Settlements of 1919, Britain and France assumed control

82

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

over much of the former Ottoman Empire. On 24 July 1922, confirming the San Remo accords of 1920, the League of Nations entrusted Great Britain with the mission of administration and development of Palestine. Referring to Article 22 of the League of Nations Charter and the Balfour Declaration, and recognizing “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” the League urged Great Britain to facilitate the establishment in that country of a Jewish national home. The British government published a White Paper (Command Paper 1700) in which it drew “attention to the fact that the terms of the [Balfour] Declaration . . . do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.” After serving a five-year term, the first high commissioner in Palestine, Herbert Samuel, was replaced in 1925 by Lord Plumer. An organization, the Jewish Agency for Israel, was constituted to represent the Jewish people with the British authorities and international organizations, and the headquarters of the British high commissioner was situated in Jerusalem. Arab nationalists mobilized against the British and the Jews, leading to bloody confrontations between the communities in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1933; Jewish underground activities against the British and against the Arabs took place in the late 1930s and 1940s by groups such as the Irgun ZvaDi LeDumi. In April 1936, bloody riots broke out between Jews and Arabs, as well as between Arabs and the British. The intervention of Arab rulers of Iraq and Transjordan allowed a return to calm after several months of confrontations. On 22 June 1937, faced with this situation, the Palestine Royal Commission concluded that it was necessary to divide Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The following October, a general insurrection spread to Palestine. Playing on the enmity between the great Arab families, such as the Husayni and the Nashashibi, the British authorities attempted to retake control of the situation. In March 1938 the Woodhead Commission was formed in response to dissension within the British government over the partition plan for Palestine. The Arab and Jewish positions proved irreconcilable, and the commission’s report, issued on 9 November 1939, stated that two independent states would be impracticable, in terms of both finances and administration. It called as well for a conference to negotiate a compromise. The St. James Round Table Conference, which included the Jewish Agency, Arab governments, and Palestinian Arabs, met in London T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BRIT SHALOM

Beirut







(F LE re B nc A h N M a

N ) O date n

SYRIA (French Mandate) Damascus

IRAQ

Golan Heights

INE

Haifa

Amman Jerusalem

LE

ST

Tel Aviv

PA

Gaza

Negev

Kerak

T R A N S J OR DA N

S AU D I ARABIA

Ma’an

EGYPT

N

British Mandate for Palestine



 0 0

40 40

Boundaries, 1923 Area separated and closed to Jewish settlement, 1921 Area ceded by Great Britain to the French Mandate of Syria, 1923 City

80 mi. 80 km

in February and March 1939 but ended in deadlock. The British government then issued the MacDonald White Paper of 17 May 1939, in which it repudiated partition and proposed the creation of self-governing institutions over a ten-year period. It limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years and restricted Jewish purchase of land in some parts of Palestine. The White Paper met with negative reactions on both sides. The Zionists viewed it as a harsh reversal of the Balfour Declaration and the partition proposal, and were incensed by its immigration restrictions, which were imposed at the moment that European Jews were attempting to flee Nazi persecution in Europe. The Palestinians, though they welcomed restriction of Jewish immigration and land purchase, were skeptical that London would fulfill its promises. Apart from the immigration restrictions, the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

MacDonald White Paper remained largely unimplemented. Following the Holocaust and World War II, the crucial problem of the placement and treatment of Jewish survivors added an element of urgency to discussions of Jewish immigration to Palestine. The United States called for the admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine. Britain offered to convene an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (AAC) to seek a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict and to the plight of the European Jewish refugees. The AAC met in January 1946; its recommendations, issued three months later, included the immigration of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, the annulment of restrictions against Jewish purchase of land, and the indefinite extension of trusteeship (essentially the British Mandate system) in Palestine. The AAC’s report was shelved just a few months afterward; the British backed away from its adoption, and the United States was not willing to assist in its implementation. On 14 January 1947 the British prime minister, Ernest Bevin, decided to relinquish the British Mandate over Palestine to the United Nations (UN). On 29 November the UN voted for a partition of Palestine between two states: one Jewish and the other Arab. Arab demonstrations against the UN plan and Jewish celebrations in support of it turned to violent clashes, and Jewish and Arab forces were soon battling throughout the country. The British Mandate over Palestine expired on 14 May 1948. By that time Jewish forces had seized most of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the UN partition plan as well as land beyond those proposed borders. On 19 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the new State of Israel. The Arab-Israeli War became an international conflict between the Jewish state and the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, with some involvement by Saudi Arabia and Yemen. SEE ALSO Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry; Arab-Israel War (1948); Balfour Declaration; Ben-Gurion, David; Bevin, Ernest; Jewish Agency for Israel; Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939); White Papers on Palestine.

BRIT SHALOM: Founded in 1925, Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) was a Jewish organization that promoted binationalism, asserting that Palestine belonged to both Palestinian Arabs and Jews, and that both were entitled to national self-determination. Among its founders were Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Arthur

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

83

B D SEISSO, ATEF FA D IQ

Ruppin, head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization. In 1942 Magnes and other Brit Shalom members created the Ihud (Union) Association, which presented its ideas for a binational government in Palestine to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946, and then to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947. Ihud proposed dividing Palestine into districts, which would have a large degree of autonomy, with two national committees, Jewish and Arab, and a federal executive and legislature. Although Brit Shalom ultimately became a marginal group, in 2001 a new organization, Brit Shalom/Tahalof Essalam (the Jewish-Palestinian Alliance for Peace), was founded. The organization promotes the ideals of full and equal rights for the Arab citizens of Israel, the rejection of violence, and the renewal of a dialogue aimed at creating a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. SEE ALSO Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry; Magnes, Judah.

BDSEISSO, ATEF FADIQ (Abu Raouf; 1946–1992): Palestinian militant, born in Gaza, Palestine. In 1971, Atef BDseisso joined the ranks of Black September, which was led by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad). In September 1973, he was arrested in Ostia, Italy, along with four other Palestinians, among whom was Amin al-Hindi (Abu Zuhayr), while they were preparing an attack against the Israeli airline El Al. A few days later, the group was set free. After going to Lebanon, BDseisso was named head of the civil arm of Fatah’s security forces headed by Khalaf. In 1983, he was assigned to East Berlin as representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s security council, in charge of relations with East German special services. In August 1989, he was elected to al-Fatah’s revolutionary council, where he collaborated closely with Khalaf in the organization’s security council. In 1991, after the assassination of Khalaf and Hayel Abdul Hamid (Abu al-Houl), he became part of the leadership of Fatah’s security council, along with alHindi. In his new duties, BDseisso had numerous contacts with leaders of Arab and Western special services. In October 1991, he went to Madrid to organize security for the Palestinian delegation at the Middle East peace conference. The following year, he was assassinated in front of his hotel, in Paris, France. According to some investigators, the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) may have been behind the murder because of BDseisso’s suspected participation in the massacre of Israeli athletes in the

84

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Munich Olympic Games of 1972. According to others, he was the victim of a settling of scores within the Palestinian leadership. SEE ALSO Black September Organization; Fatah, al-; Hindi, Amin al-; Khalaf, Salah.

B’TSELEM: A human rights organization, B’Tselem, or the Israeli Center for Human Rights, was founded in 1989 by a group of academics, journalists, attorneys, and members of the Knesset. In Hebrew, B’Tselem means “in the image of,” a reference to the Biblical assertion that humans were created in the image of God. B’Tselem focuses on human rights violations by Israeli authorities in the Occupied Territories, addressing what it calls the “phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public.” It regularly publishes reports on its findings; the reports include allegations of torture, shootings by security forces, restriction on movement, and expropriation of land. B’Tselem distributes printed material to the public, holds press conferences, participates in protests in the occupied territories, and provides information to members of the Knesset. SEE ALSO Peace Now.

BURG, AVRAHAM (1955– ): Israeli political figure. Born in 1955 in Jerusalem, Avraham Burg is the son of the leader of the National Religious Party, Yosef Burg, who joined the government of Menachem Begin as minister of the interior in August 1981. The following year, after completing his military service, Avraham Burg participated in forming a small group, “Soldiers Against Silence,” that called for an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Shortly afterward, he joined the ranks of Peace Now, where he spoke in favor of Israeli-Arab peace and the creation of a Palestinian state. In 1984, having joined the Israel Labor Party, he became advisor to Prime Minister Shimon Peres on issues related to the diaspora. In 1986, he was named director of the Center for Judaism and Tolerance. During the summer of 1988, Avraham Burg was elected Labor Party member of Knesset and was appointed chairman of its education committee. Confirming his reputation as an orator, he became one of the principal figures in the party and a leader of its “dove” wing. In the Knesset, his fight for tolerance and for the creation of an Israeli constitution attracted notice. In the parliamentary elections of June 1992, he ranked third on the Labor Party list, after T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BUSH, GEORGE W.

Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Within the Labor Party, he belonged to the renewal tendency, along with Yossi Beilin, Yael Dayan, and Nawaf Massalha. On 15 February 1995 Burg was elected chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the state organization in charge of immigration to Israel and relations with the diaspora. A few months later he launched an international inquiry to restore to their rightful owners or their descendants the Jewish assets seized during World War II and deposited in Swiss banks. In June 1999 Burg was reelected to his Knesset seat and was chosen speaker of the Knesset; while the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, was elected prime minister. On 4 September 2000, his selection as head of the Labor Party was contested by his adversary, Benyamin Ben-Eliezer, leading to the initiation of an internal inquiry procedure. He was invited, shortly thereafter, to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, along with the president of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Ahmad Qurai. There, Burg spoke on the subject of the IsraeliPalestinian peace process, recommending the resumption of negotiations. Affirming that “religious fundamentalism” was the common enemy of both the Palestinians and Israelis, he came out in favor of shared “sovereignty” of the three religions (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) in Jerusalem, and for the creation of a Palestinian state. That year, Burg was finally bested by Ben-Eliezer for the leadership of the Labor Party, in an election where participation was particularly low. In 2003 Burg was re-elected to the Knesset on the Labor Party list. Since that time, he has written several critiques of Israeli policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Beilin, Yossi; Ben-Eliezer, Benyamin; Israel Labor Party; Peace Now.

BURNS, WILLIAM (1957– ): American diplomat. Born in 1957, William Burns earned degrees in history and international relations. Between 1982 and 1984 he was a political advisor attached to the United States Embassy in Jordan. He came to be appreciated by the Jordanian leaders for his seriousness, pragmatism, and profound knowledge of the issues. Between 1995 and 1996 he was spokesperson for the U.S. State Department for Middle Eastern Affairs. In August 1998 he was named United States ambassador to Jordan. In this capacity, Burns participated in numerous negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, including those at the Wye Plantation. On 21 May 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell appointed him D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

special emissary for the Near East, in charge of negotiating the application of the Mitchell report recommendations with Palestinian and Israeli leaders. Burns traveled to the West Bank, where he met with Yasir Arafat, then on to Israel, where he was received by Ariel Sharon. That June, Burns was named assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. William Burns is the author of Economic Aid and American Policy toward Egypt, 1955–1981. SEE ALSO Oslo Accords II.

BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (1924– ): U.S. president (1989–1993). George H. W. Bush served in World War II as a naval combat pilot. He graduated from Yale University, then moved to Texas, where he worked as an oil executive. He was elected to the House of Representatives, and later served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and vice president under Ronald Reagan. As president he continued the first official U.S. dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had begun in December 1998, shortly before Bush took office, and which continued until June 1990. Jointly with President Gorbachev, he convened the Madrid Conference in October 1991, the first formal Arab-Israeli peace negotiations since the 1979 Israel-Egypt treaty. The talks, presided over by the United States and the Soviet Union, included Palestinians for the first time, as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. SEE ALSO Madrid Conference.

BUSH, GEORGE W. (1946– ): U.S. president (2001– ). The son of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush graduated from Yale University and Harvard University. He worked in the petroleum industry, and he later served as governor of Texas (1995– 2001). He was elected U.S. president as a result of the controversial elections of November 2000; his opponent, Albert Gore, received more popular votes than Bush, but the Supreme Court intervened to resolve the disputed Florida electoral vote in Bush’s favor. The Bush administration’s involvement in the Middle East centered around counter-terrorism policies following the attacks of 11 September 2001; Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and launched a war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in March 2003, toppling the Hussein government. After some initial hesitation, he also followed the efforts of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace. He became the first U.S.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

85

BUSH, GEORGE W.

PRESIDENTS BUSH. GEORGE W. BUSH (RIGHT) AND HIS FATHER, GEORGE H. W. BUSH, EACH MADE SOME EFFORTS TOWARD ISRAELIPALESTINIAN PEACE WHILE PRESIDENT. IN 1991, THE FIRST PRESIDENT BUSH (AND HIS SOVIET COUNTERPART) CONVENED THE FIRST FACE-TOFACE ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE TALKS IN MORE THAN A DECADE, WITH PALESTINIAN DELEGATES INCLUDED FOR THE FIRST TIME. THE SECOND PRESIDENT BUSH GENERALLY PRAISED PRIME MINISTER ARIEL SHARON OF ISRAEL AND SHUNNED PALESTINIAN LEADER YASIR ARAFAT, BUT HE ALSO OPENLY SUPPORTED THE RAPID CREATION OF A PALESTINIAN STATE AS PART OF HIS “ROAD MAP” FOR PEACE. (AP/Wide World Photos)

president to call openly for the creation of a Palestinian state, though his administration refused to deal with Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat. At the same time, Bush called Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon a “man of peace.” The Bush administration, forming a “Quartet” along with the United Nations,

86

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Russia, and the European Union, developed a “Road Map” for peace that was presented at the Aqaba Summit in June 2003. SEE ALSO Aqaba Summit; Arafat, Yasir; Clinton, William Jefferson; Hussein, Saddam.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

C CALIPH (from the Arab word khalifa, deputy, successor): Muslim ruler and head of the Muslim community. The first Caliphs and successors to Muhammad were Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (632–635), Omar ibn alKhattab (635–644), Othman ibn Affan (645–656), and Ali ibn Abi Talib (656–661). Some Muslim historians question the claim of Abu Bakr to the title of Caliph, since it was not until the reign of Omar ibn al-Khattab that the “commander of believers” was designated by the title of khalifat rasûl Allâh (successor to God’s messenger). The Caliphate has been in dispute throughout history, with multiple claims to authority. Therefore, historians distinguish between the Eastern Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, the Fatimid Caliphate of North Africa, and the Ottoman Caliphate. SEE ALSO Fatimids; Ottomans; Umayyads.

CAMBON SEE

Cambon Declaration.

CAMBON DECLARATION: Statement made on 4 June 1917 by then-French Foreign Minister Jules Cambon. The declaration expressed the “sympathy” of France for the Zionist cause, described as a “renaissance, under the aegis of the world powers, of Jewish nationality on this land [of Palestine] from which the people of Israel had been driven.”

CAMP DAVID SEE

Camp David Accords.

CAMP DAVID II SEE

Camp David II Summit.

CAMP DAVID II SUMMIT: Unsuccessful IsraeliPalestinian negotiations that took place at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, from 11 to 24 July 2000, sponsored by President Bill Clinton, assisted by his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. The summit brought together the Palestinian president, Yasir Arafat, with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, at a time when both were in a weakened position within their own camps. The Americans deliberately chose the symbolic site of Camp David, where the Israeli-Egyptian peace accords of 1978 were negotiated. No official documents were exchanged as a result of the summit, so most knowledge of the proceedings comes from media accounts and interviews with some participants. There were several areas of disagreement. Israel reportedly was willing to relinquish some Palestinian villages and neighborhoods to the Palestinian Authority (PA), but was unwilling to give up East Jerusalem and the Old City. The Palestinians were reported to have proposed that East Jerusalem become the capital of the new Palestinian state and that Israel relinquish territory gained during the

87

CAMP DAVID ACCORDS

Arab-Israel War of 1967. The right of return was reportedly another insurmountable issue. The Palestinians asserted that 3.7 million Palestinian refugees should either be allowed to return to their homes in Israel or should receive compensation. Israel rejected both alternatives, contending that the return would threaten the identity of the Jewish state. Concerning the question of Jewish settlements, Israel proposed the annexation of 10 percent of West Bank territory, where the majority of the settlements were located, with the remaining 90 percent of the territory going to the Palestinians. The Palestinians objected to the size of the proposed annexation and called for an equal amount of territory in Israel. No agreement could be reached. At the conclusion of the summit, the two leaders, Israeli and Palestinian, presented the following principles for future negotiation: “1) The two parties agree that the object of their negotiations is to put an end to decades of conflict and realize a just and durable peace; 2) The two parties commit themselves to pursue their efforts to conclude, as soon as possible, an accord on all questions relating to a permanent status; 3) The two parties agree that negotiations based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338 are the only means of coming to an agreement, and they commit themselves to creating the conditions for being able to negotiate without pressure, intimidation or the threat of violence; 4) The two parties agree on the importance of avoiding unilateral initiatives and that their divergences can only be resolved on the basis of the good faith of each; 5) The two parties agree that the United States will remain a vital partner in the peace process, and that they will stay in close contact with President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright.” In December 2000 the United States presented a proposal, called the Clinton Plan, to guide a resumption of the negotiation process, and talks began in Taba, Egypt. Time ran out, however, as Clinton left office in January 2001 and Barak lost to Ariel Sharon in the Israeli elections in February. SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Clinton, William Jefferson; Clinton Plan.

CAMP DAVID ACCORDS: The signing of these accords, in September 1978, resulted from the American desire to establish durable peace in the Middle East and from a process of negotiations started between the Israeli government, led by Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat. Immediately upon his coming to power in Israel, in June 1977,

88

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Menachem Begin, leader of Israeli right-wing party Herut, made a number of gestures toward the Arab countries in an attempt to resolve the Arab–Israeli contentions arising from the 1967 Arab-Israel War as well as the 1973 war. His Labor Party foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, participated in numerous secret meetings with Arab leaders, while U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger tried to convince the Israelis and Egyptians of the need to come to a peace agreement. These steps concluded, on 9 November 1977, in the historic trip of President Sadat to Israel, which in turn brought about, in early December, the creation of a Refusal Front uniting Arab countries opposed to a negotiated peace with Israel. A year later, after intense negotiations under the supervision of then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Begin and Sadat signed two general agreements at Camp David on 17 September 1978. The first defined the basis of a solution to the Israeli-Egyptian conflict: restitution of the Egyptian territories occupied by Israel in exchange for a peace treaty. The second, which concerned the Palestinian question, stipulated that any solution must take into account “the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestine people” and specified that the latter would exercise full and complete autonomy within a five-year period. At the end of this period, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestinian delegates would negotiate the final status of the territories with Israel. However, the Palestinians in the territories, overwhelmingly supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization in this matter, rejected the accord, about which they had not been consulted. On 27 October 1978, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Sadat and Begin. On 26 March 1979, in spite of the Palestinian rejection, Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement ending thirty years of belligerence. Following the signing, the member countries of the Arab League transferred the headquarters of the organization from Cairo, Egypt, to Tunis. Eighteen Arab countries recalled their ambassadors from Cairo. On 6 October 1981, President Sadat was assassinated in Cairo. On 25 April 1982, with the dismantling of the last Jewish colonies, Egypt reestablished sovereignty over the whole of its territory, including the Sinai. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Begin, Menachem; Dayan, Moshe; Herut Party; League of Arab States; Palestine Liberation Organization; Sadat, Anwar al-.

CANAAN: Name of Phoenicia-Palestine before the coming of the Hebrews, who, led by Abraham around 1790 B.C.E., saw this as the land promised to T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

CATHOLIC

HISTORIC MOMENT. PRESIDENT ANWAR AL-SADAT (LEFT) OF EGYPT AND PRIME MINISTER MENACHEM BEGIN OF ISRAEL FLANK PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER ON 26 MARCH 1979 AT THE WHITE HOUSE, AS THEY LISTEN TO THE THREE COUNTRIES’ NATIONAL ANTHEMS BEFORE SIGNING A PEACE TREATY BASED ON THE CAMP DAVID ACCORDS OF 1978. (© Wally McNamee/Corbis)

them by God. The name Canaan comes from the word kinahu, which means a region where the population has mastered the technique of purple dyeing. According to Biblical tradition, the Israelites established themselves in the land of Canaan after leaving Egypt twice: the first time led by Abraham, around 1800 B.C.E., the second by Moses, five hundred years later. From this later date, the Hebrews lived there in stable settlements until the breakup of the Kingdom of Judah. Many cities were built in the natural highlands of the country, including Megiddo, Hebron, Sh’khem (Nablus), Gezer, and Salem (Jerusalem, Urusalimu). Although they had sworn loyalty to the religion of Moses, some Hebrews borrowed religious customs from the Canaanites, even worshipping their gods, such as Baal and Astarte. Toward the year 1004 B.C.E., David conquered the city of Salem, inhabited by the Jebuseans, and under the name of Jerusalem made it the capital of the kingdom of Israel. The reign of Solomon (968–928 B.C.E.) marked the apogee of Israelite royalty, exemplified by the conD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

struction of the Temple, which housed the Ark of the Covenant. According to the Bible, Canaan was the son of Shem and the eponymous ancestor of the Canaanites. SEE ALSO Abraham; Baal; Bible; Hebrews; Hebron; Israelite; Jerusalem; Moses.

CANAANISM: Movement created by a small group of Jewish artists and intellectuals in 1942 within the revisionist current of Vladimir Jabotinsky. SEE ALSO Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev. CARLOS SEE

Ramirez, Ilyich Sanchez.

CATHOLIC (from the Greek katholikos, universal): Person associated with Catholicism or professing a faith in accord with the doctrine and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, based on the principles

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

89

CEASEFIRE SURVEILLANCE COMMITTEE

taught by Jesus Christ and transmitted by the Apostles. There were approximately 50,000 Catholics living in the Occupied Territories in 2002. In Israel, Roman Catholics are mostly guest workers. SEE ALSO Christianity; Jesus; Roman Catholic Church.

CEASEFIRE SURVEILLANCE COMMITTEE: Organization created on 26 April 1996, following the Israeli military intervention in South Lebanon (Operation “Grapes of Wrath”) against Hizbullah, which, according to Human Rights Watch, killed 154 people and wounded 351. The Ceasefire Surveillance Committee was made up of representatives of the United States, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and France and was responsible for overseeing the agreement that ended the fighting, which required the belligerents to refrain from firing on civilians on both sides of the border and from launching operations from zones populated by civilians. On 11 February 2000, Israel withdrew from the committee, leading to its de facto suspension. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; South Lebanon.

CEDMENA: Conference on the Economic Development of the Middle East and North Africa.

CENTER PARTY (Mifleget ha-Merkaz): An Israeli political entity, the Center Party was created on 25 January 1999 under the impetus of Yitzhak Mordechai, former defense minister, who had resigned from the Netanyahu government and was a dissident from the Likud Party. Among the main leaders of this party were Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Force; Dan Meridor, former finance minister, who had resigned from the Netanyahu government and was also a dissident from Likud; and Roni Milo, former mayor of Tel Aviv and former Likud member. A few days later, they were joined by Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, the daughter of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and by Uri Savir. Formed in anticipation of the general elections of May 1999, this party declared itself in favor of the creation of a Palestinian entity, and of a territorial compromise on the Golan Heights, under certain conditions for protecting the security of Israel. Their official stand on the Golan Heights issue demonstrated the party’s ability to reconcile divergent views. Mordechai was designated as candidate for the post of prime minister, to run against Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Benny Begin, and Azmi Bishara. On 14 May, just before the vote, Mordechai announced the withdrawal of his candidacy and

90

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

asked his supporters to vote in favor Barak, the candidate of the Labor Party. On 18 May, as a result of the elections, in which Barak emerged the victor, the Center Party won six seats in the Knesset and agreed to join Barak’s governing coalition. The Center Party received many votes from supporters of the Third Way. Two leaders of the Center Party joined Barak’s cabinet: Mordechai, as deputy prime minister and transport minister, and Lipkin-Shahak, as minister of tourism. On 28 May 2000, implicated in a sexual harassment scandal, Mordechai resigned his ministerial duties and his post as president of the Center Party. Early elections for the post of prime minister took place on 6 February 2001 and resulted in the victory of Ariel Sharon, the head of Likud. A few days later, the number of deputies of the Center Party fell to five, after the departure of Rabin-Pelosoff, who created her own party, the New Way, and then, the following month, joined the Sharon government as deputy minister of defense. Two leaders of the Center Party, Meridor and Milo, joined Sharon’s national unity government in August 2001 and were respectively named minister without portfolio, in charge of strategic affairs, and minister of regional cooperation, effectively dismantling the Center Party, which received only 0.1 percent of the vote in the 2003 elections. SEE ALSO Lipkin-Shahak, Amnon; Likud; Meridor, Dan; Milo, Roni; Mordechai, Yitzhak; Rabin-Pelosoff, Dalia; Savir, Uri; Sharon, Ariel.

CENTO SEE

Baghdad Pact.

CENTRAL COUNCIL OF THE PLO SEE

Palestine Liberation Organization.

CHABAD SEE

Lubavitcher Hasidim.

CHAI VE-KAYAM (“alive and well,” in Hebrew): Israeli ultranationalist, extremist movement, founded at the end of the 1970s. This splinter group advocated the “divorce of Judaism from exile and from Western culture” and the creation of a “truly Jewish state” by invoking a revolutionary messianism meant to “update the Torah as the normative guide of the Jewish people.” Its members have made a number of attempts to blow up Muslim religious edifices in Jerusalem on the Haram al-Sharif. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

CHAMOUN, CAMILLE

PRESIDENT OF LEBANON. CAMILLE CHAMOUN (RIGHT), WHO WAS ELECTED IN 1952, CONVERSES WITH KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN IN DECEM1958 LEBANESE CIVIL WAR, BUT HE REMAINED INFLUENTIAL POLITICALLY UNTIL THE END OF 1976. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

BER 1955. CHAMOUN WAS FORCED OUT OF POWER THREE YEARS LATER AS A RESULT OF THE

SEE ALSO

Haram al-Sharif.

CHALLAH: Egg-loaf bread consumed by Jews, especially during the Shabbat. SEE ALSO Shabbat. CHAMOUN, CAMILLE (1900–1987): President of the Republic of Lebanon (1952–1958). Camille Chamoun was born in 1900 at Dayr al-Qamar, in southern Mount Lebanon. Between 1916 and 1918, his family was forced into exile because of his father’s pro-French sympathies. After he obtained a law degree, Chamoun worked in journalism, then was admitted to the bar in 1925. Elected representative of the Mount Lebanon area in 1934, he joined the ranks of the Destourian Bloc and became finance minister in 1938. During World War II he advocated the abolition of the French mandate over Lebanon. After Lebanon gained independence in 1943, Chamoun served as minister of the interior. From 1944 to 1947, he was ambassador of Lebanon in London, and also D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

headed the Lebanese delegation at the United Nations, where he supported the cause of the Palestinians. In 1947 he was again named finance minister, and in April of the following year, represented his country at the Arab League. After the legislative elections of 1951, Chamoun joined the ranks of the Socialist and Nationalist Front. On 2 September 1952, he was elected president of the Republic of Lebanon, following the withdrawal of his rival, Hamid Franjiyya. During his tenure, Chamoun modified the electoral districting in Lebanon, so as to lessen the influence of feudal holdovers. Internationally, he supported the Baghdad Pact without joining it, disapproved of the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser, and was a partisan of the Eisenhower Doctrine. His rigging of the Parliamentary elections of 1957 led Chamoun’s rivals to rebel against him in what has since become known as the 1958 Lebanese Civil War. Chamoun was allowed to stay in office until the end of his term—September

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

91

CHAMOUN, DORI

1958—but was not allowed to run for a second mandate. Replaced in the presidency by Fouad Chehab, Chamoun retook his deputy’s seat. In 1959 he founded the National Liberal Party (NLP), which maintained support for his political line. A determined opponent of President Chehab, the NLP formed an alliance with the Phalange of Pierre Jumayyil and the National Bloc of Raymond Eddé. During the summer of 1968, the coalition NLPPhalange-National Bloc came out on top in the legislative elections. In 1970 Chamoun backed the election to the presidency of his adversary, Sulayman Franjiyya (Hamid’s brother). Reelected to the Chamber in 1972, Chamoun became minister of the interior in the Karame government in July 1975. During the Civil War of 1975–1976, Chamoun played a significant role as leader of the National Liberal Party, participating in political and military fighting on the Maronite fronts. On 17 June 1976, he was named foreign minister. Three months later he was appointed interim prime minister and was assigned the joined portfolios of foreign affairs and defense, up to the month of December. At that time he was accused by his enemies of being in favor of an alliance of the Lebanese Christian camp with Israel, while within his own party he found himself at odds with other Maronite leaders. In December 1976, Chamoun resigned from his positions. In July 1980, after bloody confrontations, the Lebanese Forces defeated NLP’s militia, headed by his son Dany. Chamoun participated in the Government of National Unity formed in 1984, but his influence on national politics was negligible. He died in 1987. SEE ALSO Chamoun, Dory; Eddé, Raymond; Franjiyya, Sulayman; Phalange.

CHAMOUN, DORI (1931– ): Lebanese political figure. Born in November 1931 at Dayr al-Qamar, Lebanon, Dori Chamoun is the son of the former Lebanese president Camille Chamoun, and the brother of Dany Chamoun (who was assassinated, along with his wife and two of his children on 21 October 1990). With a degree in commercial law, Dori Chamoun was a businessman until the mid-1970s. In 1975 he became secretary general of the National Liberal Party (NLP), a rightist party founded by his father. In September 1978, along with Bashir Jumayyil, he opened the office of the American Lebanese League in Washington, whose purpose was to organize the support of the U.S.-based Lebanese community in the struggle against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. On 2 September 1985 he became president of the

92

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

NLP. Between 1986 and 1990 he returned to business, leaving his post as head of the NLP to his brother Dany. In May 1991, after his brother was assassinated, Dori Chamoun was reelected president of the NLP. In June 1998 he became a town councillor of his native city, Dayr al-Qamar. In April 2001 Chamoun helped to found the Qornet Shehwan Gathering (named after the Maronite monastery in which the founding meetings had been held), a coalition of Christian political groups that oppose the government and the Syrian presence in Lebanon. Qornet Shehwan formally advocates judiciary reform and the elimination of corruption, and has made gestures toward the Druze and other non-Christian Lebanese factions; generally, however, it has not managed to rise above its Maronite factionalist origins. It is understood to be dominated by its more right-wing elements. For the elections of May 2004, Qornet Shehwan formed a unified electoral list with the backing of such groups as the Lebanese Forces and the Phalange Party opposition. SEE ALSO Chamoun, Camille; Jumayyil, Bashir.

CHARISMATIC: In Christianity, this term means a spiritual movement based on the conviction that the Holy Spirit continues to grant spiritual gifts (charismas) to believers.

CHRIST SEE

Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY: A religion based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who preached in Judea in the first century C.E. and was crucified by Roman authorities. His followers, who believed that he rose from the dead, considered him the Messiah of the Jews, son of God, and redeemer of humankind. The Greek christos, which means “the anointed one,” is a translation of “Messiah.” For the Jews, according to the Talmud, Jesus was a rabbi who desired to modify the religious practices of his time. He was neither Messiah nor prophet. The first apostles never denied their Jewish origins, and they always affirmed their opposition to idolatry. Around 45 C.E. some of the apostles, notably Paul, began to preach to the Gentiles of the Middle East. By the fourth century, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Though censuses in the Middle East, particularly concerning religious affiliation, are unreliable at best, estimates have put the number of Christians in the Middle East at the turn of the twenT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON

ty-first century at 8 to 12 million. Among the Palestinian population of Israel, by the 1990s Christians accounted for approximately 13 percent. SEE ALSO Gentile; Messiah.

CHRISTOPHER, WARREN (1925– ): U.S. politician, secretary of state (1993–1996). Warren Christopher was born in October 1925 in North Dakota. In 1959 he became president of the Lawyer’s Guild of Los Angeles and also an advisor to the governor of California, Edmund Brown. In 1965, following the Watts riots in California, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to head a commission of inquiry. Between 1967 and 1969 Christopher was assistant attorney general in the federal department of justice. During his tenure he headed, among others, commissions charged with inquiry into the Detroit riots and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From 1977 to 1981 Christopher was deputy secretary of state, second to Cyrus Vance. During his time in office, he won, in March 1978, the lifting of the embargo on the northern part of Cyprus, occupied by the Turkish Army. The government of Ankara had threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if the embargo was kept in place. In January 1981 he negotiated successfully the release of the American hostages who had been held more than a year in Tehran. He withdrew from the State Department to become head of the law firm of O’Meleveny & Meyers. On 6 November 1992, with lawyer Vernon Jordan, he was appointed by President-elect Bill Clinton to preside over a governmental transition team. In January 1993, Christopher became secretary of state in the Clinton administration. He devoted a major portion of his activity to the peace process in the Middle East. In August 1993, he visited Jordan, Israel, and Syria. In December of the same year, after having been to Rome, Brussels, and Geneva in the context of the European Security Conference, he traveled to Israel, along with Edward Djerejian and Dennis Ross. In the course of the following year, he took a number of trips to the Middle East, in an effort to organize direct negotiations between Israelis and Syrians, as well as to meet with local political leaders involved in the peace process. At the end of January 1996, he attempted, in vain, to get the Israeli-Syrian negotiations held at the Wye Plantation in the United States to move forward. In April, when Israel launched its operation “Grapes of Wrath” in Lebanon, Christopher shuttled back and forth between Damascus and Tel Aviv to obtain a cease-fire between Hizbullah and the Israel Defense Force. In D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

December 1996, Christopher resigned his position as secretary of state; he was replaced by Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold this office, in January 1997. Christopher served as advisor to VicePresident Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president, in the 2000 campaign. Christopher is the author of In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (1998) and Chances of a Lifetime (2001). SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; Clinton, William Jefferson; Djerejian, Edward; Ross, Dennis B.

CIRCASSIANS: Originally from the Black Sea area, some Circassians and Chechens (all Muslim) emigrated to the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, when tsarist troops invaded their lands. Since they were famous for their abilities as warriors and scouts, Sultan Abdul Hamid inducted them into units responsible for the Syrian and Palestinian frontiers. Small groups still live in Syria, Jordan, and Israel. In Israel, as a non-Arab minority, they are required to serve in the military and are generally incorporated into units in charge of border security. CIRCUMCISION (khitan, in Arabic; britmilah, in Hebrew): Removal of the foreskin. Arab-Bedouin and Semitic custom practiced on boys. Circumcision was originally an initiation rite whose goal was mainly hygienic. Jews perform it on the eighth day after birth so as to commemorate the covenant between their people and God. Muslims circumcise their sons at a variety of ages, depending on the region. Every 1 January, the Catholic Church celebrates the circumcision of Christ. SEE ALSO Covenant. CITIZENS’ RIGHTS MOVEMENT SEE

Movement for Civil Rights and Peace.

CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON (1946– ): U.S. president (1993–2001). Born in Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a law degree from Yale. He was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978, losing a reelection bid in 1980 before returning for five successive terms from 1982 to 1993. After assuming the U.S. presidency in 1993, Clinton found himself thrust into Middle Eastern affairs, and during his presidency he devoted more attention to the Arab-Israeli peace process than any previous U.S. president. Although his administration was not directly involved

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

93

CLINTON PLAN

CIRCASSIAN REFUGEES. THIS ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS A FEW OF THE MUSLIMS WHO FLED TO THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY WHEN RUSSIAN TROOPS INVADED THEIR HOMELAND AROUND THE BLACK SEA. SOME CIRCASSIANS STILL LIVE IN SYRIA, JORDAN, AND ISRAEL. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

in the secret talks in Oslo in 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the resulting Oslo Accord was signed on the White House lawn, where Clinton urged the now-famous handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasir Arafat—the first public demonstration of civilities between two high-ranking Israeli and Palestinian leaders. At the same time, Clinton became the first sitting U.S. president to publicly meet with Arafat on U.S. soil. After Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, the Clinton administration’s desire to salvage the peace process was hindered by the resumption of violence between both sides under Rabin’s successor, Benjamin Netanyahu. Nevertheless, Clinton continued the role of “broker” for peace, inviting Netanyahu and Arafat to Wye River, Maryland, in October 1998 and persuading them to negotiate further Israeli redeployments from the West Bank. Later that year, he became the first U.S. president to visit the Palestinian Authority. Clinton’s most memorable

94

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

effort to achieve a lasting Israeli-Palestinian agreement occurred in the last year of his presidency, in July 2000, when he hosted Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David Summit at the presidential retreat in Maryland. The negotiations were unsuccessful. Following the failed summit, Clinton in December 2000 presented his “parameters” as a guide for reaching a lasting peace agreement. Despite these efforts, Clinton left the presidency in January 2001 having failed to achieve a peace settlement. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Camp David II Summit; Clinton Plan; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Rabin, Yitzhak; Oslo Accords II.

CLINTON PLAN: Parameters for Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement proposed by U.S. president Bill Clinton in December 2000, following the failed Camp David Summit of July 2000. Clinton had invited Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat to the presidential T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

COMMITTEE OF SIX ON PALESTINE

curity guarantees for both sides; and Jerusalem as an open and undivided city, functioning as cultural and political center for both Israelis and Palestinians. The Clinton Plan rekindled some hope of breaking the impasse and helped the parties to return briefly to negotiations at Taba, Egypt, in early 2001. SEE ALSO Camp David II Summit.

COHEN (pl. cohanim): Name, sometimes altered to kahane or kahn, given to Temple priests. By extension, refers to a Jew linked to that role through a family tradition expressed by this patronymic.

COHEN, GEDULA (1925– ): Israeli politician and for-

BILL CLINTON. THIS U.S.

PRESIDENT SPENT MORE TIME THAN ANY

OTHER STRIVING TO BE A BROKER FOR ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE, FROM THE OSLO ACCORDS HANDSHAKE ON THE

WHITE HOUSE LAWN PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN AND PALESTINIAN LEADER YASIR ARAFAT TO THE FAILED CAMP DAVID TALKS IN MID-2000. BETWEEN

retreat at Camp David, Maryland, to build on earlier negotiations that had led to the Oslo Accords of 1993. The summit failed, each side blaming the other for its failure. There were several obstacles to agreement. The Palestinians opposed Israeli annexation of settlement blocks in the West Bank, and the Israelis refused to accede sovereignty over East Jerusalem. The Palestinians also argued that any settlement would have to acknowledge the future of refugees; the Israelis claimed that allowing a right of return to Israel proper would jeopardize Israel’s Jewish identity. Following the failure of the summit, Clinton put forward his “parameters,” in December of that year, as a guide toward reaching an agreement. The proposal included Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza and the vast majority of the West Bank, along with the incorporation into Israel of “settlement blocks,” in effect returning to the Palestinians most of the territory taken by Israel in the Arab-Israel War of 1967; a limited right of return for Palestinian refugees; seD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

mer LEHI radio announcer. A leading figure in the radio broadcasts of Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI), Cohen was one of nineteen LEHI members arrested when the British seized LEHI’s radio transmitter on 19 February 1946 as part of a campaign against Jewish terrorist groups. Though sentenced to nineteen years in prison, she escaped and resumed illegal broadcasts. Her work as a journalist in Israel included advocacy for Soviet Jewry. In 1970 Cohen joined the Likud Party. She was elected to the Knesset in 1973, serving through 1992, first as a member of Likud and then as a member of the Tehiya, a party that she helped found. After Tehiya’s defeat in the 1992 elections, she rejoined Likud. She has been a prominent opponent to the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement and is associated with the ideology of a Greater Israel. Cohen received the Israel Prize in 2001.

COHEN, RAANAN (1941– ): Former Knesset member and minister of labor and social welfare. Born in 1941 in Iraq, Raanan Cohen immigrated to Israel in 1951. He received a doctoral degree in Middle Eastern studies from Tel Aviv University and was secretary of the Young Guard of the Labor Party in BDnei Brak from 1961 to 1970. He later served as chairman of the Arab and Druze Branch of the Labor Party (1975–1986) and as chairman of the Elections Branch of the Labor Party (1986–1992). First elected to the Knesset in 1988, Cohen served on the Finance, Foreign Affairs and Defense, and State Control committees, and he was secretary-general of the Israel Labor Party from 1998 until 2002. In August 2000 Cohen was appointed as minister of labor and social welfare, then in March 2001 as minister without portfolio. He resigned from that post and from the Knesset in August 2002.

COMMITTEE OF SIX ON PALESTINE: Structure connected to the Organization of the Islamic Conference

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

95

COMMUNIST ACTION ORGANIZATION (LEBANON)

(OIC), created at the Twelfth Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers, held in Baghdad between 1 and 5 June 1981. The committee—originally composed of the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Senegal, Malaysia, and Guinea plus the OIC secretary general—was responsible for seeking to implement sanctions against Israel that had been adopted by the OIC at previous summit and foreign ministers’ meetings. The committee continues to be active and includes the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority as the sixth member. SEE ALSO Organization of the Islamic Conference; Palestinian Authority.

COMMUNIST ACTION ORGANIZATION (LEBANON) Organization of Communist Action of Lebanon.

SEE

CONSTANCY FRONT SEE

Rejection Front.

COOPERATION COUNCIL FOR ARAB STATES OF THE GULF SEE

Gulf Cooperation Council.

COPT: Name given by the Arabs to all the inhabitants of Egypt at the time of the Muslim conquest of 641. The word was transposed from the Greek aiguptoï, meaning Egyptian, which was itself formed from the Egyptian hieroglyphic Het Ka-Ptah (Castle of the Spirit of Ptah), the nickname of Memphis, the Pharaonic capital. Subsequently this word came to designate only Monophysite Christians of Egypt and later Ethiopia who believe in the union of the divine and the human in Christ. The Copts of Egypt are the descendents of the ancient Egyptian population that converted to Christianity around the first century C.E. and separated from the Catholic Church after the Council of Chalcedon, in 432. The evangelist Mark, who introduced Christianity into Egypt, is considered the father of the Coptic Church. After the ArabMuslim conquest of 639 to 641, the Copts had the status of dhimmis, and over the following centuries numerous conversions to Islam led to a decrease in their numbers. The Copts make up the largest Christian community of the Middle East and represent 7 to 10 percent of the Egyptian population. The coming to power of Muhammad Ali in 1805 and the modernization of Egypt allowed Copts to accede to high administrative positions for the first time since the Islamic conquest. In 1804, the naming of Cyril IV as

96

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

COPTIC CHRISTIAN. A MONK STUDIES IN THE COPTIC MONASTERY IN WADI AL-NATRUM, EGYPT. COPTIC MONKS FLEEING PERSECUTION IN IRAQ AND SYRIA DURING THE EIGHTH CENTURY BUILT MANY MONASTERIES IN THIS AREA. COPTS IN EGYPT HAD PRIVILEGED STATUS FOR MUCH OF THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES, BUT THE RISE OF ISLAMISM IN THE 1980S INCREASED DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM. (© Johannes Armineh/Corbis-Sygma)

patriarch gave new impetus to the Coptic Church. The arrival of the English in 1882 consolidated the position of the Copts, on whom the British administration depended; for example, Boutros Pasha Ghali, finance minister, foreign minister, and prime minister, became the first great Coptic statesman of Egypt. The Copts retained their privileged status once Egypt won its independence in 1922. It became normal to have Coptic ministers in the government. Nevertheless, although they account for a substantial portion of the Egyptian economy, the majority of the Copt community, as non-Muslims, are treated like second-class citizens. In the 1980s, while Islamism was growing in Egypt, the number of deadly incidents pitting Coptic communities against Muslim fundamentalists increased dramatically. In 1992, fourteen Copts were killed by members of the JamiEa alIslamiyya. On 31 December 1999, at al-Qusayr, a quarrel between a Muslim customer and a Coptic merchant degenerated into a street battle that resulted in some thirty Coptic deaths. In November 2000, a Copt, Mounir Abdul Nour, became head of the opposition in the Egyptian parliament although Copts are underrepresented in that forum. Outside Egypt, the Coptic Church is present in Sudan and Ethiopia. The principal Coptic saints are Athanasius, Anthony, and Pakem, the name of the latter deriving from the Egyptian hieroglyphic Pa Kem (son of the god Kem). The Coptic liturgical year reflects the main Egyptian seasons: flood, sowing, and harvest. The Copts practice circumcision. In T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

COVENANT

1899, at the initiative of Pope Leon XIII, a Coptic patriarchy was founded in Jerusalem and included approximately one hundred families. Since 1971, the church has been headed by Pope Shenouda III. Until 706, Coptic was the language spoken by this community. Replaced by Arabic, Coptic became a dead language, utilized only in the liturgy and called Bohairic. SEE ALSO Christianity; Dhimmi; JamiEa alIslamiyya, al-; Monophysite.

COPTIC CALENDAR: This calendar began in the year 284 to commemorate the accession of Emperor Diocletian and as a result of the persecutions perpetrated by the Romans on the Coptic community in Egypt. The calendar’s first day corresponded to 29 August in the Julian calendar and to 11 September in the Gregorian calendar, the day when the Copts celebrate the Festival of Martyrs. SEE ALSO Gregorian Calendar; Julian Calendar.

CORRECTIVE MOVEMENT: Movement within al-Fatah to create a new leadership for it and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that would be more favorable to Jordan and Jordanian influence in the West Bank. It was launched in 1986 by Colonel EAtallah EAtallah, former head of al-Fatah’s military intelligence in Lebanon, and was sponsored by King Hussein. EAtallah had resigned from al-Fatah in 1985 after being removed from its central committee because of his performance in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the PLO’s subsequent withdrawal. In February 1986 King Hussein, unhappy with the PLO leadership, suspended Jordan’s cooperation with the PLO in its approach to Israel, which it had formally agreed to the previous year. In March he altered the composition of the Jordanian parliament, increasing the number of West Bank seats. When al-Fatah objected to this as compromising its status as the sole representative of the Palestinians, Hussein closed its offices in Jordan and deported a number of its officials. In April, he induced EAtallah to launch his internal rebellion. In 1986 and 1987, based in Amman and disposing of official support from Saudi as well as Jordanian authorities, the corrective movement attempted to unite al-Fatah dissidents into a group that could compete with Yasir Arafat’s supporters. EAtallah had his supporters elect him “caretaker” chairman of the PLO in Jordan, which allowed Hussein to give him control of PLO

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

assets. He then attempted to help Hussein increase his influence on the West Bank, acting as a gobetween with local leaders. Ultimately he had little support or credibility among Palestinians and was abandoned by his Jordanian patron. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Palestine Liberation Organization; West Bank.

COUNCIL OF ARAB ECONOMIC UNITY (CAEU; in Arabic, al-Jam Eiyyah al- DArabiyyah Lil-wihdah alIqtisadiyyah): A specialized institution of the League of Arab States, the Council was created in 1957 to promote the progressive economic integration of its member states. In 1964, with the Arab Economic Unity Agreement, the Council established an Arab Common Market, whose membership now formally includes Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. SEE ALSO League of Arab States. COUNCIL OF COOPERATION OF ARAB STATES OF THE GULF SEE

Gulf Cooperation Council.

COUNCIL OF GULF COOPERATION: SEE

Gulf Cooperation Council.

COVENANT: Principal foundation of Judaism, based on three principles: a direct relation with God; revelation; and the royalty of God. According to Biblical tradition, the first true covenant was concluded between God and Abraham, based on the divine promise that the latter’s people, “elect of God,” would soon dwell in a “Promised Land.” This first covenant (b’ritt, in Hebrew), sealed by the circumcision (practiced also by the Egyptians) of Abraham, was renewed by Abraham’ descendants, Isaac and Jacob. The second covenant is that of Sinai, between God and Moses, with the transmission of the Ten Commandments (asseret ha-dibrot, in Hebrew), and the renewed assurance of a “Promised Land.” According to the sacred texts, this covenant is temporary, for it prepares the way for the “New Covenant,” which would be materialized with the coming of the Messiah. SEE ALSO Abraham; Isaac; Jacob (Biblical); Messiah; Moses.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

97

D DA (Demokratia v’Aliyah; Hebrew, meaning “democracy and immigration”): Israeli political bloc of the center-left, founded in February 1992 by Yuri Kocharovski to further the interests of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union. This movement is not represented in the Knesset.

DA’AM SEE

Organization for Democratic Action.

DAHIR: Muslim term designating the apparent or literal meaning of things, particularly religious interpretations, as opposed to the word batin. SEE ALSO Batin. DAHLAN, MUHAMMAD (Abu Fadil; 1960– ): Palestinian leader, born in 1961 in the refugee camp of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of the 1980s, Muhammad Dahlan became active in the alFatah youth movement (Shabibat al-Fatah) and was imprisoned by the Israelis. In December 1987, he was deported to Lebanon by the Israeli authorities. Later, Dahlan moved to Iraq, where he met Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), the head of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) security, who appointed him to oversee the Intifada in the Gaza Strip, in liaison with the Fatah Hawks. In 1989, Dahlan went to Tunis to work with PLO security, where, between 1990 and 1993, he was responsible for communications between the

Unified National Command of the Uprising (UNCU) and the activists of the Intifada. In this capacity he became one of Yasir Arafat’s advisors for Gaza Strip affairs. In October 1993, following the IsraeliPalestinian Declaration of Principles signed on 13 September, Dahlan joined the Palestinian delegation to the Taba (Egypt) negotiations as a member of the security affairs commission. In December, Israeli authorities allowed him to return to the Palestinian territories. At the end of December, accompanied by Jibril Rajub, he went to Rome to meet General Shahak, Israeli army chief of staff, and Jacques Neria, advisor to the Israeli prime minister. The four jointly elaborated a plan for coordinating Israeli and Palestinian security services in the general context of the application of autonomy in the occupied territories. In June 1994, Dahlan was named head of the Palestinian preventive security services in Gaza, while Rajub obtained the same post in the West Bank. Dahlan participated in numerous negotiations with Israeli and American heads of security services, who appreciated his intelligence and his determination to counteract extremist Palestinian groups. In July of 2000, Dahlan took part in the IsraeliPalestinian negotiations at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. On the following 26 September, accompanied by Saib Erekat, he met secretly with Shlomo Ben-Ami in Washington, D.C.,

99

DALET

to discuss steps to restart the peace process. In the autumn, while the Intifada was intensifying in the Palestinian territories, Dahlan—torn between his personal convictions and his security duties in the Gaza Strip—attempted to channel widespread resentment into a coherent movement. On 21 November 2000, Ariel Sharon, the head of the Israeli Likud Party, accused Dahlan of responsibility for an attack on Jewish settlers in Gaza and called for his removal. After Sharon took office as prime minister, an attempt was made on Dahlan’s life. Dahlan was one of the key people who ran the Palestinian Authority (PA) government during Arafat’s captivity in Ramallah in March–May 2002, and he was security chief in the short-lived PA administration of Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas. Dahlan is on record as favoring reform in the Palestinian Authority, including consolidation of PA security services. Although he has been regarded as a potential successor of Arafat, he has said, “As long as the Israelis are against Arafat, I’m with him.” Dahlan, an ally of Mahmud Abbas, general secretary of the PLO returned to Arafat’s favor, would perhaps succeed Arafat in tandem with the older Abbas. However, he would probably not be acceptable to HAMAS, which opposes PLO policies but has not attacked it while Arafat has been in power. In early 2004, Dahlan was reported to have been maneuvering to take charge of security in the West Bank as well as in Gaza, pitting him directly against Jibril Rajub, but he denied that this was true. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Arafat, Yasir; Ben-Ami, Shlomo; Erekat, Saib; Fatah, al-; HAMAS; Intifada (1987–1993); National Unified Uprising Command; Rajub, Jibril; Sharon, Ariel; Wazir, Khalil al-.

DALET SEE

Dalet Plan.

DALET PLAN: Prepared in March 1948 by Colonel Yigal Yadin, this plan involved preparations for a number of actions against the Palestinian Arabs so as to “guarantee the security of the Jewish defense network.” In effect the plan was a revised version of Haganah’s contingency plan, devised in 1947, for defending the future Jewish state. According to Haganah, the plan was defensive in nature, though proPalestinian historians disagree, contending that the plan was the basis for the subsequent expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli forces. SEE ALSO

100

Arab-Israel War (1948); Haganah. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

DAMASCUS DECLARATION SEE

Gulf Cooperation Council.

DAR AL-HARB: Arabic term, literally “house (or abode) of war”; in classical Islamic jurisprudence it designated a country without an Islamic government, in which “Islam is not the established religion, where the ruler is not a Muslim, and where there exists no mechanism by which political or military leaders may seek the counsel of Islamic religious specialists” (Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, 2003, p. 169). In these circumstances, the Muslim community could declare a holy war to establish an Islamic government, but there was little agreement about when this was permissible. SEE ALSO Dar al-Islam. DARAWSHE, ABDUL WAHAB (1943– ): Palestinian Israeli politician. Abdul Wahab Darawshe was born in 1943 in the village of Iksal in the Galilee. After graduating from Haifa University, he worked as a teacher. Darawshe was first elected to the Knesset in 1984 as a member of the Israel Labor Party, but he left Labor in January 1988 to protest the violent military response to the Intifada that had begun in the Occupied Territories in late 1987. Later in 1988, in association with members of local Arab councils, heads of religious communities, businessmen, and intellectuals, he established the Arab Democratic Party and was elected to the Knesset on its list in November. Darawshe is regarded as a moderate whose primary political goals are peace between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and equal rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. In October 1992, Darawshe went to Tunis to meet with Yasir Arafat, encouraging him to seek negotiations with Israel; in response, the Likud Party attempted to have Darawshe’s parliamentary immunity lifted so he could be charged under antiterrorist laws. In 1997 he helped to arrange a meeting between Ariel Sharon, then a cabinet minister, and Mahmud Abbas, Arafat’s deputy. In October 1998 he was among a group of Arab members of the Knesset who met with Egyptian president Husni Mubarak to discuss the peace process. The next year, Darawshe attempted to form an alliance with other Israeli Arab political parties in order to present a united list in the forthcoming elections, but was unable to do so. In 1999, Darawshe resigned from the Knesset, but he has remained active in efforts to bring about peace negotiations. Late in 2001, in an attempt to stem the ongoing violence related to the al-Aqsa IntiT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

DARWISH, MAHMUD

fada, he arranged for Israeli president Moshe Katsav to speak before the Palestinian parliament to express his “regrets” over the violence, after which all parties would be asked to agree to a cease-fire while Israel and the Palestinian Authority negotiated a “final status” agreement as envisioned in the Oslo Accords; the event was vetoed by Prime Minister Sharon. Darawshe is also a member of the International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace (the Copenhagen Group), which brings together prominent private citizens of Israel (both Jewish and Palestinian), Jordan, and Egypt. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Democratic Party; Arafat, Yasir; Sharon, Ariel.

DARWAZA, IZZAT MUHAMMAD (also Darwazeh; 1889– 1975): Palestinian pan-Arab nationalist politician and writer from Nablus. Izzat Darwaza became involved in politics while employed in the local Ottoman administration before World War I. He helped to organize the first Arab Congress of 1913, held in Paris, and after the war was an advocate for Palestinian inclusion in an independent Greater Syria. He helped to organize several Palestinian organizations, including the Society of Palestinian Youth, an armed anti-Zionist group. In 1932 he helped to establish the Istiqlal (Independence) Party, a political grouping aimed to appeal to youth, whose program was proindependence and anti-Zionist. During the 1936– 1939 Revolt, Darwaza organized guerrilla activity from Damascus on behalf of the Arab Higher Committee. He was elected delegate from Nablus to the fourth and seventh Palestinian National Congresses in the 1920s, was appointed general administrator of the Waqf in the 1930s, and served for a year on a reorganized Arab Higher Committee in 1947. He was the author of numerous articles and books dealing with Arab nationalist politics and the threat of Zionism to Arab interests. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; Waqf.

DARWISH, MAHMUD (1942– ): Palestinian writer and poet. Born in 1942 at al-Birwa near Acre in Galilee, Mahmud Darwish fled with his landowning family to Lebanon in 1948, at the time of the first IsraeliArab war; they returned clandestinely two years later. Since they had been away during the Arab census conducted by the Israelis after the end of hostilities, they lacked proper state identification and were considered “present-absent aliens” in Israeli terminology. Their native village having been destroyed, they D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

settled in the village of Deir el-Assad as “internal refugees.” After secondary studies in Nazareth, Darwish participated in the formation of an Arab nationalist movement, “al-Ard” (the Land), with other young intellectuals, among whom was poet Samih alQasim. Darwish then joined the ranks of the Israeli Communist Party, RAKAH. Between 1960 and 1967, he was a journalist for the cultural magazine al-Jadid and the weekly al-Ittihad, press organs of RAKAH. Israeli authorities jailed him repeatedly, mainly for traveling as an “alien” without a permit, and placed him under house arrest from 1968 to 1970. In 1969, Darwish won the Lotus Prize, awarded by the Union of Afro-Asian Writers. Between 1970 and 1971, Darwish chose exile and lived in Moscow, then in Cairo, where he worked at the daily al-Ahram. A year later he was in Lebanon, where he edited a Palestinian monthly, ShuDun Filistiniyya. In September 1972, he was elected to the secretariat of the Congress of Palestinian Journalists and Writers. Three years later, he was named head of the Center of Palestinian Research, replacing Anis Sayegh. In a few months’ time, Darwish was widely regarded as al-Fatah’s roaming ambassador. In 1982 he became editor of the Palestinian literary review alKarmil, and the following year he won the Lenin Prize. In April 1984, living in Paris, he was elected president of the Federation of Palestinian Writers and Journalists. He traveled many times to Tunis, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters was located. In November of that year, he participated in the Seventeenth Congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC). In April 1987 he was elected to the executive committee of the PLO, as president of the high committee on culture, patrimony, and information. On 18 September of that year, he attended the Congress of the Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, which was held in Baghdad. In 1987, inspired by the Intifada in the Palestinian territories, he published a poem, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Worlds” (“It is time for you to be gone. / Live wherever you like, but do not live among us . . . .”), that provoked the ire of many Israelis, who called him “the terrorist poet.” Darwish was the author of the Algiers Declaration, the proclamation of a Palestinian state, in 1988. On 23 August 1993, disagreeing with the turn the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was taking, he resigned from the executive committee of the PLO, while reaffirming his support for a peace treaty with Israel. Three years later, with permission from Israeli authorities, he decided to relocate the offices of al-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

101

DASH

Karmil (which, almost uniquely in the Arab world, publishes Israeli writing in translation) to Ramallah. In 2001, Darwish was awarded the (American) Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom. One of the most popular poets in the Arab world, he has published numerous books of poetry and prose, and his work has been translated worldwide. In 2000, Israeli education minister Yossi Sarid proposed publishing some Darwish poems, translated into Hebrew, in Israeli school textbooks; the proposal met with opposition, and Prime Minister Ehud Barak vetoed the idea. SEE ALSO Ahram, al-; Ittihad, al-.

DASH: Israeli political party, centrist in tendency, which surfaced at the time of the 1977 Knesset elections through the initiative of Professor Yigael Yadin. Dash ran its campaign advocating change, and the party won fifteen seats. In June 1977, after much debate, delay, and a very close vote, the leadership of the party threw its support to the right-wing coalition government of Menachem Begin. In November 1978, a split in this bloc led to a majority of its members rallying to Likud. The rest, under the leadership of Meir Amit, participated in constituting a new party, Shinui. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Likud; Shinui Party. DAVAR (The word, in Hebrew): Israel’s daily Labor newspaper, founded in 1925 and considered the mouthpiece of the Histadrut union. In October 1995, in an effort to demarcate itself from the Israel Labor Party, the leadership of the newspaper started to use a new name, Davar Rishon. The paper disappeared in 1996. SEE ALSO Histadrut; Israel Labor Party.

DAEWA (daawa): Arab word meaning invocation, call. Originally this term was used to designate political or religious propaganda delivered by a prophet. In the Middle Ages, the word was used by movements, often clandestine, that wanted to take power to further a political program but knew they needed religious justification to gain support. The term is used to suggest Islamic proselytism in general.

DAEWA, AL- (al-DaEwa al-Islamiyya, “Islamic Call”): An Iraqi ShiEite party, al-DaEwa was founded in 1957 by Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Monteza al-Askar, with the semi-official financial support of Iran. In 1958, after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy, al-DaEwa

102

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

opposed the Communist forces present in Iraq, while dissociating itself from other Islamic parties. In 1963, after the BaEth Party came to power, al-DaEwa went underground. The leaders of the movement sent many Lebanese, who had come to study at Najaf, back to their homeland with the mission of propagating the ideas of al-DaEwa there. In 1974, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr issued a fatwa forbidding religious students to adhere to any political party, accentuating the isolation of the movement. In 1979 the Iranian Islamic Revolution caused al-DaEwa to come forward and recognize Imam Ruhollah Khomeini as the sole head of the “Islamic nation.” The following year, when the IranIraq War broke out, the headquarters of the movement was transferred to Teheran. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was arrested by the Iraqi authorities and executed. Al-DaEwa joined the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a gathering of the Iraqi opposition. In 1982 a Lebanese branch of the movement was created under the impetus of Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. SEE ALSO Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn; Hizb al-DaEwa al-Islamiyya; Iran-Iraq War.

DAEWA AL-ISLAMIYYA, AL- (“Islamic Call,” in Arabic):

Iraqi ShiEite party founded in 1957 by Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr and Monteza al-Askar, with the semiofficial financial support of Iran. In 1958, after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy, Al-DaEwa opposed the Communist forces present in Iraq while disassociating itself from other Islamic parties. In 1963, after the BaEth Party came to power, al-DaEwa went underground. The leaders of the movement sent many Lebanese, who had come to study in at Najaf, Iraq, back to their homeland with the mission of propagating the ideas of al-DaEwa there. In 1974, a fatwa was issued by Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr forbidding religious students to adhere to any political party, accentuating the isolation of the movement. In 1979, the Iranian Islamic Revolution caused al-DaEwa to abandon clandestine status. Its leaders recognized Imam Khomeini as the sole head of the Islamic nation. The following year, when the Iraq-Iran war broke out, the headquarters of the movement was transferred to Teheran. Al-Sadr was arrested by the Iraqi authorities and executed. Al-DaEwa joined the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a gathering of the Iraqi opposition. In 1982, a Lebanese branch of the movement was created under the impetus of Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. SEE ALSO BaEth; Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn; Fatwa; Hizb al-DaEwa al-Islamiyya. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

DAYAN, YAEL

DAYAN, MOSHE (1914–1981): Israeli military and political figure, born in Kibbutz Deganiah, Palestine. Moshe Dayan joined the Haganah in 1932. Arrested by the British forces in 1939, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. In 1941, after the Allies released him from prison, Dayan joined the ranks of the Jewish Brigade, which was merged into the British Army for the duration of World War II. In this unit he fought against the French Vichy forces in Syria. He lost his left eye in one of these confrontations. In 1948, as an officer of Haganah, he fought in the first Israeli-Arab war, Israel’s “war of independence,” in the course of which he was noted for both his courage and his gifts as a strategist. In 1950, he was made a general in Israel’s new army and given the command of the southern and northern regions. Dayan became Israel Defense Force (IDF) chief of staff in December 1953 and led the Israeli Army during the Suez-Sinai War, where he demonstrated his extraordinary tactical talents. In 1958, he quit the army and entered politics. He joined the MAPAI Party under David BenGurion and became agriculture minister in 1959, a position from which he resigned in 1964. The following year, along with Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, he participated in the creation of a MAPAI splinter party, RAFI, and won a seat in the Knesset. On 2 June 1967, as the Arab threat escalated, Dayan was named defense minister in the National Unity government headed by Levi Eshkol. Already a hero of the 1956 Suez campaign, Dayan became a legend with Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israel War when the IDF defeated the Arab armies and quadrupled the territory of Israel. In 1968, he joined the Israel Labor Party, which had just been formed through a merger of MAPAI with Ahdut ha-Avoda, PoEalei Zion, and RAFI. In March 1969, he became defense minister in the government of Golda Meir. Although he supported Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories, Dayan was aware that this situation could not last forever. On 19 April 1974, revelations that Israeli intelligence and political personnel had been caught unprepared led Dayan and others to resign. In June 1977, after three years out of politics, he returned to government, joining the cabinet of right-wing prime minister Menachem Begin as foreign minister, provoking anger in the Labor Party leadership. The Begin government initiated contacts with certain Arab countries, in which Dayan participated, which led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord of March 1979. In October 1979, disappointed by the turn the peace accords with Egypt had taken, especially on the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

MOSHE DAYAN. THE LEGENDARY ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER DURING ARAB-ISRAEL WAR OF JUNE 1967, SEEN HERE IN HEBRON AFTER ISRAELI FORCES TOOK CONTROL OF THE RELIGIOUSLY IMPORTANT CITY, HAD A LONG, DISTINCTIVE MILITARY CAREER, INCLUDING

THE

CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE ARMED FORCES FOR SEVERAL YEARS IN THE MID-1950S. HE ALSO WAS A MEMBER OF THE KNESSET AND A MINISTER IN SEVERAL

ISRAELI

GOVERNMENTS UNTIL

1979.

(© David Rubinger/

Corbis)

Palestinian question, he resigned his position to devote himself to his passion, archeology. He died two years later in Tel Aviv. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avoda; Arab-Israel War (1967); Begin, Menachem; Ben-Gurion, David; Haganah; Israel Defense Force; Israel Labor Party; MAPAI; Meir, Golda; Peres, Shimon; RAFI; Suez Crisis.

DAYAN, YAEL (1939– ): Israeli writer and activist. Born in 1939 at Nahalal, in British Mandatory Palestine, Yael Dayan is the daughter of the late General Moshe Dayan. In 1959, barely twenty years old, she published her first novel, New Face in the Mirror. Between 1965 and 1980, while continuing to write, she was a journalist at Yediot Aharonot. At the time of the Arab-Israel War of 1967, she became a spokesperson

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

103

DAYR YASIN

for the Israel Defense Force (IDF). In 1984, as a member of the Israel Labor Party, she ran for the first time in the Knesset elections. In 1985 she published a book about her father. In June 1992, Yael Dayan won a seat in the Knesset, the first of her three terms. She belonged to the reformist wing of the Labor Party. As a feminist and a defender of the rights of sexual minorities, she missed no chance at lambasting the champions of religious orthodoxy in the Knesset. A member of the Peace Now movement, Dayan favored peace with the Palestinians and the creation of a JordanianPalestinian confederation, and she was one of the Knesset members who agitated for the abrogation of the law banning all contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In August 1992, on a visit to The Hague, Netherlands, she met with Nabil ShaEath, one of Yasir Arafat’s political advisors. She acknowledged the contact a few days later. On 29 January 1993, ten days after the abrogation of the law forbidding all contact with the PLO, she went to Tunis, where she was welcomed by Arafat, provoking the ire of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. After returning to Jerusalem, she spoke publicly of her hope that top Israeli leaders would follow in her footsteps, so as to “understand, learn and listen.” Since then Dayan has devoted a major part of her time to activities in support of Israeli-Palestinian peace. In the 2003 elections, she was not included on the Labor Party list; she joined the Meretz Party list of candidates but was not reelected. SEE ALSO Dayan, Moshe; Peace Now.

DAYR YASIN: An Arab village of 600 to 800 inhabitants, Dayr Yasin is located on the periphery of the suburbs west of Jerusalem. On 9 April 1948, on the eve of the creation of the State of Israel, a Jewish commando—consisting of members of the extremist organizations Irgun and the Stern Gang (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or LEHI)—attacked the villagers of Dayr Yasin. Surprised by the resistance of some of the inhabitants, the commando leaders asked for help from the Haganah, which sent in one of its Palmach brigades (“shock” brigades, or Plugot Mahatz in Hebrew). The brigade put a rapid end to the fighting and retreated, leaving behind the men of Irgun and the Stern Gang, who unleashed a massacre of the villagers, killing at least 100 of them. The survivors were expelled. Dayr Yasin played a huge role in the decision of Palestinians to flee from their homes, fearing similar massacres in their own villages. Since then, Dayr Yasin has become one of the symbols of the martyrs

104

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

of the Palestinian resistance. (The village has been renamed Givat Shaul-Bet by the Israeli authorities.) The Dayr Yasin Remembered Committee works to keep the memory of the event alive by building a memorial and supporting a “just and durable resolution” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The committee maintains a web site at www.deiryassin.org. SEE ALSO Haganah; Irgun.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS: In April 1947, Mohammed elDib, a young Bedouin from the Ta’amireh tribe, by chance discovered a number of manuscript scrolls in a grotto near the Qumran ruins, an Essenian site around 30 kilometers from Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Three of these scrolls were purchased by Professor E. L. Sukenik on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and four others by the Syrian Jacobite Convent of Saint Mark, also in Jerusalem. The latter were transported to the United States. In February 1949, Count Lippens, United Nations observer in Israel, opened the way to the exploration of the Qumran site. Father Roland de Vaux, head of the French Biblical and Archeological School of Jerusalem, and G. Lankester Harding, in charge of Jordanian antiquities, were named to direct the digs. Between 1949 and 1958, nearly 800 manuscripts were exhumed, and Jordanian authorities appealed to the international community to finance a study of the documents. On its side, the Vatican entrusted Father de Vaux with deciphering the documents, which were placed in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, under Jordanian control. In 1961, the Jordanian state declared all the manuscripts in the Palestinian Archeological Museum of Jerusalem to be national property. Five years later, the entire museum became national property of Jordan. In the 1967 Arab-Israel War, the Israeli army occupied East Jerusalem, taking over the museum and its holdings. From then on, Israeli authorities administered the Palestinian Archeological Museum. The team of Father de Vaux was authorized to continue its research but limited other scholars’ access to the manuscripts, provoking ire in the international scientific community. Photos of original documents were sent to the United States (Claremont and Cincinnati) and to Great Britain. Ten years later, a portion of the documents kept at Claremont were entrusted to the Huntington Library in Virginia, where they remained for years without being studied seriously. There was some conjecture that access to the manuscripts was being limited because they contained information on Jesus and his adherence to the sect of Essenians, which would raise questions about T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

DEHAMSHE, ABDULMALIK

DECALOGUE: According to Biblical tradition, this was the ensemble of the Ten Commandments (asseret hadibrot, in Hebrew) given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Decalogue is the moral basis for Jewish, as well as Christian, life. SEE ALSO Christianity; Moses.

THE MANUAL OF DISCIPLINE. ONE OF THE HISTORICALLY AND RELIDEAD SEA SCROLLS, THIS TEXT IS DISPLAYED AT THE SHRINE OF THE BOOK, PART OF THE ISRAEL MUSEUM IN JERUSALEM. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

GIOUSLY IMPORTANT

his divine nature. For Father de Vaux, however, the “Master of Justice” described in these manuscripts had nothing to do with Jesus. The international scientific community was shocked that translations of the texts, whose study had been underway for many years, had not yet been published. According to a former member of the committee, John Marco Allegro, some of the manuscripts, particularly the Copper Scroll, intimated the existence of a fabulous treasure, that of the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Tables of the Law, which would lead to censure on the part of Israeli authorities. On 22 September 1991, the Huntington Library, in Virginia, decided to make all the copies of the manuscripts in its keeping available to the public and to publish a photocopy edition. During the following October, Israeli authorities permitted access to all manuscripts in its collections, including the unpublished ones. SEE ALSO

Arab-Israel War (1967); Essenes; Jesus.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

DEGEL HA-TORAH (Torah Banner): An ultraorthodox Israeli political party, Degel ha-Torah was created before the Knesset elections of 1988 by Rabbi Eliezer Menachem Schach, a dissident in the Agudat Israel Party. Representing the non-Hasidic Ashkenazi current and opposed to the Lubavitch movement, Degel ha-Torah won two seats in the Knesset that year. Between 1988 and 1994, in an attempt to obtain subsidies for its institutions, Degel ha-Torah backed the governments in power, left as well as right. In the Knesset elections of 1992, it formed a common list with Agudat Israel; then, in anticipation of the elections of 1996, it constituted a new list with Agudat Israel and PoEalei Agudat Israel and again won two seats in the Knesset, which were taken by Rabbis Avraham Ravitz and Moshe Gaoni. Principal figures in the movement were Eliezer Menachem Schach, Chaim Epstein, Moshe Gaoni, Chaim Miller, and Avraham Ravitz. In the 2003 elections Degel haTorah formed a list with Agudat Israel as Yahadut ha-Torah, or United Torah Judaism, which won five seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel; PoEalei Agudat Israel; Schach, Eliezer. DEHAMSHE, ABDULMALIK (1943– ): Israeli-Arab politician, born in Kfar Kana. He is a lawyer and former president of the Israeli League of Human Rights. Abdulmalik Dehamshe was arrested in 1971 and sentenced to ten years in jail for belonging to al-Fatah. An atheist at the time, he became a practicing Muslim during his detention. Freed in 1978 and readmitted to the Israeli bar, he became one of the main leaders of the Israeli Arab Movement. At the beginning of the 1980s, he was responsible for the protection of the HAMAS leader IsmaEil Ahmad Yasin. In April 1996, he joined with the Arab Democratic Party in creating a common list, the United Arab List, for the parliamentary elections scheduled for that spring. In the elections of 29 May 1996, Dehamshe won a seat, thus becoming the first Islamist to sit in the Knesset. In the general elections of May 1999, the United Arab List won five seats, one of which was taken by Dehamshe. In October 2000, with the Intifada raging in the Occupied Territories, he failed to convince other Israeli-Arab leaders to form a single

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

105

DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE

electoral list. In 2003, Dehamshe was still a member of the Knesset representing the United Arab List. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Democratic Party; Fatah, al-; HAMAS; Knesset; United Arab List; Yasin, Ahmad IsmaEil.

DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

DEMOCRATIC FRONT FOR PEACE AND EQUALITY (HADASH): Israeli political bloc, formed in 1977 by a union of a number of smaller parties of the left. Created following a schism in the Communist camp, HADASH, in which RAKAH was the dominant party, it favored the creation of a Palestinian state, and supported human rights and the creation of a socialist system in Israel. This bloc, which had about 2,000 members, the vast majority of whom were Arabs, won four seats in the Knesset in 1981 and 1988. In the elections of May 1991, the Arab bloc of Azmi Bishara, the Democratic National Alliance (Balad), had a list in common with HADASH and won five seats. At various Knesset sessions, HADASH has been backed by Arab groups, such as the Arab Democratic Party (ADP). In the May 1999 elections, HADASH obtained only three seats. This failure revealed the loss of influence of the movement among the Arab population of Israel as well as the broadening of the possible political representation for Arabs, including the Arab Democratic Party and an Islamic party. On the following 14 June, the secretary general of the party, Muhammad Baraki, was one of the candidates for the speakership of the Knesset. As of 2004, the principal figures in HADASH are: Muhammad Baraki (secretary general), Tamar Gozansky, Salah Salim, Hashim Mahamid, Ahmad Saad, Meir Wilner, and Neila Zayyad. SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Bishara, Azmi; Democratic National Alliance; RAKAH.

DEMOCRATIC FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE (DFLP; al-Jabha al-Dimuqratiya li-Tahrir Filastin): Palestinian movement, formed on 21 February 1969, after a split in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Originally Marxist-Leninist in allegiance, the DFLP, formerly called PDFLP (Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), was created through the impetus of Nayif Hawatma and Yasir Abd Rabbo, who had fallen out with George Habash, head of the PFLP. This movement advocated an extreme left program, recom-

106

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

mending active struggle against “conservative Arab regimes and the State of Israel.” Through the 1970s it evolved toward democratic socialism and in favor of a secular Palestinian state. Striving to prioritize Palestinian unity over ideological quarrels, the DFLP often served as an intermediary between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Rejection Front. The DFLP was also one of the first Palestinian groups to establish contact with Israeli leftist parties, while still supporting armed struggle against Israel. In 1978, at the time of the Iraqi-Iranian conflict, the DFLP broke its ties with Baghdad to support the Khomeini revolution. In 1983 the movement formed a joint politicalmilitary command with the PFLP, and in March 1984, it attempted to constitute an opposition front to al-Fatah by creating the Democratic Alliance, which was composed of the DFLP, the PFLP, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), and a part of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF); but within several months, personality conflicts and ideological differences had dissolved this union. The DFLP and the PFLP decided to consolidate their activity in a unified command. Within the DFLP, an armed group called the “Red Star” was formed, charged with carrying out military actions on behalf of the front against Israel. In 1990 a fracture surfaced in the movement, caused in part by the internal crisis in the Soviet Union. The following year, the DFLP came out against the peace process that had started in Madrid, arguing that other Palestinian movements had not been consulted on the program advocated by the PLO in the negotiations. Serious differences emerged between the head of the DFLP, Nayif Hawatma, and his second in command, Yasir Abd Rabbo, who favored a rapprochement with Yasir Arafat. Having quit the DFLP, Abd Rabbo founded a dissident movement, the Palestinian Democratic Union (PDU or FIDA), which backed the policies of al-Fatah. Following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian accord of 13 September 1993, the DFLP and the PFLP decided to withdraw from the executive committee of the PLO, and appealed to “all national and Islamic forces and Palestinian notables to come together in a coalition to bring about the failure of this accord.” A few days later, the two movements joined with the Palestinian opposition front, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). In August 1994, hoping to make their opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian accord more effective, the DFLP and the PFLP announced, once more, the creation of a joint military command. In May 1995, the partisans of Arafat tried vainly to provoke a split T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

DESERT STORM OPERATION

in the DFLP. Differing with the other parties within the APF, the DFLP distanced itself from it, in an attempt to become a political force in the Palestinian autonomous territories, while still maintaining its opposition to the Oslo Accords. On 19 February, Taysir Khalid, one of the principal lieutenants of the DFLP, expressed a wish to have his movement participate in negotiations with Israel on a definitive status for the Palestinian territories. In February 1999, at the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan, Hawatma shook hands with the president of Israel, Ezer Weizman. In August 1999 meetings took place in Cairo between the leaders of the DFLP, the PFLP, and al-Fatah, in an attempt to coordinate a common strategy in the context of negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian territories. In October 2000, a month after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories, the head of the DFLP called on his militants to support the uprising but not to resort to the use of arms against Israel. At the end of April 2001, while the Intifada was intensifying, the leadership of the front launched an appeal for general mobilization and the formation of a “national emergency organization,” uniting all Palestinian forces and responsible for coordinating the actions of the Intifada, in parallel with negotiations with the Israelis. On 24 August, the DFLP claimed credit for a raid in the Gaza Strip, in the course of which three Israeli soldiers were killed. In early 2004, Hawatma held discussions with members of the Israeli Meretz Party with a view to promoting a twostate solution, and called for an end to attacks on civilians. The DFLP, whose headquarters is in Damascus, is well established in Jordan, the West Bank, and in Lebanon. As of 2004, its principal leaders are: Nayif Hawatma (secretary general), Qays Abdul Hakim (assistant), Ramzi Rabah, Qays SamarraDiD (Abu Leila), and Taysir Khalid. SEE ALSO Abd Rabbo, Yasir; Afarat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Habash, George; Hawatma, Nayif; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Democratic Union; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

DEMOCRATIC

NATIONAL ALLIANCE (DNA; alTajammuE al-Dimuqrati al-Watani): An Israeli Arab political group, the Democratic National Alliance was created in February 1999, in anticipation of the upcoming (May) parliamentary elections, piggybacked with the election of the prime minister—an election in which, for the first time, an Arab, Azmi Bishara, founder of the Democratic National Alliance, was a candidate. The creation of the DNA is to

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

be seen in the context of the demands of the Israeli Arabs. Just before the elections, Bishara withdrew and asked his supporters to support the candidacy of Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor Party. On 18 May 1999, following the elections, the Democratic National Alliance found itself with two seats in the Knesset, which were taken by Azmi Bishara and Ahmad Tibi. SEE ALSO Bishara, Azmi; Tibi, Ahmad.

DEMOKRATIA V’ALIYAH SEE

DA.

DEREKH HA-SHLISHI SEE

Third Way.

DERI, ARYE (1959– ): Former Knesset member and minister of Internal Affairs. Born in Morocco in 1959, Arye Deri was educated at the Porat Yosef Talmudic College and the Hebron Talmudic College in Jerusalem. He was a founding member and secretary (1981–1983) of the Maale Amos settlement and in 1984 a founding member of the SHAS (Sephardi Torah Guardians) Party. He held various posts, including senior adviser to the minister of the interior (1985), secretary-general of the SHAS Party (from 1985), secretary-general of the Internal Affairs Ministry (from 1986), and minister of the interior. As the leader of SHAS, Deri formed a close alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1999 Deri was charged and convicted of using the Interior Ministry in the 1980s to illegally direct government funds to SHAS Party projects in local municipalities, personally receiving $155,000 in bribes. He began a four-year prison sentence in September 2000 but was granted early release in 2003. Some SHAS supporters continued to claim that Deri had been wrongfully accused and convicted. SEE ALSO SHAS. DESERT FOX: A joint U.S.-British bombing and cruise missile campaign against Iraq over three days in December 1998, occasioned by the reluctance of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein to cooperate fully with UNSCOM, the United Nations team of weapons inspectors. DESERT SHIELD OPERATION SEE

Gulf War (1991).

DESERT STORM OPERATION SEE

Gulf War (1991).

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

107

DEVEKUT

DEVEKUT: Hebrew term designating a secret Hasidic rite during which the participants enter into ecstasy while chanting Aramaic phrases. A few days before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a ceremony of this sort was organized to obtain a “punishment” for Rabin’s “treason.” SEE ALSO Eyal; Pulsa Denura; Rabin, Yitzhak. DFLP Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

DHIKR (Zikr): Arabic term describing “the reminder, the evocation” of the various names of God during a religious ceremony, particularly in Sufi groups. Dhikr occurs under the supervision of a shaykh. It is thought to penetrate the chanter with a portion of the divine spirit conveyed in each of God’s names. SEE ALSO Shaykh.

DHIMMI (“protégé,” in Arabic): Status particular to monotheistic non-Muslims and Zoroastrians, from whom was asked the payment of a special tribute, the jiziya, and that they not serve in the army in exchange for the “protection” of Islam in countries they inhabited. SEE ALSO Christianity; Jew.

DIASPORA (from the Greek diaspora, meaning “dispersion”): Term used to designate the dispersion of the Jewish people, whose first real exile outside Palestine dates from 70 C.E.; the word refers as well to any national or religious community living abroad as a result of voluntary or forced migration. By 2004 the Jewish diaspora outside Israel numbered around 8 million persons, of whom approximately 6 million live in the United States. The Palestinian diaspora, living outside the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, numbered around 3.8 million persons, most of whom are in states neighboring Israel, particularly Jordan (1.6 million), Lebanon (370,000), and Syria (400,000). Some Palestinian sources assert that the population of the Palestinian diaspora is closer to 6.5 million, and that official figures do not reflect those Palestinians who are not registered as refugees. The Palestinian exile dates from 1948, following the creation of the State of Israel.

DIN (“sentence,” in Hebrew): A religious or secular decision, often made by jurisprudence. The Arabic term din means religion. Two ancient Jewish religious decrees, “Din Mosser” and “Din Rodef,” pro-

108

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

posing stern measures to be taken against any person who has betrayed the Jewish people or put them in danger, are sometimes sanctioned by extremist movements.

DIWAN: Arabic word meaning council, often used for the governmental chambers or councils. The term also is used to describe a communal house in Palestinian villages and refugee camps, usually for a particular tribe or part of a tribe. DJEREJIAN, EDWARD (1939– ): A U.S. diplomat, born in 1939, Edward Djerejian is an eminent Arabist, considered one of the best American specialists on the Middle East. After joining the State Department in 1962, he was posted to Lebanon (1965–1969), then to Morocco (1969–1972), in the capacity of chargé d’affaires. Between 1984 and 1986, he was head of the U.S. mission in the Kingdom of Jordan, then from 1986 to 1987, spokesperson for Ronald Reagan’s White House. From 1989 to 1991 Djerejian was U.S. ambassador to Syria, where he was appreciated for his profound knowledge of the Lebanese situation. He participated in the Middle East peace conference held in Madrid. While in Damascus, he maintained very good relations with Syrian foreign minister Faruk al-Shara. From 1991 to 1993 he was undersecretary of state for the Middle East. In December 1993 he was named U.S. ambassador to Israel by Bill Clinton. Djerejian resigned his post in 1994, feeling that he was shut out of the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations. Upon his return to the United States, he was hired by the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, to head the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. In 2003 Djerejian was invited by Colin Powell, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, to chair the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, a panel assembled at the request of Congress to study the efficacy of U.S. diplomacy and to recommend policy initiatives. The group published its first report in October 2003. DOR SHALOM (Hebrew, meaning “peace generation”): Israeli pacifist movement, founded in the spring of 1996 under the leadership of Yuval Rabin, son of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated in November 1995. The movement emphasizes volunteerism and social action to address polarization within Israeli society. Its initiatives include ecological clean-up programs, toy drives, and educational programs for Arab and Israeli children. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

DRUZE

DOUBA, ALI ISSA IBRAHIM (called Abu Firas; 1933– ): Syrian military officer, Alawite, born at Karfis, in the Matawira tribe. Ali Douba entered the army in 1955 and five years later became the deputy head of internal security in Damascus. He was a military attaché in Great Britain between 1964 and 1966, and in Bulgaria between 1967 and 1968. He returned to Syria and became the head of military intelligence for the Latakia region. In November 1970, as head of military intelligence for the city of Damascus, he supported Hafiz al-Asad’s coup d’état. In 1971, he was deputy to the head of army intelligence, Hikmat al-Shihabi. Three years later he was made head of this department. Elected to the central committee of the BaEth Party in 1978, he was promoted to general in 1981. In December 1983, when President Hafiz alAsad was ill, Douba was a member of the committee responsible for governing the state in the interim. In 1985, the Syrian president put him in charge of the Lebanon dossier, along with al-Shihabi and Ghazi Kanaan. In June 1987, he escaped an assassination attempt. Named lieutenant general in 1993, he became assistant to al-Shihabi, who was now the army chief of staff, while remaining in charge of military intelligence. General Douba was one of the most influential figures in al-Asad’s regime. At the beginning of 2000, increasingly marginalized as Bashshar alAsad, the son of the president, prepared to take power, he retired from his position as head of Syrian military intelligence and was replaced by his deputy, Hassan Khalil. Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Shihabi, Hikmat al-.

SEE ALSO

DRUZE: The Druze religion was founded in the eleventh century by followers of Caliph Hakim ibn Amr Allah. Its origins are in the Egyptian IsmaEili sect, which derives from monotheistic Islam combined with Greek philosophy and other influences. Its tenets include reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, and it recognizes as prophets or persons of great esteem (in addition to those of the QurDan) such diverse figures as Hermes, Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law), Jesus, and John the Baptist, and the philosophers Pythagoras, Plato, and Plotinus. In the fifteenth century, Jamal al-Din EAbda-llah alTannoukhi was supposed to have compiled the existing Druze religious texts into six volumes, known under the name of “Wisdom Epistles” (Rasa Dil alHikma), which constitute the basis of Druze doctrine. The mysteries of the Druze religion are secret; the Druze do not proselytize and have been essentially a closed community almost since the beginning. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

DRUZE REBELS. A DRUZE SHAYKH (CENTER) TALKS WITH TWO FOLLOWERS OF KAMAL JUMBLATT’S PROGRESSIVE SOCIALIST PARTY, WHICH FOUGHT IN 1958 FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL REFORMS FOR ALL SECTS IN LEBANON. TODAY, DRUZE LIVE IN PARTS OF LEBANON AND SYRIA, AS WELL AS IN ISRAEL, WHERE THEY ARE A PRIVILEGED—BUT NOT PROSPEROUS—MINORITY. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

Historically, the Druze community has practiced dissimulation (kitaman), meaning in practice that the Druze adopt local customs and are loyal to the established state. The Druze settled in the mountains of the Shuf region of Lebanon, where they became, along with the Maronites, the dominant people in the Lebanese mountains. Currently, the Druze live in the Metn, Kesrouan, Shuf, and Hermon regions in Lebanon, in the Hauran and the Golan Heights in Syria, and in parts of Jordan, as well as in the Galilee in Israel. The opposition of the Druze to Sunni orthodoxy inclines them toward lay Lebanese parties, such as the Progressive Socialist Party. Bloody conflicts between the Druze and Christian communities were rife during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). On 4 August 2001, with the visit of Monseigneur Sfeir to the fief of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, there was a reconciliation between the two communities. The great Druze communities of Lebanon are represented by the Jumblatt and Shahab families. In Israel, the Druze number around 100,000 (plus another 18,000 in the Golan), mainly in rural areas in the Galilee, and are officially considered non-Arab. As supporters of the state, Druze serve in

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

109

DRUZE INITIATIVE COMMITTEE

the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Though a privileged minority in Israel, their status has not increased their prosperity, and the use made of them by the IDF during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in alliance with Maronite forces and in opposition to Lebanese Druze forces, has created some conflict within the Israeli Druze community between the younger and the more conservative older generations. SEE ALSO Ismaili; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Maronites; Sfeir, Nasrallah.

110

D I C T I O N A R Y

DRUZE INITIATIVE COMMITTEE (Lajnat al-Muhadarat al-Durziya): Israeli leftist Druze organization, opposed to all collaboration of the Druze community with Israeli authorities. It opposes the conscription of Druze into the Israel Defense Force and actively assists conscientious objectors. The committee participates in various activities with international and Israeli peace organizations.

DUNAM: Turkish measuring unit, corresponding to one tenth of a hectare.

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

E EAGLES OF THE PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

EASTERN CHRISTIANS: Religious community including Melkites, Maronites, and Assyrians. SEE ALSO Assyrians; Maronites; Melkites.

EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH: A descendant of the Byzantine Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church consists of a group of autonomous Christian churches that share doctrine and liturgy. The Eastern Orthodox Church issued from the great schism of 1054, when it formally split from the Roman Catholic Church. Orthodox churches in the Middle East include: the Russian, the Balkan, and the Greek; the churches of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and the See of Constantinople (now Istanbul); and the Nestorian and Monophysite churches. The longestablished presence of the Eastern Orthodox Church (as well as purchases made from the Georgians in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) earned it control over many religious sites in Palestine during the Ottoman Empire and up unto the present. SEE ALSO Christianity.

EBAN, ABBA (1915–2002): Israeli foreign minister, born Audrey Salomon, in South Africa. Abba Eban studied eastern languages at Cambridge, and during

World War II organized the recruitment of volunteers to join the Jewish brigade of the British army. Eban was the newly created State of Israel’s first representative to the United Nations. In 1950, he became Israel’s first ambassador to the United States, and in 1953 he was elected vice president of the U.N. General Assembly. In 1959, he joined the Israel Labor Party, MAPAI, which he went on to represent in the Knesset. In December of the same year he joined the government of David Ben-Gurion as minister without portfolio. The following year he was named minister of education and culture. In June 1963, he became deputy prime minister in the cabinet of Levi Eshkol. From June 1966 to May 1974, he was foreign minister, succeeding Golda Meir. After the 1967 Arab-Israel War, he helped formulate United Nations (UN) Resolution 242. At the foreign ministry his moderate positions clashed with the intransigence of Prime Minister Meir. When Yitzhak Rabin became head of the government, Eban resigned. Between 1984 and 1988, he was chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee, where he advocated the development of a dialogue with the Palestinians. In June 1988, shunted aside by certain Labor Party leaders, he no longer figured on its list for the Knesset elections. Eban is the author of a number of works dealing with Jewish history and Israel. He died in Tel Aviv.

111

ECHUD

ABBA EBAN. A LABOR PARTY MODERATE, EBAN WAS AN ISRAELI PUBHIS MANY POSTS INCLUDED FIRST REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS AND FIRST AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES, AS WELL AS DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER AND FOREIGN MINISTER IN THE 1960S AND 1970S. A PROLIFIC AUTHOR, HE WAS AN ARTICULATE SPOKESMAN FOR ISRAEL WHO OFTEN APPEARED ON AMERICAN TELEVISION. LIC OFFICIAL DURING HIS NATION’S FIRST FOUR DECADES.

Arab-Israel War (1967); Ben-Gurion, David; MAPAI; Meir, Golda; Rabin, Yitzhak; Resolution 242.

SEE ALSO

ECHUD SEE

Yad.

EDAH HAREDIT: Ultra-Orthodox independent Jewish community. Anti-Zionist and hostile to the State of Israel, it rejects all participation in Israeli political life.

EDDÉ, RAYMOND (1913–2000): Lebanese Maronite Christian politician, born in Alexandria, Egypt. Son of Émile Eddé, president of Lebanon between 1936 and 1941, Raymond Eddé studied law, then entered politics in 1943. Six years later, he became amid

112

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

(president) of the National Bloc, succeeding his father, who had just died. As soon as he took office, he voiced his opposition to President Beshara alKhoury, the legality of whose election he contested. In opposition to the new president were also Camille Chamoun, Abdelhamid Karamé, Hamid Franjiya, and Kamal Jumblatt. In 1951, with Chamoun and Jumblatt, Eddé created the Lebanese National Socialist Front. In 1956, when he had been representing the town of Jubayl for three years, he succeeded in getting a bank secrecy law passed that would turn Lebanon into an important financial center. Concurrently, he supported the campaign advocating the adoption of civil marriage. In July 1958, he was defeated in the presidential elections by Fu’ad Shahab. In spite of this setback, he asserted himself as one of the principal leaders of the Christian camp. In October, he joined the “people’s salvation” cabinet, where he held the interior, foreign affairs, labor, and transportation portfolios. In 1964, he suffered his second political defeat in the legislative elections, losing his deputy’s seat, but he won it back the following year in partial elections. Opposed to Shahabism, he participated in a tripartite alliance with Pierre Jumayyil and Chamoun. In October 1968, he became minister of public works and agriculture, but he resigned three months later, following the Israeli raid on the Beirut airport, against which the Lebanese military put up no resistance. Advocating Lebanese unity, he asked for a United Nations force for South Lebanon, which he saw as the only way for Lebanon to avoid growing polarization. In November 1969, he opposed the agreement between the Lebanese government and the Palestinian fida Diyyun, arguing that it gave Israel a pretext for nullifying the Israeli-Lebanese armistice agreement signed in 1949. Condemning the action of the Maronite militias, Eddé was regarded as a traitor to his own group. In August 1970, he opposed the candidacy of the Shahabist Elias Sarkis and supported Suleiman Franjiya in the presidential election, but four years later he dissented from the latter’s policies and in October 1974, along with former prime ministers, created an anti-Franjiya bloc. In 1976, he escaped several assassination attempts. In July, opposing the entry of the Syrian army into Lebanon, he founded the National Union Front. In December, condemning the Phalangists’ actions, refusing to take a position in intra-Lebanese fighting, and rejecting all plans to partition Lebanon, he decided on exile in France. From Paris, Eddé continued to speak for human rights and democracy in Lebanon. In 1990, in spite of the end of the civil war, he refused to return to Beirut, opposing the TaDif Accords, which he T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

EGYPT

thought only sanctioned the Syrian presence in Lebanon. He died in Paris in 2000. SEE ALSO Chamoun, Camille; Jumblatt, Kamal; Phalange; TaDif Accord.

TURKEY Med

iterra

nean

SYRIA

Sea

Damascus ISRAEL

Tobruk

EGYPT: Previously a semiautonomous Ottoman pro-

Aswan ¯

d Re

Lake Nasser

Str

ip N

Faya-Largeau

SUDAN

CHAD

il

Port Sudan

e

Khartoum

Nyala

S ea

ou

Asmara

ERITREA le

T H E

EGYP T

Al Jawf

Aoz

SAUDI ARABIA

i ue N

O F

L I B YA

ite W h ile N

D I C T I O N A R Y

Cairo

Bl

vince, Egypt was from 1882 to the early 1950s essentially, though never formally, a British colony whose control the British considered crucial because of the Suez Canal. In 1914, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Germans, Britain declared Egypt a protectorate, and in 1922 a form of home rule under the Ottoman/Egyptian monarchy (the royal family was Albanian in origin). Hostility to foreign rule (which had been building since European interventions over Egypt’s foreign debt in the 1870s and British occupation in 1882), dissatisfaction with social conditions, and later outrage at the ongoing establishment of a European/Zionist settler state in Palestine under imperial protection led to a widespread, although divided, nationalist movement with both religious and secular components. From the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Egyptian political parties—ranging from the Wafd, the largest secular nationalist party between the wars, to the Communists, to the Muslim Brotherhood—rallied their followers over the cause of the Palestinians. Some, especially the Muslim Brothers, supplied money and volunteers for anti-Zionist actions in Palestine, including strikes, the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, and the Arab-Israel War of 1948– 1949. Egypt was the main advocate for the Palestinians in the League of Arab States after its creation in 1945. The disaster of the 1948 war, which left the Gaza Strip, with roughly a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees, under Egyptian control, severely weakened the government and discredited most of the existing political parties. A coup d’état in 1952 by a group of young military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser led to the abolition of the monarchy and the declaration of a republic in 1953. Political parties, except for an officially approved group, were disbanded, and a thorough program of social, economic, and political reform was undertaken. In 1956, under a new constitution, Nasser became president. After 1949, under both monarchy and republic, Egypt formally supported the Palestinian cause but in practice refrained from conflict with Israel and even participated in secret negotiations for a compromise settlement; resources were devoted mainly to the domestic economy. But the Lavon Affair in 1954 and Israeli attacks on Gaza in 1954 and 1955

JORDAN

Alexandria

Bousso

EGYPT 200

0 0

200

400

400 600

600

Addis Ababa 800 Miles

ETHIOPIA

800 Kilometers

convinced Nasser that the Egyptian armed forces had to be built up. His refusal to join the Baghdad Pact or take sides in the Cold War—in 1955 Egypt joined the Nonaligned Movement—as well as Egyptian aid to the Algerian nationalists then in revolt against French rule, made it impossible to obtain Western arms and prevented an agreement in ongoing negotiations with Britain over its occupation of the Suez Canal zone, which continued under a 1936 treaty. Nasser concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, then a Soviet satellite; the United States withdrew its offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, an important economic project. Nasser’s response was to seize and nationalize the Suez Canal. Although he offered financial compensation, the British and French attempted to break him militarily and colluded with Israel to provoke the Suez-Sinai War of October 1956, which ended, mostly because of American pressure, in humiliation for the British and French; in their withdrawal; and in the increased status of Egypt in the world, especially among Arabs. Also under American pressure, the Israelis withdrew from the Sinai, destroying roads and military installations as they left.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

113

EGYPT

In 1958, partly as a result of the popularity of Nasser’s Arab nationalism, Syria and Egypt created the United Arab Republic (UAR), with Nasser at its head. Political differences with the Syrians led to the dissolution of the UAR in 1961. In 1962, Egypt also became involved in a civil war in North Yemen, where a coup d’état had overthrown the Saudisupported monarchy. This conflict was a drain on Egyptian resources for several years. In 1964, Egypt, along with Syria and Iraq, sponsored the Arab League’s creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a means to channel— and keep under control—the activities of Palestinian nationalists. Under its leader Ahmad Shuqayri, it was largely beholden to Egypt for material support. Shuqayri, however, indulged in extremely belligerent rhetoric, to the detriment of Palestinian as well as Egyptian interests, particularly in the months before the 1967 war with Israel. In 1966, Egypt entered into a mutual defense treaty with Syria. In the spring of 1967, the Israelis began massing troops along the Egyptian border. Nasser moved troops into the area, requested the removal of the United Nations Emergency Force, which had guarded the border since 1956, and blockaded the Straits of Tiran. Egypt and Jordan then signed a mutual defense treaty. These acts were the culmination of a long period of tension and provocation that led to the Arab-Israel War of 1967, which ended disastrously for all the Arab state participants and for the Palestinians. The Arab armies were routed and Israel was left in possession of the Syrian Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the remainder of what had been Palestine under the British Mandate, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; hundreds of thousands of new Palestinian refugees were created. Nasser’s government and international prestige were undermined, and the PLO began to distance itself from Egypt, beginning with the resignation of Shuqayri. Nasser resigned, but his resignation was refused by the National Assembly. He negotiated a ceasefire in the Black September conflict between Jordan and the PLO shortly before he died in 1970. His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, was less interested in pan-Arab unity than Nasser and worked to reorient Egypt toward the United States. He signed the Egyptian-Soviet Friendship Treaty, which originated during the Nasser regime, but expelled Soviet military advisors in 1972. (He reconciled with the Soviet Union early in 1973 and military aid resumed.) Frustrated by the Israeli refusal to negotiate the return of Israeli-occupied territory, Egypt and Syria launched the Arab-Israel War of 1973, in which Sadat achieved

114

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

two objectives: showing that Egyptian armed forces were capable of fighting well against the Israelis and provoking the Americans to step in to mediate a peace settlement. Sadat agreed to an Israeli proposal to seek a treaty under U.S., rather than UN, auspices, and concluded agreements in 1974 and 1975 dealing with disengagement in the Sinai. He sought American aid and investment and abrogated the EgyptianSoviet Friendship Treaty in 1976, when the Soviets refused to delay repayment of Egyptian debts. These moves toward a separate peace constituted a break with the Arab world. Sadat signed the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the subsequent peace treaty in 1979. These agreements proved extremely unpopular both with Egyptians and with other Arabs. Members of the Arab League severed diplomatic relations; Egypt was suspended from the League and from the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There was immense popular opposition to the treaty, with its perceived capitulation on the Palestinian issue, as well as to Sadat’s economic liberalization, which brought great hardship to the lower and middle classes (he reduced food subsidies and abolished price controls, largely at the behest of the World Bank; there were riots in 1977, which the army suppressed violently). To retain political control, Sadat governed in an increasingly autocratic and repressive manner, largely by decree and through rigged referenda. He outlawed strikes, imposed censorship, tolerated corruption, repressed Palestinian political and economic activity in Egypt, attempted to undermine the PLO, and jailed political opponents. When Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by a group belonging to Eyptian Islamic Jihad, he was barely mourned; indeed his death was celebrated throughout the Arab world. His successor, Husni Mubarak, sought to placate popular discontent, but without losing political control. He moderated Sadat’s most repressive measures and harshest economic policies, legalized political parties, and loosened censorship. He did not repudiate the peace treaty and he maintained good relations with the United States. Like Sadat, he aided Iraq (also being helped by the United States) in the Iran-Iraq War, which began in 1980. In April 1982, in accord with the peace treaty, Israel withdrew from the Sinai. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in Operation Peace for Galilee, a move that might not have been possible without the treaty, which limited Egypt’s military presence in the Sinai and inserted a multinational force between Egypt and the Israelis. Mubarak withdrew Egypt’s ambassador from Israel but did not break relations. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon in 1983, however, Mubarak did assist it (alT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

EGYPTIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD

though he did not accept any PLO fighters into Egypt) and publicly met with its leader, Yasir Arafat; Mubarak was subsequently a frequent intermediary between the PLO and the United States. This was the beginning of Egypt’s reacceptance into the Arab World. In 1984, Jordan, another ally of Iraq and the United States, resumed diplomatic relations. In 1989, Egypt joined the Arab Cooperation Council, a group of Arab countries that had aided Iraq during its war with Iran, and later the same year was allowed to rejoin the League of Arab States. In 1990, with a majority of the League, Egypt condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the next year joined the American-led coalition in the Gulf War, although Mubarak would not allow Egyptian troops to be used inside Iraq. The Palestinian cause remained popular in Egypt, and after the Intifada broke out in late 1987 large public demonstrations took place, some of which became violent. These were organized by student, labor, political, and religious groups. Islamist groups particularly condemned both the Egyptian government and the PLO for compromising with the Israelis, and increasingly unpopular government economic policies contributed to the opposition. Through the 1990s, militant groups like Islamic Jihad and al-JamiEa al-Islamiyya campaigned against the government; they attempted to assassinate Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995 and for several years carried on a violent campaign aimed at foreign residents and tourists, which resulted in many deaths and elicited armed repression. Mubarak condemned the harsh Israeli response to the Intifada but at no time threatened to abandon the peace treaty. He recognized the Proclamation of the State of Palestine in 1988, but his opposition to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait strained relations with the PLO, which supported Iraq. After the Gulf War, however, Mubarak continued to advocate negotiations and supported both the Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords. In the opening years of the twenty-first century, Mubarak’s government remains in power through undemocratic means, and its main fear is the political strength of the Islamists. Although the more violent groups of the 1990s have subsided, the officially outlawed Muslim Brotherhood is increasingly popular, especially since the start of the Palestinians’ alAqsa Intifada in 2000. With the increasing radicalization of the Israeli and American policies and of organized Palestinian responses to them, Egyptian influence in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute has waned. Constrained by his determination to mainD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tain Egypt’s relation with the United States (Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world; Israel is the first), there is little Mubarak can do either to help the Palestinians or to restrain the Israelis. Although he offered Egypt’s support after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, his opposition to the American war in Iraq in 2003 was ignored, as was his urging that the Bush administration become more involved in seeking a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Cooperation Council; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Arab-Israel War (1982); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Baghdad Pact; Balfour Declaration; Black September 1970; Camp David Accords; Eyptian Islamic Jihad; Gaza Strip; Golan Heights; Gulf War (1991); Intifada (1987–1993); Iran-Iraq War; Iraq; JamiEa al-Islamiyya, al-; Lavon Affair; League of Arab States; Madrid Conference; Muslim Brotherhood; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Mubarak, Husni; Organization of the Islamic Conference; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939); Palestine Liberation Organization; Proclamation of the State of Palestine; Sadat, Anwar al-; Suez Crisis; United Arab Republic; United Nations Emergency Force; Wafd; West Bank.

EGYPTIAN ISLAMIC GROUP SEE

JamiEa al-Islamiyya, al-.

EGYPTIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD: Islamist extremist movement, created at the end of 1976 by former members of the Islamic Liberation Organization. Formed under the initiative of Ali al-Maghrebi, it was partially dismantled by Egyptian authorities in 1978. A few members who escaped from persecution decided to continue the activities of the group, organizing antiChristian operations in the south of Egypt. In 1979, Lieutenant Colonel Abud al-Zumur joined the movement and became one of its main leaders, along with the ideologue Abdul Salam Faraj. The latter, author of the tract Al Farida al-Gha’iba (The hidden imperative), recommended a program of action meant to establish an Islamic state, while commanding a jihad against the regime in place in Cairo. On 6 October 1981, a movement commando assassinated President Anwar al-Sadat during a military parade commemorating the 1973 Arab-Israel War. Two days later, the jihad cell of Upper Egypt staged riots, causing the deaths of almost two hundred people. Many movement members were arrested and im-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

115

EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION MOVEMENT

prisoned for a few months. Some of them left Egypt to join the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army. In April 1982, Abdul Salam Faraj, along with the members of the commando that assassinated Sadat, were executed. After the death of President Sadat, the movement was banned, but in 1987 Mahmud Sayyed Jaballah was accused of having reconstituted it and was sentenced to prison. Reorganizing, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad carried out new attacks, principally against Egyptian political figures and security heads, as well as against foreign tourists in Egypt. Repressed by Egyptian authorities, some of these militants settled in Pakistan and in Europe. Between 1989 and 1991 the movement was seemingly led by Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahri. (In 1992, after Zawahri was expelled from the movement, he formed his own organization, which he named Tala’i al-Fatah [Avant-Garde of the Conquest], an appellation that was already attached to an armed branch of the Jihad. Zawahri, then based in Pakistan, took credit for the attack on 19 November 1995 on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.) In February 1998, Egyptian Islamic Jihad joined the World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders (Front of Liberation of the Holy Sites of Islam), known as al-QaDida, whose main leader was Osama Bin Ladin, and with which al-JamaEa al-Islamiyya was also affiliated. On 18 April 1999, at a trial of 107 people accused of belonging to the Jihad, the Egyptian high military court tried the principal leaders, including Zawahri, in absentia and sentenced them to death. In 1997 some former Jihad members formed the Islah (Reform) Party and in 1999 others, including Muhammad Ali Sulayman, RaEafat Ibrahim Nasr, Amin al-Demiri, and Sabri Ahmad Muhammad, created the ShariEa Party. These parties have thus far been refused permission to contest elections, since parties based on religion are banned under Egypt’s constitution). SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Bin Ladin, Osama; Islamic Liberation Organization; JamaEa al-Islamiyya, al-; Sadat, Anwar al-.

EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION MOVEMENT (Harakat Thawrat Misr, in Arabic): This Egyptian movement, Nasserite in leaning, surfaced in 1984 and conducted several operations against Israeli and American figures in Cairo. The son and a nephew of former president Gamal Abdel Nasser were suspected of having belonged to it. The arrest of its principal members effectively neutralized the movement, whose activities ceased toward the end of the 1980s. An “Egyptian Revolution” appears among the terrorist organiza-

116

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

tions listed by the U.S. government, but little information is available on the group. SEE ALSO Nasser, Gamal Abdel.

EID AL-ADHA SEE

EId al-Adha.

EID AL-FITR SEE

EId al-Fitr.

ELDAD, ISRAEL (1910–1996): Israeli activist. Born in Galicia, Eldad received a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and graduated from the Vienna Rabbinical Seminary. In 1941 he immigrated to Palestine under the British Mandate and became a leader of the Stern Gang (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, LEHI), a militant Zionist group. He was arrested by the British in 1944. After the creation of Israel in 1948 and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s dissolution of LEHI in September of that year, Eldad remained an advocate for a Greater Israel that would encompass the land between the Nile and Euphrates Rivers. He edited the journal Sulam and lectured at the Haifa Technion until Ben-Gurion, in response to Eldad’s inflammatory remarks, ordered his dismissal from his teaching post. He became a columnist for Israel’s daily newspaper Haaretz and was considered a champion of the extreme right. He continued to write for various publications until his death. SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David; Lohamei Herut Yisrael.

ELEM (immigration for the good of the state, in Hebrew): Israeli political group, formed in March 1981 by immigrants of Soviet origin to defend their rights and facilitate their integration into Israeli society. One of their principal leaders was Yuli Nudelman. EL-HAMISHMAR (The guardian, in Hebrew): Israeli daily newspaper, founded in 1943, considered the organ of MAPAM. Closed in March 1995. SEE ALSO: MAPAM.

ELON, BENYAMIN (BENNY) (1954– ): member of Knesset. Born in Jerusalem in 1954, Elon studied at Yeshivat Merkaz Harav and served as a chaplain in the Israel Defense Force (IDF). He was a Jewish Agency emissary to the United States from 1983 to 1985. On his return to Israel, he taught at the Ateret Cohanim Center in Jerusalem and in 1990 founded Yeshivat Beit Orot. In 1996 he was elected to the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

EREKAT, SAIB MUHAMMAD

Knesset on the Moledet list, serving since that time on various committees, including the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and the Committee for Foreign Workers. In October 2001, following the death of tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi, Elon was appointed minister of tourism. A member of the National Unity Party, he has been a staunch supporter of the Gush Emunim and West Bank settlements. SEE ALSO Gush Emunim.

EL-SARRAJ, EYAD SEE

Sarraj, Eyad, el-.

EMIR (Amir): Title adopted by sovereigns, often translated as prince. Their jurisdictions are called emirates. EMUNAT HAKHAKHAMIM: Hebrew term designating the absolute obedience practicing Jews owe their religious superiors.

ENDURING FREEDOM OPERATION: Code name of the U.S. military operation launched on 7 October 2001 against Afghanistan. SEE ALSO Bin Ladin, Osama. ENTEBBE: City in Uganda, the scene of an Israeli hostage rescue operation. On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to Paris by two German nationals and two Palestinians, first to Benghazi, Libya, and then to Entebbe Airport. At Entebbe, the hijackers were joined by a second team. The non-Jewish passengers were released, and 101 Jewish passengers were held hostage. Israel, though appearing to begin negotiations with the hijackers and with Ugandan president Idi Amin, prepared for a military rescue. On the night of 3–4 July, four Hercules transport jets carrying 150 Israeli commandos flew from Sharm al-Shayk to Entebbe, evading detection. The paratroopers stormed the terminal where the hostages were being held, killing all eight hijackers and several Ugandan soldiers. Three hostages and the commander of the mission, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (brother of the future prime minister), were killed. The rescue operation was generally praised in the West but was condemned by Arab and African countries and the Soviet Union.

EPIPHANY: Christian holiday, celebrated on the twelfth day of Christmas, commemorating the recognition by the Three Wise Men (Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar) of the Messiah in Jesus. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO

Jesus; Messiah.

EREKAT, SAIB MUHAMMAD (Erakat, Arakat; 1955– ): Palestinian activist and negotiator, born in Jericho. Saib Erekat earned a degree in political science at San Francisco State University in the United States and a Ph.D. at Bradford College in Great Britain. A professor at al-Najah University of Nablus, on the West Bank, he was also in charge of public relations there between 1982 and 1986. He has been an editorialist for the daily al-Quds since 1982 and has published several works on the Palestinian question. He is close to al-Fatah and has backed the political line of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was vice-chair of the Palestinian delegation led by Haydar Abd alShafi to the Madrid peace conference in 1991. His involvement in various Israeli-Palestinian meetings only began in August 1992, because until then the Israelis would not accept him as a negotiator. He threatened to resign a year later, along with two other members of the Palestinian delegation, Faysal al-Husayni and Hanan Ashwari, to protest the Oslo Accords, which were negotiated without their knowledge. In January 1994 Erekat replaced al-Shafi as the head of the Palestinian delegation negotiating with Israel. At the end of the following May, as the Palestinian territories were becoming autonomous, he was named minister for local government in the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Yasir Arafat, while retaining his responsibilities in the Palestinian commission in charge of negotiations with Israel. On 28 September 1995 he participated in signing the provisional Israeli-Palestinian accord on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (the second Oslo Accords). Although he is close to Arafat, Erekat has spoken out against corruption in the PA and has fallen out with Arafat more than once. In 1999 Arafat dismissed him from the Wye Plantation negotiations; he was named negotiations minister in the cabinet of Mahmud Abbas when the latter became PA prime minister in 2003, but he resigned after two weeks, when he was excluded from meetings between Abbas and Ariel Sharon. Erekat has participated in a number of delegations charged with restarting peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, but with little result. He also participated, unofficially, in the discussions that over two years produced the Geneva Accord of November 2003. This unofficial agreement, negotiated with political figures of the Israeli left and endorsed by such international figures as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, was meant to prod the PA, the Israeli government, and the United States into some constructive movement toward serious negoti-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

117

ERETZ YISRAEL

ations but met with a reception ranging from polite indifference in Washington to enraged condemnation in Israel, and gained little support among Palestinian political factions. In April 2004, shortly after President George W. Bush committed the United States to support the Sharon government’s plan to evacuate Gaza while permanently incorporating Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Erekat published a commentary in the Washington Post, noting that “President Bush apparently has taken my job. . . . Israel is now negotiating peace with the United States—not with the Palestinians. . . . we are farther away from a permanent peace than we have ever been.” SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Fatah, al-; Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003; Husayni, Faysal al-; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestinian Authority; Palestine Liberation Organization; Quds; al-; Sharon, Ariel; Oslo Accords II.

ERETZ YISRAEL (Hebrew, meaning “land of Israel”): Expression used to designate the land of Israel, as it was promised by God to the Jewish people, according to Biblical tradition. Geographically this territory corresponds to the Kingdom of Solomon, which extended from Dan, north of Tiberias, to Beersheba in the south. After the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, this notion of a “Greater Israel” became the central theme of the political program of Israeli nationalist extremist movements. To them, Eretz Yisrael stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Gurion, particularly over the Lavon Affair. During the 1967 War, Eshkol continued as prime minister but relinquished the ministry of defense to Moshe Dayan. He established a National Unity government, including the right-wing Gahal bloc, which was retained in the 1969 elections but ended with Gahal’s departure from the coalition in 1970. Eshkol died in February 1969 of a heart attack while in office. Golda Meir succeeded him as prime minister. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Dayan, Moshe; Galal Party; Haganah; Lavon Affair.

ESSENES (from the Hebrew ’esah, council or party): A Jewish sect, existing between the second and first centuries C.E., whose adepts devoted their lives to the study of religious texts, sharing their possessions, and observing a strict discipline. The Essene movement represented a scission in Judaism, a response by some pious Jews to the influence of Hellenistic culture. The prime cause of this scission was the luxury of sacerdotal ceremonies, which was denounced by many, but another reason was the rivalry between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Essenes (also called “the pious”) settled in a desert area in the north of Palestine, away from the corruptions of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered at Qumran in April 1947, are believed to be relics of the Essenes. SEE ALSO Dead Sea Scrolls. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE PLO SEE

Palestinian Liberation Organization.

EXILES ESHKOL, LEVI (1895–1969): Labor Party leader and prime minister of Israel, 1963–1969. Eshkol Levi was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and settled in Palestine in 1914, serving in the Jewish Legion from 1918 to 1920. During the British Mandate (1922–1948), he became active in labor politics and Zionism, and for three years headed the settlement department of the Palestine office in Berlin during Nazi rule, organizing immigration and transfer of funds, the “Ha’avarah,” from Germany to Palestine. He also served as chief financial administrator of the Haganah. After 1948, Eshkol held various positions in the Israeli government, including director general of the ministry of defense, minister of agriculture, and minister of finance. In 1963, following David BenGurion’s retirement and at his recommendation, Eshkol assumed the post of prime minister as well as that of defense minister; he later lost favor with Ben-

118

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE

Muhajirun, al-.

EXODUS: Name of an American boat chartered in July 1947 by Mossad Beth to transport Jewish emigrants to Palestine. Under its original name President Warfield, the ship left Sète, France, on 11 July with 4,554 passengers on board, officially heading toward Columbia. When the boat reached high seas, the captain changed its name to Exodus 47 and altered course toward Palestine. On 18 July, Exodus was stopped by the British navy outside of Haifa and seized by the port authorities. The passengers, undesirables in the eyes of the British authorities, were divided into three ships that took them back to Europe. On 29 July, they arrived in France, at Port-de-Bouc, where the passengers refused to debark, except for 130 aged or ill people. On 22 August, the British authorities obliged the boats to pursue their route toT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

EZRA AND NEHEMIAH OPERATIONS

ward Hamburg, where, on 8 September, the odyssey of the passengers of the Exodus ended.

EYAL (“ram,” in Hebrew; Jewish National Organization; Jewish Combat Organization): Name of an Israeli ultranationalist splinter group created in April 1991 by Avishai Raviv. Associated with the older ultra-Orthodox Kach Party, the movement has been responsible for several anti-Palestinian attacks, and also has been suspected of assassinating Jews accused of treason by its leaders. On 22 September 1995, Israeli television filmed the members of Eyal, their heads hooded, in the process of swearing on a pistol and a Bible and accusing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of treason. On the following 4 November, Yigal Amir, an Israeli Jew close to Eyal, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Brought before a magistrate, he declared that he was “inspired by God.” During the investigation, unconfirmed rumors circulated that Eyal was created by Shin Beth to penetrate Israeli extremist milieux. The organization receives financial backing from Jewish extremist groups in the United States. SEE ALSO

Kach Party.

EZRA AND NEHEMIAH OPERATIONS: Code name for a number of operations organized by the Israeli authorities between the end of the 1940s and the middle of the 1950s, bringing almost 180,000 Jews from Morocco, Yemen, and Iraq to Israel. Also known under the code name of Flying Carpet Operation.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

INTERRUPTED EXODUS. PASSENGERS LEAVE THE DAMAGED EXODUS 47 UNDER THE WATCH OF BRITISH SOLDIERS IN THE PORT OF HAIFA, PALESTINE, IN 1947. MORE THAN 4,500 WOULD-BE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS WERE FORCED TO RETURN TO EUROPE ON THREE OTHER SHIPS, AND THEY ENDED UP IN HAMBURG.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

119

F FADLALLAH, SHAYKH MUHAMMAD HUSAYN (1935– ): Prominent ShiEite Muslim scholar and spiritual head of the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon. Fadlallah was born in Najaf, Iraq, and studied with Ayatollah al-KhuDi, whose representative in Lebanon he later became. In Najaf he also met Baqir al-Sadr, who recommended that he combine his religious beliefs and training with political and social activism. Following further studies in Qom, Iran, Fadlallah went to Lebanon in 1966 at the invitation of the ulama and Usrat al-TaDkhi (family of fraternity). He settled in NabEah, an impoverished community at the periphery of Beirut, where he created youth organizations and free clinics. After the destruction of NabEah in 1976, during the civil war, Fadlallah moved to southern Lebanon with other ShiEite refugees. He founded the Islamic Legislative Institute, responsible for the training of ulama. In 1982, after a schism developed within AMAL, Fadlallah called for all movements to embrace his program for an Islamic revolution in Lebanon, on the model of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s successful overthrow of the Shah in Iran. Hizbullah was established in 1982 and by 1987 was the second most important ShiEa political group in Lebanon, after AMAL. Fadlallah became its leader. After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, an intense power struggle developed within the leadership of the Iranian government and Muhammad Fadlallah found himself opposing Ayatollah Ali KhameneDi for presidency of the MarjaEiya, a ShiEite clerical mag-

isterium. Shaykh Fadlallah vigorously advocated resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, denounced Yasir Arafat’s willingness to negotiate with Israel, and rejected the accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, claiming that the concept of land for peace was a betrayal of Palestinians. Fadlallah’s positions on internal affairs are moderate and distinguish him from other ShiEa ulama. Differences include his commitment to social and charitable organizations and to women’s participation in public life. Although his status increased, especially among radicals, when Ayatollah Khomeini allowed him to collect khums (religious tax) from his followers in 1982, Fadlallah’s views have changed and he now calls for a multicultural Lebanon instead of an Islamic republic. Fadlallah, who is referred to as Ayatollah Fadlallah, denounced the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, describing them as “barbaric crimes” that “do not serve those who carry them out, but rather the victims who will reap the sympathy of the whole world. . . . Islamists who live according to the human value of Islam could not commit such crimes.” SEE ALSO Alim; AMAL; Hizbullah; Land for Peace.

FAHD PLAN: Named after the Saudi Crown Prince (since June 1982, King) Fahd ibn Abdelazziz, who

121

FAHUM, KHALID AL-

without enthusiasm by most Arab states but promoted by the pro-American King Hassan II of Morocco and by King Fahd, and it was formally adopted by the League of Arab States at its summit meeting in Fez, Morocco, in September 1982, where it became known as the Fez Initiative. It was rejected by Israel but remained the official position of the Arab League states until the Madrid Conference of 1991. League of Arab States; Madrid Conference.

SEE ALSO

HIZBULLAH LEADER. SHAYKH MUHAMMAD HUSAYN FADLALLAH, THE SPIRITUAL HEAD OF THE HIZBULLAH MOVEMENT IN LEBANON, HAS TAKEN A HARD LINE AGAINST PEACE WITH ISRAEL, BUT HE IS MORE MODERATE ON INTERNAL AFFAIRS IN HIS COUNTRY, AND HE CONDEMNED THE TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES ON 11 SEPTEMBER 2001. (AP/Wide World Photos)

proposed a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Presented to the Arab League on 7 August 1981, the Fahd Plan was based on the provisions of United Nations resolutions 242 and 338 and consisted of eight points: 1) Israeli retreat from the totality of the Arab territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; 2) dismantling of all Israeli settlements outside Israel’s 1967 borders; 3) guarantee of religious freedom; 4) recognition of the right of return of the Palestinian people and to indemnity for any Palestinians not desiring to return to their country; 5) placing the West Bank and Gaza Strip under UN authority for a short transitional period; 6) creation of a Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital; 7) recognition of the right to live in peace for every state in the region (in other words, an implicit recognition of Israel by all Arab states); 8) a guarantee by the United Nations or several member states that these principles would be executed. The plan was met

122

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

FAHUM, KHALID AL- (1923– ): Palestinian political figure, born in Nazareth. In 1948, at the time of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, Khalid Fahum left Palestine to seek refuge in Syria, where between 1949 and 1955 he taught political science. In 1959 he left Damascus for Egypt, where he joined the Ministry of Culture of the new United Arab Republic, which he represented as cultural attaché in Washington until 1962. An independent member of al-Fatah, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the movement’s early days, serving on the executive committee from 1964 to 1970, and as head of propaganda and planning. On 13 July 1971 he was elected chairman of the Palestine National Council (PNC). In 1972 Fahum headed a mission to Cairo to reconcile the differences between Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and the PLO. That same year, he accompanied Yasir Arafat to the Soviet Union. In 1976, at the time of the break between Syria and the PLO, he sided with Damascus, where he was seen as Arafat’s eventual successor. Criticized by most of the leadership of the PLO, he was nevertheless reelected head the PNC in 1977. His pro-Syrian stand enabled him to help negotiate the withdrawal of Palestinian guerrillas from West Beirut in 1982. The PLO’s evacuation of Lebanon and the crisis that followed within the organization led to Fahum’s removal from the PNC’s leadership. In 1984 he joined a challenge to Arafat’s leadership, which was backed by Syria. Arafat prevailed and Fahum, who also opposed the project of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, left the PNC to found the Palestinian National Salvation Front, with Syrian backing. The new organization’s purpose was to unite the various movements that opposed Arafat’s policies. Still coordinating the opposition’s efforts, Fahum resumed dialogue with Arafat in 1999 and engineered Arafat’s rapprochement with Syria in 2001. Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian National

SEE ALSO

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

FATAH, AL-

Salvation Front; Sadat, Anwar al-; Syria; United Arab Republic. FAJR, AL- (Arabic, meaning “dawn”): Palestinian daily newspaper, started in 1974, close to the center of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Between 1973 and 1986, al-Fajr, with headquarters in Jerusalem, was closed several times by Israeli authorities, and it was also the object of bombing attacks. Its first editor, Yusif (Joseph) Nasr, was kidnapped and assassinated. In July of 1993, confronted by financial difficulties, al-Fajr was obliged to stop publishing for a period. The newspaper has been under the leadership of Hanna Siniora, and had a distribution of 3,000 to 5,000 copies a day in 2001.

FAKIH SEE

Faqih.

FALASHAS: Term that comes from the Amharic word falâsi, meaning exiles, strangers. It designates black Jews settled in Ethiopia, who, according to Biblical tradition, are the descendents of followers of Menelik (heir of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba) to Ethiopia. Therefore, the Falashas would belong to the tribe of Dan, exiled to Cush in 722 B.C.E. According to some scholars, Falashas are descended from Himyarite proselytes who converted the indigenous inhabitants of the mountains of Ethiopia. Other hypotheses take the Falashas for Abyssinians converted in the second century C.E. by missionaries from the Jewish communities of Egypt. The word Falasha having a pejorative connotation, the latter prefer to be called “sons of the house of Israel” (Bene Beta Israel, in Hebrew). Toward the end of the 1960s, the Falashas became the scapegoats of great feudal lords in Ethiopia, who had been ruined through the central government’s confiscation of their lands. In 1973, Israel’s chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, recognized the Falashas as “full” Jews, thereby enabling them to benefit from the “right of return.” In October 1981, at the funeral ceremonies of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin discussed the fate of the Ethiopian Falashas with Sudanese President Jaafar al-Nimeiry. Between 1982 and 1983, a few hundred Falashas succeeded in leaving Ethiopia for Sudan. From there, through Operation Brothers, the Israelis were able to slip them secretly into Israel. Between 1984 and 1994, the Israeli authorities recommenced two such operations, called Solomon and Moses, with the participation of the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Hume Horan, and others. In the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

end, nearly 22,000 Falashas were able to go to Israel between 1984 and 1991.

FALASHMURAS: Hebrew term designating Jews exiled to Ethiopia and converted to Christianity by Protestant missionaries in exchange for arable land, as opposed to the Falashas, who had none. SEE ALSO Falashas.

FAQIH (pl., fuqaha): Arabic term designating specialists in the interpretation of Muslim law (fiqh).

FATAH, AL- (Palestinian Liberation Movement; Fateh, Fath; conquest, in Arabic): Palestinian political movement that surfaced in the late 1950s among students in Gaza and Egypt. The acronym FATAH comes from the first letters, in reverse order, of the Arab words Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniya, or Palestinian Liberation Movement. Al-Fatah was officially created on 10 December 1959 in Kuwait. Its founders include Yasir Arafat, Salah Khalaf, Khalid al-Hasan, Faruq Qaddumi, and Khalil al-Wazir. Formed for the purpose of liberating occupied Palestine, the motto of al-Fatah was “Arab unity through the liberation of Palestine,” a phrase conveying a degree of opposition to the dominant thinking in Arab countries that supported the Palestinian cause, for whom Arab unity was a precondition to the liberation of Palestine. The political program of al-Fatah specified: 1) “There is no other way to liberate the homeland than armed struggle”; 2) revolutionary action should be independent of parties and states and should be carried out, as a first step, by the Palestinian peoples themselves; and 3) the objective is the total recuperation of a unified and Arab Palestine. The governing organs of al-Fatah were the Central Committee, the Revolutionary Council, the General Congress, and the Council of Security. At the time of its creation, al-Fatah counted around 300 members, of whom two-thirds had belonged to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Fatah had a military wing, al-Assifa (“the storm,” in Arabic), which made itself known on 1 January 1965 in a radio announcement by Abu Ammar (Yasir Arafat) claiming responsibility for an action on Israeli soil. The first countries to recognize al-Fatah were Algeria, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In April 1966 Qaddumi was elected secretary general of al-Fatah. After the Arab defeat of June 1967, Fatah, backed by radical splinter groups that were starting up among the Palestinians, advocated armed struggle against Israel. Guerrilla actions multiplied, leading to Israeli reprisals, particularly in Jor-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

123

FATAH, AL-

dan. The ranks of al-Fatah increased greatly in 1968 after the victory of the fida Diyyun over an Israeli unit in a confrontation that took place on 21 March in alKarama, Jordan. The Battle of al-Karama symbolized the desire of the fida Diyyun to persist in the struggle against Israel, in spite of the defeat in the Arab-Israel War. On 15 April Yasir Arafat was named spokesperson for al-Fatah, which became the most important and best organized faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Al-Fatah took control of the PLO in 1969, with Arafat’s election as head of the executive committee. Al-Fatah advocated the creation of a “secular and democratic” Palestinian state, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all have equal rights. In the course of a few months, the movement was transformed into a veritable national liberation party, in spite of the 1970 JordanianPalestinian confrontations of Black September, which caused many divisions. The leadership of alFatah was not able to counter the desire of some of its members to revenge the massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army. Thus the Black September group was born, which carried out several spectacular attacks, in particular the November 1971 assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tell, and the September 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Forced back into Lebanon, al-Fatah once more found itself divided by the differing policies of its various leaders in the Lebanese conflict, in the course of which Palestinians fought against Christians, then Syrians, then ShiEites, and finally among themselves. An armed group within the movement, Suqur alFatah (“Falcons of Fatah,” in Arabic), drew its most radical members. On 22 June 1973 al-Fatah Secretary General Qaddumi became head of the political department of the PLO. At year’s end, after the 1973 Arab-Israel War, which saw the consolidation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, alFatah became resigned to the creation of a Palestinian state “on a liberated portion of the occupied territories.” In the autumn of 1974, Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal), who belonged to the radical wing, quit al-Fatah to form his own movement, the Fatah Revolutionary Council. The new group made itself known through terrorist action in the West as well as in the Arab world. Under the name Abu Nidal Group, the movement also assassinated al-Fatah cadres. In April 1979 the leadership of al-Fatah failed to convince the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to merge with al-Fatah. Over the years, al-Fatah became impossible to ignore and its adversaries started calling South Leba-

124

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

non “Fatahland.” On 6 June 1982 Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon, Operation Peace for Galilee, allegedly against Palestinian splinter groups in Lebanon, resulting in the destruction of a portion of the political system of al-Fatah and the PLO. The expulsion of the Palestinians to Tunisia the following year magnified a rupture that had already existed in alFatah, some of whose cadres decided to join the opposition in the Palestinian National Salvation Front. On 29 November 1984, in spite of differences in the Palestinian movement, Arafat was reelected president of the PLO executive committee. Distant from the front in Israel, al-Fatah launched a political offensive that led to the recognition of the PLO by the socialist countries of that time, and to wider recognition by the United Nations, consolidating the position of al-Fatah and Arafat among the Palestinians. After December 1987, the outbreak of the Intifada in the Occupied Territories allowed al-Fatah to tighten its ties with the Palestinian populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A National Unified Uprising Command (NUUC) was constituted by various local committees in the Occupied Territories. The NUUC was linked to the western section of al-Fatah, overseen by the council of security headed by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), who was then in Tunis. The NUUC included local representatives from al-Fatah, the Palestine Communist Party, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Arafat’s proclamation of a Palestinian state, on 15 November 1988, strengthened the position of al-Fatah in the Palestine National Council and injected enthusiasm into the uprising in the Occupied Territories. At the Fifth General Congress of al-Fatah in Tunis between 3 and 10 August 1989, the leadership of the movement reaffirmed its commitment to continue the struggle for “the liberation of the homeland,” while also taking a position favorable to pursuing a dialogue with “Israeli democratic elements that reprove the occupation and support the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” notably the right of return, the right to self-determination, and the right to a Palestinian state. During the night of 14–15 January 1991, Salah Khalaf was assassinated in Tunis by his bodyguard, an agent of Abu Nidal’s al-Fatah Revolutionary Council. The death of one of al-Fatah’s principal leaders, who was also considered the second most important leader of the PLO, was a great blow to Arafat and the whole Palestinian movement. In April 1992, while hospitalized following an airplane crash in the Libyan desert, Arafat designated three leaders of al-Fatah—Faruq Qaddumi, Mahmud Abbas, and T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

FATAH-FORCES OF THE BLACK SEPTEMBER 13TH BRIGADES

Khalid al-Hasan—to head the organization in the interim. Arafat’s support of Iraq during the 1990–1991 Gulf Crisis led to a reduction of financial aid from Saudi Arabia. Having negotiated a preliminary Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles in September 1993, which caused much criticism in the Arab world, Fatah was again shaken by serious internal dissension. Arafat’s leadership style was criticized by many Fatah and PLO cadres. Nevertheless, Fatah remained the major Palestinian political force in the territories, in spite of the opposition between the “Tunisians” (Fatah members who went to Tunis during the PLO exile) and “internal” Palestinians, who remained in the territories. Young people who participated in the Intifada reproached the leaders in Tunis with being insufficiently involved in resistance actions. After 1994, with the autonomy of the Palestinian territories, the unity of the Palestinian movements under the banner of Fatah was progressively de-emphasized in favor of the overall policies of the Palestinian Authority, headed by the leader of Fatah, Yasir Arafat. A radical current, opposed to the Oslo Accords, surfaced within the movement, to which flocked former members of the Falcons and the Black Panthers. One of the splinter groups allied with this tendency took the name Abu Reesh Brigade, after a Palestinian killed in the Intifada. On 15 March 1994 a Fatah delegation led by Soufian Abu Zayyad was received for the first time at the Knesset by the parliamentary Labor bloc. In the course of the year, although an Islamist influence surfaced in Fatah, the nationalist mainstream made efforts to strengthen its appeal to the young of the movement (Shabibat Fatah, in Arabic), whose principal leader, Marwan Barghuthi, was named secretary general of Fatah for the West Bank. On 21 January 1996, after the first Palestinian universal suffrage elections, Fatah became the majority party of the new Palestinian Legislative Council and the principal proponent of the policies of the Palestinian Authority (PA). That July, Jamal al-Shobaki was appointed secretary general of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah and Qaddumi was reelected to the leadership of the central committee. On 10 September 1996 Fatah became a member of the Socialist International. In December Ahmad Halas was named secretary general of Fatah for the Gaza Strip. In the spring of 1999 the leadership of the movement undertook a reorganization of its administration in the Palestinian territories to counter HAMAS, which was backed by elements within Fatah. They focused special attention on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. The two regional administrations of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were placed under the authority of a D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

high committee, headed by Faysal al-Husayni, Zakariya al-Agha, and Hakam BalEawi. After the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in October 2000, Fatah strove to take charge of the uprising in order to avoid the PA being outpaced by radical elements. Concurrently, some Fatah cadres tried persuading the opposition to support Arafat’s policies and also persuading the leaders of Arab countries to make the case for the Palestinian cause before the international community. In 2001 the membership of Fatah was estimated at 21,000. SEE ALSO AMAL; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); ArabIsrael War (1982); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Banna, Sabri al-; Barghuthi, Marwan Hussein al-; Black Panthers; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Fatah Revolutionary Council; FedaDi; Gulf War (1991); Hasan, Khalid al-; Husayni, Faysal al-; Intifada, 1987– 1993; Khalaf, Salah; Knesset; Muslim Brotherhood; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Communist Party; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Qaddumi, Faruq; Right of Return; Wazir, Khalil al-.

FATAH-ABU MUSA SEE

Fatah-Intifada.

FATAH-FORCES OF THE BLACK SEPTEMBER 13TH BRIGADES: Palestinian movement created on 27 October 1993 by Lieutenant Colonel Munir Hasan alMaqdah, Fatah representative at the Ain el-Helweh camp in Lebanon and opponent of the IsraeliPalestinian accord of the preceding 13 September. The principal cause of his opposition was that accord did not address the question of the refugees from 1948. While the Alliance of Palestinian Forces made efforts to rally al-Maqdah to its cause, the latter tried vainly to obtain the backing of important Fatah leaders, including the brothers Hani and Khalid alHasan. The principal members of this movement, in addition to Maqdah, are Abu Khalid al-Arkoub, Jamal Qudsi, and Ali Hussein Fahoud. Black September 13 carried out numerous attacks against Israeli occupation forces in south Lebanon in the summer of 1995, some in coordination with Hizbullah. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Fatah, al-; Hasan, Hani al-; Hasan, Khalid al-.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

125

FATAH-INTIFADA

FATAH-INTIFADA (Abu Musa Group; Fatah— Temporary Command): Palestinian movement that surfaced in Lebanon in June 1982. Fatah-Intifada emerged from a scission in al-Fatah after Yasir Arafat announced to his close collaborators his intention of withdrawing his troops from Lebanon. Headed by Colonel SaEid Musa Muragha (called Abu Musa) and Khalid al-Amiah (Abu Khalid), Fatah-Intifada opposed any agreement with Israel and advocated the continuation of armed struggle to regain all of Palestine. On 6 November 1983 its secretary general was excluded from the military command of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and accused of conspiring against Yasir Arafat’s authority. Twelve days later, General Khadra, commander-in-chief of the Palestine Liberation Army in Syria, decided to leave the PLO to join the Fatah-Intifada. In 1985 the Fatah-Intifada merged with the Palestinian National Salvation Front after failed efforts to ally itself with the Fatah Revolutionary Council of Abu Nidal. In May 1988 the movement participated in joint operations in Lebanon with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command against Arafat partisans. Fatah-Intifada was backed by Syria and had its headquarters in Damascus. It also received financial support from Iran, and to a lesser extent from Libya. At the end of the 1980s, as the Israeli-Arab peace process evolved, the movement became less influential among Palestinians. Opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian accord signed in September 1993, Fatah-Intifada joined the ranks of the Alliance of Palestinian Forces. In October 2000, during violent confrontations between the Israeli army and Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, the movement claimed responsibility for several anti-Israel actions in the name of the Forces of Chief Martyr Umar alMukhtar, a Libyan nationalist who fought against Italian colonization of Libya. Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Fatah Revolutionary Council; Palestine Liberation Army; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command.

SEE ALSO

FATAH REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL (Fatah—RC; Black June; Abu Nidal Organization; Arab Revolutionary Brigades; Revolutionary Muslim Socialist Organization; Abu Nidal Group): Radical Palestinian movement, Marxist in inspiration, created in January 1974. The Fatah—RC was born of a scission in alFatah, provoked by differences over policies toward

126

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Israel after the failure of the 1973 Arab-Israel War. Opposing all compromise with Israel, Fatah—RC advocated the pursuit of armed struggle until all of Palestine was restored. The founder of Fatah—RC, Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal), one of the leaders of the Iraqi branch of Fatah, was a fierce adversary of Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). At first influenced by Iraq, the Fatah— RC became independent in 1983, when Iraqi authorities expelled its members who had settled in Baghdad. This was due not only to the intervention of the PLO, but also to Iraq’s hope of gaining the support of Western powers and Saudi Arabia in its war with Iran. In 1985, backed by Libya, Abu Nidal proposed, vainly, an alliance with the Fatah-Intifada for the purpose of constituting the Nationalist Alliance and creating a strong opposition movement among Palestinians. In 1988 Abu Nidal returned to settle officially in Baghdad, although he kept his operational headquarters in Libya. During the summer of 1989 relations between the Fatah—RC and the PLO were definitively broken off, which led to a wave of bloody score-settling between members of the Fatah—RC and Arafat partisans. In October 1989 a dispute involving Atif Abu Bakr and Abdul Rahman Issa surfaced, leading to the formation of the Fatah Revolutionary Council—Emergency Command. The Fatah—RC was responsible for numerous attacks on Israeli, Western, and Arab targets, including the assassination of Yusuf al-SibaEyi, editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, in Cyprus in February 1978; the attack of Rue des Rosiers in Paris in 1982; the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London on 12 April 1983; the attacks on the Vienna and Rome airports in December 1985; the attack on an Istanbul synagogue in September 1986; the attack on the ship City of Poros in July 1988; and the assassination of the first secretary of the Jordanian embassy in Lebanon in January 1994. The Fatah—RC was also responsible for the assassination of several Fatah leaders, including Issam Sartawi in Portugal in April 1983 and Salah Khalaf in Tunisia in January 1991. As the Israeli-Palestinian peace process evolved, countries supporting the Fatah—RC reduced their aid, which led to fewer actions. In January 1991, forced to leave Iraq, the Fatah—RC regrouped at Mar Elias, in Lebanon. In April 1992 a difference between Ayyash al-Jakiri and Abu Nidal led to the creation of a new faction, the Popular Liberation Force. In March 1993 a second scission, initiated by Abu Nidal’s nephew, Abdul Karim al-Banna (Abu Issam), resulted in the formation of Fatah— RC—Dissidents, headquartered in Baghdad. In April 1995 Fatah—RC—Dissidents merged with Fatah— T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

FILASTIN

RC—Emergency Command. Abu Nidal, reportedly after several years of poor health, died in Baghdad in August 2002. The other principal leaders of Fatah— RC were Abdulaziz Muhammad Jawad, Muhammad Wasfi Hanoun, and Ali al-Farrah (Abu Kamal). SEE ALSO Ahram, al-; Arab-Israel War (1973); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Banna, Sabri al-; Fatah-Intifada; Palestine Liberation Organization.

FATAH REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL—EMERGENCY COMMAND SEE

Fatah Revolutionary Council.

FATAH SECURITY COUNCIL: Internal group within Fatah, responsible for coordinating the activity of the various security organizations of the Palestine Liberation Organization; also called Unified Security Management (al-Amn al-Muwahhad, or Jihaz alAmn al-Qawmi al-Filastini, in Arabic). Presided over by Yasir Arafat, this institution was headed for a long time by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), flanked by Hakam BalEawi (Abu Marwan) and Hayi1 Abdul Hamid (Abu el-Houl). The Western Department of Fatah, responsible for armed actions in the Palestinian territories, worked in close collaboration with the Fatah Security Council. For this reason, the leaders of two Fatah departments, Khalaf and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), became priority targets of Israel’s special services. After the assassination of Khalaf in January 1991, leadership of the Security Council passed to a group of four—Amin al-Hindi, Tariq Abu Rajab, Hakam BalEawi, and Atef B’seisso—supervised by Arafat. In 1994, during the application of Palestinian autonomy guaranteed by the Oslo Accords, the components of the Fatah Security Council were merged into new security organizations under the control of Arafat and officially overseen by the Palestinian Authority. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; BDseisso, Atef FaDiq; Fatah, al-; Hindi, Amin al-; Khalaf, Salah; Oslo Accords; Wazir, Khalil Ibrahim al(Abu Jihad).

Fatah-Intifada.

chapter (sura) of the QurDan. SEE ALSO QurDan.

FATWA (response, opinion, in Arabic): A formal legal opinion issued by an Islamic jurist (mufti).

FEDADI (he who gives his life for a cause, in Arabic):

In contemporary terms, fedaDi and the plural, fedaDiyan (commonly written fedayeen) designate Palestinian and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters in general. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization.

FEDADIYAN SEE

FedaDi.

FEZ PLAN Fahd Plan.

of Khadija. Fatima married Ali, by whom she had T H E

SEE

Palestinian Democratic Union.

FILASTIN: Palestine, in Arabic.

FATIMA: Daughter of the prophet Muhammad and

O F

origins to Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. The greatest power in the Muslim world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Maghrib, the Levant, and Egypt, it also enjoyed considerable cultural and artistic influence. The Fatimid Caliphat was proclaimed in 909 by Ubaydullah. Between 953 and 975, the Caliph al-MuEizz conquered the entire Maghrib and a part of Sicily. In 972 he moved his capital in North Africa to Cairo. The Fatimid Empire, which stretched theoretically from the Hijaz to the Atlantic, was fragile, because it was divided into many pieces. In 1072, the Fatimids lost Syria and Jerusalem, conquered by the Seljuks. In 1153, Ashqelon, the last Fatimid bastion in Syria, was taken by the Crusaders. In 1168, the Fatimid capital, Al-Fustat (Old Cairo), threatened by the Crusaders, was burned by its own inhabitants. Three years later, Saladin abolished the Fatimid dynasty, returning rule to Sunni hands and allegiance to the Abbasids. SEE ALSO Abbasids.

FIDA

FATIHA (“opening,” in Arabic): Title of the first

D I C T I O N A R Y

FATIMIDS: ShiEite dynasty of caliphs who trace their

SEE

FATAH—TEMPORARY COMMAND SEE

two sons, Hasan and Husayn. The ShiEa regard Fatima with particular reverence, calling her al-Azhar (the Brilliant). Her name is the eponym of the Fatimid dynasty. SEE ALSO Ali; Fatimids; Muhammad; ShiEite.

FILASTIN: Arabic-language newspaper founded as a biweekly in Jaffa in 1911 and appearing as a daily be-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

127

FILASTIN AL-THAWRA

ginning in 1929. Published by a Christian Arab family, it was strongly nationalist and anti-Zionist. For a while during World War I the paper was shut down by the Ottoman authorities. Publication was also interrupted by the 1948 War, after which it resumed publication in Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. Filastin ceased publication in 1967. SEE ALSO Ottomans. FILASTIN AL-THAWRA (Palestine of the Revolution): Official Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Arabic-language weekly, created in Beirut in 1972. The current editor in chief, Ahmad Abd al-Rahman, was in the 1970s identified with the Soviet Group, a leftist faction that appeared within the PLO in 1973. Having moderated his position, he later became the head of Fatah’s information department, a member of its central committee, and the Palestinian Authority cabinet secretary. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority. FILASTINUNA: Palestinian monthly, an organ of Yasir Arafat’s al-Fatah, published from 1959 to 1964. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Fatah, al-.

FIQH: Jurisprudence, the science of Islamic religious law.

FIR SEE

Islamic Revolutionary Front.

FITNA: Arabic term for sedition, or schism, designating the crisis, under the Caliph Ali, that led to the division of the Islamic community. SEE ALSO Ali.

FITR (iftar): Arabic word meaning breaking the fast. It refers to the meal eaten after sunset each evening during the month of Ramadan. Ramadan concludes with the Feast of Fastbreaking ( EId al-Fitr or al- EId al-Saghir, the Little Feast). SEE ALSO Ramadan.

nicknamed “the Red Prince”), one of the principal figures of the Black September group. A commando unit with unquestioned loyalty to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat, the group is said to have taken its name from Salameh’s Beirut telephone extension. Created by the Fatah Security Council, Force 17 replaced the Black September group, which had been dissolved by the head of the PLO. It was mainly responsible for Arafat’s security and that of his close collaborators, as well as for particular missions connected directly to the PLO leader. Force 17 was also placed in charge of security for PLO representatives abroad. Salameh was assassinated in January 1979 in Beirut by an Israeli commando. He was succeeded in February at the head of the organization by SaEad Sayel (Abu Walid), who was himself assassinated in September 1982 by a Syrian commando. Force 17, supervised by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Khalil al-Wazir, then passed to the command of Mahmud Ahmad al-Natour (Abu Tayib). During the 1980s the organization carried out numerous attacks on Israeli interests and on Palestinian opponents. On 25 September 1985 a commando comprised of two Palestinians and a Briton assassinated three Israeli vacationers who were Mossad members; one of them was Sylvia Raphael, who was considered to be responsible for the death of Salameh. In November 1987, in Jerusalem, two Israelis who were presumed to belong to Shin Bet were killed by a commando who was believed to have been dispatched by Force 17. In 1994, as part of the creation of the Palestinian Authority, Force 17 was merged into the newly created Presidential Security Force, or Presidential Guard (al-Amn al-Ri’asa), one of the many security forces controlled directly by Yasir Arafat. At the end of 1996 Faisal Abu Shaqra took over the leadership of the organization. The Presidential Guard is officially charged with intelligence, counterterrorism, and protecting Arafat and other prominent Palestinian officials; according to Israeli sources, who continue to refer to it as Force 17, it has been engaged in violent anti-Israeli activities since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, and at least one of its senior officers has been assassinated by the Israelis. Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Black September 1970; Fatah Security Council; Khalaf, Salah; Palestine Liberation Organization; Shin Bet.

SEE ALSO

FLYING CARPET OPERATION SEE

Ezra and Nehemiah Operations.

FORCE 17 (Quwat Saba Etasher): Palestinian security service established in 1974 and placed under the leadership of Ali Hassan Salameh (Abu al-Hassan,

128

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

FRANJIYYA, SULAYMAN (1910–1992): Lebanese Maronite political figure, president of the republic from 1970 to 1976. Sulayman Franjiyyaa was born in T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

FUNDAMENTALISM

Zgharta and studied with the Marist Brothers and in the College of Antoura. He embarked in the silk business and entered politics in 1959, after his elder brother, Hamid, suffered a stroke and was unable to continue a promising career. In 1960 he was elected to parliament for the first time, and he became one of the leaders of the center bloc. On 1 August 1960 he was appointed minister of communications in the government of Saib Salem. In May 1961 he was given the additional portfolio of agriculture. In 1964 he was reelected deputy. In 1968, after having been again elected to parliament, he became minister of the interior. In the course of the year, the portfolio of the economy was also given to him. On 17 August 1970 he was chosen president of the Lebanese Republic, by a one-vote margin, over his rival, Elias Sarkis. Between 1970 and 1973, Franjiyya strove to solve Lebanon’s internal problems and come to the aid of the Palestinian movement. He backed the creation of the al-Marada militia to defend his fief of Zgharta against the attacks of the Lebanese Phalangists. On 10 April an Israeli operation in central Beirut against three Palestinian leaders brought about a break between the Lebanese president and the Palestinian leadership, which reproached him for not having prevented the action. In November 1974 Franjiyya was mandated by the Arab countries to speak for the Palestinian cause at the United Nations. On 13 April 1975 an incident involving Palestinians and Christians led to the start of a civil war in Lebanon. Judging that only the Syrian army could reestablish order, he supported the appeal that was made to Syria. In September 1976, Sarkis succeeded him to the presidency of the republic. Having returned to his constituency at Zgharta he found himself at odds with other Maronite leaders of the Lebanese Forces. In June 1978 his son, Tony, and his son’s family were assassinated by the Phalangists. Franjiyya broke with the Maronite leaders to join with Walid Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party and of the Na-

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tional Movement. In July 1983, along with Jumblatt and Rashid Karame, he helped found the National Salvation Front, formed to oppose the policies of Amin Jumayyil. SEE ALSO Jumayyil, Amin; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Karame, Rashid; Lebanese Forces; Phalange.

FREEDOM FOREVER OPERATION SEE

Enduring Freedom Operation.

FRONT FOR THE ISLAMIC SALVATION OF PALESTINE SEE

Islamic Front for the Salvation of Palestine.

FRONT OF OCCUPIED PALESTINE: Movement formed in Lebanon at the end of 1987, with Iranian impetus, after the beginning of the first Intifada in the Palestinian territories. Iranian leaders hoped it would constitute, along with Hizbullah, an armed front in the north of Israel. A victim of internal dissensions, the movement, headed by SaEid Ghassem, lasted only a few months. Toward the end of 1990, Iran made a similar attempt with the founding of the Islamic Revolutionary Front. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; Intifada (1987–1993); Islamic Revolutionary Front.

FUHUD

AL-ASWAD-AL (Black Panthers, in Arabic): Name of the armed branch of al-Fatah. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-.

FUNDAMENTALISM : A literal adherence to the tenets of a religion or belief system; fundamentalism also implies an opposition to all development or evolution in religion. On the level of political doctrine, fundamentalism favors an intransigent conservatism. This word surfaced for the first time in Spain, at the end of the nineteenth century, referring to a political-religious party.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

129

G GAHAL PARTY: Gush Herut Liberalim,“The Bloc of Herut and the Liberals,” in Hebrew. Israeli Parliamentary coalition constituted in 1965 by an alliance of the Herut and Liberal parties. In July 1973, GAHAL allied itself with three small rightist groups to form the Parliamentary block of Likud. SEE ALSO Herut Party; Likud. GALILEE: Region in the north of Israel, situated between Lake Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee or the Kinneret) to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and Lebanon to the north. SEE ALSO Israel.

GALUT: Word of Aramaic origin, meaning “exile,” “dispersion,” “diaspora”; used to designate Jews living outside of Israel, emphasizing Jewish dispersion as a curse.

GAMAEA: Arabic word, transliterated in Egyptian pronunciation, meaning “group, association”. Identical to the word Jama Ea.

GAMAEA AL-ISLAMIYYA, SEE

Arab-Israeli War (1948); Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Intifada (1987–1983); Palestinian Authority.

SEE ALSO

AL-

JamiEa al-Islamiyya, al-.

GAMAEA AL-ISLAMIYYA LIBNANIYYIA, SEE

GAZA (CITY): Largest city of the Gaza Strip. In the 1948 War it came under the control of Egypt. Its prewar population of 65,000 absorbed many of the 200,000 to 250,000 refugees who came into the Gaza Strip; in 2004 the city’s population was more than 400,000, an unknown number of whom are refugees. (Refugees comprise over 78 percent of the 1.3 million population of the Gaza Strip as a whole.) Since the 1967 War, which caused 100,000 Palestinian refugees to leave the Gaza Strip, mostly for Jordan, it has been under the control of Israel, either through direct military occupation or through control of settlement and military zones outside the “autonomous” areas under the Palestinian Authority (set up in 1994). The city and its surrounding refugee camps, like the Gaza Strip as a whole, are centers for political unrest and anti-Israel activity, particularly since the first Intifada began in 1987. HAMAS is headquartered there. Gaza, which has a port, is the commercial center of the region, but the economy has been crippled by Israeli border closures and other measures, and it is estimated that more than half the working-age population is unemployed.

AL-

JamiEa al-Islamiyya Libnaniyyia al-.

GAZA COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH PROGRAM (GCMHP): A private, nonprofit Palestinian organi-

131

GAZA-JERICHO FIRST OPTION

zation founded in 1990 to provide “comprehensive community mental health services to the population of the Gaza Strip, including therapy, training, and research.” It has clinics in Gaza City, Jabaliya, Khan Younis, and Dayr al-Balah and provides services to children and adults, including psychological counseling and therapy, occupational therapy, and rehabilitation, with an emphasis on the most vulnerable groups, such as children and the survivors of torture. It also provides some auxiliary medical services and operates public awareness programs. The GCMHP is privately funded and is operated by a board of directors whose chair in 2004 was Dr. Ayad El Sarraj. It has an international board of advisors SEE ALSO Gaza Strip.

Gaza Strip International border 1950 armistice line Major road City

Jabalya

al-Shati (beach)

p

Gaza

S

t

r

i

Me dite r r ane an
Se a

a

z

Dayr al-Balah

a

Nusayrat Al Burayj

G

ISRAEL

Khan Yunis

GAZA-JERICHO FIRST OPTION: Phrase utilized to designate the accord on limited autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the zone of Jericho, concluded between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on 28 August 1993 as part of the Oslo Accords and signed on 13 September 1993 in Washington by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization.

GAZA STRIP: Territory about 28 miles long and from 4 to 8 miles wide (230 square miles) along the Mediterranean coast between the Egyptian Sinai Desert and the southern frontier of Israel. It contains the cities of Gaza, Khan Younis, and Rafah, as well as eight refugee camps and twenty-five Israeli settlements and military areas. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions of the world. In 2003 its population was estimated at 1,330,000 Palestinians and 5,000 Israeli settlers. The settlers and military areas occupy about 40 percent of the land. Along with the rest of Palestine, this area was under British control from 1918 and was part of the British Mandate from 1922 to 1948. After the creation of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israel War of 1948–1949, the area came to be called the Gaza Strip and fell under Egyptian administration but was given an autonomous status. Before 1948 the Gaza Strip had around 70,000 inhabitants; during and after the war it absorbed 250,000 Palestinian refugees. It became the scene of numerous frontier incidents between Egypt and Israel caused by anti-Israel operations mounted by Palestinian groups. At the time of the Suez-Sinai War of October 1956, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip experienced their first occupation by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), which led to a renaissance of Palestine nationalism. Israeli troops occu-

132

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Abasan Khirbat Ikhza‘a

0 0

3 3

6 mi. 6 km

Rafah

N

EGYPT

pied Gaza until March 1957, when United Nations forces took over and were themselves later replaced by an Egyptian regiment. During the War of June 1967, the Israeli Army reoccupied the Gaza Strip, which by then was home to 360,000 people. The Israeli government placed the area under its definitive control, encouraging the building of Jewish settlements and expelling about 40,000 people from Gaza, mostly to the West Bank. From 1967 to 1971 the Palestinian resistance struggled against the Israeli occupation. Numerous Palestinian activists were imprisoned by the Israeli authorities or were exiled to Lebanon. Political figures in Gaza and the West Bank (also occupied by Israel) formed a Palestinian National Front that advocated the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. From May 1979, as required by the Camp David Accords, Egypt and Israel started negotiating the autonomy of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These talks were not successful because of the opposition of most Gazans, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Camp David Accords. Both President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and the Israeli government imposed sanctions on the Gazans for their opposition. In April 1980 the Egyptian president proposed that autonomy first be applied in T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GEAGEA, SAMIR

the Gaza Strip. The Israelis placed it under a civilian administration in 1981. The departure of Palestinian forces from Lebanon in 1982 and frictions within Fatah thwarted any lingering impulse to revolt on the part of the Palestinians from within for several years. In 1987, however, not only was HAMAS born in the Gaza Strip, but that December the first Intifada began. The “war of stones” against the IDF lasted almost six years. In March 1993 the Israelis closed Gaza to the outside world, which resulted in an economic decline. This closure has remained in effect, either in full or in part, ever since. In 1994, during the application of the Oslo Accords, approximately 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and a part of the West Bank attained administrative autonomy under the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by Yasir Arafat. Some security matters remained under Israeli control. The stalling of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian territories caused new waves of anti-Israel attacks, as well as a further increase in unemployment, which affected more than half the population. The al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in 2000, worsened the situation. The Israelis responded by carrying out planned assassinations and an increasingly intense program of intimidation by military means. In May and June 2004 the Israelis invaded in force, particularly in the refugee camp at Rafah. Under the pretext of looking for tunnels under the Egyptian border and increasing open security areas near the border, they killed dozens of people and destroyed hundreds of houses. In 2004 Ariel Sharon’s government was promoting a plan that would involve Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip and the abandonment of the settlements there but whose acceptance by the PA would entail implicit Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to unlimited settlement and unilateral determination of borders in the West Bank. In October 2004 the Knesset voted to back Sharon’s plan to remove Israeli troops, as well as twenty-one settlements from Gaza and four small settlements from the northern part of the West Bank. The vote—sixty-seven for, forty-five against, and seven abstentions—marked the first time in twenty years that the parliament had favored the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the region. Fearing an extended delay in the start of the withdrawal process, Sharon rejected his Likud Party’s call for a referendum on leaving Gaza, thereby splitting the ruling Likud and creating turmoil in the political landscape. Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; British Mandate; Camp David Accords; Fatah, al-;

SEE ALSO

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

HAMAS; Intifada (1987–1993); Israel Defense Force; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine Authority; Palestinian National Front; Sadat, Anwar al-; Sharon, Ariel; Suez Crisis; West Bank.

GCC SEE

Gulf Cooperation Council.

GEAGEA, SAMIR (al-Hakim, “the Doctor,” in Arabic): Lebanese political figure, Christian Maronite, born in October 1952 at Bsharri in Lebanon into a family of farmers. In 1969, Samir Geagea enrolled in the Youth of the KataDib Party of Pierre Jumayyil. From 1972 to 1976, he undertook studies in medicine, interrupted by the civil war that began in Lebanon. Between 1977 and 1982, as the head of an armed militia of KataDib, Geagea took part in numerous battles against the Palestinian fida Diyyun and Syrian troops, as well as in actions meant to reestablish the authority of the Lebanese Forces (LF)—an integration of various Lebanese Christian militias with a joint command council that was formed to achieve political independence from the traditional Maronite Catholic (Christian) leaders—in areas where it was challenged by others in the Christian camp. On 12 March 1985, Geagea was dismissed from his post in the KataDib organization for insubordination. With the backing of Elie Hobeika, Geagea became head of the military leadership of the LF, whose chief was the president of the Lebanese state, Amin Jumayyil. A year later, on 15 January 1986, having supplanted Elie Hobeika, Geagea took over the military command of the LF as chairman of its executive committee, thereby becoming one of the principal Christian leaders. At the beginning of October 1988, he obliged Jumayyil to leave Lebanon for France. In March 1989, Geagea backed General Michel Aoun, who had launched a “war of liberation against the Syrian invader.” Aoun then rebelled against Geagea. In November 1990, Geagea was named a minister of state, without portfolio, in the government of Omar Karame, but he resigned a few days later. In February 1982, he traveled to the United States, where he met with many influential figures in the Lebanese community. A few weeks later, having returned to Lebanon, Geagea attempted to remove Georges Saade from the presidency of the KataDib Party in order to take his place. On the following 1 July, Karim Pakradouni was elected secretary general of the party, putting an end to the hopes of Geagea. After being arrested in February 1994, Geagea was indicted for political assassinations on 21 April. In June 1999, he

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

133

GEMARA

was sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karame. This was his fourth life sentence, after those following the assassinations of Elias Zayek and Dany Chamoun, as well as the attempted assassination of the defense minister, Michel Murr. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Hobeika, Elie; Karame, Rashid; KataDib; Lebanese Forces.

GEMARA SEE

Talmud.

GEMAYEL, AMIN SEE

Jumayyil, Amin.

GEMAYEL, BASHIR SEE

Jumayyil, Bashir.

GENERAL ARMISTICE AGREEMENTS, 1949: By January 1949 all Arab belligerents in the 1948–1949 War were ready to accept the United Nations Security Council’s call for a general truce. The first to accept formally was Egypt, on 5 January. Negotiations began on 13 January in Rhodes, under the supervision of UN undersecretary Ralph Bunche. Egypt signed a General Armistice Agreement with Israel on 24 February 1949, followed on 23 March by Lebanon, on 3 April by Jordan, and on 20 July by Syria. Iraq, which has no common border with Israel, refused to negotiate. These agreements established the border between Israel and its neighbors, including the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, which lasted until the June 1967 War SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Green Line; West Bank.

GENERAL UNION OF PALESTINE STUDENTS (GUPS): Palestinian association created in November 1959 in Cairo to promote the political program of Fatah among Palestinian youth. It is headquartered in Ramallah. Like the other Palestinian General Unions, it is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and is represented on its governing body, the Palestine National Council. Its main focus is on the Palestinian national struggle. The GUPS is a member of the International Union of Students. It has more than a hundred branches around the world and a membership that GUPS estimates at 100,000. Many leaders of the PLO have belonged to the GUPS, including Yasir Arafat, Hani al-Hasan, Faysal alHusseini, Salah Khalaf, Leila Shahid, and Ibrahim Souss.

134

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Hasan, Hani al-; Husayni, Faysal al-; Khalaf, Salah; Shahid, Leila Mounib; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council.

SEE ALSO

GENERAL UNION OF PALESTINIAN TEACHERS (GUPT): The quasi-official Palestinian teachers’ union, headquartered in Ramallah. Like the other Palestinian General Unions, it is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and is represented on the PLO’s governing body, the Palestine National Council. Like all such officially sponsored civic organizations, its primary focus is the Palestinian national struggle. It is affiliated with the international organization Education International in Brussels and maintains relations with teachers’ unions around the world. The GUPT works with refugees in camps in and out of Palestine. It is the largest Palestinian teachers’ organization, but independent teachers’ unions not under control of the Palestine Authority (PA) do exist, and their relationship with the PA has been extremely contentious. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council.

GENERAL UNION OF PALESTINIAN WOMEN (GUPW): Organization created in 1965 within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It is the umbrella group for Palestinian women’s organizations in Palestine and abroad, including refugees. It is headquartered in Ramallah. Like the other Palestinian General Unions, it is represented on the PLO’s governing body, the Palestine National Council, and its main focus is the Palestinian national struggle. The GUPW organizes women toward this end, and also toward the goal of raising the Palestinian women’ status; it maintains relations with women’s organizations in other countries and has established homes for orphans as well as vocational training centers, nurseries, and kindergartens in refugee camps. It has also organized literacy campaigns and training programs in such subjects as first aid and civil defense SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council. GENERAL

UNION

OF

PALESTINIAN

WORKERS

(GUPWo): Organization created in 1963 in Cairo by exiled Palestinian trade unionists. It is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and like the other Palestinian General Unions is represented on the PLO’s governing body, the Palestine National Council. Its main focus is the Palestinian national T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GENEVA PEACE CONFERENCE

1949 ARMISTICE. AS UNITED NATIONS MEDIATOR RALPH BUNCHE (SECOND FROM LEFT AT FAR END OF TABLE) AND HIS ASSOCIATES WATCH, ISRAELI REPRESENTATIVE RAFAEL EYTAN (AT RIGHT) SIGNS THE ARMISTICE AGREEMENT BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT ON THE GREEK ISLAND OF RHODES, 1 MARCH 1949. BY JULY, THREE SIMILAR AGREEMENTS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND LEBANON, JORDAN, AND SYRIA HAD BEEN SIGNED, ENDING THEIR 1948–1949 WAR. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

struggle. It has branches in both Arab and non-Arab countries and represents those associated with the main organizations within the PLO. In the 1970s it trained and supported fida Diyyun who fought in the 1973 Arab-Israel War and in the Lebanese Civil War’s factional fighting from 1975 to 1990. Although in theory it represents all Palestinian workers, independent unions not under Palestine Authority (PA) control do exist, and they have a more contentious relationship with the PA. Arab-Israel War (1973); Palestine Authority; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council.

SEE ALSO

GENERAL UNION OF PALESTINIAN WRITERS AND JOURNALISTS (GUPWJ): A quasi-official organization of individual writers and journalists both in and outside Palestine. It has chapters in several foreign D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

countries and is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Like the other Palestinian General Unions, it is represented on the PLO’s governing body, the Palestine National Council. It does not function as a trade union but as an association whose main focus is the national struggle. Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council.

SEE ALSO

GENEVA PEACE CONFERENCE: Peace Conference in the Middle East that took place in Geneva, Switzerland, from 21 to 22 December 1973, under the aegis of the United Nations and the sponsorship of the United States and the Soviet Union. Gathering the foreign ministers of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the conference met to find a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict in general and to sort out the consequences of the Yom Kippur

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

135

GENEVA PEACE INITIATIVE OF 2003

War of 1973 in particular. Several encounters took place after this first meeting; then the Geneva Conference was reconvened on 31 May 1974, for the signing of a Syrian-Israeli accord on the disengagement of Israeli forces from the Golan Heights. On 4 September 1975, a second disengagement agreement was signed in Geneva, between Egypt and Israel. These accords would be followed by those of Camp David (September 1978), then by the IsraeliEgyptian Peace Treaty (March 1979). Arab-Israel War (1973); Camp David Accords; Golan Heights.

SEE ALSO

GENEVA PEACE INITIATIVE

OF 2003: An unofficial agreement meant to serve as a template for a possible settlement of the Palestine-Israel dispute. It was negotiated, under the sponsorship of the Swiss government, by a group of prominent Palestinians and Israelis including former cabinet ministers, active politicians, and private citizens following the failure of peace talks at Camp David. The Palestinian delegation was led by Yasser Abed Rabbo, former minister of information in the Palestine Authority; the Israeli delegation was led by Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister. The initiative was signed in Jordan on 12 October 2003 and launched in an attention-getting public ceremony in Geneva that was attended by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and others on 1 December 2003. The agreement provides for a sovereign, demilitarized Palestinian state on 97.5 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and secure borders for Israel based on the 1967 border; for shared jurisdiction over Jerusalem; for Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall; for almost all Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to be evacuated; for the remaining settlements to be incorporated into Israel, for which equivalent amounts of territory would be ceded to Palestine as compensation; for a Palestinian-administered access corridor to be established between the West Bank and Gaza; and for Palestinian refugees to give up their right of return to areas within the borders of Israel, in return for which they would receive financial compensation from Israel for their property and their refugee status. (The initiative provides that some refugees could apply to return to Israel, which could accept them at its “sovereign discretion.”) The agreement would replace all previous agreements and United Nations resolutions. The initiative was rejected outright by the Israeli government and has not proved popular with Israelis. It was publicly praised by Yasir Arafat but neither Arafat nor any official or quasi-official

136

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

body, party, or group endorsed it, and it was condemned by many. The most objectionable aspect, for Palestinians, is the cession of the right of return. There are currently 3.8 to 4.1 million Palestinians with the official status of refugees. SEE ALSO Abd Rabbo, Yasir; Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Beilin; Yossi; Gaza Strip; Palestine Authority; West Bank.

GESHER “BRIDGE” PARTY: Israeli political party, founded in February 1996 by Likud dissident David Levy, in anticipation of the Knesset elections of the following May. The centrist Gesher conceived of itself as a conduit between underprivileged Israeli social strata and a political ideal that would result from a synthesis of the Likud and Israel Labor Party programs. In March 1996, on the advice of Ariel Sharon, Levy accepted an alliance with Likud and Tsomet to present a common list, headed by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. A few Gesher members, opposing this alliance, decided to found their own group, Israel Hadashah. As a result of the vote of 19 May 1996, Gesher took five seats in the Knesset. The Israeli right had won: David Levy joined the government of Netanyahu as foreign minister, while David Magen became finance minister. During the next few months, some party members decided to join Likud. On 22 March 1999, preparing for the general elections to be held in May of the same year, in which Likud was not favored, Gesher allied itself with the Labor Party and Meimad to create a “One Israel” electoral coalition (Israel Ehad). On 18 May, after the vote, this new block had obtained twenty-six deputy seats, two of which belonged to Gesher. On 6 July, Levy became Foreign Minister in the government of Ehud Barak. Principal leaders of Gesher: David Levy, Yehuda Lancry, David Magen, Yacov Berdugo, Maxime Levy, and Michael Kleiner. SEE ALSO Barak Ehud; Israel Labor Party; Levy, David; Likud; Meimad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sharon, Ariel.

GEULAT ISRAEL (Hebrew, “Israel’s Redemption”): Orthodox religious Israeli party, created in 1990, following a scission in Agudat Israel. Its founder, Rabbi Eliezer Mizrachi, was close to the Lubavitch. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel; Lubavitcher Hasidim. GHETTO: A word designating the foundries of the Cannaregio quarter of Venice, where in 1516 Jews coming from Germany were allowed to settle. In 1555, an encyclical from Pope Paul IV used the term T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GOLAN HEIGHTS

to mean closed and separate neighborhoods where Jews would be obliged to dwell. By extension, the word “ghetto” has come to mean any place where a community lives apart from the rest of the population.

0 0

5 5

10 mi.

N

10 km

Litan i

River Sa‘sa

LEBANON Majdal Shams

This area patrolled by UN Disengagement Observation forces.

GIMLA’EI ISRAEL PARTY (Party of the Retired): Israeli political group formed in 1996 under the leadership of Nava Arad, member of the Israel Labor Party, in anticipation of Knesset elections for the following May. Essentially meant to attract the attention of Israeli authorities to the rights of retired people, it won no seats in these elections and disbanded soon after. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party.

Jordan River

Kiryat Shemona

SYRIA Golan
Heights

Safed

ISRAEL Sea of Galilee

Nawa

Tiberias

GIVAT SHAUL BET SEE

al-Qunaytirah

En Gev

Dayr Yasin.

uk rm R i v er Ya

Nazareth

Tafas

JORDAN

GLUBB, JOHN BAGOT [Pasha] (1897–1986): British general born in Lancashire in April 1897, and died in 1986. A scholarship student at Cheltenham College, Glubb joined the British army in 1914. After serving in World War I he became an engineer, then an administrator in Arabia and Iraq, where he was in charge of a mobile Bedouin unit. In the early 1930s his skill at camel-back guerrilla warfare sent him to Transjordan. He was assigned to Colonel Frederick Peake, founder of the Arab Legion. Between 1936 and 1939, at the head of the Bedouin troops in the Desert Patrol Force, Glubb prevented the Arab revolt in Palestine from spreading to Transjordan. In April 1939, he took command of the Arab Legion, which fought brilliantly on the side of the Allies in Syria and Iraq during World War II. In 1946 King Abdullah made him a Jordanian citizen. In May 1948, during the first Israeli-Arab conflict, he entered Jerusalem at the head of the Arab Legion, thereby allowing Transjordan to maintain control of the Arab section of the Holy City. On 1 March 1956, urged by public opinion and his Arab neighbors, King Hussein of Jordan decided on a break with him, relieving him of his command. Glubb then retired to Sussex to devote himself to writing. He published twentytwo books, including A Soldier with the Arabs. SEE ALSO Hussein ibn Talal.

GLUBB, PASHA SEE

Glubb, John Bagot.

GOLAH: Hebrew equivalent of the Aramaic word galut, used to designate the Diaspora. SEE ALSO Diaspora; Galut. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Golan Heights International border Irbid 1949 armistice line 1974 disengagement line 1949–1967 former demilitarized zone 1974–2004 demilitarized zone City

GOLAN SEE

Golan Heights.

GOLAN HEIGHTS (al-Jolan, in Arabic): Plateau of approximately 646 square miles in southwestern Syria, overlooking the Syrian Hawran Plain to the east and the Israeli Plains of Galilee to the southwest. On 3 February 1922 the Newcombe-Paulet (AngloFrench) agreement drew the frontier between Syria and Palestine east of the Jordan River and the Lake of Tiberias. The accord was finalized on 23 July 1923, making the Golan Heights part of Syria. Three years later, France and Great Britain, powers with mandates over Syria and Palestine, came to an agreement allowing France access to the lake. In 1934, the Council of the League of Nations ratified the accords on a 29-square-mile frontier separating the Syrian Golan from Palestine. On 20 July 1949, as a result of the first IsraeliArab conflict, the armistice agreement drew a new frontier between Syria and the new State of Israel, which followed the north shore of the Lake of Tiberias, the south shore being part of a newly constituted

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

137

GOLAN HEIGHTS

demilitarized zone. By 1967 approximately 130,000 Syrians lived in 139 villages and 61 farms in the Golan. On 10 June, at the time of the 1967 ArabIsrael War, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) moved into the Golan, forcing out most of the Syrian population. In spite of UN Security Council Resolution 242 demanding that Israel withdraw from all the occupied territories, the IDF remained in place. On 19 June 1967 the Israeli government, headed by Levi Eshkol, sent a secret communication to the United States recognizing “Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” and announcing its readiness to “withdraw to the ceasefire line, in exchange for peace, based on internationally recognized frontiers and taking account of Israel’s security needs.” In October 1973 a Syrian attempt to recapture the Golan Heights from Israel led to a further Israeli incursion, adding an additional 197 square miles to the lands occupied by the IDF, a new pocket theoretically divided from the zone conquered in 1967 by a Violet Line. On 31 May 1974 an Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement allowed Syria to recuperate everything it lost in October 1973, as well as a little piece of the territory conquered in 1967—a total of 256 square miles of land. Since then, a UN force of 1,250 soldiers, known as United Nations Disengagement and Observer Force (UNDOF), has been stationed in the Golan and is responsible for overseeing the ceasefire and supervising a “limited weaponry” zone that is 28 miles long and 3 miles wide. On 14 December 1981 the Israeli government headed by Menahem Begin pressured the Knesset to vote for a law annexing the Golan Heights. Three days later, the UN Security Council voted unanimously, except for Israel and the United States, to adopt Resolution 497 declaring the Israeli decision invalid. The Israeli government ignored the resolution. Between the end of the 1960s and the middle of the 1980s Israel pursued a policy of colonizing the Golan, although it was not able to attract large numbers of settlers to these colonies. The Arab population of the Golan Heights, which is chiefly Druze, has never stopped opposing Israeli administration. Druze in the Golan do not serve in the Israeli army as the Druze from inside Israel do, and they do not follow the same religious leaders as the Druze inside Israel. In addition to wanting authority over the settlements already in place in the Golan, both the Israelis and Syrians want control of the Golan because of its military significance. Mount Hermon in the north overlooks southern Lebanon and parts of southern Syria and northern Israel. In the east, volcanic hills

138

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

overlook Galilee in the west and Damascus to the east. In the west, the Golan overlooks a thriving Israeli metropolitan area. The Golan is also important for its water, particularly because the headwaters of the Jordan River lie in Mount Hermon. The presence of the IDF in the Golan also allows Israel to control access to the Lake of Tiberias as well as two tributaries of the Jordan. This ensemble of resources supplies almost a third of the water needs of the Jewish state. During the peace process launched in Madrid in 1991, Syria demanded that Israel conform to UN Resolution 242 and evacuate the Golan, withdrawing behind the line the was in place before 6 June 1967. This would leave Israel with access to the lake only from the west and the south. On 16 February 1993 Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin launched an appeal to Damascus, declaring himself ready for “territorial compromise” on the Golan Heights. During the Majdal Shams First Plan, Rabin proposed a “partial” withdrawal from the Golan, spread out over three years. From his point of view, a few divergences with Damascus needed to be worked out: the Israeli line of withdrawal in the Golan Heights, the schedule of this retreat, security arrangements, and the connection between the retreat and normalization of relations. Between 1994 and 1996 secret Israeli-Syrian negotiations, followed by semiofficial negotiations, took place in the United States, but they were interrupted in 1996 when Likud came to power in Israel. The new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he favored negotiations with Syria but opposed the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. On 4 January 1999 the Israeli Knesset adopted a bill submitting any restitution of an annexed territory to a double approbation: an absolute majority in the Israeli parliament (61 out of the 120) and in a popular referendum. On the following 15 December, in Washington, new Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak met with Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara in an attempt to restart the Israeli-Syrian negotiations, which had been stalled for almost four years. The day before, the Knesset had approved restarting the negotiations by only 47 votes of the full 120, seven members of Barak’s majority having voted with the opposition, and the orthodox SHAS Party, which had joined the government, having abstained. On 1 March 2000, by 60 votes to 53, the Knesset passed a draft bill sponsored by Likud for the purpose of enlarging the voter base in view of acquiring a majority in a referendum on a peace accord with Syria. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GREATER ISRAEL

On the following 22 May the UN Security Council decided that the Shebaa Farms, claimed by Lebanon at the time of the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, was part of the Golan. On 6 August new Syrian President Bashar al-Asad received the U.S. envoy, Edward Walter, who had been asked by President George W. Bush to try to restart the IsraeliSyrian discussions. Since the Israeli invasion of the Golan Heights, the UN Security Council has regularly extended the mandate of the UNDOF, which is camped between the Israeli and Syrian armies. By 2003 about 16,000 Syrians, mostly the Druze, remained in five Arab villages. The Druze account for many of these Syrians in part because Israeli leadership believes they are more amenable to Israeli rule. Meanwhile, more than thirty-five Jewish settlements have been created in the Golan, with an estimated population of 15,000. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Asad, Bashar al-; Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menahem; Eshkol, Levi; Galilee; Israel Defense Force; Knesset; Likud; Madrid Conference; Majdal Shams First Plan; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Rabin, Yitzhak; Resolution 242; Resolution 497; SHAS; Shebaa Farms.

GOSHEN (Gessen): “Land of the Hebrews,” territory situated near the Nile Delta and given by a pharaoh (king of Egypt) to the tribe of Joseph (Yossef, in Hebrew; Yusef, in Arabic), as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, which has been reconstructed as possibly taking place around the sixteenth century B.C.E. According to the Biblical narrative, Joseph, the son of Jacob, was sold into slavery to nomads by his brothers and ended up in Egypt, where he became one of the pharaoh’s advisors. To reward his sage counsels, the pharaoh gave the “land of Goshen” to Joseph and his family. So, the clan of Jacob (Israel), which had been dwelling in Canaan, where famine was raging, emigrated to Egypt. Toward 1580 B.C.E., the Egyptian people rebelled against their occupiers, the Hyksos—a Hebrew dynasty that invaded Egypt in 1710 B.C.E. and ruled for more than a century. The Hebrews, having come to terms with the Hyksos, were persecuted by the different pharaohs who followed, until around 1300 B.C.E., when the Biblical narrative notes that Moses arrived on the scene, thereby allowing the Hebrew people to leave Egypt for “the promised land.” SEE ALSO

Canaan; Jacob (Biblical); Moses.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

GRAPES OF WRATH OPERATION: On 11 April 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres gave the green light to the “Grapes of Wrath” operation. Its goal was to neutralize the Lebanese Hizbullah so as to oblige them to cease their rocket-propelled grenade attacks against populated areas in northern Israel. This operation was launched in the middle of the Israeli election campaign, at the time when the Israelis were preparing for the first time to elect their prime minister by direct ballot, separate from their members of the Knesset. Between 11 and 17 April, there was significant fighting in Lebanon, particularly in the south of the country, which was evacuated by most of the population. Israeli air and naval forces’ targets included roads and an electricity station north of Beirut, while the Hizbullah continued daily Katyusha rocket attacks. On 18 April, Israeli artillery shelled the village of Qana, placed under the protection of United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon, causing the death of 102 civilians and provoking great outrage. On 20 April, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher went to Damascus to talk with the Syrian leaders and the Russian, French, and Italian foreign ministers who had been sent there. On 23 April, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1052, demanding an immediate halt to hostilities. Four days later a ceasefire was declared between Israel and the Hizbullah, putting an end to the Grapes of Wrath operation. A group comprised of representatives of the United States, France, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel was put in charge of surveillance of the observance of this accord. On 7 May 1996, a report to the Security Council assigned Israel responsibility for the massacre at Qana, provoking objections in Washington and Tel Aviv. SEE ALSO Christopher, Warren; Hizbullah; Peres, Shimon; Resolution 1052; United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon.

GREATER ISRAEL (Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael [Hashlema]): The phrase Eretz Yisrael is biblical in origin and refers in that context to various parts of the region that were under Jewish sovereignty at different times. Under the British Mandate, Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel) was used as the Hebrew name for Palestine. After 1948 David Ben-Gurion used the term Medinat Israel (State of Israel), but other Israeli politicians, including Menachem Begin, continued to speak of Eretz Yisrael to suggest an allegiance to the larger historic (biblical) Israel, or the “Greater Israel.” After the 1967 Arab-Israel War, the Greater Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashelema) movement developed; its

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

139

terra

Nazareth

Jenin

Medi Netanya Tulkarm

Nablus

Tel Aviv

Jorda n Riv e r

adherents opposed ceding sovereignty over newly conquered territories and began a settlement campaign in disputed areas. The right-wing Herut Party, prior to 1973, continually evoked the notion of a Greater Israel through its emphasis on Jewish control of the territory of Eretz Yisrael and its opposition to ceding sovereignty over disputed areas. In 1973 Herut became the senior partner of the Likud bloc. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Begin, Menachem; British Mandate; Gurion, David Ben-; Herut Party; Likud.

nean S ea

GREEK CATHOLIC CHURCH

J O R DA N

West Bank Amman

GREEK CATHOLIC CHURCH: Refers to the Christians known as Melkites. The word Melkite comes from the Syrian and Arabic words for king and was originally used to refer to those within the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem who accepted Christianity as professed by the Byzantine emperor. Early on, Melkite followers were centered in modern-day Syria and Lebanon, but they later immigrated to Palestine and Egypt. These Arabicspeaking Christians of the Middle East are now part of the Church of Rome but have their own patriarch and still observe Byzantine rituals. The Melkite Church has three major seminaries, including the Holy Savior Seminary in Beit Sahour, Israel, which serves dioceses in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. Melkites make up the second largest Catholic community in the Middle East, after the Maronites. SEE ALSO Christianity; Maronites; Melkites.

GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH SEE

Eastern Orthodox Church.

GREEN LINE: Israeli-Jordanian armistice line of 3 April 1949, separating Israel from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), implicitly recognized as the frontier of Israel by the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242. Delimiting territories under Israeli control and those under Arab control, the Green Line was the frontier claimed by the Palestinians to demarcate the Palestinian state that was to have come into existence as a result of the Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles. The Israelis preempted this claim by annexing East Jerusalem and later proposed that the frontier be further redefined to take account of Jewish settlements on the Palestinian side. Final status negotiations failed as part of the Camp David Summit of 2000, and the Oslo peace process has become moot. SEE ALSO Camp David II Summit; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Resolution 242; West Bank.

140

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Ramallah Jericho Jerusalem

ISRAEL

Bethlehem

Hebron

N

Dead
Sea

0 0

10 10

20 mi. 20 km

Green Line International border “Green line” City

GREGORIAN CALENDAR: Currently in use, the name of this calendar comes from Pope Gregory XIII, who reformed the Julian calendar in 1582. The Julian year was 365 days and 6 hours. By the sixteenth century the total surplus time had displaced the vernal equinox to 11 March 11 from 21 March, the date adopted in the fourth century. Pope Gregory XIII fixed the problem, by removing ten days in the year 1582 and proclaiming that thereafter an extra day would be added every four years (leap year). In 1582, the lag of the Julian calendar in relation to the sun was ten days. Hence, 4 October 1582 was followed by 15 October to correct the disparity. The reform was adopted almost immediately in most Roman Catholic countries but more gradually in Protestant countries. It wasn’t adopted in England and her colonies in America until 3 September 1752. While the year there until 1752 began on 25 March, the changeover to 1 January as New Year’s Day was also effected that year.

GROUP OF TEN: Ensemble of Palestinian movements opposed to the peace process that had been launched in November 1991 at the Madrid Conference. CreatT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL

ed in September 1992, the Group of Ten brought together the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Yacoub Faction of the Palestine Liberation Front, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of PalestineGeneral Command, HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-SaEiqa, Fatah-Intifada, and the Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party. The goal was to replace the Palestinian National Salvation Front, established in 1985, but ideological differences and personality conflicts in the leadership prevented the Group of Ten from ever constituting a united Palestinian opposition front and presenting an alternative to the policies of Fatah and Yasir Arafat. In October 1993 the Group of Ten was dissolved, to be replaced by the Alliance of Palestinian Forces. Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Fatah, al-; Fatah-Intifada; HAMAS; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command; SaEiqa, al-.

SEE ALSO

GUARDIANS OF CEDARS (Lebanese, Hiras al-Arz,): An extreme right-wing Lebanese Maronite nationalist militia founded in 1975 by Etienne Saqr (Abu Arz, b. 1937), a former Lebanese government security officer. Saqr was influenced by the work of the Lebanese poet SaEid Aql, who promoted a nationalist ideology called Lebanonism, which claimed direct Lebanese descent from the Phoenicians with little input from Muslim or Arab cultural sources, going so far as to devise a Latin alphabet for what he called the Lebanese language. During the civil war of 1975 to 1990, Saqr allied the Guardians (estimated to number about 500) with other Maronite political militias, especially the Phalange, and with Israel, against both Lebanese Muslim groups and the Palestinians. A number of Guardians also joined the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army in 1978. After the civil war ended, the Guardians disarmed, but unlike a number of other such groups declined to transform themselves into a more conventional political party, remaining a very small, highly ideological movement with close ties to the Israelis. In 2000, after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, Saqr was forced to flee into Israel, having been sentenced to death by a Lebanese court on charges relating to his Israeli connections. He was condemned to death a second time in 2001 on new, related charges. The Guardians’ stated D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

purposes include to rid the country of Syrians, Palestinians, and “uncivilized” Iranians who “seek the destruction of Lebanon’s cultural identity”; to forbid foreigners to own property; to ban political parties “that imported their ideologies . . . from outside Lebanon”; to sign a peace treaty with Israel; to withdraw Lebanon from the Arab League and “eliminate the quality that designates Lebanon an Arab country”; to replace the Arabic with the Lebanese alphabet devised by SaEid Aql; and to liberate it from the “defacement that was caused by the Arabic.” SEE ALSO South Lebanon Army.

GUARDIANS OF THE REVOLUTION SEE

Pasdaran.

GÜLBENKIAN, CALOUSTE (1869–1955): A businessman, very adept in the oil sector, nicknamed “the King of Oil,” and “Mister 5%,” born in 1869 in Scutari, near Istanbul, and died in July 1955. Calouste Gülbenkian, a naturalized Englishman, was an engineer by education. He contributed to the merging of Royal Dutch, belonging to Henry Deterding, with Shell, of Marcus Samuel, while attempting to keep U.S. oil companies out of the Middle East. Gülbenkian used his Turkish connections to join the two corporations with Turkish Petroleum Company, in which he held a 5% interest. At the July 1928 oil conference in Oostend, Belgium, he traced the famous “Red Line” on a map of the Middle East, which delineated the former Ottoman oil-rich territories now controlled by Turkish Petroleum. In this zone, the different societies were supposed to exploit oil resources together, and to act in concert in case of the discovery of new deposits. On 27 September 1928, the first oil cartel was founded with the signature at Achnacarry, Scotland, of an accord on the oil trade between Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL: Arab organization, officially the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (Majlis al-Ta’awan li Dual al-Khalij alArabiya), including Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, created on 26 May 1981. The headquarters of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The group is a mutual protection organization of Arab monarchies, controlled by the Saudis, and its purposes are to strengthen cooperation and promote integration and coordination among the members in economic and military affairs, particularly in security matters, both external and internal. It was first pro-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

141

GULF CRISIS (1990–1991)

posed by Saudi Arabia in 1979 after an armed revolt in Mecca and was created less than a year after the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Previous efforts to create such international institutions often failed; an example of this is the attempt to establish a free-trade zone, beginning in August 1964, through the Council of Arab Economic Unity, an organ of the League of Arab States. These failures were mainly due to the concerns of smaller nations about preserving their autonomy in the face of the great regional powers that were competing against each other for leadership. However, the Camp David Accords, followed by the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League and the conflict between Iran and Iraq, with the light it shed on the vulnerability of countries in the area, prompted countries in the region to strengthen their ties. In 1982 the council failed in an attempt to mediate a truce in the Iran-Iraq War. In 1986, however, the war inspired the council to create a common defense force, which was deployed at the Saudi border with Kuwait when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, although it did not intervene. In December 1990 the GCC demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait; its troops were subsequently part of the American-international coalition that ejected Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991. On 6 March 1991, after the war, the foreign ministers of Syria, Egypt, and the GCC states pronounced in favor of maintaining an “Arab peace force” in the Gulf. The Damascus Declaration signed at this meeting also called for improving economic cooperation among Arab states. At the same time, a majority of GCC members opposed an immediate resumption of contacts with countries that had supported Iraq during the Gulf crisis. The members suspended all aid to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as long as Yasir Arafat, who had supported Iraq, was its head. The council also declared in favor of a “just and global peace” in Palestine/Israel based on the principle of “land for peace.” Member states participated in the Madrid Conference, begun in November 1991. Two member states, the Sultanate of Oman and the Emirate of Qatar, initiated relations with Israel. In 1993, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, member states resumed relations with, and aid to, the PLO. On 12 March 1995, in spite of the reservations of Oman and Qatar, the GCC published a communiqué declaring that it was necessary to maintain international sanctions against Iraq as long as that country had not fulfilled all of its obligations under UN Resolution 687. On 28 June 1998 the members of the GCC denounced Israel’s intention of expanding the geographical boundaries of Jerusalem. On 19 May 1999 the leaders of the GCC countries met in

142

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Saudi Arabia to discuss the Middle East peace process and rapprochement with Iran. Six days later President Muhammad Khatami made an official visit to Saudi Arabia, the first by an Iranian leader since the Islamic revolution of 1979. On 14 November 1999, the defense ministers of the GCC member countries announced the strengthening of defense agreements between their states. In December 2001 the members agreed to establish a customs union among their countries, which began in 2003, and a common market with a single currency by 2010. The GCC did not take an official position on the American-British war in Iraq that began in 2003, although the member states were not in favor. In December 2002 the Saudi foreign minister urged the United States not to launch the war unilaterally, and in January 2003 the council encouraged Russia in its diplomatic efforts to prevent the war. However, all member countries, particularly Kuwait, gave logistical assistance by opening bases, staging areas, ports, and territorial waters to US and British troops and supplies. Member states of the GCC hold 45 percent of the world oil reserves and 15 percent of the natural gas. The GCC maintains a permanent mission at the European Union and in 2004 was negotiating the creation of a free trade zone with the European Union. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Camp David Accords; Council of Arab Economic Unity; Gulf War (1991); Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); League of Arab States; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization.

GULF CRISIS (1990–1991) SEE

Gulf War (1991).

GULF WAR (1980–1988) SEE

Iran-Iraq War.

GULF WAR (1991) (Second Gulf War): War waged from 16 January to 28 February 1991 by an American-led coalition against Iraq after Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990. The war was the culmination of the Gulf Crisis, which began in July 1990 when the price of oil fell to $11 a barrel, severely reducing Iraq’s income. Iraq, which was heavily in debt to Kuwait and the other Gulf states as a result of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 through 1988, blamed the low price on overproduction by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and demanded compensation in the form of debt forgiveness, the cession of Kuwait’s Rumailiya oil fields (to which T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GULF WAR (1991)

Iraq had a longstanding but internationally unrecognized claim), and the leasing of two Kuwaiti islands at the head of the Persian Gulf for use as an oil port. The Kuwaitis refused, even as Iraqi president Saddam Hussein massed troops on the border. On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and occupied all of Kuwait. The administration of U.S. President George H. W. Bush determined to force Iraq out, despite the long friendly relationship between American military and intelligence agencies and Saddam Hussein’s regime, especially during the Iran-Iraq War, when the United States had supplied Iraq with weapons, equipment, and intelligence and protected it from international censure over its behavior in the war and its assaults on its Kurdish population. On 2 August, the same day as the invasion, the UN Security Council condemned Iraq and demanded that it withdraw. On 3 August Arab League foreign ministers did the same (the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] and Jordan abstained) but also called for an Arab summit where a negotiated settlement could be reached, while rejecting intervention by any outside party. On 4 August the Organization of the Islamic Conference condemned Iraq (again the PLO abstained). On 6 August the Security Council passed a resolution imposing sanctions on Iraq. The Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, asked the United States for military protection. On 10 August the Arab League repeated its condemnation of Iraq (with only the PLO and Iraq opposed) and reversed its position on foreign intervention by supporting the Gulf states’ request for American help.

AIR RAID. AN IRAQI WOMAN AND HER BROTHER STAND INSIDE THEIR BASRA HOME, DESTROYED BY AERIAL BOMBING DURING THE FIRST GULF WAR (ALSO KNOWN AS DESERT STORM). A COALITION LED BY THE UNITED STATES QUICKLY EXPELLED IRAQI FORCES FROM KUWAIT AND COMPELLED IRAQI LEADER SADDAM HUSSEIN TO AGREE TO TERMS. (© Reuters NewMedia Inc./Corbis)

Saddam Hussein responded by declaring a jihad to free Mecca from the Saudis. On 12 August Saddam Hussein proposed that Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait be linked to Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, an occupation that was also in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. After several months of political maneuvering and failed attempts at negotiation by various parties, the United States obtained UN approval and assembled a military coalition that included some twenty-nine countries, including several Arab states, although the bulk of the forces were American. These were gathered in the Gulf area with the clear intention of attacking the Iraqis in Kuwait and expelling them. Russia, which opposed a war, attempted to mediate but was unsuccessful. The United States launched its military offensive (Operation Desert Storm) on 16 January 1991 with a warplane and cruise missile attack on military installations, infrastructure (transportation, water, gas, and electricity distribution networks), and population centers in Iraq that went on continuously for five and a half weeks. On 21 Febru-

ary Saddam Hussein agreed to the latest Russian plan for a truce; Bush rejected it. The Iraqis announced that they were withdrawing from Kuwait and began to pull out, setting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells as they moved toward the border. Bush ordered a ground attack into Kuwait on 24 February. The Iraqi forces, already in retreat, were driven out of Kuwait City and mostly destroyed from the air on the “highway of death” as their retreat was blocked. A ceasefire was declared on 28 February. Approximately 545,000 troops were involved in the war on the Iraqi side and 700,000 on the US-coalition side. Approximately 80,000 air sorties were flown and more than 200 cruise missiles fired by the coalition. The Iraqi air force was not a factor. Iraq launched perhaps a dozen Scud missiles at Israel, with negligible results; at the request of the United States, Israel did not retaliate. Total casualties, including civilian casualties, are unknown but in the tens of thousands; Iraqi military

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

143

GULF WAR (2003)

deaths are estimated at 100,000; total coalition deaths were 376. About 600 Kuwaitis were killed. On 3 April 1991 the UN Security Council made the lifting of sanctions conditional on the elimination of all Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the surveillance of factories that had the potential to replace them. A war of attrition started between the United States and Iraq that lasted until the Iraq War of 2003. Iraqi deaths attributable to sanctions between 1991 and 2003 are estimated at anywhere from 500,000 to a million. The war was a disaster for the PLO and for the Palestinians. Some Palestinians supported Iraq, or at least appreciated Saddam Hussein’s rhetorical aggressiveness toward Israel; some, especially in Kuwait, condemned the invasion (including the Fatah and PLO representatives there); most are believed to have been neutral. Yasir Arafat and the PLO adopted an equivocal position intended to be seen as neutrality but which effectively supported, and was seen by the world as supporting, Saddam Hussein and Iraq. (The PLO was virtually alone in refusing to condemn the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait.) The practical results of this position were the persecution, expulsion, and impoverishment of the large Palestinian community in Kuwait—about 350,000 before the war and 30,000 after. The earnings of this community had supported many family members in the territories and the camps, and the PLO had collected taxes from it for the Palestine National Fund. Many of these Palestinians fled to Jordan, which suffered severe economic losses. The PLO also lost financial aid from the Arab states (mainly the Gulf states), which had supported Palestinian civic and social institutions and aid to the needy, and lost Arab diplomatic support in international affairs. Blanket curfews and border closings imposed by Israel on the occupied territories created social and economic havoc, and the PLO was nearly destroyed, leaving the Palestinian community increasingly vulnerable. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Hussein, Saddam; Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); Jihad; League of Arab States; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Fund.

GULF WAR (2003) SEE

Iraq War (2003).

144

SEE

General Union of Palestinian Women.

GUPWJ General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists.

SEE

GUPWO SEE

General Union of Palestinian Workers.

GUR: One of the greatest of Hasidic dynasties, founded by Isaac Meyer Rothenberg Alter. It is the keystone of the Agudat Israel Party. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel.

General Union of Palestinian Students.

SEE

GUPT SEE

GUPW

GURION, DAVID BEN

GUPS SEE

HEBRON VIOLENCE. JEWISH SETTLERS FIRE ON PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK TOWN IN DECEMBER 1993, IN RESPONSE TO THE STONING OF RABBI MOSHE LEVINGER’S CAR. THE SMALL GROUP OF JEWISH RESIDENTS IN HEBRON BELONG TO THE EXTREME NATIONALIST GUSH EMUNIM MOVEMENT, WHICH ADVOCATES JEWISH SETTLEMENT THROUGHOUT THE WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP BECAUSE OF THE LAND’S ANCIENT RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE. (AP/Wide World Photos)

GUSH EMUNIM (“Bloc of the Faithful”, in Hebrew): Israeli extremist movement, founded in February

General Union of Palestinian Teachers. D I C T I O N A R Y

Ben-Gurion, David.

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GUSH HERUT-LIBERALIM

1974 by Rabbis Moshe Levinger and Chaim Druckmann. Starting up after a scission in the National Religious Party, where this current had been in existence since 1968, this organization mixed religious fundamentalism and fanatical nationalism, appointing itself the mission of colonizing the Arab territories that had just been reoccupied after the Yom Kippur War. Many settlers saw a messianic sign in the victory of the 1967 War and wanted to reawaken an enthusiasm that had somewhat subsided. Gush Emunim came into its own with the 1977 victory of Likud but withdrew its support in 1979, after the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord implied land restitution. In May 1984, anticipating the Knesset elections, Gush Emunim joined with the extremist nationalist party ha-Tehiya, which allowed them to win five seats. Internal dissension between moderates and re-

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ligious ultranationalists weakened the Gush Emunim-Tehiya alliance, leading to the departure of many members, who decided to start new movements like Meimad, Oz Ve-Shalom, and Netivot Shalom. As a result of the elections of June 1988, occurring in the shadow of the Intifada, Gush Emunim obtained no seats, while ha-Tehiya held on to three. The principal leader of this movement, Rabbi Levinger, is also the spiritual guide of the extremist settlers who have taken up residence in Hebron. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); ha-Tehiyah; Hebron; Intifada (1987–1993); Likud; Meimad; National Religious Party.

GUSH HERUT-LIBERALIM SEE

GAHAL Party.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

145

H HAARETZ (“the Land,” in Hebrew): Independent Israeli daily, left-leaning, founded in 1919. Considered the oldest of the Israeli dailies, the influential Haaretz has belonged to the Schocken family since 1939. Its views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to represent the political agenda of the Meretz Party. As of 2003, the newspaper, under publisher Amos Schocken, was selling 50,000 copies per weekday. Though the daily is not a leader among Israeli media, its English-language Web site attracts large numbers of Jews outside of Israel, particularly in America. SEE ALSO

Meretz Party.

HABASH, GEORGE (al-Hakim, “the Doctor”; 1925– ): Palestinian political figure born in Lydda, Palestine, to a Greek Orthodox family. In July 1948, after the start of the first Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Habash family took refuge in Lebanon. After studying at the Orthodox College in Jerusalem and the American University in Beirut, Habash went on to study medicine. In 1948 he joined the Syrian People’s Party. In 1951 he graduated from medical school at the top of his class. In October 1952, in Beirut, with his fellow students Hani al-Hindi, Ahmad al-Khatib, Bassel al-Kobeissi, and WadiE Haddad, he founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which was Nasserist in inspiration and agitated against Zionism and for the liberation of Palestine. Having become a pediatrician, he and Haddad opened a clinic in

Amman, where he treated the Palestinian refugee population for free. In August 1956 he ran for office unsuccessfully in the Jordanian legislative elections. He was questioned a number of times about his political activism, and the Jordanian authorities expelled him to Damascus, where he continued to advocate the ideas of the ANM. He arrived in Damascus when Egypt and Syria were forming the United Arab Republic. In 1963, when relations between BaEthists and Nasserists were deteriorating, he left Damascus for Beirut. In April 1964, after the national conference of the ANM, he created a regional command for Palestine, supervising the planning of armed actions. In December 1967, after the Arab defeat in the 1967 War, he dissolved the ANM in order to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), into which the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) of Ahmad Jibril merged. Habash was named secretary general of the PFLP. He was imprisoned in Damascus in March 1968 and freed eight months later by a PFLP commando, led by his friend Haddad. However, while he was incarcerated a number of his close associates began to compete for leadership of the PFLP. Two of his assistants resigned in order to create their own movements: Ahmad Jibril, in 1968, founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command, and Nayif Hawatmeh created of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). On his return to Jordan, Habash came up

147

HABASH, GEORGE

GEORGE HABASH. A COFOUNDER OF THE ARAB NATIONALIST MOVE1952, HE REPLACED IT WITH THE POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE AFTER THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAEL WAR (AND, LATER, OTHER GROUPS). HABASH TOOK A HARD LINE AGAINST PEACE WITH ISRAEL AND ALSO—DISASTROUSLY—WAGED WAR AGAINST THE MONARCHY IN JORDAN IN 1970. (AP/Wide World Photos) MENT IN

against the hostility of the Hashimite monarchy, whose abolition he was advocating. In June 1970 PFLP guerrillas entered Amman and fought with the Jordanian army, which was unable to defeat them decisively. A truce was reached, with the PFLP remaining in place in the capital. In August Habash made a virtual declaration of war on King Hussein, demanding the installation of a “national democratic regime” in Jordan. Between 6 and 9 September a PFLP commando hijacked three civilian airliners to the Jordanian desert, destroying them after the passengers were evacuated. On 16 September the king formed a military government and the next day launched an attack against Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. This was the beginning of Black September 1970. After ten days a ceasefire was arranged by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, but when fighting flared up again the following summer all Palestinian resistance organizations were expelled from the country and went to Lebanon, ending the virtual civil war in Jordan.

148

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

In September 1974, opposing a negotiated solution to the Palestinian problem, Habash quit the PLO Executive Committee to join the Rejection Front, in which he became the principal figure. Between 1975 and 1978, opposing Syrian meddling in the Lebanese Civil War, he advised rapprochement with al-Fatah. In 1980 he suffered a serious stroke that incapacitated him for months. In September 1982, evicted from Lebanon along with other Palestinian organizations, he left Beirut at the head of his troops to set up his base in Damascus. In June 1983 he announced the constitution of a common military and political command linking the PFLP and Nayif Hawatmeh’s DFLP. The following year, in order to oppose the policies of al-Fatah, he participated in founding the Democratic Alliance, which gathered together the PFLP, the DFLP, and the PLF. In April 1987, after the Democratic Alliance was dissolved, putting the unity of Palestinian forces before ideological differences, he rejoined the PLO Executive Committee, as did the DFLP leadership. In 1989 illness prevented him from completely fulfilling his duties as the head of the movement and a struggle for succession started between Ahmed Yamani and Salah Salah. On 17 September 1990, for the first time in more than twenty years, he returned to Amman, accompanied by Hawatmeh, and both of them were received by King Hussein. In February 1991 he was in Paris for cancer treatment; in Paris his presence caused an international outcry. On 19 September 1993, opposing the Israeli-Palestinian accord that was scheduled to be signed three days later, he and Hawatmeh announced their resignation from the PLO Executive Committee. A few days later, the two movements joined the Palestinian opposition, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). In August 1994, to consolidate his position in the APF and toughen the organization’s opposition to the Oslo Accords, the PFLP announced its resignation from the PLO Central Council. In April 2000 Habash resigned from the leadership of the PFLP. In July he was replaced by Mustafa al-Zabri (Abu Ali Mustafa), who was assassinated by the Israelis in Ramallah in 2001. Habash, in ill health, lives in Damascus. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab Nationalist Movement; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Jibril, Ahmad; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command; Rejection Front.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HAGANAH

HAGANAH. DAVID BEN-GURION, WHO WOULD BECOME THE FIRST ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER, MEETS WITH SOLDIERS OF THE JEWISH PARAMILITARY ORGANIZATION BEFORE THE CREATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL. THE WELL-TRAINED DEFENSIVE GROUP WAS REPLACED BY THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCE IN 1948. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

HABASHIS SEE

HAGANAH:(“defense”, in Hebrew) Name of the mili-

Ahbash, al-.

HADASH SEE

Democratic Front for Peace and Equality.

HADITH: Arab word used to designate a collection of the words and acts of the prophet Muhammad, functioning as commentaries complementing the teaching of the Qur’an. SEE ALSO Muhammad; Qur’an.

HAFRADAH (“separation,” in Hebrew): A concept favored by many Israelis, involving a separation between the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories. The partisans of this project believe that “a small country at peace is better than a big country at war.” D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tary wing of the Jewish leadership in Mandatory Palestine. This paramilitary organization was created in 1920 for the purpose of protecting Jewish colonies against the actions of Arabs opposed to their expansion. So as to avoid possible excesses, the movement established a rule of “self-restraint” (havlagah), according to which the Haganah would restrict itself to defensive actions. Within the Haganah, the “Rekhesh” section was in charge of procuring the necessary weaponry. Between 1936 and 1941, benefiting from the experience of certain British officers, the Haganah produced some particularly well-trained reconnaissance units. The latter served as a nucleus for the constitution of the Jewish Brigade during World War II. In 1948, the Haganah was dissolved, with many of its members joining the ranks of the new Israeli army, the Israel Defense Force (Tsahal). SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

149

HAGARINES

REMEMBERING THE EXODUS. AS HAPPENS ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF PASSOVER EVERY YEAR IN JEWISH HOMES ALL OVER THE WORLD, A FAMILY IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, READS ALOUD FROM THE HAGGADAH, THE STORY OF THE HEBREW PEOPLE’S EXODUS FROM ANCIENT EGYPT, DURING THE SEDER MEAL IN 1989. (© Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis)

HAGARINES: Term used by Christians in the Middle Ages to designate Arabs and Muslims in general. It derives from the tradition that Arabs descend from Ishmael, son of Abraham and his servant Hagar. The term itself derives from the Arabic Muhajirun, those who accompanied Muhammad on his hijra from Mecca. The word hijra is based on the Arabic root H-J-R, from which also comes the Arabic name of Hagar. SEE ALSO Abraham; Hijra; Ishmael; Muhajirun, al-.

HAGGADAH (Haggada, aggadah; “tale”, in Hebrew): Ritual reading, during the “seder” meal on the first night of Passover, of the story of the flight from Egypt of the Hebrew people. By extension, designates a non-juridical interpretation of the Jewish law which is read as a kind of instruction during the Passover feast. The Haggadah, whose provenance is the classical rabbinical period, figures in two texts: the Talmud and the Midrash.

150

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE ALSO

Talmud.

HAG HA-MATZOT (“the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” in Hebrew): One of the names for Pesach (Passover), celebrating the liberation of the Jewish people from Egypt. HAIFA: A major city in northwest historic Palestine, located on the Bay of Haifa on the Mediterranean coast, now Israel’s third largest city. As part of the Ottoman Empire, Haifa was populated predominantly by Muslim and Christian Palestinians until Jews began to settle there in the late nineteenth century. Under the British Mandate (1917–1948), Haifa expanded, especially after 1933, when a deep-water port was opened. In 1922 its population was recorded as 25,000, of whom 6,000 were Jews and 18,000 Palestinians. By 1944, as a result of growth and increased Jewish immigration, it had about 66,000 Jews and 62,000 Palestinians. During the Arab-Israel War of 1948, Arab and Israeli forces T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HAKHAM BASHI

HAIFA. THIS VIEW OF THE NORTHWESTERN ISRAELI PORT CITY, A MAJOR INDUSTRIAL CENTER, LOOKS WESTWARD TO THE BAY OF HAIFA. THE HAIFA HAS A SMALL PALESTINIAN POPULATION AND IS ALSO THE WORLD CENTER OF THE BAHA’I RELIGION. (©

THIRD-LARGEST CITY IN ISRAEL,

David Rubinger/Corbis)

fought for control of the city. After the war, only 3,000 Palestinians remained, the rest having been expelled by Israeli forces; many of them fled to Lebanon. Present-day Haifa is Israel’s principal port and a major industrial and commercial center. Its population in 2001 was over 270,000, of whom 10 percent were Palestinians. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Ottomans.

HAJJ (Hadj): Arab word for the pilgrimage that every Muslim must make once in his or her life. Accomplished in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar (dhû al-hijja), it consists of a ritual visit to the holy sites in Mecca. The pilgrimage confers upon the person who completes it the title of hajj or hajja (for a woman), which is added to his or her name. The lesser pilgrimage to Mecca (umra) can be accomplished anytime in the year and does not require the fulfillment of any particular ritual obligations.

HAIFA, UNIVERSITY OF: A public liberal arts university, established in 1963. Considered one of the leading institutions of higher learning in Israel, it has promoted innovative studies on topics such as the attitudes of Arabs toward Israelis and of Israelis toward Arabs. As of 2004, a total of 13,000 students were enrolled in the university’s undergraduate and graduate programs.

SEE ALSO

Islamic Calendar; Umra

HAKHAM: Hebrew word meaning “wise man,” and likely the origin of the Arabic word meaning “rabbi.”

HAKHAM HA-IHUD HA-LE’UMI SEE

National Union Party.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BASHI: (association of two words, Arabic and Turkish) Title of the Chief Rabbi, under the Ottoman Empire. In Jewish tradition this word designates a master of the law.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

151

HAKIM, AL-

PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA. MUSLIM MEN PRAY WITH UPRAISED HANDS ON THE MOUNTAIN OF MERCY IN MECCA, SAUDI ARABIA. THE HAJJ IS MUSLIM DURING HIS OR HER LIFETIME. (AP/Wide World Photos)

ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL ACTIONS EXPECTED OF EACH

HAKIM, SEE

ter of those animals. The Muslim religion forbids the consumption of pork and alcohol.

AL-

Habash, George.

HALAKHAH (halakha): Legal religious code that has regulated the life of Jews since the post-Biblical epoch, gathering the ensemble of precepts and practical commandments of the religious law, from an orthodox perspective. With roots in the Bible, the authority of the Halakhah is based on the Talmud. In order to allow Jews to locate what they are looking for in the arcana of the Halakhah, succinct and practical résumés were composed in the first centuries of our era. The Shulhan Arukh, composed by Joseph Karo in the sixteenth century, is a later codification that has since been the most authoritative. SEE ALSO Bible; Talmud.

HALUKKA (Haluqa): (Hebrew word meaning “division” or “distribution”) referring to the charitable funds received for needy Jews in Palestine and later in Israel from Diaspora Jews. The word also translates as “partition,” referring to the British and UN plans of 1937 and 1947 respectively. HALUTZ: Hebrew word used to designate the Jewish pioneer phenomenon in Palestine. HALUTZIM: Hebrew word designating “pioneers,” or the first Jews who immigrated to and settled in Palestine in the 1880s and afterwards.

HALAL (“lawful,” in Arabic): Describes everything

HAMAS: Informal name of the Islamic Resistance

that conforms to the prescriptions of Islam. In the matter of food, this word describes the animals allowable for consumption, as well as the ritual slaugh-

Movement (Harakat al-Muqawima al-Islamiya), formed from its acronym in Arabic. HAMAS is an Arabic word meaning “fervor” or “zeal.” HAMAS

152

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HAMAS

was founded in the Gaza Strip on 14 December 1987 by Shaykh Ahmad Yasin with Abdullah Darwish, Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, Salah Shahada, and Ahmad Shama, Palestinian followers of the Muslim Brotherhood. Constituted a few days after the start of the first Intifada, it proposed fighting for the liberation of Palestine and the re-Islamization of Palestinian society. According to its charter, published in 1988, HAMAS sanctioned armed struggle against Israel only in Palestinian territory and proscribed interPalestinian armed conflict. Its leadership was composed of a board of directors (Mudiriya), a consultative council (Majlis al-Shura), and departments (Shaaba) or bureaus (Maktab). The political bureau (al-Maktab al-siyassi) was headed by a general secretary, and the military bureau (al-Maktab al-askari) supervised the operations of the armed branch (alJinah al-musallah), called the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade after a martyr of the revolt of the 1930s. HAMAS combined resistance to Israel with significant social action (such as charities) among the Palestinian population. At first Israeli authorities were not opposed to it, hoping that HAMAS would weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1988, the western sector of al-Fatah, led by Khalil alWazir (Abu Jihad), in charge of operations in the occupied territories, tried unsuccessfully to mount joint actions with HAMAS and Islamic Jihad. On 29 September 1989, the Israeli authorities declared HAMAS illegal. On 14 December 1990, the third anniversary of its creation, it claimed responsibility for its first attack, the assassination of three Israeli soldiers in Haifa. On 12 January 1991, HAMAS launched a general appeal for holy war to the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, while preparations for the Madrid Conference for peace in the Middle East were underway, the HAMAS leadership came out categorically against any negotiated settlement with Israel. In September 1992 HAMAS published a tract expressing a hardening of its position toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 13 December a commando kidnapped an Israeli border guard. When Israel refused to exchange the guard for Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, who had been sentenced to life in prison, the border guard was killed, which led to the arrest of 1,223 people by the Israeli authorities and the expulsion to Lebanon of 415 sympathizers or members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and HAMAS. During this exile, negotiations were begun for a rapprochement between the PLO and HAMAS, but they were fruitless. In November 1993, resolutely opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian accords of the previous 13 September, HAMAS joined the vanguard of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

WOULD-BE SUICIDE BOMBERS. HAMAS

MILITANTS TAKE PART IN

AN ANTI-ISRAELI DEMONSTRATION AT A SOUTHERN LEBANESE REFUGEE CAMP IN DECEMBER 2001. THE EVENT MARKED THE FOURTEENTH AN-

HAMAS, ALSO CALLED THE ISRESISTANCE MOVEMENT, BY ISLAMISTS DEDICATED TO HOLY WAR AGAINST ISRAEL. (AP/Wide World Photos) NIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF

LAMIC

those who comprised the Palestinian opposition in Damascus, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). In April 1994, in response to the assassination of twenty-nine Palestinians by a Jewish colonist in Hebron the preceding 25 February, HAMAS undertook a series of deadly suicide attacks in Israel. In June 1994, with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip, a difficult cohabitation began between the two organizations. Although rejecting the Israeli-Palestinian accord, HAMAS nevertheless recognized the PA, which among other functions had taken responsibility for suppressing anti-Israeli militancy. Because of its charity work, HAMAS enjoyed the support of a large part of the Palestinian population, even if the majority of the population opposed the terrorist tactics HAMAS was using, such as suicide bombings. Many members of the movement were arrested by the Israeli and Palestinian police forces and two leaders of the armed section were assassinated by Israeli services. On 25 July 1995 one of the main leaders of the political section of HAMAS, Abu Musa Marzouq, was arrested in the United States. In the autumn, faced with the prospect of presidential elections in January 1996 and not wanting to accept the Oslo Accords, HAMAS refused to engage in the electoral process. Two splinter groups that favored electoral participation but represented only themselves were formed: the Islamic National Way and the Islamic Front for the Salvation of Palestine. In October 1997

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

153

HANUKKAH

Shaykh Yasin was freed from prison as part of a deal to return two Israeli agents who had been caught in Jordan trying to assassinate a HAMAS leader. Shaykh Yasin returned to Gaza, where he gave a speech advocating struggle against Israel and inviting Yasir Arafat to join “the resistance front.” Between 1998 and 1999, under the pressure of Israeli authorities, who demanded that harsher measures be taken against HAMAS, the Palestinian police regularly interrogated many of its leaders and militants. In 1998 the PA arrested some HAMAS leaders over their criticism of the Wye River Accords. At the end of August 1999, when the Jordanian authorities decided to close the offices of HAMAS in Jordan and issue warrants for the arrest of its representatives, several of them went underground. On 22 September Khalid MishEal and Ibrahim Ghusha were arrested by the Jordanian police and Abu Musa Marzouq, who had returned to Amman, was expelled to Iran. HAMAS attended a national meeting of opposition groups with the PA in October 1999 but later severely criticized it for participating in the Camp David talks of July 2000. At the same time, however, Shaykh Yasin announced that if the Israelis stopped attacking Palestinian civilians HAMAS would stop attacking Israeli civilians and that if the Israelis pulled out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip HAMAS would observe a truce. With the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories in October 2000, HAMAS and the PA reconciled. In November 2000 HAMAS joined the resistance committees through which national and Islamic forces coordinated their local actions. HAMAS intensified its campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, leading to many Israeli reprisal operations. In 2002 Israel reoccupied the West Bank Palestinian “autonomous” areas. On 22 March 2004, after a failed attempt the previous September, Israel succeeded in assassinating Shaykh Yasin in a missile attack. He was succeeded by Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, who had survived an assassination attempt the previous June. Israel assassinated him on 17 April 2004. His successor’s name has not been announced. In June 2004 it was reported that Ismail Hanyeh, a HAMAS leader, announced that HAMAS would stop resisting the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip if Israel withdrew from the areas it had been besieging for the previous two months. HAMAS has offices in many countries, including Iran, Jordan, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria. Originally financed mainly by its members and others who wished to contribute to its charitable activities, it received substantial aid from the Gulf states during and after the Gulf Crisis of 1990 and 1991, when those states withdrew their aid from the PLO. Al-

154

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

though it is Sunni, HAMAS has been financed largely by ShiEite Iran since 1991, when Iran sponsored an international conference, meant to contrast with the Madrid Conference, to support a Palestinian Islamic revolution. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Aqsa Intifada, al-; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; Gulf War (1991); Intifada (1987–1993); Islamic Jihad; Islamic National Way Movement; Madrid Conference; Muslim Brotherhood; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Qassam, Izz al-Din al-; Rantisi, Abd al-Aziz; Wazir, Khalil al(Abu Jihad); West Bank; Yasin, Ahmad IsmaEil.

HANUKKAH (“inauguration,” in Hebrew): Jewish Festival of Lights, which celebrates the purification of the Temple after the victory of the Maccabees over the Hellenistic Syrians. Beginning on 25 Kislev, the day of the winter solstice, Hanukkah commemorates the inauguration of the temple built to replace the one that had been dedicated to the glory of Zeus by the Syrians, under the reign of Antiochus IV in 164 B.C.E. This holiday takes place during the period between the end of November and the end of December, and lasts eight days. The word hanukkiyah refers to the Jewish nine-branch candelabra, returned to the Temple after the Maccabean victory.

HA-POEEL HA-MIZRACHI (“Eastern worker”, in Hebrew): Name of a Zionist religious bloc, with a working-class orientation, created in 1922. In 1956 Ha-PoEel ha-Mizrachi became an Israeli political party and merged with the Mizrachi Party to form the National Religious Party. SEE ALSO Mizrachi; National Religious Party HAQ SEE

Arab Islamic Liberal Party.

HAQ, AL-: Important Palestinian nonpartisan human rights and legal assistance organization in the West Bank, founded in 1979 by Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab. The organization’s name is usually given as “Law in the Service of Man”; the Arabic word haq signifies “fairness,” “justice,” “law,” and “truth.”) Originally focused on Israeli legal structures and behavior in the occupied territories, since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 it also takes official Palestinian activity within T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HARAM AL-SHARIF

its purview. Its primary activities are monitoring and documenting human rights violations, including war crimes; providing free legal services to the Palestinian community; producing reports and analyses on human rights issues; disseminating information on human rights principles; and intervening to stop or prevent abuses. Al-Haq is headquartered in Ramallah and affiliated with the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. It has an informal relationship with many international nongovernmental organizations as well as a consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It receives its funding from private foundations, human rights and social justice organizations, and individual contributors. SEE ALSO Occupied Territories; Palestinian Authority; West Bank.

al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount)

N

Golden Gate

Dome of the Rock Muslim Quarter

HARAAM: Arabic word designating whatever is illicit, prohibited or forbidden by Islam, such as alcohol, pork, or pre-marital sex.

Al-Aqsa Mosque

Jewish Quarter

0 0

250 50

500 ft.

area enlarged

100 m

HARAKA AL-ISLAMIYA AL-MUJAHIDA AL-FILASTINIYA, ALSEE

Lions’ Gate

City wall Street

ISRAEL

West Bank

Jerusalem

Palestinian Islamic Combat Movement. 0 0

HARAKA AL-ISLAMIYA LI-TAHRIR FILASTIN,

2

4 mi.

2 4km

AL-

Islamic Movement for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

HARAKAT AL-QAWMIYYIN AL-ARAB HARAKAT AL-JIHAD AL-ISLAMI AL FILASTIN SEE

SEE

Arab Nationalist Movement.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

HARAKAT AL-TAHRIR AL-WATANI AL-FILASTINI HARAKAT AL-MUHAJARUN SEE

SEE

-Muhajarun, al-.

HARAKAT AL-MUJAHADA AL-ISLAMIYYA AL-FILASTINIYA SEE

Palestinian Islamic Combat Movement.

HARAKAT AL-MUQAWAMA AL-ISLAMIYA SEE

HAMAS.

HARAKAT AL-NAFIR AL-ISLAMI SEE

Hizbullah-Palestine.

HARAKAT AL-NAHDA AL-ISLAMIYYA SEE

Fatah, al-.

Islamic Renaissance Movement.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

HARAKAT AL-TAHRIR AL-WATANI AL FILASTIN ALMAJLIS AL-THAWRI SEE

Fatah, al-Revolutionary Council.

HARAM: Arabic word for a holy or sanctified area, as in Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) in Jerusalem, site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. In more colloquial usage, the word may mean “precinct” or “enclosed area,” and thus may be used to refer to the haram of the university or of the house. SEE ALSO Aqsa, al-; Haram al-Sharif.

HARAM AL-SHARIF (Noble Sanctuary): Walled precinct atop a hill in East Jerusalem (called Mount Mo-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

155

HAREDI

by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.. On 28 September 2000 a visit to the site by Ariel Sharon, head of Likud, accompanied by a company of Israeli soldiers, provoked the anger of Muslims and set off the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories. On 29 July 2001 the symbolic laying of the first stone of the proposed new temple further provoked Muslim anger. SEE ALSO Aqsa, al-; Aqsa Intifada, al-; ArabIsrael War (1967); Likud; Sharon, Ariel; Waqf; Western Wall.

DOME OF THE ROCK. THIS LATE-SEVENTH-CENTURY MOSQUE ON THE NOBLE SANCTUARY—TO JEWS, THE TEMPLE MOUNT—IS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN BUILT OVER THE SITE, HOLY TO JEWS AND MUSLIMS, WHERE ABRAHAM PREPARED TO SACRIFICE ISAAC, WHERE THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON AND THEN THE SECOND TEMPLE STOOD, AND WHERE THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD ASCENDED TO HEAVEN. (© The Art Archive/Dagli Orti)

riah in the Bible, known to Jews today as the Temple Mount [Har ha-Bayit]). Mount Moriah is, by tradition, the place where Abraham prepared Isaac for sacrifice upon a rock. The two main structures in the precinct are the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, enclosing the Rock of Abraham, which Muslims believe is the place to which the Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad brought him and from which he was taken to receive a message from God and pray with the earlier prophets. The Dome of the Rock replaced an earlier structure, the Mosque of Omar, and is sometimes referred to by that name. It is the third holiest site in Islam, built upon what is thought to be the site of the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple, or Temple of Herod, of which the Western Wall, or Kotel, is believed by devout Jews to be the remnant. The proximity of these Islamic and Jewish holy sites has led to much conflict between the two communities. After the June 1967 War, when East Jerusalem came under Israeli control, an agreement was reached between Israelis and Palestinians limiting access to the Sanctuary to Muslims. Control of the Sanctuary in matters of worship is in the hands of the Waqf, an organization responsible for the administration of Muslim religious property, while access to it is controlled by Israeli police. Jewish extremist groups frequently demand the right to enter the site; some of them advocate razing the mosques and other buildings to make way for a reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon, destroyed

156

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

HAREDI (pl. haredim): Hebrew word meaning “Godfearing,” and which designates, in practice, ultraorthodox Jews. The Haredim believe that Jewish sovereignty in Israel will only be established with the arrival of the Messiah (Mashiah, in Hebrew). SEE ALSO Messiah. HAREL, ISSER (1912–2003): Founder of Israel’s intelligence community, second and most powerful head of Mossad. Born Isser Halperin in Russia, he immigrated with his family in 1931 to mandatory Palestine. During World War II he served in the Haganah and with the British coast guard. Appointed secretary of the Jewish department of the Haganah’s intelligence service in 1944, he oversaw counterespionage efforts and operations against dissident Jewish underground groups such as Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI). His success in these efforts led to his appointment as head of the new General Security Service (Shin Bet, or Shabak) in 1948. In 1953 he was appointed head of the Mossad, supervising all Israeli intelligence agencies. Often criticized for the extensive internal surveillance he maintained, he also developed an effective international intelligence operations network. He is credited with uncovering several Soviet spies, including Yisrael Beer, and with orchestrating the capture of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. He left office in 1963 after a dispute with David Ben-Gurion. After a brief stint as Levi Eshkol’s intelligence coordinator in 1965 and 1966, he won a seat in the eighth Knesset on the RAFI Party list. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Haganah; Lohamei Herut Yisrael; Mossad; RAFI Party; Shin Bet. HA-REMISHIMAH HA-MITKADEMENT LE-SHALOM SEE

Progressive List for Peace.

HA-RESHIMAH HA-ARAVIT HA-ME’UHEDET SEE

T H E

Unified Arab List.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HASAN, HANI AL-

HARIRI, RAFIQ AL- (1944–): Lebanese political figure, born in Sidon into a working-class family. In 1966, leaving Beirut Arab University after only a year, Hariri emigrated to Saudi Arabia, where he pursued a business career that made him one of the wealthiest people in the Middle East. He obtained Saudi nationality in 1978. He worked for five years as a teacher and accountant in a construction company before founding his own construction business, Siconest, in partnership with the French firm Oger in 1970. Siconest thrived in the 1970s oil boom and Hariri bought out his partner in 1978. In 1980 he opened a Lebanese branch of Oger International, which became the largest construction firm in the Middle East. He also became director of the Lebanese Bank of Commerce, the Mediterranean Bank, and the Saudi Bank, as well as the principal shareholder in the Saudi-Lebanese Bank and the Mediterranean Investors Group. In 1987 he was authorized by the French minister of economy to buy parts of the French banks Suez and Paribas. In August 1992 he merged two smaller French banks to create the French Bank of the Orient. He also controls insurance, engineering, computer, advertising, and broadcasting businesses, the last being especially important to his political career, and his political party publishes a newspaper. In Lebanon, Hariri used money as an entrée to public life. He created the Islamic Institute for Higher Education, now known as the Hariri Foundation, in 1979; it gives grants to Lebanese students both in Lebanon and abroad. During the 1980s and 1990s he spent freely on many Lebanese and Syrian politicians and political groups (he is reported to have built a palace and given it to President Hafiz alAsad). In September 1983 he served as an intermediary between Saudi leaders and the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt; six days later, during the TaDif negotiations, he was a Saudi mediator, which was the beginning of his career in Lebanese politics proper. When the civil war of 1975 through 1990 ended, he promoted a project to reconstruct central Beirut, which had been destroyed by the Israeli siege in 1982 and by the ongoing civil war. On 22 October 1992, after the fall of the Rashid Solh regime, he was appointed prime minister, largely on the basis of his international financial connections, leading to a speedy revaluation of the Lebanese pound in international markets. He backed the creation, in May 1994, of the Solidere Civil Land Society, of which he is the main shareholder. This entity, financed mainly through international borrowing by the Lebanese government, controls a massive program of reconstruction and development of central Beirut (sometimes D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

known as Haririgrad), with the work executed mostly through Hariri’s companies and plentiful fees for intermediaries and subcontractors. Several parliamentarians have accused him of mixing politics and business. In May 1995 he resigned and was reelected to the office of prime minister. In the legislative elections of September 1996, his party won the majority of the seats in Beirut, to the detriment of a portion of the Sunni bourgeoisie traditionally elected there. On 7 November 1996 he was again chosen to form a government. On 27 November 1998, after the election of Émile Lahoud as president of the republic, he resigned from his position as prime minister and was replaced by Selim al-Hoss. Determined to make a political comeback, he created his own party, alMustaqbal. In the Lebanese legislative elections of 3 September 2000, his list, which included Christian and Druze leaders, won eighteen of the nineteen seats for the city of Beirut, making him the principal leader of the Lebanese opposition. On 23 October he was named prime minister with the support of 106 of the 128 deputies in the Lebanese parliament. On 6 November, after five days of debate marked by the question of the Syrian presence in Lebanon, parliament gave its approval to his government’s declaration of general policy. With thirty ministries, the cabinet of Rafiq Hariri represented all Lebanese parliamentary tendencies except for Hizbullah and General Michel Aoun. Hariri resigned from his post on 15 April 2003 but was asked to form another government the next day. His largest ongoing problem has been the economic consequences of the Lebanese government’s debt. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Asad, Hafiz al-; Hizbullah; Hoss, Selim al-; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal.

HASAN, HANI AL- (Abu Hasan, Abu Tariq; 1937– ): Palestinian political figure born in Haifa, Palestine, brother of Khalid al-Hasan. Having become a refugee in Lebanon in 1948, at the time of the first ArabIsraeli conflict, Hani al-Hasan studied in Lebanon and then in Germany, where he obtained a degree in engineering. He was elected president of the General Union of Palestinian Students in Europe in 1958. A member of Fatah since its formation in 1959, he joined the fida Diyyun in Jordan and became the movement spokesperson. Between 1969 and 1973, as a refugee in Lebanon, he served in the political section of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), where among other responsibilities he was in charge of relations with China and Romania. In July 1976,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

157

HASAN, KHALID AL-

in the midst of the Lebanese crisis, he attempted in vain to persuade Yasir Arafat to accept Syrian help. In 1979, after being named to the Fatah’s central committee, he became PLO ambassador to Iran, where he remained until 1981. Between 1982 and 1987 he was PLO representative in Jordan and a political advisor to Arafat. During this period he also was a roving ambassador to a number of countries, including Morocco, Egypt, and France. In May 1989 he became the head of a committee responsible for contacts between the PLO leadership and France, a body created after Arafat’s Paris visit. After September 1990, in spite of his loyalty to Arafat, he openly expressed his opposition to Arafat’s policies and his manner of directing the movement. During the Gulf crisis he was against the PLO siding with Iraq and became one of the leaders of the opposition in Fatah. In July 1991 Arafat relieved him of leadership of the committee on relations with France, and al-Hasan was put in charge of overseeing the activities of Fatah in Jordan. Opposed to the Israel-Palestinian accord of 13 September 1993 because of form but not its basic principle, he declined the post of ambassador to Jordan. Hasan returned to the Gaza Strip in 1995 and became Arafat’s chief diplomatic advisor. He was appointed interior minister of the Palestinian Authority in October 2002 but left the cabinet in April 2003. He remains on the central committee of Fatah. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; General Union of Palestinian Students; Hasan, Khalid al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority.

HASAN, KHALID AL- (Abu Said; 1928–1994): Palestinian political figure and brother of Hani al-Hasan, born in Haifa, Palestine. Khalid al-Hasan became a refugee in Lebanon in 1948, during the first ArabIsraeli conflict. Between 1949 and 1951, as a student at the American University of Beirut, he took part in the activities of the Islamic Liberation Party before going to Kuwait, where in 1959, with Yasir Arafat, he participated in the creation of Fatah, taking responsibility for information and propaganda and becoming the movement’s main ideologue. His activities in Arab countries, in particular Saudi Arabia, allowed Fatah, and afterwards the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to obtain significant financial support. Between 1960 and 1967 he was a member of the City Council of Kuwait City and from 1968 to 1974 he was head of the PLO’s political department. Opposed to terrorist tactics, he found himself often at odds with Arafat, who recommended armed action;

158

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

he also reproached Arafat for his alliance with the Palestinian left. As president of the foreign relations commission of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), in November 1988 he met with three Jewish American leaders to whom he explained the tenor of the PNC resolution on the creation of the Palestinian state and recognition of the Jewish state. In 1991, during the Gulf War, he distanced himself from Arafat’s pro-Iraqi position. In September 1993, favoring the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation, he criticized the tenor of the Israeli-Palestinian accords signed in Washington, particularly on the fate of Palestinian refugees. He withdrew from political activity because of illness and died in Rabat. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Hasan, Hani al-; Islamic Liberation Party; Palestine Liberation Organization.

HASHD SEE

Jordanian People’s Democratic Party.

HASHIM,

AL-: The ruling family of Jordan. The alHashim dynasty (also referred to as Hashimis, or Hashimites) has borne this name for a millennium, and from it sprang the sharifs of Mecca, guardians of the holy sites of Islam. The dynasty claims descent from Ali Hashim, great-grandfather of the prophet Muhammad. The Hashimites ruled in the Hijaz (western Arabian Peninsula) from the twelfth century until 1925, when the Saudis conquered the province and expelled them. In return for their help against the Ottomans in World War I—the Arab Revolt against the Turks was led by Husayn ibn Ali al-Hashim, king of Hijaz and sharif of Mecca—the British installed as king of Iraq in 1921 a Hashimite prince, Faysal ibn Hussein, Sharif Hussein’s son. Faysal had ruled Syria in 1920 until he was dislodged by the French; he and his descendants reigned in Iraq until the regime was overthrown in 1958. The British allowed another of Sharif Husayn’s sons, Abdullah ibn Hussein (Abdullah I), to become emir of Transjordan (after 1946 the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan) on condition that he accept the British Mandate and not attempt to restore his brother to the throne in Syria. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; British Mandate.

HASHIMITE SEE

T H E

Hashim, al-.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HASSAN OF JORDAN

HASHEM, SEE

AL-

Hashim, al-.

HA-SHOMER HA-TZAEIR: A socialist-Zionist youth movement, ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir was founded in 1913, unifying the Zionist youth organizations in Poland and Galicia into one movement. Its name, which means “Young Guardian,” was also the name of the largest of the existing youth organizations as well as that of a Jewish militia organization in Palestine. The new organization placed emphasis on settlement, and in 1919 ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir sent its first group of settlers to Palestine. By 1924 its membership was more than 10,000. In the 1920s and 1930s it developed a Marxist-Zionist ideology, and many of its members envisioned a socialist Palestine that would work with the Soviet Union to bring about a worldwide workers’ revolution. By 1940 haShomer ha-TzaEir had grown to a membership of over 70,000 with thirty-nine kibbutzim in Palestine. Because it had favored the creation of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine, ha-Shomer haTzaEir had little influence on the politics of the Zionist movement in Palestine preceding the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. That year, when several socialist factions joined together to form MAPAM, or the United Workers’ Party, ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir became its youth movement. It has remained active primarily as an educational movement. SEE ALSO MAPAM.

HASID SEE

Hasidism

HASIDISM: Jewish pietist movement, born in the eighteenth century in the Ukraine and Poland, under the impetus of Israel ben Eliezer, called “Baal Shem Tov.” Hasidism taught that man should unite with God through meditation, contemplation, study and respect for the ascetic life. It was inspired by the Kabbalah, but in practice it was in opposition to the hermetic doctrine from which it emerged, which was meant for an intellectual elite. The founder of Hasidism and his companions were opposed to religious austerity, emphasizing joy and fervor of prayer. The ideas and doctrine of this movement came into conflict with the traditional rabbinate, whose principal leader was Eliahu ben Shlomo, called the Gaon of Vilna. The Hasidim believed in the sanctity of the earth itself, and so lived there without accepting the political authority of the state. Hasidism accorded D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

priority to the religious fervor of the chant over intellectual knowledge of the Torah, also considering dancing as a prayer and as a way of achieving spiritual ecstasy and elevation. Gradually, through various migratory waves, this movement developed in Europe, North America, and Israel. SEE ALSO Kabbalah; Torah.

HASSAN OF JORDAN (1947– ): Royal prince and former crown prince (1965–1999) of Jordan. Hassan ibn Talal al-Hashem is the son of King Talal and the younger brother of King Hussein. He has a degree in history and economics from Oxford University. On 1 April 1965 King Hussein designated him crown prince of the Hashimite kingdom in place of King Hussein’s son, Abdullah, who was three years old. In 1968, while studying in England, Hassan married the daughter of the Pakistani ambassador to London. When he returned to his country, King Hussein assigned him economic and administrative duties. In July 1970 he founded the Jordan Scientific Academy and two years later a commercial bank, the Housing Bank. He also participated in establishing the Century Corporation Industry Group. In June 1976 King Hussein entrusted him with reorganizing the Jordanian administration. In 1980 he founded the Academy for Research on Islamic Civilization and then the Arab Forum (al-Muntada al-Arabi). In April 1989, while he was in charge of the regency during his brother’s absence, his success in dealing with five days of rioting strengthened his credibility among the Jordanian people. Between 1992 and 1997 his involvement in the affairs of his country became more and more noticeable. He participated in JordanianIsraeli peace negotiations, as well as in various conferences on economic development in the Middle East. In July 1998 King Hussein was hospitalized in the United States; during that time he gave Hassan control of the regency, which Jordanians saw as a transfer of power. Hassan’s direct interference in certain internal matters led to conflicts with a number of highly placed Jordanian leaders. On 23 January 1999, after returning from the United States, King Hussein stripped Hassan of the titles of prince regent and crown prince, giving them to his eldest son, Prince Abdullah, who succeeded him as Abdullah II on 7 February. Hassan holds no official position. He is the chairman of a think tank called the Arab Thought Forum and is involved with the World Conference on Religions for Peace, a private group based in New York. In early 2004 he was rumored to have ambitions to restore the Hashimite dynasty

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

159

HA-TEHIYAH

CROWN PRINCE, NOT KING. THE YOUNGER BROTHER OF KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN, HASSAN IBN TALAL (SHOWN IN A 1996 PHOTOGRAPH) WAS THE CROWN PRINCE OF THE HASHEMITE KINGDOM FROM 1965 TO 1999. THEN KING HUSSEIN GAVE HASSAN’S TITLES TO PRINCE ABDULLAH, THE KING’S ELDEST SON, WHO SUCCEEDED TO THE THRONE WHEN HUSSEIN DIED TWO WEEKS LATER. (AP/Wide World Photos)

to the throne of Iraq, with himself as king, but he has denied this. SEE ALSO Hashim, al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Talal ibn Abdullah.

government of Yitzhak Shamir. The following month ha-Tehiyah allied itself for a few months with the new extremist block of General Eitan, Tzomet. In February 1984, Cohen proposed restricting the election of the members of Knesset to Israelis who had done their military service, which consequently would have disqualified the Arab members of the Knesset. As a result of the elections of July 1984, HaTehiyah, allied to the extremist settlers’ movement, Gush Emunim, strengthened its position, winning five seats. However, dissension between religious and nonreligious ultranationalists in the movement weakened the Tehiyah-Gush Emunim alliance. Anticipating that the elections of June 1988 would be held in the shadow of the Intifada, the program of ha-Tehiyah proposed: 1) “Peace against peace, without ceding an inch of ground; 2) Augmenting the number of settlements, so as to assure their security; 3) Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” In the elections ha-Tehiyah won only three seats, many militants having preferred to support Tzomet. In June 1990, backed by the deputies of Likud and those of the far right, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir decided to form a new cabinet, in which Professor Ne’eman was again science minister. Six months later, Ne’eman resigned after the Israeli government announced its intention of starting negotiations with the Palestinians. In April 1992, preparing for the Knesset elections of the following June, ha-Tehiyah joined with the extreme right party Moledet. The electoral defeat of the Israeli right led to the disappearance of ha-Tehiyah from the political stage, most of its members joining the ranks of Tzomet or the Likud. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Cohen, GeDula; Gush Emunim; Herut; Intifada (1987–1993); Likud; Moledet; Ne’eman, Yuval; Shamir, Yitzhak; Tzomet Party.

HA-TEHIYAH(“National Renaissance”): Ultranationalist Israeli party created in October 1979 by dissidents from Herut under the impetus of GeDula Cohen and Moshe Samir. This group resulted from a split in the Israeli right, following the IsraeliEgyptian peace accord of the previous year. HaTehiyah advocated maintaining an Israeli presence in all of the occupied territories, even Sinai. In July 1980, Cohen proposed a draft bill on the city of Jerusalem, “united city and eternal capital of Israel,” for which she succeeded in gaining the support of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. As a result of the elections of July 1981, ha-Tehiyah won three seats, allowing the government of Begin to enjoy a narrow majority in the Knesset. In October 1983, Professor Yuval Ne’eman was named science minister in the

160

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

HA-TIKVA (Ha Tikvah; “The Hope”, in Hebrew): National anthem of the State of Israel. HA-TSOFEH (The Observer, “The Scout,” in Hebrew): Israeli daily created in 1938, considered the organ of the National Religious Party. SEE ALSO National Religious Party.

HA-TZOHAR (Hebrew acronym for “Revisionist Zionists”): Radical Jewish movement, founded in 1925. This political party (also known as the Union of Zionist-Revisionists) was founded in Paris by Vladimir Jabotinsky and a group of mostly Russian Zionists who sought a return to the original aims of Zionism T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HAWATMA, NAYIF

with principles espoused by Theodor Herzl. The union’s platform actually reflected Jabotinsky’s ideology: the future establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River under Jewish sovereignty. In advance of that, a colonization regime would be set up to create the conditions necessary to achieve a demographic Jewish majority, considered a prerequisite for a state. The movement grew rapidly—particularly in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe—and by the end of the 1920s the union was the major opposition party, becoming the party of the Zionist Right or even Zionist fascism. One major point of controversy with official Zionism was the union’s “independent diplomacy,” which was expressed primarily to obtain the support of European countries, particularly Poland, to pressure Britain in the Mandate Council of the League of Nations in Geneva. The movement’s growth in popularity brought about many points of contention between the revisionists and “official” followers of Zionism. These differences were often expressed in acts of violence until 1933 when the moderates dropped out of the union and founded a small independent party called the Jewish State Party. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the union began legal and illegal efforts to encourage a mass emigration of 700,000 to 1.5 million Jews from Europe to Palestine within a ten-year period. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Herzl, Theodor; Jabotinsky, Vladimir ZeDev.

HAWARI, COLONEL SEE

Hawari Group.

HAWARI GROUP: Palestinian group created in February 1979 by the central committee of Fatah in order to take charge of some of the Fatah leadership’s security needs and carry out special operations. Rising out of differences in Force 17 and placed under the command of Abdullah Abd al-Hamid Labib (Colonel Hawari), this splinter group was controlled directly by Yasir Arafat and benefited from Iraqi help. It is known to have carried out several terrorist attacks in the 1980s, including exploding a bomb on an American airliner in 1986, killing four people. After it was expelled from Tunisia in 1987, it lost its operational capacities, then disappeared in June 1991 after the death of its leader. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Force 17.

HAWATMA, NAYIF (Abu al-Nuf; 1935– ): Palestinian political figure, born in as-Salt, Jordan, to a Greek D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Orthodox family. In 1954, while enrolled at Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine, Hawatma joined the Nasserist Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) of George Habash, who was a friend of his. He returned to Jordan in 1956, during the Suez War, but fled the country in 1957 after participating in anti-regime activities, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia. In 1958 he took part in factional fighting in Lebanon, then fled to Iraq, where a Hashimite king had just been overthrown, and became the head of the Iraqi branch of the ANM. Imprisoned in July 1962 in Baghdad, he was liberated in February 1963, at the time of the BaEthist coup d’état, only to be expelled two months later to South Yemen, where he participated, with the Liberation Front, in the struggle against the British presence. In 1967, after an amnesty had been declared, he returned to Jordan. In January 1968, after the Arab defeat in the 1967 War, he participated, with George Habash and Ahmad Jibril, in the creation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), within which, along with Ibrahim Mohsen, he represented the Marxist current. In February 1969 he quit the PFLP to found, with Yasir Abd Rabbo, the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, known after August 1974 as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). This new organization became part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and followed a political line at the far left of the Palestinian spectrum. In January 1970 his movement established its first contacts with leftist Israeli parties, including Matzpen. His intention was to begin a dialogue based on the provisions of United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242. In June 1970 Hawatma was elected to the PLO’s central committee. Advocating the abolition of the Hashimite regime, the DFLP participated, along with the PFLP, in battles with the Jordanian army in August and September 1970 and July 1971. After their expulsion from Jordan, Hawatma and his organization settled in Lebanon, where from August 1973 he espoused the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside the Israeli state. Accused of capitulating to Israel, he was the object of two assassination attempts. He stayed in contact with leaders of the Israeli left and recommended an alliance with Arab Communist Parties. From 1975 on he favored a rapprochement with Syria, and in 1977, after the visit of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat to Israel, he joined the Rejection Front. In 1978 he broke ties with Baghdad after having sided with Tehran in the IraqIran conflict. Backed by the Soviet Union, he became more strident in his opposition in the PLO. In March

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

161

HAY D A AL-AMILA LI-TAHRIR FILASTIN AL-

1984, along with George Habash, he founded the Palestinian Democratic Alliance, which united the DFLP, PFLP, Palestine Communist Party, and a part of the Palestine Liberation Front in an attempt to counter the influence of Fatah in the Palestine movements. The project failed rapidly as personality conflicts took priority over political purposes. In April 1987, after the dissolution of the Democratic Alliance, he decided that the DFLP would rejoin the PLO executive committee, as the PFLP had done. On 17 September, accompanied by Habash, he went to Jordan, where he hadn’t been for twenty years; there the two men were received by King Hussein. This reconciliation, facilitated by the Gulf crisis, allowed the resumption of relations between the DFLP, the PFLP, and Jordan. Hawatma opposed the Madrid Conference of October 1991, and the DFLP was torn between his partisans and Yasir Abd Rabbo’s, who favored the peace process. Abd Rabbo and his followers broke from the DFLP to create a new organization, the Palestinian Democratic Union. On 10 September 1993 Hawatma opposed the Israeli-Palestinian accord, which was to be signed three days later, and he and Habash announced their resignation from the PLO executive committee. In October both took their organizations into opposition in the Alliance of Palestinian Forces. On 25 October 1999, after meeting with Yasir Arafat in Cairo, Hawatma announced his support for the peace process. In an interview, he declared that the struggle of the DFLP was at once “political and diplomatic.” In April 2001, while the alAqsa Intifada was developing in the Palestinian territories, the leadership of the DFLP launched an appeal for a general mobilization of the Palestinian people and armed resistance against Israel. It took credit for a raid on an Israeli post in the Gaza Strip but in general, in contrast to its earlier years, the DFLP has not been very active. It is much reduced in size and is believed to have about 500 members. In early 2002 Palestinian Authority security began, under Israeli pressure, to round up the members of the DFLP, PFLP, and other groups, leading to public protests against Arafat, but after Israeli attacks in Jenin and Ramallah these groups called for unity among Palestinian political factions. Hawatma has published a number of books and articles on Palestine and the resistance. SEE ALSO Abd Rabbo, Yasir; Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab Nationalist Movement; Arafat, Yasir; BaEth; Black September; Democratic Front for the

162

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Liberation of Palestine; Habash, George; Hashim, al-; Gaza Strip; Madrid Conference; Matzpen; Palestine Communist Party; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Democratic Union; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Rejection Front; Resolution 242; Sadat, Anwar al-; Suez Crisis; West Bank.

HAYDA AL-AMILA LI-TAHRIR FILASTIN ALArab Organization for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

HAYAT, AL- (“life”, in Arabic): Lebanese newspaper, founded in 1946. Its editor in chief, Kamil Mruweh, was assassinated in 1966. The newspaper ceased publication from 1975 to 1988 and resurfaced in 1989. Financed by Saudi sponsors, al-Hayat is published in Beirut, Cairo, London, Paris, and New York. It can be found online at http://www.daralhayat.com

HEBREW: A Semitic language whose origin, according to Biblical tradition, is Shem, Noah’s second son, whose descendents populated the Middle East. Along with Phoenician, and Ugaritic, Hebrew constitutes the Canaanite branch, an evolved form of the language used by the inhabitants of the Land of Canaan before the arrival of the Israelites. A dead language for many centuries, Hebrew became once more a spoken language due to the efforts of Eliezar ben Yehuda (Yitzhak Perlman) in the nineteenth century. Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel. The most ancient known Hebrew inscription is from the Gezer calendar of 950 B.C.E. SEE ALSO Canaan. HEBREW CALENDAR: Israelite time began on the day of Creation, set by tradition on 7 October 3760 B.C.E., a lag of 3760 years in relation to the Gregorian calendar. The Hebrew calendar was established definitively in the fifth century C.E., during the talmudic epoch. The Israelite year is a compromise between the lunar year and the solar year, its duration varying within a cycle of 19 years, which includes 12 common years of 12 months (29/30 days) and 7 embolismic years, each having an extra month of 30 days. SEE ALSO Gregorian Calendar; Talmud. HEBREWS: Early name of a Semitic people of the ancient East, descended from the line of Abraham, whose ancestors today define themselves as “Jews”. Hebrew may have come from the word habirou, or T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HEBRON

habiru, designating tribes who left Egypt for the Canaanite kingdoms after the death of Amenophis IV (Ikhnaton, 1334/1334 B.C.), or from the word ibrim, designating “those beyond the sons of Abraham.” In certain Hebrew writings the name of Abraham appears sometimes under that of the ibri (sons of Eber), which also could be the source of the word “Hebrew.”

HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM: Israeli university. Opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus, the university’s creation as a Jewish institution teaching in Hebrew was considered a major cultural accomplishment among Zionists. By 1947 over a thousand students were enrolled. After the Arab-Israel War of 1948, the Mount Scopus campus was on the Jordanian side of a divided Jerusalem and a new campus was created at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; other campuses were later added, including the Hadassah medical school at Ein Kerem. After the 1967 War, the Mount Scopus campus was rebuilt as the university’s main campus. On 31 July 2002 a bombing of the student cafeteria killed nine and wounded several dozen others. In 2003 nearly 23,000 students, including both Arab and Jewish Israelis, were enrolled in a range of advanced degree programs. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967).

HEBRON: Ancient Canaanite city of Judea, now part of the West Bank, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions situate the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah. The site is known to Jews as the Cave (or Tomb) of the Patriarchs (Mearath ha-Makhpela, in Hebrew) and to Muslims as the Sanctuary of Abraham the Friend (alHaram al-Ibrahimi al-Khalil, in Arabic) or the Ibrahim Mosque. The Arabic name for the city is alKhalil; the Hebrew is Hevron; both mean “friend,” a reference to Abraham, who in sacred Muslim literature is known as “the Friend of God” or “the Friend of the Merciful” (al-Khalil al-Rahman). For Jews, Hebron—which in the Bible was called Qiryat Arba (City of the Four) before the time of Abraham—is one of the four holy cities of Eretz Yisrael, along with Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias. According to Biblical tradition, on the death of King Saul, toward 1010 B.C.E., David was proclaimed King of Israel in Hebron, which became his first capital. The original structure enclosing the cave was built by King Herod the Great (r. 37–4 B.C.E.). The Byzantine rulers made it into a church, and when the Muslims conquered Hebron in 636 C.E. they rebuilt it as a mosque. In 1100 Crusaders took over the city and expelled the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Jews. They destroyed the mosque and the Synagogue of the Caves, building in their place a church dedicated to Saint Abraham. In 1187, after the victory of Saladin over the Crusaders, the mosque was reconstructed. In 1267, a Mamluk sultan, Baybars I, declared that Jews would no longer be allowed to visit the tomb of Abraham. This interdiction stayed in effect until June 1967. A Jewish community remained in Hebron and in 1516 the area came under the rule of the Ottomans, who welcomed to their empire many of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. In the sixteenth century many Sephardic Jewish families settled in Hebron and the city became a center of Jewish learning. For three centuries, except for the sacking of the city by the Egyptians in 1834, the pace of life in Hebron was slow, and Palestine as a whole was something of a backwater. Once Zionist settlement began in the 1880s, and especially after World War I, relations between the Jewish and Arab communities became increasingly tense. On 24 August 1929, following the riots over the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Arabs massacred sixty-seven Jews in Hebron, destroying their synagogue and schools. (The city had only one British policeman.) The remaining Jews, many of whom had been protected by their Arab neighbors, fled. Two years later, thirty-five Jewish families returned, but on 23 April 1936, after months of rising tension and the beginning of a Palestinian general strike (called in reaction to the discovery of Zionist arms shipments into the country), British authorities decided to evacuate them. After the departure of the British and the 1948 War, Jordan inherited control of the West Bank, but as a result of the 1967 War, Israel occupied the area. A messianic interpretation of the conquest of Palestinian territory among ultra-Orthodox Jews encouraged the development of Jewish settlement, and in 1968 the first extremist settlers, under the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, moved into the center of Hebron, registering at a hotel and declaring themselves a new Jewish community. The Israeli government removed them to a disused army camp outside the city, which in 1972 they were allowed to convert to a permanent settlement, Qiryat Arba, where in 1974 the Gush Emunim movement was born. These armed extremists demanded the right to live anywhere they chose in “Greater Israel.” In 1979 Gush Emunim started a permanent settlement in the ancient Jewish quarter in the heart of the city and refused to leave. They engaged in a standoff with the government and the next year, after

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

163

HEBRON

CLASH IN HEBRON. A PALESTINIAN POLICEMAN CONFRONTS A YOUTH THROWING ROCKS AT ISRAELI SOLDIERS IN THE WEST BANK TOWN. HOLY TO JEWS AND MUSLIMS AS THE TRADITIONAL BURIAL SITE OF THE FIRST THREE GENERATIONS OF PATRIARCHS—ABRAHAM, ISAAC, AND JACOB— HEBRON HAS SEEN VIOLENCE BETWEEN ARABS AND JEWS FOR SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS. (AP/Wide World Photos)

six yeshiva students returning from the Tomb of the Patriarchs were killed by Palestinians, the settlement was officially recognized. Since that time the presence of these 400 armed settlers, their deliberately provocative behavior, and their desire, of which they make no secret, to expel the Arabs (an estimated population of 137,000 in 2003)—as well as the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) frequent disruption of the city—have led to violent reactions on the part of the Palestinians, followed by severe Israeli reprisals. Toward the end of 1979, a group of settlers from Qiryat Arba and other settlements formed a clandestine militia, which in June 1980 carried out bomb attacks on three West Bank Palestinian mayors. In 1983 this splinter group killed four students of the Islamic College of Hebron. On 25 February 1994, during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which had started in Madrid in 1991, an American Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, from Qiryat Arba, killed twenty-nine Pal-

164

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

estinians worshipping at the Ibrahim Mosque and wounded sixty others before he was beaten to death while reloading his rifle. An official commission found that he had acted alone and condemned his action; his grave has become a shrine for the Jewish settler movement. In May 1994 the United Nations deployed an unarmed observer unit called the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) to try to calm the situation, but its mandate was allowed to run out that August. On 28 September 1995 Israelis and Palestinians signed the second Oslo Accords, dealing with the extension of Palestinian autonomy to the West Bank and providing for the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from the city of Hebron. The accord led to a wave of violent protests, organized by Israeli settlers and ultra-Orthodox Israelis, followed on 4 November 1995 by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. IsraeliT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HERUT PARTY

Palestinian negotiations were suspended. In May 1996 a new TIPH was constituted and deployed; it was reorganized by treaty in 1997. In June 1996 the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared his lack of confidence in the Oslo Accords. A group of ultranationalist rabbis launched an appeal to Israeli soldiers to disobey any order to withdraw from Hebron. On 15 January 1997, after many months of negotiation, an accord on the city of Hebron was finally signed between the Israelis and Palestinians, providing for the withdrawal of the IDF from four-fifths of the city, with the Jewish inhabitants remaining under the authority of Israel. This accord included a “protocol on the redeployment of the Israeli army in Hebron,” a memorandum on the commitments of both parties to future negotiations, and a letter of guarantee by the U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In the course of the preliminary discussions leading to this accord, the Israeli prime minister insisted that the notion of reciprocity be the basis of future commitments. On 18 January the Israeli army began its withdrawal from Hebron, and the next day Yasir Arafat proclaimed the liberation of the city. Two days later, hundreds of Jewish settlers demonstrated against the retreat of the IDF. Obstructions of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the development of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 resulted in the non-application of the Hebron accords and in many deadly confrontations between the Jewish and Palestinian communities. In March 2002, two TIPH observers were killed by Palestinians, and TIPH discontinued patrols in the Jewish quarter because of confrontations with settlers. In November 2002, twelve Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack by Palestine Islamic Jihad, and in August 2003 a suicide bombing killed twentythree. In 2004, 400 to 600 Jews lived in more than twenty settlements in Hebron, and about 6,000 lived outside the city in Qiryat Arba. The Palestinian population was approximately 16,500 in 1922, 80,000 in 1990, and 137,000 in the city and surrounding villages in 2003. SEE ALSO Abraham; Aqsa Intifada, al-; ArabIsrael War (1967); Arafat, Yasir; Eretz Yisrael; Greater Israel; Gush Emunim; Isaac; Jacob (Biblical); Judea and Samaria; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords II; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Rabin, Yitzhak; Saladin; West Bank; Western Wall.

HEBRON ACCORDS SEE

Hebron.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

HEGIRA SEE

Hijra.

HEGIRA CALENDAR SEE

Islamic Calendar.

HEREM: Hebrew word meaning “banned.” HERUT PARTY (“liberty”, in Hebrew): Israeli political party, founded in 1948 by Menachem Begin, until then head of Irgun. Herut advocated the creation of a Jewish state and picked as its slogan “God has chosen us to rule.” In the first Knesset elections, in January 1949, Herut obtained 11.5 percent of the votes, becoming the fourth largest party, with fourteen seats in the Knesset, whereas the MAPAI (Labor) won forty-six seats. Between 1953 and 1959, after losing six seats in 1951, Herut strove to gain some of the Sephardic vote, which had tended to favor MAPAI; it won seventeen seats in the Knesset and MAPAI won forty-seven. In April 1965, in order to pose a more effective opposition to Labor, Herut allied itself with the Liberal Party, which had separated from the General Zionists to form a parliamentary bloc, the GAHAL, which had twenty-six seats under its control. In 1966 Begin was reproached for weakening the party and on 1 June 1967, just before the 1967 War, he joined the Labor-led government of Levi Eshkol as minister without portfolio. Several other members of GAHAL also joined Eshkol’s cabinet. In October 1969, with twenty-six seats in the Knesset, as opposed to fifty-six for the Labor bloc, six members of the GAHAL bloc entered the Labor government of Golda Meir. Among them, Ezer Weizman, in transportation, was the first general to have joined a rightist party. In August 1970 Begin and his GAHAL allies resigned their positions as soon as the government’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan was announced. During the spring of 1973, Likud (“Consolidation”), a coalition of the Israel right, was constituted under Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir, and led by Begin. It united Herut, the Liberal Party, the Free Center, and the Movement for Greater Israel. During August 1976, after the death of his brother in the Israeli raid on Entebbe, Benjamin Netanyahu joined Herut. At the year’s end, in anticipation of the coming elections, Sharon resigned from the Likud coalition to create his own political group, Shlomzion. In May of the following year, the Likud bloc won the legislative elections with forty-three seats against the Labor

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

165

HERZL, THEODOR

THEODOR HERZL. THE

FOUNDER OF POLITICAL

WROTE A GROUNDBREAKING BOOK IN

1896,

ZIONISM, HERZL

THEN ESTABLISHED A

WORLDWIDE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION AND A FUND TO BUY LAND IN PALESTINE FROM THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND SUPPORT IMMIGRATION TO ESTABLISH A JEWISH HOMELAND THERE. IN JUST EIGHT YEARS, HERZL LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR WHAT BECAME THE STATE OF ISRAEL FORTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH.

Party’s thirty-two. Sharon’s group, with two seats, joined with the Likud coalition. Since 1977 Herut has existed as the senior partner of the Likud coalition, and the Herut/Likud bloc has formed the basis of most Israeli governments since then. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Begin, Menachem; Irgun; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Rogers Plan; Shamir, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; Weizman, Ezer.

HERZL, THEODOR (1860–1904): Born in Budapest in May 1860, died in Austria in 1904. Theodor Herzl, journalist and writer, is considered the founder of political Zionism. In 1894, as a correspondent in Paris, then literary contributor to the Neue Freie Presse, he was struck by the anti-Semitism that the Dreyfus affair brought to light, posing questions about the assimilation of the Jews. In his 1896 book

166

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

The Jewish State, he propounded his conception of Zionism, proposing the creation of a state that would allow Jews to live with dignity and in security. The following year he organized a meeting of the First Zionist Congress at Basel, in the course of which a strategy aimed at the purchase of land in Palestine was adopted. The project launched by Herzl was supported by Russian Jews who had been victims of pogroms, but met resistance from German and French Jews, who were better integrated into their countries. Theodor Herzl first turned to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, so as to persuade him to “restore” a part of Palestine to the Jews. On 17 June 1901, the Sultan received him and informed him of his intention of extending special protection to the Jews, who he envisaged settling in Turkish territory, in exchange for their creating a fund that would be used to pay off the Turkish debt. A Jewish National Fund was established to finance Jewish emigration to Palestine. In 1902 Theodor Herzl published a utopian novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land), in which he depicted a new society where technological advances would allow the resolution of social conflicts. In May 1903, the British minister of colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, proposed Uganda as a place for a Jewish homeland. On 23 August of the same year, the British proposition was rejected by the Zionist Congress. On 3 July 1904, Theodor Herzl died in Austria, and David Wolffson succeeded him at the head of the organization. SEE ALSO

Zionism.

HERZOG, CHAIM (1918–1997): Israeli military and political figure born in 1918, in Belfast (Ireland), died in 1997. In 1936, Chaim Herzog came to Israel, where he joined up with the Haganah. Two years later he returned to Great Britain to study law. At the outbreak of World War II he enlisted in the British Army, where he served as an officer in the intelligence service. In 1946 he married Ora Ambash, whose sister was the wife of Abba Eban. He finished his legal studies in Palestine and became the head of the security section of the Jewish Agency. At the time of the first Arab-Israel war in 1948, he was assigned to the Israeli intelligence services. Two years later he was named military attaché to the Israeli embassy in Washington. In 1957 he returned to Israel and became commander of the Central military region. After three years as commander Herzog was promoted to the rank of general and became head of the Aman (Israeli military intelligence service). Two years later, he resigned from the army to start a law career and then a political one. In 1965 he joined the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HIJRA

Party; Jewish Agency for Israel; Peres, Shimon; RAFI Party; TAMI; West Bank.

HESHVAN: Name of the second month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the end of October and the beginning of November. SEE ALSO Hebrew Calendar. HEZBALLAH SEE

Hizbullah.

HEZBOLLAH SEE

Hizbullah.

HIBBAT ZION: The first international Zionist organi-

CHAIM HERZOG. AN IMPORTANT EARLY FIGURE IN ISRAELI MILITARY HERZOG WAS THE FIRST MILITARY GOVERNOR OF THE OCCUPIED WEST BANK AND THEN THE ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS. HE CULMINATED HIS CAREER WITH TWO ELECTIONS IN THE 1980S AS PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL. INTELLIGENCE AND COMMAND,

RAFI Party, along with David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres. In June, during the 1967 War, he became the leading military commentator on Israel’s national radio, Kol Israel. After the war’s end, he resumed his service in the Israel Defense Force to become the first military governor of the occupied West Bank. In 1969 he quit the army for a career in the Israel Labor Party. In 1975 he was named Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. In 1983, two years after having been elected Member of Knesset on the Labor ticket, he was a candidate to succeed Yitzhak Navon as the president of the Jewish state. Much to everyone’s surprise, he was elected to the presidency, partly owing to the backing of the Sephardi party, TAMI. In 1988 he was reelected for a second term. Herzog died in Apri1 1997, at the age of 79. For many Israelis he remains “the president of the Jewish people” because of the great efforts he made to tighten the ties between the Diaspora and the Jewish state. Aman; Arab-Israel War (1967); BenGurion, David; Diaspora; Eban, Abba; Haganah; Israel Defense Force; Israel Labor

SEE ALSO

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

zation, Hibbat Zion was founded in 1884 by Leo Pinsker, a Russian doctor practicing in Odessa, following the Russian pogroms of 1881 and 1882. Pinsker argued that Jews of the Diaspora were not safe in their adopted homes and asserted that liberation could be achieved only by establishing a national homeland in Palestine. His organization consisted of Jewish traditionalists as well as secular nationalists from Eastern Europe. This mixed membership created internal differences. At the bidding of its orthodox members, Hibbat Zion offered financial aid to settlers in Palestine only if they agreed to observe Judaism and its traditions. Secular nationalists like Pinsker were troubled by this policy, and differences continued to plague the organization. It did manage to establish a few colonies, including Petah Tikvah, and it is thought to have influenced the growth of other Zionist groups in Eastern Europe.

HIJAB: Traditional scarf worn by Muslim women to cover their hair. HIJAZ: Coastal, mountainous region of the Red Sea located in Saudi Arabia, stretching north to south, and toward the interior of the country. The principal cities of the Hijaz are Mecca and Medina, holy sites of Islam; Jeddah, TaDif, and Yanbu. HIJRA (“migration”, in Arabic): The voyage of prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in July 622 (12 rabi al-awwal) to escape the hostility of the Meccans. The word has also been interpreted to mean “breaking old ties,” that is, marking the break between the time of ignorance and the time of knowledge. Muhammad’s hijra marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar; thus Muslim dates are referred to as hijri years, or A.H. (anno hegirae).

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

167

HILONI

SEE ALSO

Muhammad.

HILONI: Hebrew word utilized to designate a secular Jew.

HILULA: Hebrew word used to designate a pilgrimage to the tomb of a Jewish sage.

HINDI, AMIN AL- (Abu Zuhayr; 1939– ): Palestinian activist, born in Gaza, Palestine. Between 1968 and 1972 Amin al-Hindi was secretary of the Palestinian Student Union in Berlin, where he was a student. After joining Fatah, he was assigned to the security services, headed by Salah Khalaf. At the end of 1972 he joined the radical Iqab group, backed by Libya and considered a branch of the Black September Organization. In September 1973, while participating in preparations for an attack on an Israeli El Al plane, he was arrested in Ostia, Italy, with four other Palestinians, among whom was Atef Bseisso. The five were freed a few weeks later by the Italian authorities. On 5 November 1975 he was sent by Yasir Arafat to King Hassan II of Morocco with a message of support on the question of the Moroccan Sahara. Two years later al-Hindi became the leader of the organization section of Fatah, maintaining contacts with Cuban, East German, Yugoslavian, and other information services. In 1981 he was elected to the Fatah revolutionary council and became one of Khalaf’s principal assistants. In 1982 he followed Arafat into exile in Tunis, where he kept his post in al-Fatah’s unified security leadership. In February 1991, after the assassinations of Khalaf and of Hayel Abdul Hamid, he became interim head of security services under Arafat’s direct control and was often in touch with significant Arab and European security figures. On 17 September 1993, during the application of the Israeli-Palestinian accords on partial autonomy of the Palestinian territories, Arafat named him head of the Palestinian foreign intelligence service. In 2004 he headed the General Intelligence Service in the Gaza Strip and held the rank of major general. He has been proposed as Palestinian Authority interior minister if and when Israel withdraws from Gaza. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Black September Organization; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; Iqab; Khalaf, Salah; Palestinian Authority.

Israel Labor Party and controls a large portion of the Israeli economy. The Histadrut functions as an umbrella organization for trade unions and has played a significant role in the development of Israeli agriculture, in the marketing of food and other products, in construction and housing, in insurance, in health, and in social services. Approximately three-quarters of all wage earners in Israel are Histradut members. About forty trade unions are affiliated with the organization, with approximately 85 percent of the Israeli labor force covered by labor agreements negotiated by Histadrut. In the 1920s its major role was to help develop the Jewish economy; to this end it founded Bank Hapoalim (Workers’ Bank) and developed a wide range of economic enterprises, including construction and industrial companies. Its financial enterprises were successful until the 1980s, when many Histradut companies and affiliates faced serious financial difficulties. The government provided financial assistance and stipulated changes in management. The Labor Party subsequently distanced itself from the Histradut bureaucracy, which it considered an electoral liability. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party.

HIZB AL-DAEWA AL-ISLAMIYYA (Islamic Appeal Party,

in Arabic): Lebanese ShiEite movement that surfaced at the end of 1979 to spread the Iranian Islamic revolution. Better known simply as al-DaEwa, it issued from the Iraqi al-DaEwa, founded in 1957. Starting in 1970, Iraqi ShiEite religious leaders sent their followers to Lebanon to teach the fundamentals of their movement. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, ShiEite proselytism was directed by Tehran through the intermediary of its Syrian representative, the Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. The Lebanese branch of al-DaEwa, headed by Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, one of the highest Lebanese ShiEite dignitaries, advocated an Islamic republic in Lebanon. In 1981 Ayatollah Khomeini recommended dissolving al-DaEwa, considering the party system a Western phenomenon. The members of the movement joined AMAL to found, in February 1985, the Lebanese Hizbullah. SEE ALSO Hizbullah.

HIZBALLAH HISTADRUT: Israeli federation of labor; in full, haHistadrut ha-Klalit shel ha-Ovdim ha-Irvriim beEretz-Yisrael (General Organization of the Jewish Workers in Eretz Yisrael). Constituted in 1920, this union has been linked, ever since its start, to the

168

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE

Hizbullah.

HIZB’ALLAH SEE

T H E

Hizbullah.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HIZBULLAH

HISTADRUT MEETING. GOLDA MEIR (CENTER, STANDING) SPEAKS IN 1946 AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF HISTADRUT, WHICH WAS FOUNDED IN 1920 TO ORGANIZE ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES OF JEWISH WORKERS. IT HAS BECOME AN UMBRELLA ORGANIZATION AFFILIATED WITH ABOUT FORTY TRADE UNIONS, AFFECTING 85 PERCENT OF ISRAELI WORKERS. (© Photograph by Zoltan Kluger. Government Press Office [GPO] of Israel)

HIZBOLLAH SEE

Hizbullah.

HIZBULLAH (Hizb Allah, “Party of God”, in Arabic):

Lebanese ShiEite Islamist movement, officially constituted in February 1985 but with roots reaching back to the beginning of the 1980s. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, a group encouraged by Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the revolutionary Iranian government’s ambassador in Syria, and led by Hussein Moussawi, formed a faction within AMAL, a ShiEite group that had come under Syrian influence and become, in the Moussawi group’s opinion, too conservative. This new group was known as the Islamic AMAL Faction. Three years later, under the guidance of Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the leader of the disbanded Iranian-backed Hizb al-DaEwa al-Islamiya (Islamic Appeal Party), this faction separated from AMAL to form Hizbullah. Fadlallah became its spiritual mentor, and the movement was swollen by the influx of the revolutionary D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

guards (pasdaran) of Subhi Tufayli. Backed by Iran, Hizbullah advocated an Islamic regime in Lebanon and active resistance against the Israeli invasion and occupation of South Lebanon. Concurrently it set up a charity system that was much appreciated by the Lebanese ShiEite population. Between 1982 and 1988, in addition to fighting the Israelis, Hizbullah and its predecessor organizations also attacked Western troops. A multinational force had been deployed to protect the withdrawing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1982 and it was brought back after the assassination of Bashir Jumayyil and the Israeli/Phalange massacre at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. In 1983 American and French troops intervened in the ongoing civil war in favor of the Lebanese army, which was actually a partisan Maronite force. Hizbullah (under the name Islamic Jihad) is believed to have been responsible for suicide bombings that killed 241 American and 56 French soldiers in October 1983 and also kidnapped dozens of foreign nationals, especially

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

169

HIZBULLAH

Americans, to hold as hostages. Ransoms were paid in exchange for some of these, and others were executed. Some of these acts were meant to discourage further American assistance to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). They had no such effect, although one ransom paid by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan took the form of weapons sold to Iran for use against Iraq—part of what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. (Israel was known to be supplying weapons to Iran at the same time.) Between 1985 and 1989, Hizbullah also fought frequently with the Syrian-backed AMAL and maintained a constant state of high tension in South Lebanon through repeated attacks by the Islamic Resistance Army (al-Muqawama al-Islamiya al-Mussalaha), its military wing, against the South Lebanon Army (SLA), an Israeli proxy, and through firing regular salvos of rockets into the north of Galilee. These actions were sometimes coordinated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine— General Command. In August 1989 Hizbullah’s leader in South Lebanon, Abdul Karim Obeid, was kidnapped by an Israeli commando; he was released in February 2004, along with Mustafa Dirani, who was captured in 1994. In 1990, with the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Hizbullah refused to join the national government, believing that the government was not committed to expelling the Israelis and that ShiEites continued to be discriminated against, as they had been in the past. Although all Lebanese militias were to disarm under the TaDif Accord, Hizbullah refused and the government was not strong enough to force it to. Hizbullah did, however, confine its military activity to fighting Israel and the SLA in the south. In the meantime, dissension developed within the movement as a consequence of internal power struggles in Tehran. In 1986 two currents appeared in Hizbullah, a minority headed by Hassan Nasrallah, siding with Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Hizbullah’s original Iranian patron and now the former Iranian minister of the interior; and the majority led by Subhi Tufayli and Abbas al-Moussawi favoring the Iranian president, Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. During October 1989 members close to Fadlallah were dismissed from their positions because of conflict between Fadlallah and Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi, the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had died in June. In November, Tufayli became secretary general of Hizbullah, which led to divisions between his followers and Fadlallah’s. Hoping to take control of the movement, Syria attempted to amplify these dissensions. In 1991 Tufayli lost the leadership of the movement to Moussawi, who was assassinated on 16 February

170

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

1992 by an Israeli commando. The post of secretary general was filled by Hassan Nasrallah, who favored active involvement in Lebanese politics. He succeeded to the extent of having eight Hizbullahbacked candidates (including two Sunnis and two Christians) elected to the Lebanese parliament in 1992, the first general election since before the civil war. In July 1993 a Hizbullah attack killed two Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers and the Israelis responded with a week’s bombardment that killed 139 Lebanese and left 250,000 homeless. In January 1994 confrontations in Baalbek between the Tufayli and Nasrallah factions clearly revealed the internal divisions in the movement. Tufayli opposed the integration of Hizbullah into Lebanese politics, advocating struggle against Israel even if the latter were to withdraw from South Lebanon. In 1996, in response to more Hizbullah rocketing of the Galilee, the Israelis launched Operation Grapes of Wrath against targets near Beirut and in South Lebanon, including a United Nations base where 100 Palestinian refugees were killed; 400,000 Lebanese were left homeless. In November 1997, anticipating an Israeli retreat from South Lebanon and preparing to participate in Lebanese political life, Hizbullah’s leadership launched an appeal to Lebanese of all confessions to join with them in a broad-based national resistance. New recruits were inducted into a unit formed especially for them, the Lebanese National Resistance Brigade. Attacks against Israel were especially heavy in 1997 and 1998. In February 1998, accused of wanting to divide the movement, Tufayli was expelled from Hizbullah. In May 1999 Ehud Barak won the prime ministerial election in Israel by promising to withdraw the IDF from Lebanon. On 13 January 2000 Israel freed twenty-seven Lebanese, including twelve Hizbullah members, who had been detained for months in SLA prisons. On 30 January the secondin-command of the SLA, Colonel Aki Hashem, was killed in a Hizbullah bombing. Between 17 and 20 May 2000, after Israel had officially informed the United Nations of its decision to withdraw its troops from South Lebanon before 7 July, intense artillery duels occurred between Hizbullah forces and the IDF. On 21 May, weakened by many desertions, the SLA abandoned a number of positions, which were immediately occupied by the Hizbullah. In the 2000 parliamentary elections, Hizbullah and AMAL ran a combined list of candidates and won the majority of the constituencies in the south and the Beqaa Valley. In October 2000 the leadership of Hizbullah claimed responsibility for the kidnapping in SwitzerT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HOJATOLISLAM

land of an Israeli reserve officer, who was later used in a prisoner exchange with Israel. On 7 August 2001 the advisory council of the movement reelected Shaykh Nasrallah as secretary general of Hizbullah. Shaykh Naim Qassem was also reelected assistant secretary general, Hassan Khalil political counselor, Ibrahim Amin al-Sayed head of the political section, and Muhammad Yazbek director of religious affairs. Hashem Saffieddin was named head of the executive council, Jawad Noureddin director of coordination of resistance activities, and Nabil Qawuk leader of the movement for South Lebanon. Hizbullah has continued to attack Israel with rockets and artillery, both in the Shabaa Farms area of southern Lebanon, which it still occupies, and across the border, occasionally provoking a severe response. Hizbullah continues to receive support from Iran and Syria, which sees it as almost the only group that has had any success against Israel, and it has become the major ShiEite political and social organization in southern Lebanon. SEE ALSO AMAL; Barak, Ehud; Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn; Grapes of Wrath Operation; Iran-Iraq War; Jumayyil, Bashir; Maronites; Palestine Liberation Organization; Phalange; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command; Sabra and Shatila; South Lebanon; South Lebanon Army; Tufayli, Subhi Ali al-.

HIZBULLAH-PALESTINE (Hizb Allah-Filistin): Palestinian Islamic movement, created in Lebanon in August 1989 following dissension in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) between Fathi Shiqaqi and Ahmad Hassan Muhanna. Benefiting from Iranian help, the Palestinian Hizbullah set up its base in Lebanon. After a few military operations against Israeli soldiers in South Lebanon, carried out between 1990 and 1992, the movement ceased activity in the autumn of 1992, most of its members rejoining either the Lebanese Hizbullah or the PIJ. The movement has sometimes been called Harakat al-Nafir al-Islami (Islamic Mobilization Movement). SEE ALSO Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Shiqaqi, Fathi. HOBEIKA, ELIE (1956–2002): Lebanese Maronite politician, born in the Kesrouan, Lebanon. After studying business, Elie Hobeika entered a career in banking. In 1976, when the civil war broke out, he joined the Lebanese Forces, the militia of the Maronite Phalange. Four years later, after attracting notice for his intelligence and organizational abilities, he D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

was entrusted by Bashir Jumayyil, leader of the Phalange, with the direction the Lebanese Forces’ intelligence services. In 1983, at the time of the inquest into the Sabra and Shatila massacres, he was named as one of those responsible for this operation, which had been carried out by the Christian militia against the Palestinians. On 11 May 1985, backed by Samir Geagea, he was called upon to head the executive committee of the Lebanese Forces. On 28 December, to end the war between the militias, he concluded an accord with the leaders of AMAL and the Progressive Socialist Party, which made his ties to Damascus apparent and led to discontent among the principal leaders of the Christian community. Under pressure from the latter, on 15 January 1986 he resigned his command of the Lebanese Forces and was replaced by Geagea. On the following 28 January, Hobeika declared his support for the ex-president Sulayman Franjiyya, who was demanding the resignation of President Jumayyil. On 27 September, in a militia called Movement of 9 May, his partisans tried and failed to take control of a portion Beirut’s Christian suburbs. On 30 December 1990 he became minister of state in charge of refugees in the national unity government led by Omar Karamé. In February 1991 he founded a small party, Al-Waad, and was elected a deputy. On 30 October 1992 he joined the cabinet of Rafiq Hariri. In December 1998, after Emile Lahoud became president and Hariri refused to form a new cabinet, he resigned his minister’s post. Although he planned to run for the presidency, Hobeika was defeated in the legislative elections of September 2000. His part in the Sabra and Shatila massacres caught up with him and he was forced to withdraw from politics. He was assassinated in a car-bombing in Beirut. A Lebanese group opposing Syria’s continued grip on the country claimed responsibility, calling Hobeika a traitor for his allegiance to Damascus, but its claim was never confirmed. Speculation also centered on Syria, which may have objected to Hobeika’s known cooperation with the CIA, and on Israel, since on the day before his assassination Hobeika had agreed to testify in a war crimes case brought against Ariel Sharon in Belgium over the Sabra and Shatila massaces. SEE ALSO AMAL; Franjiyya, Sulayman; Geagea, Samir; Hariri, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-; Jumayyil, Bashir; Lebanese Forces; Phalange; Sabra and Shatila; Sharon, Ariel.

HOJATOLISLAM (hojjat al-islam): An honorific accorded to a respected ShiEa cleric. The word means “reason, proof of Islam”; by extension, it designates

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

171

HOLOCAUST

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. PRIESTS STAND OUTSIDE THE CHURCH IN JERUSALEM THAT WAS BUILT OVER THE TRADITIONAL SITE OF THE CHRIST. THE CHURCH, WHICH DRAWS CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, IS DIVIDED INTO SEVERAL AREAS CONTROLLED BY DIFFERENT CHRISTIAN DENOMINATIONS. (© Paul A. Souders/Corbis)

CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS

one who is capable and worthy of explicating the religion. SEE ALSO ShiEa.

HOLOCAUST: Designates the persecutions and extermination systems of which Jews were the victims in Europe, dominated by the Nazi regime during World War II. The roots of the word go back to religious sacrifices practiced in ancient Israel B.C.E., during which an animal victim was consumed by fire. Most Israelis and many Jews prefer to use the word Shoah to describe the extermination of the Jews during World War II, since the word holocaust implies an idea of sacrifice to a higher being. SEE ALSO Shoah.

HOLY SEPULCHER: Constructed in 326, during the reign of the Emperor Constantine, this building in Jerusalem was meant to protect the tomb of Christ. The structure was originally made up of a group of

172

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

churches but Constantine gave orders for it to be made into an architectural monument. The original cave and much of the structure were carved away and broken down by Muslim ruler al-Hakim in 1009 as part of a plan to destroy the Christian sanctuary and Christianity itself. The structure was rebuilt between 1030 and 1048 by order of Byzantine Emperor Monomachus. On 27 November 1095 Pope Urban II called for a crusade to protect the Holy Sepulcher. An army of Crusaders occupied Jerusalem on 15 July and seven days later Godfrey de Bouillon took the title Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. In 1149 Crusaders combined the remaining structures into a Romanesque church with a twostory façade, giving the structure its current architectural form. The building’s interior includes a rotunda, which is modeled after the Pantheon, and an Orthodox cathedral. The former houses a shrine covering the tomb of Christ. Several Christian denominations have chapels within the shrine and regularly guard their areas. Roman Catholic, Greek OrT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HUSAYNI, FAYSAL AL-

thodox, and Armenian Orthodox groups share the control of the shrine, although Ethiopian, Egyptian Coptic, and Syrian churches also are present. The Muslim Nuseibeh and Joudeh families were given the sole key to the church by the Arab conqueror Saladin in the twelfth century, ensuring that no one sect could take control of the shrine. In June 1999 the leaders of all of the denominations agreed to install a new door in the church in order to provide a safe and orderly exit for the millions of pilgrims who were expected to visit the following year. SEE ALSO Christianity.

HOLY WAR: Armed struggle undertaken in the name of God, accompanied by promises of spiritual rewards. In current Western discourse, the Arabic term jihad (struggle) is sometimes taken to have this meaning exclusively, although in Islam the word most often refers to the struggle to create a more just social order (the “lesser jihad”), or the personal struggle with the self to be a better Muslim (the “greater jihad”). SEE ALSO Jihad.

HOSS, SALIM AL- (1929– ): Lebanese Sunni Muslim political figure. Salim Hoss was born into a middleclass family in Beirut. After obtaining a degree in economics from the American University of Beirut, then a doctorate in economics at Indiana University in the United States, he taught economics at the American University of Beirut for about ten years. Between 1964 and 1966 he was a financial advisor in Kuwait and in 1967 he was named president of the Central Bank of Lebanon’s commission on bank inspection. During this time he formed a friendship with Elias Sarkis, director of the Central Bank, and then became his advisor when Sarkis was elected president. In September 1976 he was named prime minister, holding the portfolios of commerce, industry, oil, and intelligence. As prime minister in the midst of the civil war (1975–1990), he made efforts to apply an “Arab solution”, recommended at the Cairo summit. After the resumption of fighting between the militias and the Syrian army, and then the Israeli invasion of 1978, he formed a third national unity cabinet. On 25 October 1980, unable to master the internal situation in Lebanon, he resigned his position as prime minister and was replaced by Shafiq Wassan. In 1984 he joined the government of Prime Minister Rashid Karame as social affairs minister. After Karame’s assassination, President Amin Jumayyil asked him to form a new government. On 22 SepD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tember 1988 Jumayyil replaced him with General Michel Aoun at the head of a military government consisting of generals. Hoss refused to step down, and for a time Lebanon had two prime ministers. He resigned in the autumn of 1989, and on 13 November he was asked by the new president of the Republic, René MuEawwad, to form a new national unity government. On 31 December 1990 he was replaced by Omar Karame. In the legislative elections of 1992, he headed the opposition list to the government’s candidates. Elected representative for Beirut, he formed a “Bloc for Salvation and Change,” which attracted some influential people and aggressively challenged the economic policies of the new prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. In 1996 he suffered a setback in the legislative elections, leading him to join with the National Assembly, which united six prominent figures of the opposition. Hoss again became prime minister on 2 December 1998, after General Emile Lahhud was elected president and Hariri refused to form a new government. For the first time, the great feudal barons and warlords were left out of a new cabinet. As soon as he assumed his duties, he began a reform of the Lebanese public service through a purge of cadres suspected of corruption. Hoss has won respect for his abilities as a manager, but the Sunni community reproached him for his selfeffacing manner as prime minister, which worked to the benefit of the republic’s presidency. On 17 October 2000 the victory of Hariri’s party in the legislative elections prompted Hoss to step down as prime minister and Hariri became prime minister again. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Hariri, Rafiq; Jumayyil, Amin; Karame, Rashid; Lahhud, Emile.

HOVEVEI ZION SEE

Hibbat Zion.

HURRIYAH, AL- (“Liberty”): Palestinian weekly publication, started in 1960 by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Published in Beirut and available online in Arabic at http:// www.alhourriah.org. SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

HUSAYN, ABDULLAH IBN SEE

Abdullah II ibn Hussein.

HUSAYNI, FAYSAL AL- (Husseini, Feisal; 1940–2001): Palestinian politician. Faysal al-Husayni was born in Baghdad into the prominent and influential Husayni

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

173

HUSAYNI, FAYSAL AL-

family. His father, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, a Palestinian nationalist leader, was killed in combat on 9 April 1948 at the Battle of al-Qastal, just before the proclamation of the State of Israel. His grandfather, Musa Kazim al-Husayni, was one of the leaders of the Arab struggle against the British occupation. His great-uncle was Hajj Amin al-Husayni. After his father’s death, he was raised by his uncle’s family. In 1958, after studying science in Baghdad, he enrolled in the University of Cairo, where he was acquainted briefly with Yasir Arafat, whom he replaced as head of the Palestinian Students Union. In May 1964, while living in Jerusalem, he joined the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1966 he underwent military training in a Palestinian camp in Syria. In 1967, after returning to Israel, he was imprisoned for a number of months by Israeli authorities. In 1979, as a member of the Supreme Islamic Council of Jerusalem, he founded the Arab Studies Society in East Jerusalem. Between 1982 and 1987 he was under sentence of house arrest and then accused of being an underground leader of Fatah and again imprisoned. On 12 September 1987 he was sentenced to six months of detention for having had contact with a Likud leader, Moshe Amirav. On 30 July 1988 he was sentenced to six months in prison after the Israelis occupied his office and found a document dealing with the creation of an independent Palestinian state and the formation of a government-in-exile. When this document was published it provoked a controversy in Israel. In March 1989 he was able for the first time to obtain an exit visa from Israel to travel to London and New York to attend a peace conference. On 29 July he was invited to speak by Israel Labor Party authorities and proposed negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. On 23 January 1990, after the intervention of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, he was released from confinement by Israeli authorities. In mid-April, after being questioned a number of times by Israeli authorities, he participated in a conference in Brussels, where he was the invited guest of the Jewish Lay Community Center. On 27 June, he attended an Israeli-Palestinian meeting in Stockholm organized by Swedish authorities. After this meeting, he went to the United States, where he pleaded the Palestinian cause before influential American figures. In March 1991 he met three times with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. On 8 May, accompanied by Hanan Ashrawi, he had discussions with Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, in London. In the course of the summer, his popularity rose in the Palestinian territory.

174

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

On 28 October, in spite of Israeli reluctance, he was named to head the Palestinian delegation’s commission of orientation for the Middle East peace conference in Madrid. However, Israel refused to allow Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem and PLO members in the delegation, and he did not participate directly. This did not prevent him, in the two years that followed, from being one of the principal negotiators of the peace process that had started in Madrid. Between March and April 1993, he met many times with heads of state and government leaders involved in these discussions. On 26 March he was in Washington with Ashrawi to try to restart the peace process. During his stay, he had a one-onone conversation with the secretary of state, Warren Christopher. On 9 April Israel officially accepted him as part the Palestinian delegation at peace negotiations. On 8 June he was received by the Amir of Qatar in an attempt to end the stalemate in relations between the emirate and the PLO, which had been broken off at the time of the Gulf War. On 8 August, disapproving of the parallel negotiations in which the leadership of the PLO was engaged, he, Ashwari, and Saib Erekat, principal negotiators in the peace process, threatened to resign from the Palestinian delegation. On 4 May 1994 he declined to go to Cairo for the signing of the IsraeliPalestinian accord on the application of Palestinian autonomy in order to express his opposition to its content. At the end of the month, after much negotiating, he joined the Palestinian Authority (PA) as minister-without-portfolio in charge of the Jerusalem question. His offices were in Orient House in East Jerusalem, which had been built in the nineteenth century by a member of the Husayni family and was the headquarters of the PA representatives in Jerusalem and considered by Palestinians the seat of their future national government. Israel, which had annexed East Jerusalem and considered it Israeli territory, disputed their right to be there. A majority of the inhabitants of the occupied territories considered Faysal al-Husayni a leader of Palestinian nationalism. He favored the constitution of a Palestinian state, integrated into a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. He died in Kuwait of a heart attack. In August 2001 Israeli authorities seized Orient House, closing the Arab Studies Society and the PA offices and seizing all archives, documents, and property. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Christopher, Warren; Erekat, Saib Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Israel Labor Party; Likud; Orient House;

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HUSAYNI, HAJJ AMIN AL-

Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority.

HUSAYNI, HAJJ AMIN AL- (1895–1974): Mufti (Islamic jurist) of Jerusalem and Palestinian nationalist leader. Hajj Amin al-Husayni was born in Jerusalem into one of Palestine’s most prominent landholding families. He attended al-Azhar University for a year and, briefly, the Dar al-DaEwa wa al-Irshad (House of Prayer and Guidance), run by Rashid Rida, a panIslamic reformer, which were both in Cairo; he also attended the Military Academy in Istanbul. During World War I, al-Husayni served in the Turkish army, from which he deserted in 1916 to join the Arab Revolt under Husayn ibn Ali al-Hashem, sharif of Mecca. In 1919, as president of the nationalist Arab Club (al-Nadi al-Arabi), he supported the creation of a Greater Syria, to be ruled by Amir (later King) Faysal ibn Husayn al-Hashem, a son of Sharif Husayn. From February to April 1920 he helped to organize several protests, the last of which turned into an antiZionist riot that ended in the deaths of five Jews and four Arabs. Sentenced in absentia to ten years of hard labor, he fled first to Damascus, Syria, where he worked for the Arab nationalist government of Amir (later King) Faysal, and then, when Faysal was expelled by the French, to Transjordan. He was pardoned in April 1921 by the British high commissioner, who appointed him mufti of Jerusalem, succeeding his brother Kamal, who had died. (Their father had also held the position.) In 1922 Hajj Amin al-Husayni (Hajj is an honorific designating someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca) was named president of the newly established Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, a position that gave him control of Muslim religious institutions and made him a prominent and influential public figure. He opposed British proposals for a Palestinian legislative council and warned of Zionist plans for Palestine but in the 1920s was not active in political opposition. In 1929, when violence broke out over the Western Wall, he attempted to pacify the angry Palestinians and helped the Mandate government try to restore peace. He also, however, publicly opposed British policy on Zionist immigration and land purchases and tried to persuade the British to change it. Late in 1929 he participated in negotiations with the British over a compromise political settlement, but it was rejected by Zionist leaders. In this period he became the most visible Palestinian political leader and was in frequent discussions with the British. In 1931, as president of the World IslamD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

MUFTI OF JERUSALEM. HAJJ AMIN AL-HUSAYNI (SHOWN IN A 1938 PHOTOGRAPH) ROSE TO PROMINENCE AS A PALESTINIAN NATIONALIST LEADER IN THE EARLY 1920S. OPPOSED TO BRITISH RULE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN PALESTINE, HE ASSOCIATED HIMSELF WITH NAZI GERMANY DURING WORLD WAR II. HUSAYNI’S INFLUENCE DECLINED OVER THE NEXT TWO DECADES. (© UPI/Bettmann/Corbis)

ic Congress, he organized an Islamic conference in Jerusalem to generate anti-Zionist feeling among Arabs and Muslims outside Palestine, but it was had little effect on the British. In April 1936, at the beginning of a Palestinian general strike called after the discovery that Zionists were smuggling arms into the country, he organized the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), an ad hoc coalition of political leaders that took over direction of the strike. The AHC sought to defend Palestinian interests against the increasing power of Zionist institutions by boycotting Jewish businesses and demanding an end to Zionist land purchases and Jewish immigration, and ultimately by replacing British rule with an independent elected Palestinian government. Taking this position meant that alHusayni could no longer conciliate the British; the Palestinian community would no longer allow it, and

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

175

HUSAYNI, HAJJ AMIN AL-

the strike was escalating into a popular armed revolt against the British rule and British policies, which favored the Zionist project. The AHC rejected the recommendation of the Peel Commission in June 1937 that Palestine be partitioned between the Arab and Zionist communities. In October the British outlawed the AHC. Four committee members were arrested and the rest escaped the country. Al-Husayni fled to Beirut, where he continued to organize the rebellion, which lasted until the spring of 1939. Although the White Paper of May 1939 recommended limiting Jewish immigration and proposed an unpartitioned, independent Palestine with an Arab majority, al-Husayni, no longer trusting the British, rejected it, as did the Zionists. After the start of World War II, he escaped to Iraq, where he became involved in the nationalist resistance to de facto British rule there. He also began receiving financial assistance from the Germans, to whom he represented himself as the head of the panArab movement, and engaged in diplomatic discussions with them, which produced nothing concrete. After a nationalist coup in Iraq in April 1941, the British government of Winston Churchill sent in a team recruited from the outlawed Zionist group Irgun to assassinate al-Husayni; the attempt failed, but when British troops overthrew the new regime in May he fled to Iran, where he was given asylum by Reza Shah. In June, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, both the Russians and the British invaded Iran; Reza Shah was forced to abdicate and alHusayni went into hiding. Eventually he escaped through Turkey and Italy, where he met with Benito Mussolini, to Germany, where he was received by Adolf Hitler. Hitler, whose beliefs about Arabs were comparable to his beliefs about Jews, gave him assurances of his support for Arab and Palestinian independence in return for Arab help against the British, although he would not make his support public. AlHusayni conducted propaganda broadcasts and attempted to recruit for a German-Arab Legion, which the Germans wanted to send to the Eastern Front rather than the Middle East. After the war, he went to Switzerland but was refused asylum and handed himself over to the French, who could not decide what to do with him. The French were not anxious to be seen punishing him, since he was still popular in the Middle East. The British proposed deporting him to the Seychelles, but the French would not agree. In May 1946 he escaped from the house near Paris, where he was interned, and went to Cairo, where he was given asylum by King Faruq. From Cairo he attempted to revive his

176

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

political influence in Palestine with the help of his cousin Jamal al-Husayni, who was attempting from his own exile to revive the Arab Higher Committee, and of his nephew Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, who led a Palestinian militia. He could do little without the help of the League of Arab States, which had in effect become the strongest force in Palestinian politics, the only Arab political grouping that could potentially match the strength of the Zionist government, the Jewish Agency for Israel. But the league was a creature of the Arab governments and was not united over Palestine. Al-Husayni and Palestinian nationalism had supporters in the league, but all moves for Palestinian independence were opposed by Amir Abdullah of Transjordan (Abdullah I), who wanted to annex Palestinian territory to his country and was secretly working with the Jewish Agency toward this end. Abdullah refused to deal with al-Husayni, as did the Jewish Agency. In 1946 the Arab League created a new Arab Higher Committee to represent Palestinians, with alHusayni as chairman, but it proved ineffective. The paramilitary forces under its nominal control were uncoordinated and no match for the Haganah, and the league would not agree to allow the committee to form a shadow government. Al-Husayni rejected United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine and on 1 December 1947 launched an appeal for a general strike among the Palestinians. In April 1948 his nephew Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was killed in the Battle of al-Qastal against a Jewish militia. In September 1948, after most of Palestine was already lost to the State of Israel, the Arab League allowed the AHC to set up an AllPalestine Government based in Gaza with alHusayni as president. It lasted for only a few weeks, in the few square miles controlled by the Egyptian army. Stripped by Abdullah of his title of mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husayni became active in Syria and Egypt, trying to recapture a position as leader of the Palestinian people. In 1951 he became spiritual head of the Muslim Congress of Karachi, Pakistan. The same year, he was suspected of having ordered the assassination of Abdullah by a Palestinian in Jerusalem on 20 July. Between 1952 and 1959, he undertook multiple initiatives in Arab capitals in the name of the moribund Arab Higher Committee. In April 1955 he participated in the Bandung Conference, where he denounced Israel’s expansionist policies. His public agitation made some Arab leaders uncomfortable and he was obliged to take refuge in Lebanon in 1959, where he found himself for all practical purposes under house arrest. In June 1962 he was named president of the World Islamic ConT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HUSAYNI, MUSA KAZIM AL-

gress, and in November he led a delegation of the Arab Higher Committee to Algiers. In 1964, with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, he found himself definitively excluded from Palestinian political affairs. He died in Beirut. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Arab Higher Committee; British Mandate; Haganah; Husayni, Jamal al-; Irgun; Jordan; League of Arab States; Western Wall.

HUSAYNI, JAMAL AL- (1892–1982): Palestinian politician. Jamal al-Husayni was born in Jerusalem into a prominent Palestinian family and educated at the Anglican St. George’s School and the American University of Beirut. From 1920 to 1934 he was secretary general of the Arab Executive, a committee of notables, chaired by his cousin Musa Kazim al-Husayni, which was the most visible political organization advocating for the Palestinian cause, mostly through petitions and delegations; in its later years it was generally regarded as conservative and inadequate in the face of rising Palestinian anger and increasing political crisis. In 1930 he was a member of a delegation sent by his cousin Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, to London to plead the Palestinian position on Zionism and British rule. In 1935 alHusayni became the president of the Palestine Arab Party, controlled by the Husayni family, and the editor of the party’s newspaper, al-Liwa. In 1936 he joined the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), chaired by Hajj Amin, which came into existence to coordinate the activities of the general strike organized to protest Zionist activities and British support for them and which attempted to get control of what became an armed uprising against the British and the Zionists. When the British banned the AHC in 1937 al-Husayni joined Hajj Amin in exile in Lebanon, where they attempted to continue coordinating the uprising until it was crushed in 1939. In 1939 Jamal al-Husayni was allowed to travel to London as the head of the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference. After the start of World War II he went to Iraq, and in 1941 to Iran, where he was arrested by the British in 1942 and deported to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). From there he attempted to revive the AHC but found no support from other political factions. In 1946 he returned to Palestine and worked with the newly constituted Arab Higher Committee created by the Arab League in 1946; he became foreign minister in the All-Palestine Government that lasted through September and October 1948 in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. He later went to Saudi Arabia, where he D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

was an advisor to King SaEud from 1953 to 1964. He died in Beirut. SEE ALSO All-Palestine Government; Arab Higher Committee; Gaza Strip; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-.

HUSAYNI, MUSA KAZIM AL- (1853–1934): Palestinian political figure. Musa Kazim al-Husayni was born in Jerusalem into one of Palestine’s most prominent families; since the mid-nineteenth century the mayors and muftis of Jerusalem had usually been members of the Husayni family. Educated in Istanbul, he served the Ottomans in numerous administrative positions in several countries. He was a leading member of the Palestinian Muslim-Christian Association in 1918 and 1919 and in 1918 was appointed mayor of Jerusalem by the British, succeeding his late brother Husayn. He was removed from this office in April 1920 for protesting British support for the Zionist project and for publicly supporting the Arab government of Amir Faysal in Syria when the French were moving to impose their League of Nations Mandate there. He was elected president of the Arab Executive in December 1920, at its founding in Haifa. He became chairman in 1928. He followed a course of cautious, moderate, and largely deferential protest, in the style of Ottoman politics in which he and his colleagues on the committee had been schooled; nevertheless, the Arab Executive was the most important Palestinian nationalist organization of its time. In August 1921 he led a delegation to London to argue against the Balfour Declaration, for suspending Zionist immigration, and for establishing a democratic representative government. He later opposed, with more success, the British effort to impose a legislative council that would have had only limited authority and would have allocated the Palestinians only 43 percent of the seats. In 1928, as Zionist organizations were becoming stronger and Jewish immigration was increasing, the Arab Executive was expanded to encompass a greater range of Palestinian political opinion in an attempt to strengthen it. Its influence declined, however, after the Western Wall disturbances of 1929, in which many Jews and Palestinians were killed. In 1930 he again led a delegation to London to argue against British policies. Once again they were refused, but two British commissions of inquiry did result in the Passfield White Paper, which recommended substantial changes, including suspension of Zionist land purchases. However, Zionist political influence in London and strength in Palestine were great enough to prevent these recommendations

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

177

HUSSEIN, SADDAM

from being followed, and Palestinian politics— which through the 1920s had been evolving toward an openness to mass public opinion and the importance of popular action—became radicalized. Husayni and his colleagues on the Arab Executive found it difficult to adapt their strategy to this situation. Under pressure, the Arab Executive sponsored a demonstration in Haifa in October 1933, protesting British support for Zionism and led by Husayni. It was broken up by the police and Husayni was beaten. He never recovered and died the next year. The Arab Executive dissolved in 1934. Musa Kazim al-Husayni was the father of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni (1908– 1948), a military leader and hero of the 1948 War. SEE ALSO Arab Executive; Balfour Declaration; White Papers on Palestine.

HUSSEIN, SADDAM (Husayn; 1937– ): Head of the Iraqi state from 1979 to 2003; Sunni Muslim. Saddam Hussein was born in Auja, near Tikrit. He joined the BaEth Party in 1956 and was arrested several times in 1958 and 1959 for his political activities against the Iraqi regime. In July 1958 General Abdal Karim Qassim took power in Baghdad, relying on the backing of the communists and banning parties favorable to Egypt, among which was the BaEth. On 7 October 1959 Hussein participated in an assassination attempt against General Qassim. A few weeks later, after having avoided a death sentence, he left Iraq to take refuge in Syria, and then in Egypt, where he studied law. In March 1963 he returned to Iraq, where the BaEth Party had taken power on 8 February and named General Abd al-Salam Arif as the head of the National Council of the Revolution. On the following 17 November, General Arif seized all power in Iraq, pushing aside the BaEthist leaders, who were imprisoned for nearly two years. After his release from prison, Hussein was elected, in September 1966, assistant secretary general of the BaEth Party. Adhering to the Egyptian-Jordanian mutual defense pact, on 5 June 1967 Iraq joined in the 1967 War against Israel. The conflict ended with the defeat of the Arab armies and Israeli occupation of Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. One year later, a coup d’état overthrew the regime of General Arif, who was replaced by General Ahmad Hassan alBakr. A new government was formed, controlled by the BaEth Party, within which Saddam Hussein proceeded to violently purge the principal leaders and strengthen the position of the party in the Iraqi army. During the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Iraqi government supplied significant material help to the

178

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Palestinians. On 9 November 1969 Saddam Hussein was named vice president of the Command Council of the Revolution, becoming the second most important figure in the state. In June 1972 he supervised the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company, a Western-owned consortium that held a monopoly on the extraction of oil in Iraq. In October 1973, during the 1973 War, Iraq supported Egypt and Syria against Israel. The Arab armies were again defeated. In 1979, after the success of the Iranian revolution, Hussein, over Bakr’s objections, confronted ShiEa dissidence in Iraq directly. In July 1979 he forced Bakr to resign and had himself elected secretary general of the BaEth Party, president of the Command Council of the Revolution and president of Iraq. The next day he was promoted to marshal of the Iraqi Army. To make himself an important player in the region, he strengthened his support for the Palestinian cause and tried to replace Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, who was in a weak position following his peace initiative with Israel, as the leader of the Arab camp. Three months after he came to power, Hussein began to question the validity of the treaty of Algiers, which was signed on 6 March 1975 and fixed the frontier between Iran and Iraq in the Shatt al-Arab. On 20 June 1980 the BaEth Party won the majority of seats in parliament in the first Iraqi legislative elections for over twenty years. On 22 September, supported massively by most of the Arab and Western countries, Hussein attacked Iran. During the conflict, the two countries also fought in Lebanon through the intermediaries of Lebanese militias and Palestinian movements. On 18 July 1988, after eight years of war, in the course of which both Iraq and Iran used chemical weapons a number of times, Iran was obliged to agree to a ceasefire. Hussein presented himself as the winner in the war, but it left Iraq in difficult economic straits, not least through its debts to Kuwait. Two years later, on 19 July 1990, at a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Riyadh, Iraq demanded that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates stay within their oil production quotas. According to Iraq, these two OPEC members, by exceeding their quotas, were impoverishing the Iraqi people. On 2 August Iraqi armies invaded Kuwait. In the eyes of the West—and the Americans in particular—by annexing this country Iraq was doubling its oil reserves and would therefore become the world’s second largest oil exporter in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. A majority of Arab countries voted the next day in the Arab League T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HUSSEIN IBN TALAL

for a resolution condemning Iraq; the Palestine Liberation Organization, Jordan, Yemen, Mauritania, and Sudan abstained; Libya’s representative did not attend the meeting; only Iraq voted against the resolution. The Arab League supported negotiation to resolve the crisis and opposed outside intervention but changed its position a week later to support the Gulf states’ right to call for outside help in self-defense. During this crisis Hussein presented himself as a new Saladin, “ready to stand up against the Zionist occupier of Palestine.” This was appreciated by some Palestinians, who were frustrated at Arab timidity in the face of Israel and who also had good reason to resent the treatment of Palestinians in Kuwait, but the linkage of Hussein’s aggression with the Palestinian issue was not generally accepted. The United States and its allies built up a huge military force in Saudi Arabia over the next several months, and on 29 November the UN Security Council authorized the use of force against Iraq. The Gulf War of 1991 was launched on 16 January and concluded on 28 February—a long campaign of air and missile bombardment followed by only four days of ground fighting—with the rout of the Iraqi army. During these hostilities, Iraq launched a number of SCUD missiles at Israel. At the request of the United States, Israel did not respond. Following the end of the war, the United States undertook to organize, with the participation of the Soviet Union, the Madrid Conference on peace in the Middle East to begin a peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors, as well as between Israel and the Palestinians. The Iraqi defeat was total. The army, until then thought to be one of the world’s mightiest, was decimated, and the civilian infrastructure—electricity distribution grids, communications, water, sanitation—was deliberately destroyed. Iraq was not occupied but was isolated and subject to the oversight of the U.S. and British military. From 1991 to 2003, Iraq was subject to a regime of weapons inspections and dismantling, military overflights, restrictions on use of its own airspace, the virtual separation of the Kurdish region in the north of the country, and a severe trade embargo (modified somewhat in 1996), which caused great economic damage and much physical suffering. The purpose of all this was to enforce UN resolutions regarding Iraqi armaments and particularly “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs)—specifically chemical and nuclear weapons. Iraq essentially complied with the resolutions by 1994 and Hussein spent the next nine years campaigning for an end to the embargo. A crisis arose in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1997 when the new chief of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq became convinced that Hussein was withholding information about chemical weapons. The dispute was mediated by the UN secretary general, but in late 1998 UNSCOM pulled out of Iraq at the urging of the United States, which that December launched, with Britain, the aerial bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox. The result was that in 1999 Saddam Hussein refused to allow the inspectors back under a new UN resolution. He also attempted to develop support in the Arab world by sending assistance to the Palestinians in the al-Aqsa Intifada that began in September 2000, paying compensation to the families of those who had attacked Israelis as suicide bombers. After the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the George W. Bush administration engaged in a propaganda campaign, despite a lack of evidence, associating Iraq and Saddam Hussein personally with the attacks and claiming that he had built up stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions. After months of building public sentiment for an attack, despite the lack of support from most of the world (except for Britain) and despite Hussein’s grudging delivery of all requested information about Iraqi arms programs and their destruction, and his acceptance of last-minute conditions, the Iraq War of 2003 was launched on 20 March. Iraq’s shattered economy, weak military, and lack of weapons of mass destruction ensured that the war ended quickly, on 16 April. The occupation of Iraq by U.S. and British forces, however, and the concomitant armed resistance by various factions, continue. Saddam Hussein disappeared from Baghdad some time in April or May and was captured in a rural hideout in December SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); BaEth; Desert Fox; Gaza Strip; Gulf War (1991); Iraq War; Madrid Conference; Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries; Palestine Liberation Organization; Sadat, Anwar al-; Saladin; West Bank.

HUSSEIN IBN TALAL (1935–1999): King of Jordan from 1952 to 1999. Hussein ibn Talal al-Hashem was the son of King Talal and grandson of King Abdullah I, of the al-Hashim dynasty, which claims descent from Ali Hashim, great-grandfather of the prophet Muhammad. Hussein was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, at Harrow in Britain, and at the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

179

HUSSEIN IBN TALAL

British military academy Sandhurst. On 20 July 1951 he was at his grandfather’s side in Jerusalem when the latter was assassinated by a Palestinian. On 11 August of the following year, he became King of Jordan, replacing his father Talal, who was removed because of mental illness. A regency council exercised power until Hussein reached eighteen and formally acceded to the throne in May 1953. At the same time, another British-supported Hashimite monarch, Hussein’s cousin Faysal II, was beginning his reign in Iraq. Hussein inherited a kingdom that was supported financially by Britain. Jordan’s army (then called the Arab Legion) was paid for by Britain and commanded and partly staffed by British officers, and its security arrangements were governed by a Jordanian-British treaty signed in 1948. The political situation at the time Hussein came to power was shaped by resentment of Britain; anti-Hashimite sentiment and Nasserist-Arab nationalism (the Egyptian revolution had overthrown a British-associated monarchy in 1952); the presence of Palestinians in the kingdom (half to two-thirds of the population was Palestinian, including more than 800,000 refugees from the 1948 War); and the continuing Palestine crisis, including frequent Israeli incursions into the West Bank. In 1954 major public unrest occurred when general elections were rigged by the Hashimite government. In 1955, under public pressure, the king could not sign on to the Baghdad Pact, initiated by Britain and the United States, and in March 1956 he dismissed the British commander of the Arab Legion and changed its name. This resulted in strained relations with Britain, but British aid did not stop. In October 1956, shortly before the Suez War, Hussein allowed honest elections to take place, which resulted in the installation of a left-leaning nationalist government. British collaboration with Israel in the attack on Egypt inspired the end of Jordan’s subordinate relationship with Britain. In January 1957 Jordan entered the Arab Solidarity Agreement with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, which provided for military cooperation as well as financial assistance to Jordan. In March the government canceled its 1948 treaty with Britain and negotiated a new one, under which Britain ended its subsidies, turned over its bases, and withdrew its troops. All this was done with Hussein’s acquiescence and the support of public opinion. Believing that his Nasserist government was planning to abolish the monarchy, however, Hussein dismissed it in April 1957. After a coup d’état by the Nasserist army commander was squelched, the newly

180

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

appointed conservative government dissolved parliament and banned political parties. From this time on Hussein took the lead in governing the country himself. The Arab Solidarity Pact having fallen apart almost immediately, the king, claiming to be menaced by communism, requested and received aid from the United States. In return for this aid he allowed American and British intelligence agencies to operate freely in Jordan, and they in turn helped him against his domestic and foreign opposition. In February 1958, as a conservative counterweight to the United Arab Republic created by Egypt and Syria, he and his cousin Faysal II decided to unite their two countries. Five months later this federation, the Arab Union, failed when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Faysal assassinated. Fearing similar events in Jordan, Hussein’s government declared martial law, the United States began supplying Jordan with oil, and Britain sent in troops. On 10 November 1958, while flying to Switzerland, Hussein escaped an assassination attempt when a Syrian plane tried to force his down. In August 1960 Hussein’s prime minister was assassinated in his office; the plot was traced to Syria. On 25 May 1961, having divorced his first wife, Hussein married Antonia Avril Gardiner (renamed Princess Muna), daughter of a British officer, with whom he had his first son, Prince Abdullah. In 1965, to avoid a long regency in the event of his death while Abdullah was still a child, Hussein designated his brother Hassan crown prince. In 1967, with regional tension rising, Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in a mutual defense pact. As a result of the June 1967 War, Hussein found himself confronted by the loss of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and by a second massive influx of Palestinian refugees. On 16 February 1968, following new reprisals by the Israeli army in Jordanian territory, he condemned armed actions by the Palestinian resistance. Palestinian-Jordanian tensions increased, with much fighting between the Jordanian army and Palestinian organizations, which were trying to bring down the Hashimite regime. The situation culminated in what has come to be known as Black September 1970, when Hussein installed a military government and the army launched a massive attack on the Palestinian fighters, killing some 4,000 of them in ten days and defeating a Syrian force that had been sent to help them, until a truce was negotiated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser at the behest of the Arab League. After renewed fighting in July 1971 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other groups were expelled to Lebanon and all the PalestinT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

HUSSEIN IBN TALAL

ian civil organizations that had made up the Palestinian state-within-a-state were shut down. In November 1971 Hussein’s prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal, who was visiting Cairo, was assassinated by the Palestinian group Black September. On 15 March 1972 King Hussein announced a plan for a Jordanian-Palestinian federation with the West Bank, to be called the United Arab Kingdom. This was rejected the next month by the Palestine National Council (PNC). During the following November, Jordanian security services uncovered a conspiracy organized by Jordanian officers to overthrow the king. During the October 1973 War, under the influence of the United States, Jordan did not open a third front to assist the Egyptian and Syrian armies in the struggle against Israel, although it did send two armored brigades to fight with the Syrians. On 26 October 1974 King Hussein opposed the decision of the Arab League summit, meeting in Rabat, recognizing the PLO as “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and supporting an independent Palestinian state in liberated territory. Hussein accepted the decision, however, and dissolved parliament, half of whose constituencies were in the West Bank. He also maintained Jordanian civil and administrative ties to the West Bank. In February 1977 Hussein met with a delegation from the PLO and the next month, in Cairo, he reconciled with the head of the PLO, Yasir Arafat. On 8 June of the following year, just before his fourth marriage to the Arab-American Lisa Halaby (renamed Queen Noor), he named his son Ali, whose mother, Hussein’s third wife Alia Tuqan, had died in a helicopter accident in 1977, as second crown prince. In 1978 he declined to participate in the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt or to endorse the 1979 peace treaty. From 1980 to 1988 he supported Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, which allowed his kingdom to benefit from trade with Iraq. In 1981 he negotiated an arms deal with the Soviet Union. In 1984 Hussein allowed parliament to reopen and began dealing with Egypt again, despite the Arab League ban that had been imposed after the 1979 treaty. In 1985 Hussein allowed the PNC to meet in Amman. He came to an agreement with the PLO regarding a coordinated approach to a PalestinianIsraeli settlement but differences developed, partly over the loyalties of expatriate Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship, and it was abandoned by 1987. In December 1987 the Intifada began in the occupied territories and in July 1988, fearing the violence would spill across the Jordan River, Hussein reD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

nounced all legal and administrative claims and responsibilities in the West Bank, canceling the Jordanian citizenship of all West Bank Palestinians. This gave the PLO complete responsibility for Palestinian interests, enhancing its international status. During the Gulf Crisis of 1990 to 1991, Hussein did not support the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait but refused to join the anti-Iraq coalition. At the Arab League on 3 August 1990, Jordan abstained from voting on the resolution condemning Iraq, but Hussein did support the League’s position that the crisis should be resolved by negotiation under Arab auspices rather than by foreign intervention. When the Arab League modified this position a week later, approving the Gulf states’ right to self-defense and implicitly approving the use of outside forces, Jordan voted in favor but expressed “reservations”—in effect remaining neutral. In October 1991, when the end of the Gulf War led to the organization of the Madrid Conference on Middle East peace, Hussein agreed to the PLO’s inclusion in the Jordanian delegation since the Israelis refused to deal with it directly. On 26 October 1994, a year after the IsraeliPalestinian Declaration of Principles in Washington, King Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel that was opposed by some Jordanians, ending forty-six years of belligerence between the two countries. In February 1996 his previously friendly relations with Iraq changed when he authorized an Iraqi opposition group to open an office of in the Jordanian capital. On 5 June 1996, after a Likud government that opposed the Oslo Accords came to power in Israel, he organized, with Yasir Arafat and Husni Mubarak, a mini-summit to reaffirm his support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 3 August he resumed Syrian-Jordanian relations, which had been interrupted by the Israeli-Jordanian peace accord. On 6 August he met with the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, confirming his own role in Israeli-Arab negotiations. Five days later he was in Saudi Arabia for the resumption of Jordanian-Saudi relations, interrupted since the Gulf War. On 15 October he met Arafat in Jericho to show his support in the stalemated negotiations with Israel. On 12 January 1997 he helped break the stalemate when he obtained an accord on the redeployment of Israeli troops in Hebron. In August 1998, his health worsening, Hussein delegated most of his power to his brother Hassan and left for medical treatment in the United States. Returning to Amman in January 1999, he stripped his brother of the title of crown prince and gave it to his son Abdullah, to whom he also accorded the regency. He died the next month.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

181

HUSSEIN OF JORDAN

SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Arafat, Yasir; Baghdad Pact; Black September 1970; Black September Organization; Camp David Accords; Gulf War (1991); Hashim, al-; Hassan of Jordan; Hebron; Intifada (1987– 1993); Iran-Iraq War; League of Arab States; Madrid Conference; Mubarak, Husni; Muhammad; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Occupied Territories; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Suez Crisis; Talal ibn Abdullah; West Bank.

HUSSEIN OF JORDAN SEE

Hussein ibn Talal.

HUT, SHAFIQ AL- (1932– ): Palestinian political figure and writer. Shafiq al-Hut was born in Jaffa and fled Palestine for Lebanon with his family in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. In 1953 he received a degree in biology from the American University of Beirut and taught for a while before being fired for Nasserist activities. In 1958 he joined the Lebanese weekly, al-Hawadith (Events) and later contributed to another weekly, al-Muharrir (the Editor). In 1961 he founded a group of intellectuals called the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF; not to be confused with the guerrilla group of the same name founded in 1977). The PLF (later called the PLF—Path of Return or PLF—PR) recruited for the Palestine Liberation Army. In 1964 al-Hut participated in the first meeting of the Palestine National Council, at which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was organized. He became its Lebanon representative. In 1966 he became a member of the PLO’s executive committee and joined the opposition to Ahmad Shuqayri, the first chairman of the PLO, who resigned six months after the June 1967 War. In 1967 al-Hut declared in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Between 1967 and 1969

182

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

he traveled widely on behalf of the PLO in the republics of the Soviet Union. In 1968 he left the PLF—PR, which was then absorbed into Fatah. During the summer of 1970 he opposed the new policy direction of the PLO, now led by Yasir Arafat, and was temporarily relieved of his functions as PLO representative in Lebanon, but he assumed them again a few weeks later. In June 1974 he was reelected to the PLO executive committee, taking the place of the poet Kamal Nasser, who had been assassinated two months earlier in Lebanon by the Israelis. He is said to have been offered Nasser’s job as PLO spokesman but to have declined it. In November 1974 he was part of the Palestinian delegation, led by Arafat, to the UN General Assembly. From that time on, al-Hut was closely allied with Arafat and his Fatah organization (although he never joined), and participated in numerous negotiations concerning Palestinian interests. In August 1975 he went to Japan to negotiate the opening of a PLO office in Tokyo. As the PLO’s representative in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, he was the object of a number of assassination attempts, including one orchestrated by al-SaiEqa in 1976. In April 1979 he was in Washington to participate in discussions at the Institute for Policy Studies, and in March 1980 he led a Palestinian delegation to the Council of Europe. In May 1985 he was elected to the PLO central council. Between 1986 and 1992 he participated in numerous negotiations, including those concerning the fate of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. He opposed the Oslo Accords, and in September 1993 a few days after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles in Washington he resigned from all his PLO positions. He remains in Beirut, with no organizational affiliation, working with various Palestinian groups there and in Damascus. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Army; Palestine Liberation Organization; SaEiqa, al-; West Bank.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

I EID AL-FITR: Muslim holiday concluding the period

IAF SEE

Islamic Action Front.

IBLIS: Arabic, meaning “Satan” or shaytan. IBN: Arabic word meaning “son of.” Equivalent to the Hebrew ben.

of fast of the month of Ramadan. Called also EId alSaghir (“Little Feast”), it is celebrated on the first of the month of Shawwal. SEE ALSO Ramadan.

EID AL-KEBIR SEE

IBN LADEN, OUSSAMA SEE

Bin Ladin, Osama.

EId al-Adha.

EID AL-SAGHIR SEE

EId al-Fitr.

ICO SEE

Organization of the Islamic Conference.

IDB SEE

Islamic Development Bank.

EID: “celebration,” in Arabic (sometimes rendered as eid.)

IDF

EID AL-ADHA: Muslim celebration, called the “Feast of the Sacrifice,” which marks the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Called also EId al-Kebir (“Large Feast”) in the Maghrib, or Kurban Baïram (“Great Festival”) in Turkey, this holiday occurs on the tenth of the month of Dhu al-Hijja. This ceremony commemorates the action of Ibrahim (Abraham), who, obeying the injunctions of God, was ready to sacrifice his son, Ishmael (Isaac), to him. SEE ALSO Abraham; Ishmael.

SEE

Israel Defense Force.

SEE

Qassam.

IFF

IFTAR SEE

Fitr.

IHRAM: Arab word used to designate the sacred state any Muslim must be in before going on a pilgrimage.

183

IIM

By extension, it designates also the ritual apparel of the pilgrim. SEE ALSO Muslim.

IIM SEE

Israeli Islamic Movement.

ILO SEE

Islamic Liberation Organization.

SEE

Islamic Liberation Party.

SEE

Israel Labor Party.

ILP

ILP

IMAM: A Muslim prayer leader. During the prayer the imam conducts and regulates the general rhythm of the collective prayer. For the Sunnis, the imam is only one among others exercising this function. Recognizable for his competence in religious studies, the imam, sometimes under the name of a khatib, also functions as a preacher. SEE ALSO Sunni Islam. IMAN: Arabic word meaning faith or belief. INDEPENDENT NASSERITE MOVEMENT (INM): Lebanese Sunni political organization, created in 1958 by young students opposed to the pro-Western policies of Camille Chamoun. Backed by Egypt, its moments of glory were under the leadership of Ibrahim Koleilat, between 1975 and 1980, when it was allied with the Palestinian Fatah, while retaining its own armed branch, al-Murabitun (the Sentinels). In 1982, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel forced the Murabitun and the INM to go underground. In June 1983, a split in the group gave rise to the Independent Lebanese National Alliance, under the leadership of Samir Sabbagh, former assistant to Ibrahim Koleilat. In December 1986, a new rift led to the creation of the National Independent Movement, headed by Samir Sabbagh. Weakened by much dissidence, the INM then waned in influence in the Lebanese political arena. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-.

INDYK, MARTIN (1951–): Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel (1995–1997 and 1999–2001), Martin Indyk grew up in Australia where he earned a degree in eco-

184

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

nomics and a doctorate in international relations. In 1978, he was an advisor to the Australian secret service. In 1982, after he had been living in the United States for two years, he joined the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a U.S. lobby promoting the interests of Israel within the U.S. administration. Between 1983 and 1993, while executive director of AIPAC, Indyk headed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, to which Dennis Ross also belonged. Members of a “group of presidential studies,” both played an important role at the time of the crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, becoming the principal crafters of the IsraeliArab peace process that was launched in Madrid in November 1991. In 1988, Indyk supported the candidacy of Michael Dukakis for the presidency of the United States. The following year, with Dennis Ross, he was part of a group of advisors on the Middle East for President George H. W. Bush. During the presidential election campaign of 1992, Indyk was one of the consultants of candidate Bill Clinton on questions having to do with Arabs. In January 1993, after Clinton had been elected to the White House, Indyk obtained U.S. citizenship, and a few days later, he was named director of the Department of the Middle East and Southeast Asia of the National Security Council (NSC), replacing Richard Haas. Along with Dennis Ross and Daniel Kurtzer, he became one of the principal architects of U.S. policy in the Middle East. In February 1995, succeeding Edward Djerejian, he was named U.S. ambassador to Israel, the first Jew to hold this post. This nomination led to unease in the Arab community, which feared that the policies advocated by the new U.S. ambassador would be too partial to Israel. In November 1997, having returned to Washington, Indyk became assistant secretary for the Middle East in the State Department under Madeleine Albright, while Dennis Ross was special coordinator for the peace process in the Middle East. In October 1999, Indyk was again named U.S. ambassador to Israel, replacing Edward Walker. On 21 September 2000, he was suddenly recalled to Washington for supposed “violation of security rules”; he returned to Israel a few weeks later. On this occasion, the Israeli press recalled that he had often been attacked by the Israeli right, who reproached him for his close ties with the Labor Party. On 12 July 2001, he resigned his post as ambassador to Israel, to be replaced by Daniel Kurtzer. In 2001 Indyk joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC FRONT

MARTIN INDYK. THE U.S.

AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL VISITS

METULLA IN NORTHERN ISRAEL IN MAY 2000. AFTER ISRAEL UNCONDITIONALLY LEBANON, EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER INVADING AND OCCUPYING IT, INDYK ANU.S. MILITARY AID TO IMPROVE ISRAELI SECURITY ALONG THAT BORDER. (AP/Wide World Photos)

WITHDREW MOST OF ITS FORCES FROM THE SOUTHERNMOST PART OF NOUNCED THE RELEASE OF

50

MILLION IN

SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; American Israel Public Affairs Committee; Djerejian, Edward; Ross, Dennis B.

INFITAH: In Arabic, “opening up.” The word was used by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat to designate the program of economic liberalization that he instituted in 1974, among whose provisions was the opening up of the country to greater foreign investment. SEE ALSO Sadat, Anwar al-.

INSP SEE

Islamic National Salvation Party.

INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR ARAB-ISRAEL PEACE: An unofficial organization of prominent citizens, sometimes known as the Copenhagen Group, founded in January 1997 at Copenhagen to promote a just resolution to the Israel-Palestine issue. It holds D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

public meetings and conferences, lobbies governments, monitors the human rights situation, and attempts to mobilize public opinion for its broad goals. The founding membership consisted of sixty representatives of a broad range of political opinion (from the DFLP to Likud) from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine. The original founding committee consisted of David Kimche of Israel, Lutfi al-Khuli of Egypt, Ihsan Shurdom of Jordan, and Sari Nusseibeh of Palestine. SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Likud.

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC FRONT: Loose coalition of radical Islamic groups created in August 1990 in Saudi Arabia and led by Osama Bin Ladin. Among the member organizations of this front were the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-JamiEa al-Islamiyya, the Jordanian Army of Muhammad, the Kashmiri Harkut al-Ansar (Partisans’ Movement), and the Saudi Muhajirun (Exiles, Migrants). (This last was

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

185

INTIFADA (1987–1993)

founded by Shaykh Omar bin Bakri Muhammad, who later established himself in London.) In February 1998, Osama Bin Ladin issued a public statement calling for attacks on all Americans and announced the creation of a new World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders. This umbrella organization included among its members the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-JamiEa alIslamiyya, the Kashmiri Harkut al-Ansar, the Pakistani Jamiat ul-Ulema (Scholars’ Group), and the Bangladeshi Islamic Jihad. The Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places, which claimed credit for the simultaneous attacks of 7 August 1998 against the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar esSalaam, is understood to be this same group, also known as al-QaEida (“the Base”). SEE ALSO Bin Ladin, Osama; Egyptian Islamic Jihad; JamiEa al-Islamiyya, al-; World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders.

INTIFADA (1987–1993): In 1987 the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had endured for twenty years. In 1967, the Israelis captured (among other places) the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, both of which were all that remained of former historic Palestine, and both had large Palestinian populations of refugees and indigenous residents. During that time, under both Labor and Likud governments, Palestinians had been subjected to humiliating occupation policies—known to Israelis as the “Iron Fist”—designed to prevent the possibility of collective political action. Israeli authorities acted to suppress Palestinian political, social, and economic activity and institution-building by means of school and university closings, press censorship, curfews, control of travel, arbitrary arrests, deportations, home demolitions, limited access to markets and other restrictions on trade, border closings, destruction of agricultural property such as orchards and olive groves, and general harassment. Israel also established numerous permanent settlements in the territories, confiscated land and other property, took control of water resources, and established a physical infrastructure of roads and public works for the use of Israelis only. Israel also annexed and formally incorporated East Jerusalem and surrounding areas. The effect of these policies was not only to impoverish Palestinians and severely damage Palestinian society, but to establish “facts on the ground” that would make it difficult for any future Israeli government to agree to withdraw from the territories. At

186

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

the same time, the Palestinian issue seemed to be disappearing from the official consciousness of the Arab world; the Arab League summit of November 1987 in Amman devoted almost no attention to it (the Iran-Iraq War was the primary issue). When the cumulative humiliation, anger, and frustration of the Palestinians came to a head beginning in December 1987 in the popular rebellion against the occupation that came to be known as the (first) Intifada (“uprising”; literally “shaking off”), the intensity of the outrage was almost uncontainable. The Intifada began on 8 December 1987 in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Four Palestinians were killed and seven injured by an Israel Defense Force (IDF) truck that crashed into a line of cars at a border checkpoint. That evening a demonstration involving thousands arose spontaneously and continued over several days. Protests arose and spread rapidly in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. There were clashes with the IDF, which responded with tear gas and live ammunition against stone-throwing demonstrators, mostly young and many of them children (this early phase became known as “the war of stones”), killing twenty-four of them by the end of December. Neighborhood committees were soon organized, taking upon themselves the responsibility to provide social services, including health care and schooling, as well as to carry out acts of resistance. These began to coordinate their activities through a national structure, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), which incorporated local members of Fatah, the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). These new leaders, mostly young and having grown up under the occupation, became known as “Palestinians from inside.” The established leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then in exile in Tunis—“Palestinians from outside”—was surprised by these developments but soon began to provide assistance to (and attempted to exercise some control over) the spontaneous, populist movement of resistance. In January 1988, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza organized the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or HAMAS), which worked independently of the UNLU. The UNLU and HAMAS operated by means, at first, of anonymously printed leaflets (bayanat), and then of electronically distributed texts that were reproduced and distributed locally, with instructions and directives. Most called for nonviolent acts of civil T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

INTIFADA (1987–1993)

PALESTINIAN REFUGEES. THE FIRST INTIFADA BEGAN IN ONE OF THE REFUGEE CAMPS IN THE GAZA STRIP IN DECEMBER 1987, IN RESPONSE WEST BANK AND GAZA. BY THE TIME THE OUTBURSTS OF NONVIOLENT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND VIOLENT ACTS ENDED SIX YEARS LATER, AT LEAST 1,200 PALESTINIANS AND 170 ISRAELIS HAD BEEN KILLED. (© Peter Turnley/Corbis)

TO ISRAELI POLICIES IN THE OCCUPIED

disobedience, including boycotts, withholding of labor and taxes, general strikes, and demonstrations. As Israeli responses increased in severity, however, violence was often the result. Administrative measures included university closings, increased numbers of house demolitions, confiscation and destruction of agricultural land in the name of “security,” mass arrests, curfews sometimes lasting for as much as a week at a time, and other forms of collective punishment. The IDF, encouraged publicly by the government to “break their bones,” attacked demonstrators with beatings, tear gassings, and use of both rubber bullets and live ammunition. Palestinians were also attacked by armed settlers (it is estimated that about three hundred were killed by settlers, rather than by the IDF, during the Intifada). As the Intifada wore on, economic damage increased for both sides, and violence became more widespread, not only between Israelis and Palestinians but among Palestinians themselves. Fighters attacked the IDF; suspected collaborators were killed; rival factions D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

fought among themselves. Islamic groups became prominent in Palestinian affairs for the first time. After the first four years, the Intifada was less coherent, but the disorder threatened both sides. Yasir Arafat had been suggesting for some time that he was willing to negotiate a compromise solution to the Palestinian issue, but the Israelis had been unresponsive, instead pursuing policies intended to achieve permanent possession of the territories, with apparent success: by 1987 the Palestinian population seemed helpless to resist, the occupation was not disrupting Israeli society, and the PLO had been severely weakened by the IDF and its Lebanese proxies during the early 1980s. The Intifada, however, brought the message that suppression of Palestinian national feeling could not continue indefinitely, or at least not without an unacceptably high price. Images of the Intifada, particularly those of Palestinian adolescents confronting armed Israeli soldiers with stones, had a significant impact on public opinion, both Israeli and international. Though the Intifada

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

187

INTIFADA 2000

provoked extreme responses—some, particularly among the settlers, revived the idea of deportation (“transfer”) of all Palestinians—Israeli public opinion shifted in the direction of negotiations. In July 1988, King Hussein renounced all of Jordan’s legal and administrative claims and responsibilities in the West Bank (including canceling the Jordanian citizenship of all West Bank Palestinians), thus leaving the PLO as the only institution with a plausible claim to represent Palestinian interests. In November 1988, at the urging of Arafat, the Palestine National Council (PNC), meeting in Algiers, adopted a program favoring a peaceful settlement with Israel, based on UN Resolutions 181 and 242. Arafat was proposing Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza—the two-state solution. He reiterated this position before the UN General Assembly in Geneva the next month, explicitly accepting coexistence with Israel. The dangerous conditions represented by the Intifada and the Gulf War of 1991 led to the Madrid Conference on Middle East Peace. The Israelis continued to refuse to talk directly with Arafat or other representatives of the PLO, but shortly after the June 1992 Israeli elections a new government led by Yitzhak Rabin, elected on a platform of “land for peace,” began the secret negotiations with it that led to the Oslo Accords. The Intifada began to die down around the time of the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington, D.C., in September 1993. Estimates of casualties vary by source; according to BDtselem, the Israeli human rights organization, from 8 December 1987 to 13 September 1993, 1205 Palestinians and 172 Israelis were killed; about 175,000 Palestinians were arrested. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; Gulf War (1991); HAMAS; Hussein ibn Talal; Iran-Iraq War; League of Arab States; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Communist Party; Rabin, Yitzhak; Resolution 181; Resolution 242; West Bank.

INTIFADA 2000 SEE

Aqsa Intifada, al-.

INTIQAD, AL- (Critique): Weekly Arabic-language newspaper published by Hizbullah in Beirut since 2002. Previously called al-Ahd (The Covenant), published between 1984 and 2002.

IQAB (“punishment, sanction,” in Arabic): Palestinian radical group, constituted in 1973 by members

188

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

of the Black September movement. Libyan special services supported it in the hope of revenge for the Libyan Airlines Boeing airplane that was shot down over Sinai on 21 February 1973 by the Israeli air force. On 5 September 1973, five Palestinian members of this group, among whom were Amin alHindi and Atef Bseisso, were arrested in Italy while they were preparing an attack against an Israeli airliner. On 17 December, a commando of this splinter group carried out an attack on a Pan Am plane in the Rome airport, which caused thirty-four deaths. In 1975, after Black September was disbanded, Iqab was dissolved in its turn, its members joining the Palestinian security services, headed by Salah Khalaf. SEE ALSO Black September Organization; Bseisso, Atef FaDiq; Hindi, Amin al-; Khalaf, Salah.

IRAN-IRAQ WAR: Also known as the first Gulf War, a long, extremely costly, and inconclusive conflict fought from 1980 to 1988. In 1980 Iran was in an isolated and weakened condition as a result of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, had proclaimed a policy of exporting its ShiEite Islamic ideology, an implicit threat to the BaEthist state in Iraq, a secular, Sunni-dominated regime that kept itself in power partly by suppressing its ShiEa majority. The war began as a dispute over territory that was to have been returned to Iraq under the terms of a 1975 border treaty between the two countries. On 10 September 1980, Iraq took control of the disputed territory, and on 17 September renounced the 1975 treaty and claimed Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt al-Arab, the estuary at the head of the Persian Gulf. On 22 September Iraq launched a fullscale invasion of Iran, including an aerial bombing campaign against military and economic targets. By November Iraq occupied some 10,000 square miles of Iran, including the city of Khorramshahr. Iraq offered to negotiate but Iran refused as long as Iraq occupied any of its territory. There was a stalemate until March 1982; between then and June 1982, the Iranians rallied and pushed the Iraqi forces back to their own borders. Again Iraq offered to negotiate, but this time Khomeini refused until Saddam Hussein was removed from office. In July 1982 Iranian forces began a series of offensives into Iraqi territory, including an unsuccessful attempt to take Basra. Over the next several years fighting moved back and forth and evolved into a World War I–style war of attrition, of defensive trench warfare, and of massive assaults of “human waves” that produced huge casualties. Both sides bombed civilians, and there is eviT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

IRAQ

dence that both sides used chemical weapons, although only Iraq did so on a large scale. Each side also attacked oil tankers in the Gulf carrying oil from the other’s ports. Air attacks continued throughout the war, although by the later stages Iran’s air force was seriously degraded. Throughout the war, Iraq had the support of most Arab states, the Gulf states in particular (to which it became seriously indebted, a factor in the origin of the Gulf War of 1991), the Soviet Union, and the United States, which in the later stages of the war supplied it with weapons and intelligence, and which actually carried out naval strikes on its behalf in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians were supported by Syria, Libya, North Korea, and China (and received covert weapons shipments from the United States as well). In August 1988, after years of stalemate, with little territory gained by either side, both sides accepted a UN-sponsored truce. Estimates of the dead vary from 500,000 to 1,500,000, roughly two-thirds of them Iranian. In August 1990, at the same time that his armies were occupying Kuwait, Saddam Hussein agreed to honor the international boundary negotiated in 1975. Prisoner exchanges were still being negotiated as late as 2003. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991).

IRAQ: Iraq was under Ottoman rule before World War I. It was created as a state in 1921 by the British, who had arranged in 1919 to receive a League of Nations mandate to govern it. Previously known to Europeans as Mesopotamia, the new state comprised the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. After violently suppressing (with, among other strategies, the first systematic campaign of aerial bombing of a civilian population) a 1920 nationalist revolt—one that contributed to the unification of the country—the British appointed as king Amir Faysal ibn Husayn al-Hashim, former king of Syria, son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca, and brother of Amir Abdullah I of Transjordan, who were leaders of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during the war. He died in 1933 and was succeeded by his son Ghazi, and after Ghazi’s death in 1939 by his grandson Faysal II. A regent, Amir Abd al-Ilah al-Hashim, ruled in Faysal’s place until he came of age in 1953. The British ended the mandate in 1932 and Iraq became officially independent. Under the AngloIraqi Treaty of 1930, however, Britain remained in control of Iraqi foreign policy and British troops were stationed on Iraqi soil. In 1941 a nationalist Iraqi government led by Rashid Ali Gailani staged a revolt against the British that was short-lived but D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

suppressed only with great force. A new treaty with the British (which the government was forced to repudiate), as well as shortages, high prices, and the absence of popular elections, contributed to a revolt in 1948. The defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 War, and particularly the poor performance of the illtrained, ill-equipped Iraqi troops, exacerbated the public’s anger. The war also caused economic problems. The expense, including allocations for Palestinian refugees, was crushing; the oil pipeline to Haifa was cut; and anti-Jewish sentiment led most of the Jewish community of 120,000, who had mainly been engaged in urban commerce, to emigrate by the early 1950s. Riots and protests broke out again in 1952; the government responded with heavy repression, declaring martial law, closing newspapers, and banning political parties, forcing the opposition underground. The government was led by the British favorite Nuri al-SaEid (prime minister seven times from 1930 to 1958), a former army officer and defense minister, with the help of the British-installed regent Abd alIlah. In 1955 SaEid led Iraq into the Baghdad Pact, a Cold War, anti-Nasser alliance sponsored by Britain and the United States, prompting a call from Nasser for the Iraqi army to overthrow the monarchy; in 1956 SaEid refused to condemn the aggression of Britain, France, and Israel in the Suez War, adversely affecting Iraq’s relations with the Arab world. In 1957 he endorsed the Eisenhower Doctrine, a U.S. policy justifying U.S. intervention anywhere on anticommunist grounds. In July 1958, five months after King Hussein of Jordan, working with Abd al-Ilah, proposed to unite Iraq and Jordan into a proWestern, anti-Nasser federation called the Arab Union, a coup d’état overthrew both the government and the monarchy. SaEid was executed along with the king, Abd al-Ilah, and much of the royal family. The coup was carried out by a military group formed in 1956, the Free Officers, containing both Iraqi nationalists and Nasserist pan-Arab nationalists. They were led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim alQasim and Colonel Abd al-Salim Arif. After the coup an internal dispute broke out about whether Iraq should join Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic (UAR); the Nasserists lost the argument. The new government pulled Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact and followed a policy of Cold War nonalignment. Qasim’s government freed communist prisoners, suppressed the BaEth Party, legalized trade unions, and instituted land reform, educational reform, and partial nationalization of oil. In 1959 an armed rebellion began among the Kurdish population in the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

189

IRAQ

northern part of the country, which has continued on and off ever since. Also in 1956 the BaEth attempted to assassinate Qasim (the assassin was Saddam Hussein). In 1960 Qasim participated in founding the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In 1961 he threatened Kuwait, which had just become independent, claiming it as part of Iraq. Intervention by the Arab League (and secret payments by Kuwait) ended the crisis. In February 1963 Qasim’s government was overthrown and Qasim executed in a violent coup d’état carried out by the BaEth in alliance with a group of military officers led by the former Free Officer Abd al-Salam Arif, who had been removed from the government, jailed, and sentenced to death for treason after losing the UAR argument (he was pardoned by Qasim in 1962). Arif became president. The BaEth, using lists supplied by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), systematically murdered suspected communists, leftists, and intellectuals. In November Arif expelled the BaEthists, who were internally divided, from the government. He continued a policy of economic nationalization and revived the idea of unification with Egypt. After he was killed in a plane crash in 1966, his brother Abd al-Rahman Arif took his place, continuing the same policies but dropping preparations to unite with Egypt. Arif kept Iraq out of the 1967 War with Israel, and the regime’s standing suffered as a result. With political opposition building and street demonstrations demanding elections, the BaEth Party, in alliance with some military officers, took power in a bloodless coup in July 1968; two weeks later the BaEth expelled the non-BaEthists from the government. The leader of the coup and the president of the Revolutionary Command Council was General Ahmad Hassan Bakr. His chief instrument behind the scenes was his cousin Saddam Hussein, who had been largely responsible for reorganizing and strengthening the BaEth since 1963. Bakr and Hussein spent the next several years consolidating the BaEth’s power, which included the creation of a huge domestic intelligence apparatus; by the mid1970s Hussein was clearly the one in charge. During this time he put down an uprising by the Kurds (1974) and negotiated a treaty dealing with an outstanding border dispute with Iran (1975). After Egypt became isolated in the Arab world as a result of the Camp David Accords of November 1978, Hussein hosted the Arab League summit in Baghdad that denounced Egypt. He also took advantage of the situation by improving Iraq’s relations with Syria and

190

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Jordan. In 1979 Bakr resigned and Hussein took the position of president. In 1980 Iran was isolated and weak as a result of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had proclaimed a policy of exporting its ShiEa Islamist ideology, an implicit threat to the secular, Sunni-dominated BaEthist regime in Iraq, which kept itself in power partly by suppressing the country’s ShiEa majority. In April 1980 members of the ShiEa Islamist al-DaEwa, supported by Iran, attempted to assassinate the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and were suspected of another attempted assassination. The government responded by deporting thousands of Iranian ShiEas. In the summer, Hussein had a leading ShiEa cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, executed. Skirmishes took place over border territory that was to have been returned to Iraq under the terms of the 1975 treaty. On 10 September 1980, Iraq took control of the disputed territory, and on 17 September renounced the treaty and claimed Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt alArab, the waterway that drains the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the Persian Gulf. On 22 September Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. During the war, the Iraqi regime had the financial assistance of Gulf oil states that feared the influence of the Iranian revolution among their own ShiEa populations; it also received arms, equipment, and intelligence from the United States and its allies, as well as diplomatic assistance in blocking any international censure of Iraq for its conduct of the war. The war killed as many as 500,000 Iraqis and up to 1 million Iranians. After it was over, the regime attacked the Kurds, who had renewed their revolt with the assistance of the Iranians; during this period a chemical attack, which became infamous, on the Kurdish civilian population took place. In July 1990, as the regime struggled to recover from the war, the price of oil fell to as low as $11 a barrel, severely damaging the Iraqi economy. Iraq was heavily in debt as a result of the war, and Saddam Hussein blamed the low price on deliberate overproduction by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. He demanded compensation in the form of debt forgiveness, the cession of KuwaitEs Rumailiya oil fields (to which Iraq maintained the claim put forward by Abd al-Karim al-Qasim in 1961), and the leasing of two Kuwaiti islands at the head of the Persian Gulf for use as an oil port. The Kuwaitis refused. On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. This led to the Gulf War of 1991, in which an international force including some Arab states and led by the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

IRAQ WAR

United States forced Iraq out of Kuwait and destroyed Iraq’s military and much of the country’s infrastructure. At its end, the Kurds revolted again, as did the ShiEas of Basra province. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled into Turkey until the United States and Britain imposed a “no-fly” zone over the Kurdish areas of the north to protect the Kurds from retaliation and allow them to set up an autonomous government, which still exists. The ShiEas of the south, however, were bloodily suppressed, with American acquiescence, and thousands were killed. After the war the United Nations, at American urging, instituted an arms inspection/destruction program as well as a set of economic sanctions (first imposed in August 1990) that crippled the Iraqi economy until it was destroyed altogether in the next war, in 2003. Throughout the 1990s, the sanctions imposed on Iraq combined with the destruction of the war caused widespread destitution, food shortages, and rising public health problems, which particularly affected children. Iraq balked at complying with the requirements of the weapons inspection regime, and the United States and Britain, which carried out military overflights every day, bombed the country on three occasions in 1993, 1996, and 1998. Iraq had essentially complied with the resolutions by 1994 and Saddam Hussein spent the next nine years campaigning for an end to the embargo. A crisis arose in 1997 when the new chief of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq became convinced that Saddam Hussein was withholding information about chemical weapons. The dispute was mediated by the UN secretary general, but in late 1998 UNSCOM pulled out of Iraq at the urging of the United States but without the permission of the Security Council; that December the United States and Britain launched the aerial bombing campaign Operation Desert Fox. As a result, in 1999 Hussein refused to allow the inspectors back under a new UN resolution. He attempted to develop support in the Arab world by sending assistance to the Palestinians in the al-Aqsa Intifada that began in September 2000, including compensation for the families of those who had attacked Israelis as suicide bombers. After the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration engaged in a propaganda campaign associating them with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein personally, claiming, despite a lack of evidence, that he had built up stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions. After months of building public sentiment for an attack, the Gulf War of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

2003 was launched on 20 March, despite a lack of support from most of the world, despite Hussein’s grudging delivery of all requested information about Iraqi arms programs and their destruction, and despite Hussein’s acceptance of last-minute conditions. Iraq’s shattered economy, weak military, and lack of weapons of mass destruction ensured that the war was over by 16 April. The occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, however, and the increasing level of armed resistance by various factions, continue. Saddam Hussein disappeared from Baghdad some time in April or May and was captured in a rural hideout in December. From April 2003 until June 2004, Iraq was ruled directly by US occupation authorities; in June 2004 a US-appointed interim “Iraqi” government took over. The 2004 population of Iraq was about 24 million, of whom 78 percent were Arab, 18 percent Kurdish, and 4 percent other. About 96 percent of Iraqis were Muslim (62 percent ShiEa and 34 percent Sunni) and 3 percent Christian (Chaldean Catholic, Nestorian, and Greek Orthodox). SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1967); Baghdad Pact; Camp David Accords; DaEwa, al-; Desert Fox; Gulf War (1991); Hussein ibn Talal; Iran-Iraq War; Iraq War; League of Arab States; Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries; Ottomans; Suez Crisis; United Arab Republic.

IRAQ WAR: War fought by a largely Anglo-American force in March and April 2003, leading to the overthrow of the BaEthist regime of Saddam Hussein and the indefinite occupation of the country by the Americans and the British. The war was preceded by an extended diplomatic crisis over whether or not Iraq was complying with the disarmament regime imposed on it by the United Nations at the end of the Gulf War of 1991. Both the crisis and the war were driven by American claims that Iraq had, in violation of UN resolutions, maintained “stockpiles” of weapons of mass destruction, both chemical and nuclear, and that it was an immediate threat to its neighbors and the United States; that it engaged in proliferation of such weapons to terrorists and “rogue states”; and that it had “ties” to the al-QaEida organization of Osama bin Ladin that was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001. All of these claims proved to be untrue. They generated little credence or support among the world’s governments, and the buildup to war during

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

191

IRGUN

2002 inspired the largest popular protest demonstrations in history. The claims were refuted by UN arms inspectors before the war, and no evidence could be found to sustain them after Iraq was occupied. The war did fit, however, with the strategic plans of the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, based upon effective American control of Middle East and Central Asian petroleum resources and the strategic needs of its ally, Israel (for which some of the most important American strategic planners have also worked), and had been planned even before Bush took office in 2001. The United States is currently engaged in building no fewer than fourteen permanent bases for its forces to occupy, when and if it is able to overcome the current armed resistance to its presence. SEE ALSO Bin Ladin, Osama; Bush, George W.; Gulf War (1991); Hussein, Saddam; International Islamic Front.

IRGUN (IZL, Irgun Zvai Le’umi; National military organization, in Hebrew): Nationalist extremist Jewish movement that surfaced in Palestine in spring 1931 after a scission in Haganah between political and military figures. Its principal founder, Avraham Tehomi, resigned from the Haganah in April 1931 to create the National Haganah, or Haganah B, along with nineteen other officers. In August of 1933, inspired by the revisionist ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky and backed by the religious party Mizrachi, the movement decided to reply in kind to Arab attacks, taking as a slogan Rak kach (“only this way,” in Hebrew). In 1936, the leadership of Haganah B strongly criticized the policies of the British in Palestine, which it considered pro-Arab. The British authorities accepted increased Jewish participation in police duties. David Ben-Gurion asked the semiofficial Haganah to exercise havlagah (“restraint,” in Hebrew), that is to say cease all terrorist activity. In April 1937, a scission surfaced in the movement between the partisans and the adversaries of havlagah, as well as between the revisionists and diverse political tendencies in the organization. Tehomi and his supporters decided to rejoin the Haganah and those who embraced the hard line, headed by David Raziel and Avraham (“Ya’ir”) Stern, created their own movement, the Irgun. On 14 November 1937 a commando of the latter group killed eight Arabs in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, which led to such a vigorous repression on the part of British authorities that the Irgun decided to cease all violent actions until June, when Shlomo Ben-Yosef, a member of Betar close to the Irgun, was hanged.

192

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Between 4 July and 26 August 1938, the Irgun organized a wave of anti-Arab attacks that caused more than 100 deaths. On 11 September at the Betar World Congress in Warsaw, Menachem Begin attracted notice with his advocacy of armed struggle. In May 1939, the Irgun, under the guidance of Avraham Stern, resumed attacks on the British and Arabs. In September 1940, a scission caused by Jabotinsky’s death led to two currents surfacing in the Irgun: one, under the impetus of David Raziel, favoring an alliance with the British against Nazi Germany; the other, headed by Avraham Stern, favoring struggle against British forces in Palestine. Stern quit the Irgun to form his own movement, the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI). In May of 1941, David Raziel was killed in the course of a mission in Iraq. Yaacov Meridor replaced him as the head of the Irgun but was not able to supply the impetus necessary for the organization to survive. In December 1943, Begin, after being demobilized from the Polish army, took command of the Irgun. On 2 February 1944 he published a communiqué calling for the Jewish people to struggle against the British forces present in Palestine. Although his program was similar to LEHI’s, Begin was not successful in rallying its members to his party. In October 1945 the Irgun, LEHI, and Haganah decided to coordinate their actions against the British authorities, creating a united front, the United Hebrew Resistance (Tnuat ha-Meri ha-Ivri), under the control of Committee X of the Haganah. On 17 June 1946, Irgun and Palmach units blew up ten of the eleven bridges linking Palestine and Transjordan. On 29 June the British authorities started Operation Agatha, during which a number of members of the United Resistance were arrested along with leaders of the Jewish Agency and a significant quantity of arms and documents were seized. The captured documents were stored at the headquarters of the British army at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. On 22 July an Irgun commando led by Israel Levy blew up part of the hotel, killing ninetyone people. Confronted with the traumatized reaction of the Jewish community, the United Hebrew Resistance was disbanded, although the Irgun continued the struggle against the British forces. Between December 1946 and August 1947, the Irgun’s attacks were responsible for the deaths of many British soldiers, shocking the British public. British leaders branded the Irgun leaders, including Begin, terrorists and threatened to hang them. At the end of August 1947 the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into two independent states, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISLAM

Jewish and Arab. The Irgun, thinking its battle had been won, directed its operations solely against the Arabs. On 9 April 1948, accompanied by men from LEHI, an Irgun commando attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacring more than 100 of its 750 villagers. The following May the Irgun recognized the authority of David Ben-Gurion’s provisional government while warning against renouncing all of Greater Israel. The Altalena incident on 21 June 1948, in which the eponymous ship carrying Irgun arms to Israel was sunk by gunfire ordered by Ben-Gurion, marked the end of the Irgun, most of whose members joined the new Israeli army, the Israel Defense Force. Begin, after creating the nationalist Herut Party, became prime minister in 1977. SEE ALSO Altalena; Begin, Menachem; BenGurion, David; Betar; Haganah; Herut Party; Israel Defense Force; Jabotinsky, Vladimir; Lohamei Herut Yisrael; Meridor, Yaacov; Mizrachi; Palmah.

ISA: Arabic word used for Jesus. In Islam, he is recognized as a prophet but not as the son of God. SEE ALSO Jesus. ISAAC (Ishaq, in Arabic): Son of the prophet Abraham and his wife, Sarah. Because the latter was sterile, the birth of Isaac is considered an expression of the divine will to provide a descendant for the first prophet of God. According to the Hebrew Bible, God, wanting to test Abraham’s faith, asked him to sacrifice Isaac. Seeing that Abraham was ready to do so, God intervened and Abraham sacrificed a ram in place of his son. Followers of the QurDan believe Isaac’s half-brother, Ishmael (IsmaEil, in Arabic), was the sacrificial son. The Jews consider Isaac the first of their lineage, whereas Ishmael is thought of as the ancestor of the Arabs. SEE ALSO Abraham; Ishmael; QurDan. ISHMAEL (IsmaEil, in Arabic): Son of the prophet Abraham and his Egyptian servant Hagar. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, after having miraculously given birth to Isaac (Ishaq, in Arabic) in spite of persistent sterility, was jealous of this older son. In response to Sarah’s demand, Abraham disassociated himself from Hagar and her son. Although Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree that Abraham showed his faith in God by sacrificing his beloved only son when asked to, they disagree on the identity of the child. The Bible states that this child was Isaac. Followers D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

of QurDan believe Ishmael was the sacrificial son, although the QurDan does not give the child’s name. Muslims note that the Bible supports their belief by saying that Abraham offered his only son, and Ishmael was Abraham’s only son for more than thirteen years, which would make it impossible for Isaac to be the son he sacrificed. A popular tradition recorded in the Bible makes Ishmael the ancestor of the Arabs of the desert (Ishmaelites). Islamic tradition also recognizes Ishmael as ancestor of the Arabs, while his half-brother Isaac is considered the ancestor of the Jews. SEE ALSO

Abraham; Isaac; QurDan.

ISLAM: Arabic word formed from the root salam (peace), meaning submission or reconciliation (to the will of God). Founded in Arabia in the 7th century, Islam is the religion professed by the prophet Muhammad. Muslims believe that God revealed himself to Muhammad through oral communications which he received while meditating on Mount Hira, near Mecca, through the intermediary of the archangel DjabraEil (Djibril, Gabriel). These revelations were written down during Muhammad’s life, and later collected in the QurDan, the entire corpus of revelations. Muhammad was charged with the task of transmitting the message to humankind, based on the unity of God, and to become thereby an Arab prophet of the God of Abraham and Moses. In preaching this message, Muhammad struggled for almost twenty years with the reigning polytheism of the region. Confronted by Meccan hostility, he and his supporters left Mecca for Medina on 16 July 622. This date was considered subsequently to mark the beginning of the Muslim era: the hijra (immigration or exile). In 630, after many months of fighting, the Muslim community took Mecca, where they destroyed the many idols in the KaEba, built by Abraham, leaving only the Black Stone in place. After the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632, Islamic rule spread, in a little over a century, from Samarkand (Uzbekistan) to Andalusia. In the Muslim religion, the believer is alone with Allah, without the intermediary of any clergy, the imam being there only to direct the collective prayer. Five “pillars of Islam” define what it means to be a Muslim: shahada (profession of monotheistic faith), salat (prayer in the direction of Mecca), sawm (fasting during the period of Ramadan), zakat (charity obligation), and the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca during the 12th lunar month).

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

193

ISLAMIC ACTION FRONT

ISLAMIC ACTION FRONT (IAF): Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, transformed into a political party on 8 December 1992, as allowed by the Jordanian law of the preceding 6 July. In the Jordanian legislative elections of 1993, the IAF won thirteen seats in the House of Deputies, and on 8 November of the following year it obtained sixteen (out of a total of eighty seats). In the summer of 1997, a reformist current surfaced in the party, headed by Majid al-Nasser. In the following December, several members of this current were elected to the party’s consultative council (shura). In the parliamentary election in June 2003, the IAF won twenty seats (out of a total of 104). The IAF, which is the principal Islamist entity in Jordan, was opposed to the Jordanian-Israeli peace accord and to normalization of relations between Jordan and Israel. It also opposed the Iraq War of 2003 and the subsequent occupation of Iraq by American and British forces. The IAF has a general secretariat, an executive committee of seventeen members, a consultative council of 120 members, and local sections. The Secretary General of the IAF in 2004 was Shaykh Hamza Mansur. SEE ALSO Iraq War; Muslim Brotherhood. ISLAMIC ARMY FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE HOLY PLACES (al-Jaish el-Islami li-Tahrir al-Muqadasat, in

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD. THIS MINIATURE FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY DEPICTS THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM MOUNTED ON HIS STEED, BURAQ, AS HE ASCENDS TO PARADISE. IN THE QURDAN THE PROPHET JOURNEYS IN ONE NIGHT TO THE “FAR DISTANT PLACE OF WORSHIP,” MEANING JERUSALEM, AND CONTINUES ON TO THE HEAVENS.

Arabic): This movement claimed responsibility for the attacks of 7 August 1998 carried out simultaneously against the American embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es-Salaam (Tanzania). This small group is thought to have joined the International Islamic Front constituted in 1990. SEE ALSO International Islamic Front.

The Granger Collection, New York. Reproduced by permission.

ISLAMIC AVANT-GARDE SEE

As it evolved throughout history Islam, like all other religions, has known division and dissidence (fitna), reflecting a diversity of doctrinal opinions and juridical options. Consequently, Sunnism and ShiEism have become the two principal components of Islam. Finally, Islam defines itself as a religion and project of community life based on a double source: the laws revealed in the QurDan and the practices instituted by the prophet Muhammad recorded in the Sunna (the sayings and practices of the Prophet). SEE ALSO Abraham; Hijra; KaEba; Mecca; Moses; Muhammad; ShiEa; Sunna.

194

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Shiqaqi, Fathi.

ISLAMIC CALENDAR: Based on a cycle of twelve lunar months, the Islamic calendar alternates months of twenty-nine and thirty days to make a year of 354 or 355 days. In the Islamic calendar, the twenty-fourhour day starts at sunset. The Muslim era began on 16 July 622 C.E., according to some, 16 or 24 September, according to others, presumed dates of the beginning of the prophet Muhammad’s Hijra to Medina. The month of Ramadan can last twenty-nine or thirty days, and, in relation to the solar calendar, the date moves back every year by eleven days. The first month of the Hijri calendar is Muharram, followed by the months of Safar, Rabi al-Awwal, Rabi alThanni, Jumâda al-oula, Jumâda al-Thânnyia, Rajab, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISLAMIC LIBERATION PARTY

Shabân, Ramadhan, Shawâl, Dhû al-QaDda and Dhû al-Hijja. SEE ALSO Hijra; Muhammad; Ramadan.

ISLAMIC CONFERENCE SEE

Organization of the Islamic Conference.

ISLAMIC CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION SEE

Organization of the Islamic Conference.

ISLAMIC DEVELOPMENT BANK (IDB): Specialized institution of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, created in 1974 to contribute to the economic development of member states according to the principles of Shari Ea. SEE ALSO Organization of the Islamic Conference; ShariEa.

Qassam.

Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

ISLAMIC JIHAD, PALESTINIAN

ISLAMIC JIHAD: A movement of loosely associated extreme Islamists (known as jihadis) in the Muslim world. There are many tendencies in the movement—Sunni, ShiEa, pro-Iranian, pro-Egyptian, proSaudi. Islamic Jihad in Lebanon is ShiEite; in Egypt and Palestine, Sunni. The Sunni groups are influenced by the Saudi Wahhabi movement. All jihadis advocate a return to the “genuine Islam” of the prophet Muhammad, with the QuDran and Shari Ea as the foundation for state and society. The modern Islamic movement arose at the beginning of the 1970s, after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 ArabIsrael war, an event that encouraged millenial interpretations among both Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews. The creation of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) by Saudi Arabia in September 1969 reflected this reality in the Muslim world. The OIC proposed the establishment of an “Islamic nation” according to the strictest laws of the Muslim religion, while favoring “Islamic orthodoxy.” This institution also participated in the re-Islamization of society by building schools and mosques and by opening Islamic banks. Backed by Saudi Arabia, Islamist political activity revived in countries where it had been harshly repressed, such as Egypt and Syria. After the Arab-Israel War of 1973, Muslims in many countries, disappointed by the ineffective, secular, nominally socialist politics of so many Muslim countries, turned toward Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. D I C T I O N A R Y

ISLAMIC JIHAD, EGYPTIAN SEE

ISLAMIC FIGHTING FORCE SEE

The proclamation of an Islamic republic in Iran, even though ShiEite (a minority within Islam), confirmed for the Islamist faithful the value of practicing jihad as “holy war.” Resorting to terrorism to achieve their ends, jihadis have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people (among them Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981). At the beginning of the 1980s, many jihadis joined the ranks of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army. Some of them, called “Afghans,” upon returning to their native countries placed the technical expertise they acquired during this conflict (1979–1989) at the disposal of extremist movements in their own countries. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Muhammad; Organization of the Islamic Conference; Sadat, Anwar al-.

O F

T H E

SEE

Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

ISLAMIC LIBERAL PARTY SEE

Arab Islamic Liberal Party.

ISLAMIC LIBERATION ORGANIZATION: Palestinian movement (Munazamat al-Tahrir al-Islamiya, in Arabic), founded in 1971 by Salah Sarriya, Fatah member and dissident of the Islamic Liberation Party (ILP). Following the Arab defeat of June 1967, Salah Sarriya went to Egypt, where, with a few members of the Muslim confraternities, he created a number of underground Islamic cells. On 18 April 1974, he attempted a coup in Heliopolis, so as to take power in Egypt and proclaim the foundation of an Egyptian Islamic state. The attack on the military barracks failed, at a cost of around forty deaths, and Salah Sarriya was captured, then hanged in November 1976, along with Talal Ansari, head of a cell of the movement at the University of Alexandria. The death of Sarriya resulted in the disappearance of his movement. In 1977, some of his followers participated in the creation of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Fatah, al-; Islamic Liberation Party. ISLAMIC LIBERATION PARTY (ILP): Organization (Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami, in Arabic) created in November 1952 in Jerusalem by Shaykh Taqi al-Din al-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

195

ISLAMIC MOVEMENT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE

Nabhani (1909–1979), who broke with the Muslim Brotherhood because of its links with the Jordanian Hashemite government. Nabhani was an Islamic court judge in Jerusalem and a former associate of the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. The ILP advocated the establishment of a new caliphate in the Islamic world, opposing both panArabism and nationalist ideas of the left. Because of its opposition to the Hashemite regime, it was soon banned in Jordan, and Nabhani fled to Lebanon in 1953. ILP members were implicated in a number of coup attempts in Jordan (1969), Egypt (1974), and Tunisia (1985). The general ideas of the ILP were adopted by Shaykh Asad Bayud Tamimi, one of the founders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In June 1993, several members of the ILP were questioned by the Jordanian police, accused of having attempted to assassinate King Hussein. In August 1994, the ILP sponsored an Islamic conference in London attended by representatives of HAMAS, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, and Hizbullah. Today the Islamic Liberation Party exists in Britain, where it is legal— its British branch was founded in 1986 by Shaykh Omar Bakri Muhammad—and illegally in a number of Arab and non-Arab Islamic countries; most of its members are now said to be Central Asian. In 2003 it was banned in Russia, where the government accused it of association with Islamic fighters in Chechnya, and it has been accused of terrorist activities in Uzbekistan, although there is no evidence that it has ever been involved in violence or terrorism. In 2004 a group of twenty-six Islamists, including five Britons, were jailed for attempting to revive the party in Egypt. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

INSP made a point of distinguishing itself from HAMAS, in that its political program provided for no form of armed resistance. Its main leaders were FuDad Nahal (president), Ismael Abu Shanab, Fikr Abdul Latif (spokesperson), and Ahmad Mahmud Bahar. SEE ALSO HAMAS; Muslim Brotherhood.

ISLAMIC NATIONAL UNION: Palestinian Islamic movement (al-Ittihad al-Watani al-Islami, in Arabic), created in February 1996 by Khadr EAttiya Muhjaz, a dissident of the Islamic National Way Movement. This party united former members or sympathizers of HAMAS, opposed to the utilization of violence. Its founder, Muhjaz, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a poet and preacher much appreciated in the Gaza Strip. SEE ALSO HAMAS; Islamic National Way Movement; Muslim Brotherhood.

ISLAMIC NATIONAL WAY MOVEMENT (Harakat alMasar al-Watani al-Islami, in Arabic): Palestinian Islamic movement, created in August 1995 in the Gaza Strip by a former member of HAMAS, Mahmud Abu Dan, who had resigned from it in 1991 to join the Fatah of Yasir Arafat. Favorable to the Oslo Accords, some think that this movement was founded at the request of the leader of Fatah, so as to attempt to attract the moderates and malcontents of HAMAS. At the beginning of 1996, one of its leaders, Khadr Attiya Muhjaz, separated from it to found his own party, the Islamic National Union. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Islamic National Union; Oslo Accords.

ISLAMIC RESISTANCE MOVEMENT SEE

ISLAMIC MOVEMENT

FOR THE

LIBERATION

OF

TINE (al-Haraka al-Islamiyya il-Tahrir Filastin,

in Arabic): Movement created at the beginning of the 1980s by Shaykh Jabir Abdallah Ammar, member of Fatah, with the approval of the latter, desirous of taking control of a part of the Islamist current that had appeared among the Palestinians since the victory of the Iranian revolution. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-; Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

ISLAMIC NATIONAL SALVATION PARTY (Hizb alKhalas al-Watani al-Islami, in Arabic): Created in Gaza, on 19 March 1996, so as to realize “Palestinian national unity,” this Palestinian entity attracted influential figures from the Muslim Brotherhood. The

196

D I C T I O N A R Y

HAMAS.

PALES-

O F

ISLAMIC SALVATION FOUNDATION SEE

Bin Ladin, Osama

ISLAMIC UNIFICATION MOVEMENT (IUM): Lebanese organization (Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami, in Arabic) uniting anti-Syrian Islamic movements. The IUM surfaced in 1984 after the dissolution of the Islamic Union Front (IUF) of Khalil al-Akkawi. It was organized by Shaykh Said ShaEaban (d. 1998), former member of the Lebanese Islamic Group (JamiEa alIslamiyya Libnaniyya) and professor of Arab literature at Tripoli since 1964, who had followed a course of religious studies abroad, particularly in Egypt and Iraq. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISRAEL, STATE OF

The IUM proposed liberating Lebanon from all foreign occupation, in view of creating an Islamic republic. Between 1984 and 1987 the movement went underground, participating in the fighting against Syrian forces present in Lebanon; then it returned to the Lebanese political arena in 1988. Two years later, a pro-Syrian current, headed by Malik Allush, appeared in the IUM. Since 1991, the leadership of the IUM has benefited from financial help from Tehran, and has become more conciliatory toward Syria. Opposing the Israeli-Palestinian accord of 13 September 1993, the IUM was very involved in the struggle against the Israeli presence in South Lebanon, which ended with an Israeli pullout in 2000. Since then it has focused on its current leader, who is Bilal ShaDaban. A faction called Islamic Unification Group—Leadership Council is headed by Hashim Minqara, who was imprisoned by the Syrians from 1986 to 2000.

known to Jews as the Temple Mount, he tied up Buraq at the wall, which Jews currently refer to as the Wailing Wall and which Muslims call the Wall of Buraq. Muhammad then ascended to the heavens (mi Draj) where God made a revelation to him, and where he prayed together with the prophets and patriarchs. Muslims commemorate the nocturnal ascension of Muhammad on the 27th of the month of Rajab. The revelation associated with it (Surat alIsra, Sura 17) reads: “Glory be to him who took His slave [Muhammad] on a journey by night, / From the Holy Mosque to the Furthest Mosque, / The precincts of which We have blessed, / That We might show him some of Our signs. / He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing.” The al-Aqsa (Furthest) Mosque in the Haram al-Sharif was built to commemorate the Night Journey and named after the reference to “the Furthest Mosque” in the QurDanic verse. SEE ALSO Muhammad.

ISLAMIC VANGUARD

ISRAEL: Hebrew word meaning “Let God rule.” Ac-

SEE

Shiqaqi, Fathi.

ISLAMISM: Ideology that calls for 1) the practice of Islam to be returned to its sources (salaf) in the “true religion,” and 2) the organization and regulation of society and the state by QurDan and shari Ea. In many Arab countries, where political expression is often heavily repressed by the state, Islamism is a way of challenging social or political power. This current surfaced at the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when most Muslim countries were controlled by European powers. Consequently “Islamic reformism,” initiated by Jamal al-din al-Afghani, was having a significant impact by the beginning of the twentieth century. The first modern Islamist movement was the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in Egypt in 1928. SEE ALSO Muslim Brotherhood.

ISLAMIST: Embodying or acting upon an ideology of Islamism. SEE ALSO

Islamism.

ISRAD: According to QurDanic tradition, in 622 or 623 C.E., after having fallen asleep, the Prophet Muhammad made a voyage (isra D), known as the Night Journey, from Medina to Jerusalem, straddling a mare named Buraq, which had a woman’s head and a peacock’s tail. Arriving at the Rock of Abraham in what is now the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) on the hill

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

cording to Biblical tradition, this name designates Jacob, son of Isaac, as well as the twelve tribes whose eponyms are the sons of Jacob that comprise the Jewish people. Grandson of Abraham, Jacob took the name of Israel, which also means “strong against God,” as a result of a nocturnal combat against an angel at the ford of Jabbok. For some, the name comes from the Hebrew verb saro (“struggle”) or sar el (“God’s minister”), or even from yachar el (“in the right before God”). This name is also used to designate one kingdom, which had nineteen kings between 930 and 722 B.C.E., from Jeroboam to Hosea, of the two kingdoms that issued from that of Solomon. The first archaeological trace of the name of Israel was found on the Egyptian Merenptah stele, which dates from around 1230 B.C.E. SEE ALSO Abraham; Isaac; Jacob.

ISRAEL, STATE OF (Medinat Yisrael, in Hebrew): Middle East land bordered by the Mediterranean on the west, Lebanon on the north, Syria and Jordan on the east, the Red Sea on the south, and Egypt on the southwest. The country’s length is 270 miles (435 km) from north to south; at its widest it is 67 miles (108 km). On 15 May 1948, a few hours before the expiration of the British mandate, the creation of the State of Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion, who read its “Declaration of Independence.” This decision was made after the United Nations had passed, on 29 November 1947, Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into two independent states, one Jewish and the other Arab, and

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

197

ISRAEL AHAT

after Great Britain had announced its decision to turn its mandate over Palestine back to the United Nations. The declaration sparked clashes between Jewish and Arab Palestinians, leading to the first of the five Arab-Israel wars, in which the armies of neighboring Arab states entered the former mandate lands. Four armistice agreements in 1949 were negotiated between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, though no peace treaties were signed. Arab Palestinians fled the country in great numbers; though there are no official figures, the United Nations estimated that over 700,000 Palestinians—over half the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine— became refugees. The State of Israel, recognized by the principal world powers, has been rejected since its beginnings by the Palestinians, who had lived in this land for centuries, and by the ensemble of neighboring Arab countries. Following the Arab-Israel War of 1967, Israel occupied territory equal to more than three times its previous area; the new territories included the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, part of the West Bank, some of the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for Israel’s withdrawal from the newly occupied territories, which has yet to be negotiated, and which remains at the center of negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between 1948 and the 1990s, more than 2 million Jews migrated to Israel, many fleeing persecution in their own countries. There was a massive migration of Jews from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and 1990s, and Soviet Jews became the largest ethnic group in Israel in the twenty-first century. In 2003 the population of Israel was 6.7 million. The Arab community represented 19 percent of the population; of these, 77 percent were Muslim, 13 percent Christian, and 10 percent Druze. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Ben-Gurion, David; British Mandate; Resolution 181; Resolution 242.

ISRAEL AHAT SEE

One Israel.

ISRAELI-ARAB PEACE PROCESS: For significant dates please refer to the Arab-Israeli Conflict timeline located in the appendix. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Arab Revolt; Arafat, Yasir; Balfour Declaration; Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem;

198

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Black September; Bush, George H. W.; Camp David Accords; Camp David II Summit; Clinton, William Jefferson; Egypt; Fahd Plan; Golan Heights; Gulf War (1991); Haram alSharif; Hussein ibn Talal; Intifada (1987– 1993); Lebanon; League of Arab States; Likud; Madrid Conference; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Ottomans; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Resolution 181; Resolution 194; Resolution 242; Resolution 338; Road Map (2002); Rogers Plan; Sharm al-Shaykh Summits; Sykes-Picot Agreement; Syria.

ISRAEL BE-ALIYAH (Israel with Immigration): Israeli political party, founded in June 1995 by Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky to defend the social rights of immigrants from Russia. Its political platform, published on the following 1 November, affirmed the “inalienable right of the people of Israel over the land of Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, including all of the West Bank”; and rejected the creation of a Palestinian state, but envisaged autonomy for the occupied territories. As a result of the elections of 29 May 1996, the party obtained seven seats in the Knesset, with Anatoly Sharansky being named minister of commerce and industry in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1997 a police investigation revealed that Israel be-Aliyah had received financing from Grishka Lerner, presumed head of the Russian mafia in Israel. Between 1997 and 1998, Israel be-Aliyah lost some of the support of the community that had come from Russia, which reproached its leader for positions it thought too moderate. On 18 May 1999, as a result of the elections, which saw the victory of Ehud Barak, Israel be-Aliyah won six seats. On 6 July, Sharansky became minister of the interior, and Marina Solodkin became deputy minister of immigrant absorption in Barak’s cabinet. In December the leadership of the party threatened the government with withdrawing its support in case of negotiations on the Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights. In February 2001, the party supported the leader of Likud, Ariel Sharon, for the post of prime minister, against Ehud Barak, who lost the elections. On the following 7 March, Sharansky became minister of housing and construction in Sharon’ cabinet. The main figures in the party are Sharansky, Yuli Edelstein, Roman Bronfman, Vera Golavensky, Solodkin, Yuri Stern, and Felix Aushrenko. The party supports a democratized Palestinian Authority as an essential element of T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISRAELI ARABS

the peace process. In the 2003 elections, it received 2.2 percent of the vote and two seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Knesset; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sharansky, Natan; Sharon, Ariel.

ISRAEL BEITEINU (“Israel is our home,” in Hebrew): Israeli political party of the right, founded on 3 January 1999 by Avigdor Lieberman, former chief of staff of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Constituted for the scheduled Knesset elections of the following 17 May, the party proposed rallying the votes of Russian immigrants to Israel to Benjamin Netanyahu, taking some that would have gone to Israel beAliyah. This ultranationalist grouping advocated a “Greater Israel,” with a “strong” government. On 18 May, as a result of the ballot, it won four seats in the Knesset, while the head of the Israel Labor Party, Ehud Barak, was elected prime minister. On 7 March, 2001, Avigdor Lieberman became minister of infrastructure in the government of Ariel Sharon, head of Likud. Israel Beiteinu formed a coalition—the National Union—with two other rightwing parties: Moledet and Tekumah. The National Union advocates the voluntary transfer of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza to other Arab countries, and it opposes concessions to the Palestinian Authority and the creation of a Palestinian state. In the 2003 elections the National Union received 5.5 percent of the vote and won seven seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Greater Israel; Lieberman, Avigdor; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sharon, Ariel. ISRAEL COMMITTEE AGAINST HOUSE DEMOLITIONS (ICAHD): A self-described nonviolent, direct-action group, the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions was established to oppose the Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the occupied territories. It opposes as well the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and policies of “closure” and “separation.” ICAHD describes its activities as resistance and protest, including attempts by its members to physically block bulldozers sent to demolish homes; dissemination of information to the Israeli public and the international community; and the provision of support to Palestinian families, particularly in dealing with Israeli authorities. ICAHD maintains a web site (http://www.icahd.org) where it posts information about Israeli demolition in the occupied territories, which it claims destroyed as many as 4,500 Palestinian homes during the al-Aqsa D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Intifada. ICAHD supports the peace process and the creation of a Palestinian state. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Occupied Territories.

ISRAEL COMMUNIST PARTY (MAKI) (Miflagah Komunistit Yisraelit): Israeli Communist party, founded in the mid-1960s, following a split within the RAKAH (Reshima Komunistit Hadashah, “New Communist List”) party over differences between Communism and Zionism. Representing a mostly Zionist current, MAKI advocated that Israel evacuate the quasi-totality of the occupied territories, as well as negotiate a solution with the Palestinians. In 1973, this party disappeared from the political scene after merging with the T’helet-Adom (the “Blue-Red” movement) to form Moked. SEE ALSO Moked. ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCE (IDF; in Hebrew, Tsahal: Ts’va Haganah L’Israel): Successor to the self-defense militias of the Jewish community of Palestine, under the British mandate, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) was officially created on 26 May 1948. The army plays an important role in Israel, not only in matters of defense but also in politics and daily life. Israelis are obliged to serve in the army for relatively long terms: three years for men and two for women. In the course of five wars, the IDF has forged a reputation of invincibility, attributable to the determination of its soldiers as well as to the excellence of its matériel. Handicapped strategically because of its small size, Israel has been confronted with a permanent security problem. Having to choose between a lasting war and an uncertain peace, the Israeli military leaders have made every effort to maintain a technical and technological advantage over the neighboring Arab states as well as those in the “second circle,” such as Iraq and Iran. Furthermore, the efficacy of the IDF has been based on its capacity to evaluate dangers as well as the rapidity of its response. In 1949 Israel received $100 million in U.S. aid; beginning in 1951, the country has received annual aid from the United States, beginning at $35 million in 1951 and reaching nearly $3 billion annually by 2004, of which $2.1 billion were for defense. SEE ALSO Haganah.

ISRAEL EHAD SEE

One Israel.

ISRAELI ARABS SEE

Palestinian Israelis.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

199

ISRAELI ARMY

ISRAELI ARMY SEE

Israel Defense Force.

ISRAELI ISLAMIC MOVEMENT (IIM): Israeli political organization, founded in 1983 by Shaykh Abdallah Nimr Darwish, to propagate Islam in the Israeli Arab community. The IIM also supported the creation of a Palestinian state, alongside the State of Israel. In September 1995, Shaykh Attaf Qatif proposed creating an “Islamic Group.” In April 1996, in the context of the Knesset elections for the following May, the movement allied with the Arab Democratic Party (ADP) to constitute a common list, the United Arab List. Four members of the United Arab List won Knesset seats in the vote. Three—Tawfiq Khatib, Talib al-SanaEa and Abdul Wahab Darawshe—were members of the ADP, and Abdul Malik Dahamshe of the IIM became the first Islamist to sit in the Knesset. The candidates of the Israeli Islamic Movement once more joined the United Arab List in May 1999, winning five Knesset seats, two of which went to the IIM in the elections that saw the victory of Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor Party. In February 2001, in the elections for prime minister, with the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, running against the head of Likud, Ariel Sharon, the leadership of the IIM recommended abstention. Principal members of the Israeli Islamic Movement are: Shaykh Abdallah Nimr Darwish, Abdul Malik Dahamshe, Ibrahim Sarsur, Shaykh Attaf Qatif, Kamel Khatib and Ibrahim Darwish. SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Israeli Arabs; Knesset; United Arab List. ISRAELI-JORDANIAN ACCORDS: On 25 July 1994 in Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan signed an accord ending forty-six years of war between their two countries. The accord came after the conclusion of the Jordanian-Israeli Agenda, signed in 1993 also in Washington, which itself followed the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles. On 8 August the frontier post of Arava (Araba, in Arabic) between Israel and Jordan was opened, in the presence of the Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher. On 25 October the Israeli Knesset ratified the peace treaty with Jordan by a vote of 105 in favor to 3 against, with 6 abstentions. The next day, under the sponsorship of the United States and the

200

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Soviet Union, the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was signed in the Desert of Arava (Wadi Araba) at the Jordanian-Israeli border. Through this accord Jordan took back most of the 147 square miles between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea that Israel had annexed in 1948. SEE ALSO Christopher, Warren; Hassan of Jordan; Hussein ibn Talal; Knesset; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak.

ISRAELI-LEBANESE WAR SEE

Arab-Israel War (1982).

ISRAELI NEW LEFT SEE

Siah.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN ACCORDS SEE

Oslo Accords.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN MUTUAL RECOGNITION: On 9 September 1993, in the framework of the peace process started openly two years earlier at the Madrid Conference and pursued secretly in Oslo, Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin addressed letters to each other in which the PLO recognized the State of Israel and the Israelis recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The former had been demanded by the Israeli government, which reproached the PLO for its 1968 charter denying Israel’s right to exist. These letters were a formal prelude to the Declaration of Principles (DOP) signed 13 September 1993 in Washington—the culmination of the Oslo Accords. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Rabin, Yitzhak.

ISRAELI PALESTINIANS SEE

Palestinian Israelis.

ISRAELI PRIME MINISTERS: David Ben-Gurion (1948– 1953), Moshe Sharett (1953–1955), David BenGurion (1955–1963), Levi Eshkol (1963–1969), Golda Meir (1969–1974), Yitzhak Rabin (1974– 1977), Menachem Begin (1977–1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983–1984), Shimon Peres (1984–1986), Yitzhak Shamir (1986–1992), Yitzhak Rabin (1992– 1995), Shimon Peres (1995–1996), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999), Ehud Barak (1999–2001), Ariel Sharon (2001–). T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISRAEL LABOR PARTY

SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; BenGurion, David; Eshkol, Levi; Meir, Golda; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharett, Moshe; Shamir, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel.

ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS SEE

Settlements.

ISRAELI-SYRIAN NEGOTIATIONS (1949) SEE

General Armistice Agreements, 1949.

ISRAELI-SYRIAN NEGOTIATIONS, 1994–2000: In 1991 the Syrian government of President Hafiz al-Asad agreed to join the Madrid Conference on Middle East Peace on receiving assurances that Israel was willing to discuss the status of the Golan Heights in the subsequent bilateral talks that were projected as part of a Madrid peace process. At the beginning of 1994, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undertook secret contacts with the Damascus authorities with a view to starting negotiations on an eventual peace accord. His plan, called “Majdal Shams First,” was based on a partial withdrawal from the Golan Heights, to be spread over a period of three years. Negotiations began later that year between the Israeli and Syrian ambassadors in Washington, Itamar Rabinovich and Walid alMoualem. U.S. president Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher also took an engaged interest in these talks and supported them in their own dealings with Rabin and Asad. Meetings between the two countries’ military chiefs were also held in December 1994 and June 1995. In all talks, the Syrians made clear that a complete withdrawal from the Golan was a prerequisite for peace. For the Israelis, extensive, but not complete, withdrawal was acceptable, and only as part of an overall peace agreement, with negotiations addressing these four points: the extent of Israeli withdrawal; the schedule for this withdrawal; the linkage of stages of withdrawal with normalization of relations; and permanent security arrangements. Rabin also made clear that any treaty that included withdrawal would have to be subject to a referendum in Israel, where the status of Israeli settlements, which would have to be removed from any returned territory, was a major political issue. In late 1995 the Syrians relaxed their position somewhat, and additional meetings at the ambassadorial level were held in December 1995 and January 1996 at the Wye Plantation in Maryland. In February and March 1996 there was a series of suicide bombD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ings in Israel carried out by Islamist fanatics, and Prime Minister Shimon Peres (who had taken office after Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish fanatic) then broke off the Syrian negotiations. The reason was ostensibly that Syria would not condemn the attacks, but critics blamed his move on electoral posturing, having more to do with the strong challenge Peres faced in the upcoming Israeli elections from Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud opposed any Israeli withdrawal from occupied land. Netanyahu won, and there were no further negotiations while he was in office. (Netanyahu did publicly offer to restart talks if Syria negotiated without preconditions, understanding that Syria could not agree to this.) In 1999, a new Israeli Labor prime minister, Ehud Barak, who had won office that May on a promise to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon, began the Syrian talks anew. On 15 December he and Syrian Foreign Minister Faruk al-Shara met officially at a summit meeting hosted by President Clinton in Washington. Bilateral talks under American auspices were then held in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, from 3 to 11 January 2000; no agreement could be reached. On the following 26 March, Clinton met with Asad at Geneva and gave him Barak’s latest proposal; Asad rejected it because it involved Israel’s retaining sovereignty over part of the disputed territory, in this case a strip of land north of Lake Tiberias. This was effectively the end of the negotiations. SEE ALSO Asad, Hafiz al-; Barak, Ehud; Golan Heights; Likud; Madrid Conference; Majdal Shams First Plan; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Shara, Faruk al-

ISRAELITE: A descendant of Israel, belonging to the Jewish community and religion. This word is used for whatever relates to Biblical Israel and its people. Around 1200 B.C.E. the Hebrews settled between Jerusalem and Nablus (Sh’khem), in the land of Canaan. Allying with the B’nai Jacob (Sons of Jacob), whose authority they recognized, they lay the basis of a confederation and from then on were called Israelites. A century later, at war with the Canaanites, the Israelites formed the first military kingdom of Israel, ruled by King Saul (around 1020 B.C.E.). Taking advantage of the weakness of Egypt and Assyria, Saul’s successors, David and Solomon, turned Israel into an even stronger regional power. SEE ALSO Canaan; Jacob (Biblical).

ISRAEL LABOR PARTY (in Hebrew, Mifleget haAvodah): The Israel Labor Party (ILP) was created

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

201

ISRAEL LABOR PARTY

in 1968 with the merger of the leftist parties MAPAI, RAFI, and Ahdut ha-Avodah PoEalei Zion. MAPAI, in fact, effectively governed the State of Israel from 1948 to 1977, when the Labor Party lost the elections to the Likud. Among Labor’s major figures were David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Shulamit Aloni, Abba Eban, Gad Yaacobi, and Yossi Sarid. In 1969, Labor won by the widest margin of any party in Israeli history, obtaining 56 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. In 1973, when Golda Meir was heading the government, a split surfaced in the party, leading to the departure of Shulamit Aloni, Raanan Cohen, and Yossi Sarid, who decided to create their own group, the Citizens’ Rights Movement (RATZ). Under pressure from the right, reinforced by the formation of the Likud, the Labor Party adopted a nationalist rhetoric. On 3 June 1974, Yitzhak Rabin, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, having joined the Labor Party, succeeded Meir as prime minister, and Shimon Peres was named defense minister. In the eyes of Israelis, the Labor Party was confirming its reputation as the party of “rich Ashkenazim,” while the Likud was looking like the party of the “discriminated-against Sephardim.” On 19 April 1977, Shimon Peres was elected head of the party. In the Knesset elections of the following May, the Israeli electorate voted for Likud, favoring security-oriented policies, to the detriment of Labor. The responsibility for the loss was hotly debated. Rabin’s difficulties in 1977 over an allegedly illegal bank account belonging to his wife were considered by some to be linked to Labor’s defeat, while others attributed the loss to the “colorless” Peres. With 43 seats in the Knesset, the Likud became the principal political bloc, ahead of the Labor Party, which won only 32. Many Labor votes apparently went to a new centrist party, the Dash. Shimon Peres was replaced as head of the party, on 28 May 1978, by Haim Bar-Lev. Two currents surfaced in the Labor Party: the “hawks,” headed by Yitzhak Rabin, and the “doves,” led by Shimon Peres. On 18 December 1980, by an overwhelming majority, the latter was again designated as “unquestionably” leader of the ILP. As a result of the Knesset elections of June 1981, the Labor Party obtained 47 seats, behind Likud, which had 48, obliging the two blocs to unite to form a government coalition, to be led, alternating every two years, by the heads of the two parties. On 26 November, Haim Bar-Lev, backed by Shimon Peres, was reelected secretary-general of the ILP, with 63 percent of the votes, against his adversary, Eliahu Speiser, sup-

202

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ported by Yitzhak Rabin. As a result of the elections of July 1984, the Labor Party won 44 seats in the Knesset, ahead of Likud, which obtained 41. In spite of the weakening of Likud, only 34.9 percent of the votes went to the ILP, while some of the votes lost by the right went to the extreme right. Between 1984 and 1986, succeeding Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres was the prime minister of the Labor-Likud National Unity government, while Yitzhak Rabin was defense minister. One of the main goals Peres set for himself was the economic recovery of the country, which was experiencing an inflation rate of 400 percent. In October 1986, following the rotation agreement, Peres ceded his place as prime minister to Yitzhak Shamir, leader of Likud. As a result of the elections of November 1988, which took place while the first Intifada was raging in the Palestinian territories, the ILP won 39 seats, behind Likud, which won 40. At this time, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the main elements in the Labor Party program were no return to the frontiers of 1967, with part of the occupied territories being kept for security reasons and with a demilitarization of evacuated areas; a resolution of the Palestinian problem by the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian entity, including regions of high-density Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; acceptance of negotiation with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, to be included in the context of an international conference; the creation of an Israeli constitution; opposition to any form of discrimination against Israeli Arabs; and the separation of religion and the state. Between 1988 and 1992 the leader of Likud, Shamir, was prime minister, with no change in the Knesset during this period. On 15 March 1990, the left succeeded in obtaining the censure of the government, by a Knesset vote of 60 to 55. On the following 11 June, after Shimon Peres did not succeed in forming a government, Shamir formed a new cabinet. In February 1992, Peres being again blamed for the electoral failures of 1988 and June 1990, Yitzhak Rabin was elected to lead the Labor Party. As a result of the elections of the following June, the Labor Party obtained 34.8 percent of the votes, against 24.9 percent for Likud. Rabin became prime minister. The portfolio of the foreign ministry was accorded to Peres, the latter becoming the architect of peace negotiations with Arabs and Palestinians, with the support of Rabin. On 24 March 1993, Ezer Weizman, a member of the Labor Party, was elected president of Israel. On the following 13 September in Washington, Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed an accord on T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ISRAEL LABOR PARTY

principles, opening the way to a definitive IsraeliPalestinian agreement. As a result of the municipal elections of the following November, Labor and Likud shared between them the twenty largest cities in Israel. In 1994 many propositions were submitted to the central committee of the party advocating the creation of a new political bloc uniting all the parties of the left. On 25 June 1994 the government of Yitzhak Rabin signed an accord with Jordan, ending the state of war between the two countries. On 16 February the Laborite Avraham Burg, son of Yosef Burg, former head of the National Religious Party (NRP), was elected head of the Jewish Agency, a paragovernmental organization in charge of immigration to Israel. In the course of the following July, the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, Ehud Barak, joined the ILP, to be named, two days later, interior minister in the government of Rabin. During the fall, the ILP was the target of much criticism by Likud and the ultra-orthodox movements, while there were a number of splits in the party itself. Several Labor deputies joined the Third Way. The leadership of the party attempted to get Haim Ramon, head of the Histadrut, to rejoin it. On 5 October, the Knesset approved, by 61 votes against 59, the accord on the extension of Palestinian autonomy. On 12 October, Prime Minister Rabin admitted he was concerned about the violence of the attacks against his peace policies with the Palestinians. On 4 November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist. On 21 November, after being designated as interim head of government and the ILP, Shimon Peres was sworn in as prime minister by the Knesset. Like his predecessor, he combined the functions of prime minister and defense minister. The foreign ministry portfolio was accorded to Ehud Barak, and that of the interior to Chaim Ramon. Yossi Beilin obtained the post of minister without portfolio, responsible for the peace process. In anticipation of the Knesset elections of May 1996, three currents surfaced in the ILP, respectively led by Haim Ramon, Ehud Barak, and Shimon Peres. Apart from the mainstream there was also a reformist current, which included Haim Ramon, Avraham Burg, Yossi Beilin, Haggai Merom, Nawaf Massalha, Amir Peretz, Shlomo Avital, and Yael Dayan. On 30 May 1996, as a result of the elections, the ILP won 34 seats in the Knesset against 32 for the Likud, while the leader of the latter party, Benjamin Netanyahu, was elected prime minister. Many differences surfaced in the ILP. Once more blamed for the electoral failure, Peres was excluded from the party leadership and reD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

placed, provisionally, by Nissim Zvili. On 3 June 1997, the ILP organized the election for the new post of chairman of the party, for which four candidates were jostling: Barak, Beilin, Shlomo Ben-Ami, and Ephraim Sneh. With 50 percent of the votes, Barak was elected chairman of the ILP, ahead of Beilin, who obtained only 29 percent. On the following 28 December, Raanan Cohen was elected secretarygeneral, replacing Nissim Zvili, who had resigned his post six months earlier. Weakened by divisions and power struggles, the Labor Party became mired increasingly in certain positions that displeased the electorate, particularly in the social domain and concerning the peace process. In October 1998 the ILP published its program, which emphasized a social pact, proposed by Barak, to encourage understanding between religious and secular Israelis. On 14 January 1999, anticipating the general elections of the following May, the leadership of the party named Barak to head the list, as candidate for the post of prime minister, with Shimon Peres in second position. With the Gesher and Meimad parties, Barak constituted an electoral list called “One Israel.” During the election campaign, several party figures, such as Nissim Zvili, quit the ILP to join the Center Party. On 18 June, Barak was elected prime minister, defeating Benjamin Netanyahu by a margin of 56.7 percent to 43.3 percent. The electoral list of Labor Party-Gesher-Meimad won only 26 seats in the Knesset, of which 23 were ILP. On 6 July 1999, Barak presented his government, composed of 18 members from 8 different parties. The foreign ministry was accorded to David Levy, head of the Gesher party, flanked by deputy minister Nawaf Massalha, Israeli Arab and member of the Labor Party. Finance and public security were respectively assigned to Avraham Shohat and Ben-Ami of the ILP, while the portfolio of regional development was given to Peres. On 5 September, at Sharm al-Shaykh, after many encounters, Barak and Yasir Arafat signed an accord, meant to open the way to negotiations on a definitive peace between Palestinians and Israelis. On 24 May 2000, Barak gave the green light to the evacuation of South Lebanon by the IDF, ending eighteen years of occupation. At the beginning of July, Barak lost his majority in the Knesset; then his foreign minister, David Levy, quit just before an Israeli-Palestinian summit to be held in Washington, and in which Barak was supposed to participate. On 31 July, surprising everyone, Peres lost the election for the presidency of Israel against his rival, Moshe Katsav, causing consternation in the ILP.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

203

ISSA

During the fall of 2000, the al-Aqsa Intifada, which had begun at the end of September, intensified in the Palestinian territories. Barak was not able to negotiate a return to calm with the Palestinian leaders. The members of Knesset rejected a motion to dissolve the Knesset and accepted the organization of elections for the post of prime minister. On 20 December, Peres decided to become a candidate for prime minister, but could not obtain the necessary approval of 10 deputies. On 6 February 2001, Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon, who obtained 62.5 percent of the votes. The Labor alliance remained the leading political bloc, with 26 seats, against 19 of the Likud. On 20 February, Barak decided to quit politics and resign from the presidency of the ILP. Some Laborites favored joining a government coalition with Likud, but several ILP leaders opposed this project. Finally, on 27 February, the central committee of the party voted, in majority, to participate in a cabinet of national unity, designating seven of its members to join the government of Sharon, among whom were the Laborites Shimon Peres, Benyamin BenEliezer, and Raanan Cohen, becoming respectively foreign minister, defense minister, and minister without portfolio. The following 4 September, Avraham Burg was elected to head the Labor Party, against his adversary, Benyamin Ben-Eliezer, who contested this election, claiming electoral fraud. While waiting for the decisions of the juridical commission, the party was placed under committee leadership, overseen by Peres and by the secretarygeneral, Raanan Cohen. Three months later, at the end of December, Ben-Eliezer was officially elected head of the party, after a ballot in which participation was low. In October 2002, Peres and other members of the Labor Party resigned from the Sharon government. In November 2002, Amram Mitzna, former mayor of Haifa, was elected head of the Labor Party. Mitzna, a “dovish” former army general and a favorite of the peace movement, resigned in May 2003, three months after leading Labor to its worst election defeat. In June 2003, the party once again chose elder statesman Peres as its leader. Under Peres, it was again conceivable that Labor might move toward a coalition with Likud. In July 2004 the Sharon government sought to formally widen its shaky governing coalition, after barely surviving three noconfidence motions in the Knessset, asking Labor as well as United Torah Judaism to begin coalition talks. It was anticipated that Labor would press for a swifter pullout from the Gaza Strip and for direct talks with the Palestinians.

204

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; Beilin, Yossi; Ben-Ami, Shlomo; Ben-Gurion, David; Cohen, Raanan; Likud; Meir, Golda; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak.

ISSA: (“Jesus,” in Arabic.) The name is derived from the Greek Iesous, which in turn is derived from the Aramaic Yeshua, which is a form of the Hebrew Yehoshua. (The name Jesus is an anglicized version of the Latin Iesus, which in turn derived from the Greek.) Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet, and that his teachings were genuine revelations from God, but not that he was divine. ISTIQLAL, AL- (Independence): Weekly newspaper, created in 1994, of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It is published in Gaza. SEE ALSO Bayt al-Maqdis.

ITTAHAD WATANI ISLAMI SEE

Islamic National Union.

ITTIHAD, AL- (Union): For a long time Israel’s only Arabic-language daily newspaper. Founded as a weekly in 1944 by activists close to the Arab Workers Congress, the paper fully supported the 1948 United Nations decision to partition Palestine, which led to the creation of the State of Israel. Historian Emil Toma was its first editor, followed by Israeli Arab writer Emil Habibi, who ran the paper until 1990. AlIttihad became a daily in 1983. It is published in Haifa and has a daily circulation of twelve thousand.

ITTIJAH, AL- (Direction): The Union of Arab Community-Based Organizations, an umbrella group of Palestinian nongovernmental organizations in Israel, based in Haifa. Founded in 1995, Ittijah fosters cooperation among Palestinian Israeli organizations that provide social support services, advocate for change, and promote the development of Palestinian civil society and cultural autonomy within Israel. These organizations are more important to Palestinian Israelis than to Jewish Israelis because of the government’s discrimination against its Palestinian citizens and its lack of funding for the institutions that serve them. Ittijah focuses on three principal areas: advocacy (making the status of Palestinian Israelis known to the Palestinian and Israeli publics and to the Arab and international publics, nongovernmental organizations, and governments); “capacity building” (increasing the resources of its member organizations through staffing, technical help, education, and funT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

IZZ AL-DIN AL-QASSAM BRIGADE

draising); and networking (bringing together organizations with similar agendas and expertise locally, regionally, and internationally). Among its dozens of member organizations are groups focused on civil and human rights, women’s advocacy, children’s welfare, theater, history, scholarly research, library support, and religious charity. It maintains links with Palestinian nongovernmental organizations in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, as well as with foreign nongovernmental organizations and international organizations, including the United Nations. Its funding comes from voluntary contributions, mainly from foreign nonprofits and the European Union. Ittijah also takes public stands against policies and acts of the Israeli government that injure Palestinian Israelis, as well as those directed against Palestinians in the occupied territories. The government has harassed Ittijah, as well as other Palestinian civil agencies and institutions, through legal, illegal, and extralegal means: it has proposed legislation forbidding Palestinian Israeli nongovernmental organizations from accepting funding from foreign governments; it has broken into offices and stolen files and computers; it has intimated to donors and potential

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

donors that such organizations “support terrorism.” Ittijah maintains a web site at www.ittijah.org. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Palestinian Israelis; West Bank.

IUM SEE

Islamic Unification Movement.

IVRIT: The modern Hebrew language. IYAR (Yhiar, Ityar): Name of the eighth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to late April and early May. The festival of Yom ha-Atzma’ut is celebrated on 5 Iyar and that of Lag B’Omer on 18 Iyar. SEE ALSO Hebrew Calendar; Yom ha-Atzma’ut. IZZ AL-DIN ALSEE

Qassam, Izz al-Din al-.

IZZ AL-DIN AL-QASSAM SEE

Qassam, Izz al-Din al-.

IZZ AL-DIN AL-QASSAM BRIGADE SEE

HAMAS.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

205

J JAAFARI: A word derived from the name of the ShiEite imam Jaafar, used to designate the twelver juridical school. SEE ALSO ShiEite. JABAL: Arabic word meaning “mountain.” JABAL MUSA: “Mount Moses,” “Mountain of Moses”; the Arabic name for Mount Sinai.

JABARA, HUSSNIYA (1958– ): Israeli Arab, professor of Middle East studies at Beit Berl College. A member of the lay Meretz Party, she won a seat in the general elections of 18 May 1999, becoming the first Arab woman elected to the Knesset. SEE ALSO Knesset; Meretz Party.

JABHAT AL-DIMUQRATI AL-TAHRIR AL FILASTIN Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

JABHAT AL-INQADH SEE

Palestinian National Salvation Front.

JABHAT AL-ISLAMIYYA AL ALAMIYYA LI-JIHAD AL YAHUD WAS AL-SALIBIYYIN World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders.

SEE

JABHAT AL-KHALAS AL-ISLAMI AL-FILASTIN SEE

Islamic Front for the Salvation of Palestine.

JABHAT AL-TAHRIR AL ARABIYYA SEE

Arab Liberation Front.

JABOTINSKY, VLADIMIR ZE’EV (1880–1940): Zionist ideologist, born in Odessa. Vladimir Jabotinsky studied in Switzerland and Italy, where he was influenced by romantic nationalism. Advocating a radical Zionism, he had begun propounding his concept of a Jewish state by 1903. In 1918, during World War I, he helped create a Jewish battalion that was integrated into the British army and fought the Ottoman army. He made a name for himself there. In 1923 students supporting Jabotinsky’s ideas founded the Betar movement, which was transformed into a paramilitary force. In 1925 he created the Union of Revisionist Zionists, an independent branch of the Zionist movement. Between 1928 and 1929 he lived in Jerusalem, where he directed an insurance company and published a daily, Do’ar ha-Yom. Confrontations on 1 May 1928 between young Betar members and communist militants were evidence of a scission, which over time grew larger, between the revisionists and the socialist majority of the Zionists. From that time on, Betar found itself spearheading the fight for the “liberation of Palestine.”

207

JACOB

heart attack during a visit to a Betar youth camp in New York State. His ashes were long barred from entry into Israel by the Zionist Labor leadership but were finally transferred to Mount Herzl, in Jerusalem, in 1964. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Betar; Ottomans; Zionism.

JACOB (Yaakob, “held by the heel,” in Hebrew; Yaqub, in Arabic): According to Biblical tradition, Jacob was the son of Isaac and Rebecca, and the father of the twelve sons who became the eponymous ancestors of the tribes of Israel. In most of the prophetic writings he was designated by the name Israel, which became the ethnic name of the people of Israel. SEE ALSO Isaac.

VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY. THE RADICAL ZIONIST INSPIRED THE CREBETAR MOVEMENT, AND HE ESTABLISHED THE UNION OF REVISIONIST ZIONISTS IN THE 1920S. JABOTINSKY ADVOCATED THE CREATION OF A JEWISH STATE IN ALL OF PALESTINE, REJECTING MORE CAUTIOUS ZIONIST PROPOSALS AND BRITISH ADVOCACY OF PARTITIONING PALESTINE. (© Government Press Office [GPO] of Israel)

ATION OF THE

In 1930, when Jabotinsky was visiting South Africa, British authorities prevented him from returning to Palestine by refusing to renew his visa, obliging him to live in Paris. In 1931 he broke with the leadership of the Zionist Congress, which refused to pronounce itself openly in favor of creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. In 1935, at the time of the Vienna Zionist Congress, he announced the creation of a new movement, of which he was the president, the New Zionist Organization, whose headquarters were in London. He rejected the British plan to partition Palestine and made numerous attempts to further his cause with any government that approved of creating a Jewish national homeland, obtaining financial and material help from Poland. In 1937 Betar and the Irgun coordinated their actions against British forces in Palestine. In September 1938, at the Betar conference in Warsaw, he was strongly criticized by party members, in particular by Menachem Begin, who favored passing to the “military phase.” After the start of World War II, he recommended the creation of a Jewish brigade, which would participate in combat against Germany. Jabotinsky died of a

208

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

JACOBITE CHURCH: Name of a Syrian religious community of Christians who in 451 refused to adhere to the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon and who do not recognize the authority of the Pope. The Syrian Orthodox patriarch sits in Antioch, Turkey. The Jacobite Church is one of the many Christian denominations that share rights to the Holy Sepulcher. SEE ALSO Christianity. JAFFA: Ancient port on the eastern Mediterranean, south of present-day Tel Aviv, Israel. Known as Joffa in biblical times, Jaffa prospered under Egyptian, then Ottoman, rule in the nineteenth century as a thriving port city. The population, 5,000 in the midnineteenth century, expanded to 40,000 by 1914; 15,000 of that number were Jews. The city was virtually deserted during World War I, but under the subsequent British Mandate, Jaffa revived, reaching a population of 30,000 by 1922 and continuing to grow thereafter. After the United Nations decision to partition Palestine in 1947, riots broke out in Jaffa. Following the fighting, Jewish forces took the city, and most of its 65,000 Arabs fled. In 1950 Jaffa was incorporated into the Tel Aviv municipality and remains a mixed Jewish and Arab section of the metropolitan area. JAHBAZ: (“Cashier” or “banker,” in Arabic.) For many centuries in the Muslim world, this work was the exclusive province of Jews and Christians, as it was for Jews in Christian societies.

JAHILIYYA: (“Ignorance” or “barbarism,” in Arabic.) In Islam jahiliyya traditionally has referred to Arabia T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JAMI E A AL-ISLAMIYYA AL-LIBNANIYA, AL-

in the period before Islam, when the predominant religions were animistic or pantheistic. Among contemporary extremist Islamist thinkers, however, the term has been applied to all non-Islamic societies and belief systems, and indeed to “un-Islamic” elements incorporated into modern Muslim societies. According to Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the Egyptian theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, only two cultures exist in the world, Islam and jahiliyya. SEE ALSO Muslim Brotherhood.

JAI SEE

Jewish Agency for Israel.

JAMIE: Arab word used to designate a main mosque. SEE ALSO

Mosque.

JAMIEA

AL-ISLAMIYYA, AL- (al-GamaEa al-Islamiya, “Islamic group”): Islamic militant movement that surfaced in Egypt in the late 1970s. In the early 1970s the regime of President Anwar al-Sadat released many of the Islamic militants who had been jailed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat encouraged and aided the spread of the Brotherhood and of new Islamic groups (al-gama Eat al-Islamiya), some of which had been created in prison, to counteract the influence of leftists in universities and the labor movement. All fundamentalist tendencies were represented in these groups, and they had various affiliations and influences in and out of Egypt. Their success soon put them beyond the government’s control, particularly in the period after the ArabIsrael War of 1973 when Sadat was following a policy of rapprochement with Israel and the United States and opposition to the regime was rising. In 1978, representatives of the jami Ea won a landslide victory in the university student union elections. The following year, their increasing opposition to the policies of President Sadat forced the government to ban their activities in the universities. But, encouraged by the success of the Iranian revolution, the Islamic movement become more radical, demanding, among other things, the cessation of negotiations with Israel. Small extremist splinter groups appeared, among which the most radical was one called simply al-JamiEa al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group. Its principal initiators, Karam Zuhdiand Najeh Ibrahim, advocated resorting to violence in order to gain power and establish an Islamic state in Egypt. In 1980, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made efforts to convince Karam Zudhi of the desirability of

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

an alliance between their two movements. The following year, the latter was arrested and accused of complicity in the murder of President Anwar alSadat, carried out by a commando of the Jihad. In 1985, one of the principal leaders of the JamiEa, Muhammad Shawqi, quit the movement to found his own group, Al-Shawqiyun, inspired by Ahmad Shukri Mustafa, former head of Al-Takfir wa al-Hijra. The JamiEa al-Islamiyya was made up of small cells, coordinated by leaders either in Egypt or abroad (Pakistan, Europe). In liaison with Islamic Jihad, the terrorist actions of the JamiEa al-Islamiyya targeted Egyptian political personalities, heads of security services, and sometimes tourists. On 5 July 1997, at the opening of a trial of ninety-seven Islamists before the military court of Cairo, six founders of the movement, condemned to hard labor for the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, launched an appeal to end the violence. In February 1998, the JamiEa alIslamiyya and the Jihad joined the World Islamic Front for Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, of which Osama Bin Ladin was one of the principal leaders. On 26 April 1999, the Egyptian government decided to liberate one thousand militants of the movement, after a number of al-JamiEa leaders announced that they were renouncing violence. The main leaders of the movement are Jamal Ferghali Haridi, Mustafa Hamza, RifaEi Ahmad Taha, and Muhammad Shawqi Islambuli. The spiritual head of al-JamiEa al-Islamiyya was Shaykh Omar Abd alRahman, who had emigrated to the United States in 1989. He was convicted in 1995 of being involved in the February 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and is currently serving a life sentence. SEE ALSO Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Muslim Brotherhood; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Sadat, Anwar al-; Takfir wa al-Hijra, al-; World Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders.

JAMIEA AL-ISLAMIYYA AL-LIBNANIYA, AL-: Lebanese Islamic movement (the Lebanese Islamic Group, in Arabic), which surfaced in 1962 under the impetus of Fathi Yakan. Originating from the JamaEa EIbad alRahman (Group of Servants of the Merciful), this organization, which advocated struggle against Israel, was a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1972, one of its members, Said Shabaan, quit the movement in order to form the Islamic Unification Movement (IUM). In 1990, at the time of the Gulf War, the JamiEa al-Islamiyya decided to support Iraq,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

209

JAPANESE RED ARMY

which led to an interruption in the Saudi aid it had been receiving. In 1992, so as to participate in legislative elections, the movement changed into a party and won several deputy seats. The following year, Faysal al-Mawlawi, leader of the branch of the northern part of the country, replaced Fathi Yakan as leader of the movement. In 1996, a split appeared in the movement, caused by a power struggle for the leadership between Fathi Yakan and Faysal al-Mawlawi, which Mawlawi won. SEE ALSO Islamic Unification Movement; Muslim Brotherhood.

ment, then resumed again in December 1970. In February 1971, Jarring presented proposals to Israel and Egypt, but no agreement could be reached. The mission lapsed, though it was not formally ended until 1990. SEE ALSO Resolution 242.

JCS (JOINT COMMITTEE FOR SECURITY) Joint Coordination and Cooperation Committee for Mutual Security Purposes.

SEE

JDPP SEE

JAPANESE RED ARMY (JRA): Japanese terrorist movement formed in 1971 to support the Palestinian cause. Originating from the Armed Faction of the Communist League (AFCL), this small group became known as “Red Army Faction” in 1971. Established in Lebanon, in the Baqaa Valley, the group participated in many attacks in the West and the Middle East from 1972 to 1988, including airplane hijackings, in concert with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), in particular. On 30 May 1972, a JRA commando exploded a bomb in the Tel Aviv Airport, killing twenty-seven and wounding seventy. Twenty-five years later, the Lebanese authorities arrested a number of Japanese citizens in the south of the country whom they suspected of belonging to the JRA. In 2000, Lebanon deported to Japan four members it arrested in 1997, but granted a fifth political asylum. Longtime leader Fusako Shigenobu was arrested in November 2000 and faces charges of terrorism and passport fraud. SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

JARRING MISSION: A United Nations-sponsored mission to negotiate an Arab-Israel peace settlement. In November 1967, UN Secretary-General U Thant appointed Gunnar Jarring, a Swedish diplomat who had served as Sweden’s ambassador to the United Nations (1956–1958) and ambassador to the United States (1958–1964), as special envoy to promote a peace settlement based on UN Security Council Resolution 242. Jarring began his mission in 1968, but the parties demonstrated little interest in his initiatives. His mission was suspended when UN representatives of the countries began direct talks, then resumed briefly in 1970, after the August cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt ended the war of attrition along the Suez Canal. It was again suspended because of Egyptian violations of that agree-

210

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Jordanian Progressive Party.

JEDDAH, TREATY OF: Signed on 20 May 1927 by King

Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman al-SaEud—known as ibn SaEud—and the British, this treaty established the frontiers of the newly established Saudi Arabia with the British protectorates of Transjordan, Iraq, and Kuwait. With the Treaty of Jeddah, Great Britain recognized ibn SaEud as “King of Hijaz, Nejd, and its dependencies.” SEE ALSO Jordan.

JERICHO: City in the West Bank, situated at the northern end of the Dead Sea. Considered to be the oldest city in the world, Jericho (Ariha, in Arabic) is 825 feet below sea level. According to Biblical tradition, the city was conquered by the Hebrews under Joshua in the twelfth century B.C.E., through the power of a shofar sounded by priests. After the signature in Washington on 13 September 1993 of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, Jericho became the first “autonomous” Palestinian city. SEE ALSO West Bank.

JERUSALEM (in Arabic, Beit al-Maqdis, “holy house,”or al-Quds al-Sharif, “the holy”; in Hebrew, Yerushalayim): Venerated by each of the three great monotheistic religions, the city of Jerusalem has always been a battleground. Its name, Yerushalayim, in Hebrew means, according to some, “city of peace”; according to others, it means “foundation of Shalem,” and has thus been identified with the city of Shalem (Salem) mentioned in Genesis. Therefore, according to Jewish tradition, the name of Jerusalem would come from the association of two places, Shalem and Yeru, the latter being where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. The city of Salem was supposed to have been built by the Canaanite goddess Anet in honor of her brother, Salem, the god T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JERUSALEM

of peace. In the twelfth century B.C.E., Jerusalem was already considered a holy city because of the presence of the Gihon spring, reputed to be miraculous. It became the Jewish religious and national center after it was conquered by David (c. 1000 B.C.E.); it remained so until the destruction of the second Jewish Temple by the Romans (70 C.E.) and the subsequent rebellions against Roman occupation, which resulted in the Jewish exile from Jerusalem. Practically forgotten for five centuries, during which a number of Christian churches were built in the city, Jerusalem began to be more prominent with the birth of Islam. According to the QurDan, the prophet Muhammad spent time there, during which he ascended to heaven (miraj). In 634 the Arabs took the city and gave it the name of Ilia, from the Latin appellation of Aelia Capitolina. After Muhammad established Mecca as the premier holy site of Islam, the Umayyads decided to make Jerusalem a sacred city, naming it Bayt al-Maqdis or al-Quds. In 688– 691 the Umayyads built the first great edifice of Islam, the Cupola of the Rock (Dome of the Rock), on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, and on the spot where the prophet Muhammad was believed to have begun his ascension to the heavens. In 715 a second mosque was built in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, which the Umayyads called AlMasjid al-Aqsa (the furthest Mosque). After the fall of the Umayyad dynasty, Jerusalem was forgotten once more, allowing the Christian community to develop there, until 1077, when the city was conquered by Seljuk troops. On 15 July 1099, the Crusaders, led by Godfrey de Bouillon, took the city by assault. The conquest of the Holy City gave birth to the Latin states of the east, and Baudouin de Flandre became the first king of Jerusalem. The Kingdom of Jerusalem comprised at the time all of Palestine, which name was dropped, in favor of “Holy Land.” In 1149 the Crusaders rebuilt the Holy Sepulchre, destroyed by the Arabs fifty years before. On 4 July 1187, at Hittin, the troops of Saladin crushed those of the Franks and three months later the Muslims retook Jerusalem. In 1229 one of the grandsons of Saladin yielded control of the city to the emperor Frederick II, but in 1244 the Muslims reconquered it. In 1291 the fall of Acre marked the end of the Latin states of the east. Palestine was divided by the Mamluks into six districts and was joined with Syria. In 1516, Jerusalem was easily conquered by the Ottomans, and two centuries later, in 1757, the Sultanate decided to divide the guardianship of the holy places among Christians of every obedience. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha, son of the vice-king of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, backed by France, took control of Palestine. In 1850, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte reclaimed the right of protection over the holy sites of Jerusalem, retained by Russia since 1808. This claim was one of the causes of the Crimean War (1854– 1856). In 1860, taking advantage of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, England expanded its sphere of influence in Palestine. In 1878 an accord was signed at the Berlin congress, which confirmed the rights of France over the holy sites of Palestine. In 1885 the treaty of Berlin specified “that there shall be no alteration of the status quo of the holy sites.” In 1889 the Jerusalem region passed out of Syrian control, for the first time in six hundred years, to be governed by Constantinople. In 1898, as a counterweight to the French, Russian, and British influence, Germany began building religious edifices in Jerusalem. On 9 December 1917, during World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire backed Germany, British troops entered the city and immediately declared martial law. On 29 September 1923, the British Mandate over Palestine went into effect, and Jerusalem became the capital of the country. Under the British Mandate, Jerusalem became the center of both Zionist and nationalist movements. Arab Palestinian fears of displacement and of continued Zionist immigration led to violence in 1929 (the Western Wall Disturbances) and to the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. Both were suppressed by British military force. On 29 November 1947, in the context of United Nations Resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine, it was proposed that the city be accorded a special status as a separate entity (corpus separatum), overseen by an advisory council, in order to guarantee the rights of the three religious communities. On 15 May 1948, a few hours before the end of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel, which led to the first Arab-Israel war. On 28 May, when Israel took over the western part of Jerusalem, Transjordanian troops occupied the Old City, where the Muslim holy places were located. On 3 April 1949, an armistice was signed between Transjordan and Israel. While the Arab camp emerged defeated from the conflict, Transjordan found itself aggrandized, by the West Bank and the control of the Arab part of Jerusalem. The Israeli government then launched into an intense program of development of the New City of Jerusalem, where its administrative offices were transferred. On 19 December 1949, the UN passed a resolution demanding the internationalization of the Holy City, but the resolution was ignored by both Israel and Jordan. In

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

211

JERUSALEM

1950 Israel proclaimed Jerusalem its capital, even though most governments did not relocate their embassies from Tel Aviv. On 28 May 1964, at the first congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC), held in East Jerusalem, the Arab countries decided to create the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose goal was the liberation of “all of occupied Palestine.” In June 1967, during the Arab-Israel War, the Israeli army occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. On the following 4 and 14 July, the UN passed Resolutions 2253 and 2254, declaring the annexation of Jerusalem by Israel illegal, and demanding that the latter refrain from any decision that would change the status of the city. From that time, as Israel ignored these resolutions, Jerusalem became one of the principal subjects of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An accord was reached between the Waqf and the Israeli authorities, stipulating that only the Muslim religion would be practiced in al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount). In September 1969, after a fire at the al-Aqsa Mosque, the leaders of the Muslim states decided to create the Islamic Conference Organization (ICO), to oversee the safeguarding of the holy sites of Jerusalem. The Israeli occupation gave rise to a new Palestinian nationalism, whose watchwords were the “right of return” and the creation of a state, with Jerusalem as its capital. On 30 July 1980, the Israeli Knesset passed a law proclaiming Jerusalem “one and entire, eternal capital of Israel,” which provoked an international outcry. On 20 August, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 478, rejecting the decision of the Israeli government. In September 1981, at the Third Islamic Summit, which took place in TaDif (Saudi Arabia), the Arab states decided to create the al-Quds Committee, in charge of protecting Muslim interests in the city of Jerusalem. On 9 September 1982, at the Twelfth Arab summit in Fez, the member states adopted a plan for resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, which provided, notably, for a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem (al-Quds) as its capital. The Israeli authorities undertook a campaign, vainly, to have Jerusalem recognized as the “capital of Israel” by the international community. On 15 November 1988, at a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, proclaimed the “independence of the Palestinian state,” with Jerusalem as its capital. In March 1990, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution in favor of recognizing Jerusalem as “capital of Israel,” which caused a wave of protest in much of the international community. When U.S. president

212

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

George Bush, in March 1991, launched the idea of a peace plan for the Middle East, the subject of the internationalization of the status of Jerusalem came up again, prompting Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to reiterate that Jerusalem would forever remain the capital of Israel. On 19 May 1993, on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the eastern part of the city, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin declared that the “question of Jerusalem is not part of the agenda in negotiations for a temporary accord” concerning the occupied territories. On 4 September 1995, the Israeli administration of the city announced a celebration, to last fifteen months, to commemorate the thirdmillennium anniversary of the declaration of King David, proclaiming Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish people. The European Union and the Palestinians decided to boycott these events, so as not to support Israeli claims on the Arab part of the city. At the opening of these festivities, other than the absence of European diplomats, that of the ambassador of the United States was also noticeable. On 24 October 1995, the U.S. Senate voted (93 for and 5 against) to move the embassy of the United States from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision approved by Congress (374 in favor and 37 against), notwithstanding the opposition of the Clinton administration, which was wary of harming the peace process. Implicitly recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, this U.S. initiative prompted much anger and protest in Arab countries. On 4 December 1996, referring to the Israeli decision of 1980 to extend its laws, jurisdiction, and administration over Jerusalem, the United Nations General Assembly declared the takeover of the Holy City to be illegal. This resolution was passed by a massive majority, with 148 voices for, one against (Israel) and 13 abstentions, including the United States. The municipal elections of 10 November 1998, in which the abstention rate was almost 60 percent, allowed the ultra-orthodox SHAS Party to win 15 seats of the 31, while the lay party of the left, Meretz, won only 7 seats. In July 2000, at the IsraeliPalestinian summit hosted by the United States at Camp David, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said he was willing to accord administrative powers to the Palestinians over the Arab part of Jerusalem, provoking the anger of the Israeli right and the ultraorthodox. In September, a visit by the head of Likud, Ariel Sharon, to al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) sparked a violent outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which prompted Israeli authorities to restrict Palestinians who did not reside in Jerusalem from entering the city. HAMAS and the Islamic Jihad carried out more suicide bombings, and Israeli authorities T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL

began constructing a barrier to cut off Palestinian areas from Jewish areas. In January 2004 the wall was extended to cut off the Palestinian suburb of Abu Dis from the city. Jerusalem remained at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); British Mandate; Haram al-Sharif; Palestine National Council; Resolution 181; Resolution 2253; Sharon, Ariel. JERUSALEM POST: Israeli weekly, founded in 1932 under the name Palestine Post, becoming the Jerusalem Post in 1950. Openly Labor until the middle of the 1980s, this publication was bought by a Canadian group in 1989 and has been transformed into a daily newspaper of the center-right. Its owners control also 49 percent of the shares of the biweekly Jerusalem Report. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party.

JESUS (Jesus Christ; Isa, in Arabic; Joshua, in Hebrew): The founder of Christianity, Jesus is considered by Christians to be the Messiah, son of God, and redeemer of humanity. According to many historians, the effect of Jesus’ preaching was to annoy the great Jewish priests, Pharisees and Sadducees, who saw in his discourse the ferment of unrest in the Jewish community of Palestine. After he went to Jerusalem for Passover, Jesus was arrested, condemned to death, and crucified on the order of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. After his death, his apostles claimed that Jesus had been resurrected, thereby giving birth to the first generation of Christians, whose faith was based on the preaching of Jesus. The year in which Jesus is believed to have been born marks the beginning of the common era. However, many historians think Jesus was actually born in Galilee six or seven years earlier. SEE ALSO Christianity; Galilee; Isa; Messiah.

JEW (yehudi, in Hebrew): Name accorded since the Exile (4th century B.C.E.) to the descendants of Abraham, a monotheistic Semitic people who lived in Palestine. The word Jew was used for the first time in 332 B.C.E. to designate the inhabitants of Judea at the moment when Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East. Judea was a province of the Persian Empire that issued from the Kingdom of Judah, one of the sons of Jacob. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, many political, intellectual, and religious leaders launched a public debate about who exD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

actly was a Jew. Lay people and most political figures favored a separation between religion and politics, and between religion and nationality, but the ultraOrthodox favored the creation of a religious state and connected ethnic origin with religion, as the Israeli government eventually did and continues to do. The Law of Return (Hoq ha-Shvut), passed by the Knesset on 5 July 1950, provides that any Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. A 1970 amendment extended citizenship rights to nonJewish spouses and the children of Jews. Some Orthodox leaders have called for an amendment narrowly defining a Jew as a person born of a Jewish mother or converted according to Orthodox tradition. This has sparked considerable debate among the Jewish Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative movements. SEE ALSO

Abraham; Jacob; Knesset; Law of

Return.

JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL (JAI): The Jewish Agency for Palestine was officially created in 1929. Its name comes from the text of the 1922 British mandate calling for “a Jewish agency.” It became the Jewish Agency for Israel after 1948. In 1929, the organization was opened to non-Zionist Jewish groups and also became the executive arm of the World Zionist Organization. Numerous non-Zionist personalities, including Albert Einstein and Leon Blum, belonged to the Jewish Agency. Created while Palestine was under British mandate, the JAI cooperated with the British administration to find solutions to the problems of Jewish immigration. In the 1930s the agency supervised the transfer of Jewish capital from Germany to Palestine, as well as the immigration—both legal and illegal—of thousands of European Jews. But faced with restrictive measures regarding the immigration of the Jews into Palestine, the executive committee of the Jewish Agency decided, in 1939, to harden its position regarding British authority. In May 1941, in the context of the war against Nazi Germany, the Jewish Agency and Haganah decided to create the PALMACH (Hebrew acronym for “shock brigades”), some of which would be merged into the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and would participate in combat against the German Army. At the end of January 1943, faced with the persecutions of the European Jews of Central Europe, the Jewish Agency created a “Rescue Committee,” directed by Yitzhak Gruenbaum, to help Jews leave their country to go to a neutral one or to Palestine.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

213

JEWISH RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS

In December 1946, approving the positions of the Jewish Agency, the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress designated David Ben-Gurion to head a defense committee. After the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, the Jewish Agency concentrated its activities on immigration and the integration of the masses of new immigrants. In 1954 the Israeli government and the executive committee of the World Zionist Organization confirmed the role of the Jewish Agency for immigration into Israel. The Jewish Agency also organizes the rescue of Diaspora Jews in danger and retains some authority regarding agricultural resettlement. It spends a large portion of its budget on educational and cultural activities related to its mission of increasing the commitment of world Jewry to the State of Israel. SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David; Haganah.

JEWISH RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS: Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement; falls on 10 Tishri); Rosh Hashana (New Year’s Day; falls on 1 and 2 Tishri); Sukkoth (Feast of the Tabernacles; falls between 15 and 21 Tishri); Pesach (Passover; falls between 15 and 21 Nisan); Purim (Feast of the Drawing of Lots; falls on 13 or 14 Adar); Shavuoth (Pentecost; falls on 6 and 7 Sivan). SEE ALSO Yom Kippur.

JIBRIL, AHMAD (1935–2002): Palestinian political figure born in 1935, near Ramla, in Palestine. Having taken refuge in Syria in 1948, at the time of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, Ahmad Jibril joined the Syrian army in 1952, becoming a captain. He was expelled from the army in 1958 at the time of the creation of the United Arab Republic. He briefly worked with Fatah in 1965 and then created a fida Diyyun group, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). In 1967, after the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War of 1967, he participated in the creation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by George Habash and Nayif Hawatma, and born of a merging of the PLF and the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). The following year, in disagreement with George Habash, he quit the PFLP to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which put armed struggle before political action. The PFLPGC, whose headquarters was in Syria, made itself known on 21 February 1970 by blowing up, in flight, a Swissair plane directed toward Tel Aviv. In the following year, the PFLP-GC carried out many attacks on Israeli soil. In March 1974, three of Jibril’s closest collaborators died in an automobile accident, caus-

214

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

AHMAD JIBRIL. THE PRO-SYRIAN—AND LATER PRO-IRANIAN— RADICAL, WHO LONG OPPOSED THE POLICIES AND RULE OF YASIR ARAFAT, FOUNDED THE BREAKAWAY POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE—GENERAL COMMAND IN 1968 AND COMMITTED MANY TERRORIST ACTS IN ISRAEL AND ELSEWHERE BEGINNING IN 1970. (© Reza/Webistan/Corbis)

ing wavering in the movement. During the year, in spite of his opposition to the policies of Yasir Arafat, the PFLP-GC joined the PLO, with Jibril becoming a member of the central committee of the organization. Bolstered by aid from Syria and Libya, the PFLPGC launched into a series of terrorist actions against Israel, which impaired the diplomatic initiative that had been undertaken by the PLO. In 1977, the proSyrian policy advocated by Jibril prompted Muhammad EAbbas Zaydan (Abu al-Abbas) to resign from the PFLP-GC, to found his own movement, which retook the name of the Palestine Liberation Front. In 1983, a new opposition surfaced in the PFLP-GC, giving birth to the PFLP-GC-Temporary Command. In 1984, expelled from the PLO, the PFLP-GC joined the Palestinian opposition, by adhering to the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF). Certain opponents of Yasir Arafat began regarding Jibril as a possible successor to the head of the PLO. Between T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JORDAN

1985 and 1989, the PFLP-GC planned and carried out many terrorist actions. In 1990, Jibril became closer to Iran, making efforts also to back an Islamic current that had surfaced in his movement, one which participated regularly in joint actions with Hizbullah. In September 1993, opposing the IsraeliPalestinian Declaration of Principles, signed in Washington, he made a death threat against Arafat, whom he accused of treason, and he decided to join the Palestinian opposition, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). As the Israeli-Palestinian peace process evolved, Jibril found himself becoming more irrelevant to Palestinian movements. Two currents surfaced in the PFLP-GC: the radical current, which he advocated, along with his son, Muhammad Jihad Jibril; and the moderate current, advocated by the assistant secretary general, Talal Naji, in favor of supporting the policies of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Muhammad Jihad Jibril was assassinated by car bomb in Beirut in May 2002. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab National Movement; Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Habash, George; Hawatma, Nayif; Hizbullah; Palestinian Authority; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Zaydan, Muhammad EAbbas.

JIHAD: (Arabic word meaning “struggle” or “effort.”)

According to the QurDan, jihad is a duty for each Muslim, to achieve the “wisdom and perfection” necessary to deserve the blessing of Allah. This is the “greater jihad,” the personal struggle with the self to improve the character, to be a better Muslim. The “lesser jihad” is the collective struggle to create a more just social order, or the necessary struggle to protect the Muslim community when it is threatened by external danger. In this case, jihad may include or consist of “holy war,” an armed struggle undertaken in the name of God, with the promise of spiritual rewards. This concept was reborn among extremists of the modern Islamist movement, subsequent to the creation of the State of Israel (considered by the Muslim community as an amputation of a part of the land of Islam). The spread of this movement owes a great deal to the ineffectiveness of secular Arab governments in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and also to their failure to serve the needs of their people, their corruption, and their suppression of democratic political alternatives. In current Western political discourse, “jihad” is often taken to have the meaning of “holy war” exclusively. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO

Allah.

JIHAD

AL-BINA: Organization (Effort for Construction, in Arabic) subsidiary to the Lebanese Hizbullah, in charge of reconstruction, in the ShiEite sections of Lebanon, of homes destroyed by Israeli bombardments. SEE ALSO Hizbullah.

JOINT COORDINATION AND COOPERATION COMMITTEE FOR MUTUAL SECURITY PURPOSES (JSC) : Organization created in May 1994, within the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian accord on the application of Palestinian autonomy (Oslo Accords II), for the purpose of coordinating the actions of Palestinian and Israeli police in the West Bank and Gaza. After the coming to power in Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu in June 1996, the Israeli government secured the presence of the American CIA on this committee to advise the Palestinian police on combating terrorism and also to serve as an arbiter in case of disagreement. SEE ALSO Gaza; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords II; West Bank.

JOINT LIAISON COMMITTEE (JLC) Local Aid Coordination Committee (LACC).

SEE

JORDAN: The territory that is now Jordan was, like most of the Arab East, under Ottoman rule until World War I. During the war, the British encouraged the Arabs, under the leadership of Husayn ibn Ali alHashim, sharif of Mecca and amir (after 1917, king) of the Hijaz (western Arabia), to rebel against the Ottomans. In 1920, his son Faysal, who had been chosen by local notables to be king of Syria, was expelled by the French, who held a League of Nations mandate over that country. The next year Faysal’s older brother Abdullah led an army into Transjordan and established himself at Amman, with the intention of moving to restore Faysal in Syria. The British, who held a mandate over Palestine and Transjordan, persuaded him to remain in Amman and agreed to recognize him as ruler there (at the same time they installed Faysal as king of Iraq). By treaty in 1923, Abdullah agreed to accept this arrangement and became Emir Abdullah I of an autonomous emirate of Transjordan (in which the British controlled finance, the military, and foreign relations). In 1946 the country became nominally independent, and declared itself

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

215

JORDAN

the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, and Abdullah king. A treaty of 1948, however, preserved Britain’s dominating presence in the country. It supplied financial aid and stationed troops there; in addition, Jordan’s army, known as the Arab Legion (al-Jaysh al-Arabi), continued to be commanded and largely run by British officers.

Jordan was admitted to the UN. In March 1956, also under public pressure, the king dismissed Sir John Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion (and changed its name), and announced new elections. These took place in October 1956, shortly before the Suez War, and resulted in the installation of a left-leaning nationalist government.

Abdullah also wished to rule Palestine, or as much of it as possible. This put him in conflict with the rising Palestinian nationalist movement, particularly the Arab Higher Committee headed by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and from the early 1920s he maintained a secret relationship with the Zionist leadership designed to further their mutual interest in thwarting Palestinian aspirations. In November 1947, shortly before the United Nations adopted a resolution partitioning Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian states, the king and the Jewish Agency reached an agreement to divide Palestine between them—the Zionists would establish their state, Abdullah would recongnize it and annex the “Arab part of Palestine” to Jordan, and there would be no Palestinian state. Although matters did not go as Abdullah expected—he did not wish to fight a war against the Zionists, but he was subject to Arab pressures—the truce lines at the end of the Arab-Israel War of 1948—1949 left Jordanian forces in control of a substantial portion of Palestine. On 3 April 1949, the Rhodes armistice agreement ratified this control, and a year later Jordan officially annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank by an Act of Union. Abdullah wanted to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel, but Arab pressure prevented him from doing so.

British collaboration with Israel in the attack on Egypt inspired the end of Jordan’s subordinate relationship with Britain. In January 1957, Jordan entered the Arab Solidarity Agreement with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, which provided for military cooperation as well as financial assistance to Jordan. In March the government cancelled the 1948 treaty with Britain and negotiated a new one, under which Britain ended its subsidies, turned over its bases, and withdrew its troops. Believing that his Nasserist government was planning to abolish the monarchy, however, Hussein dismissed it in April 1957. After a coup d’etat by the Nasserist army commander was squelched, the newly appointed conservative government dissolved parliament and banned political parties. From this time Hussein took the lead in governing the country himself. The Arab Solidarity Pact having fallen apart almost immediately, the king, claiming to be menaced by Communism, requested and received aid from the United States, which aroused fierce opposition to him in the country. In return for the aid he allowed American and British intelligence agencies to operate freely in Jordan, and they helped him against his foreign and domestic opposition, which included Palestinians, nationalist Jordanians, Nasserists, and pan-Arabists.

On 20 July 1951, the king was assassinated by a Palestinian at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. His son Talal succeeded him but abdicated in favor of his own son, Hussein, on 11 August 1952. Resentment of Britain; anti-Hashimite and Nasserist-Arab nationalist sentiment (the Egyptian revolution had overthrown a British-associated monarchy in 1952, and its leader was idolized in the Arab world); the presence of Palestinians in the kingdom (half to twothirds of the population was Palestinian, including more than 800,000 refugees from the 1948 war); and the continuing Palestine crisis—including frequent Israeli incursions into the West Bank—shaped the political situation at the time Hussein came to power. In 1954 there was major public unrest when general elections were rigged by the Hashimite government. In 1955, under public pressure, the king could not sign on to the Baghdad Pact, initiated by Britain and the United States. On 14 December 1955,

At the beginning of February 1958, following the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) by Syria and Egypt, Hussein decided, with his cousin Faysal II of Iraq, to form the Arab Union, which ended the following July when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Faysal was assassinated. Fearing similar events in Jordan, Hussein’s government declared martial law; the United States began supplying Jordan with oil, and Britain sent in troops. On 10 November 1958 Hussein himself escaped an assassination attempt while flying to Switzerland, when a Syrian plane tried to force his down. In August 1960 Hussein’s prime minister was assassinated in his office; on 29 August the king escaped from an attack directed against him. The plot was traced to Syria. On 30 May 1967, with regional tension rising, Jordan signed a military defense accord with Egypt and Syria, leading to the 1967 war with Israel, resulting in the loss of the West Bank including East Jerusa-

216

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JORDAN

lem, and the arrival of almost 350,000 newly uprooted Palestinian refugees in the kingdom. While favoring a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel, King Hussein was blocked by the refusal of Arab countries, which, by way of compensation, accorded him significant financial aid, principally from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. On 16 February 1968, following new reprisals by the Israeli army in Jordanian territory, he condemned armed actions by the Palestinian resistance, but after the Battle of Karama in March 1968, activities by Palestinian guerrillas (fida Diyyun) in Jordan increased. There was fighting between the Jordanian army and Palestinian organizations, who by then were trying to bring down the Hashimite regime. The situation culminated in what has come to be known as Black September 1970. Hussein installed a military government and the army launched a massive attack on the Palestinian fighters, killing about four thousand of them in ten days—and defeating a Syrian force that had been sent to help them—until a truce was negotiated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser at the behest of the League of Arab States. After renewed fighting in July 1971 the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and other groups were expelled to Lebanon, and all the Palestinian civil organizations that had made up the Palestinian state-within-a-state were shut down. In November 1971, Jordan’s prime minister, visiting Cairo, was assassinated by the Palestinian group Black September. Jordan became even more isolated in the Arab world because of an economic crisis caused by the halting of Arab financial help, as well as because of the king’s proposed project for a Jordanian-Palestinian federation with the West Bank, to be called the United Arab Kingdom, which he announced on 15 March 1972. This was rejected the next month by the Palestine National Council (PNC). In November, Jordanian security services uncovered a conspiracy organized by Jordanian officers to overthrow the king. During the October 1973 war against Israel, under the influence of the United States, Jordan remained neutral when the conflict started, although it did send two armored brigades to reinforce the Syrian front. On 26 October 1974, King Hussein opposed the decision of the Arab League summit meeting in Rabat recognizing the PLO as “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and supporting an independent Palestinian state in liberated territory. He accepted the decision, however, and dissolved parliament, half of whose constituencies were in the West Bank. He also maintained Jordanian civil and administrative ties to the West D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Bank. In 1977, the trip by the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, to Jerusalem led to a reconciliation between King Hussein and Yasir Arafat. Both opposed the establishment of autonomous regimes under Israeli control for the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and both wanted Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since 1967. In 1978 Hussein declined to participate in the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt or endorse the 1979 peace treaty, in spite of the secret meetings that he had been conducting for years with Israeli leaders. Consequently, at the Arab summit in Baghdad in September 1980 the Gulf states decided to accord some significant financial help to Jordan. From 1980 through 1988, Hussein supported Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, which allowed his kingdom to benefit from trade with Iraq. In 1981 he negotiated an arms deal with the Soviet Union, which was also supplying Iraq. In 1984 Hussein allowed parliament to reopen, and Jordan began dealing with Egypt again despite the Arab League ban that had been imposed after the 1979 treaty. At the summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Casablanca in January 1984, Jordan supported the return of Egypt to the Arab community. In 1985 Hussein allowed the PNC to meet in Amman. He came to an agreement with the PLO regarding a coordinated approach to a PalestinianIsraeli settlement, but differences developed—partly over the loyalties of expatriate Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship—and it was abandoned by 1987. In December 1987 the Intifada began in the occupied territories and in July 1988, fearing the violence would spill across the Jordan River, Hussein renounced all legal and administrative claims and responsibilities in the West Bank (this included the cancellation of the payment of salaries of public officials and of the Jordanian citizenship of all West Bank Palestinians). This move gave the PLO complete responsibility for Palestinian interests. During the Gulf Crisis in 1990, Hussein did not support the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but refused to join the antiIraq coalition. At the Arab League on 3 August 1990, Jordan abstained from voting on the resolution condemning Iraq, but Hussein did support the League’s position that the crisis should be resolved by negotiation under Arab auspices, and rejecting foreign intervention. When the Arab League modified this position a week later, approving the Gulf states’ right to self-defense and implicitly approving their use of outside forces, Jordan voted in favor but expressed “reservations”—in effect, chose to remain neutral.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

217

JORDAN

The end of the Gulf War in 1991 led to the organization of the Madrid Conference on Middle East peace, which opened on 30 October 1991. Hussein agreed to the PLO’s inclusion in the Jordanian delegation, since the Israelis refused to deal with it directly. On 14 September 1993, following the signature of the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel and Jordan signed an agreement in Washington on future peace negotiations. On 18 July 1994, the first formal peace parley took place, and on 26 October 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty. This accord aroused strong opposition in Jordan, as did the accords between Israel and the PLO. Some Jordanians felt that Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship, who presumably would be leaving for a projected Palestinian state, should not be allowed to vote; some Jordanians still favored annexation of the West Bank to Jordan. Many Palestinians still suspected Hashimite friendliness with Israel. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, however, Jordan since 1988 has been an advocate of Palestinian statehood, as well as a necessary intermediary. In February 1996, there was a change in Jordan’s previously friendly relations with Iraq when the king authorized the opening of the office of an Iraqi opposition group in the Jordanian capital. On 5 June 1996, after the coming to power in Israel of a Likud government opposed to the Oslo Accords, Hussein organized, with Yasir Arafat and Husni Mubarak, a mini summit to reaffirm his support for the IsraeliPalestinian peace process. On 3 August, Jordan resumed diplomatic relations with Syria, which had been interrupted by the Israeli-Jordanian peace accord. On 6 August, Hussein met with the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and five days later, he was in Saudi Arabia for the resumption of Jordanian-Saudi relations, interrupted since the Gulf War. On 15 October, he met Yasir Arafat in Jericho, to show his support in the current negotiations with Israel over Hebron, which were at a stalemate. On 12 January 1997, he helped break the stalemate when he mediated an accord on the redeployment of Israeli troops. In August 1998, his health failing, Hussein delegated most of his power to his brother Hassan, and left for the United States for medical treatment. While there, he lent his assistance to the U.S.sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks at Wye River Plantation in October. Returning to Amman in January 1999, he settled the succession on his son Abdullah. He died on 7 February 1999.

Abdullah signed onto an accord developed at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, between Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, that was thought to open the way to negotiations for a final IsraeliPalestinian peace settlement. A few days later Jordan resumed relations with Kuwait, broken off since the Gulf War. Domestically, Abdullah issued a warning to Jordanian Islamists opposed to peace with Israel and announced his intention of continuing the process of democratization begun ten years previously. On 25 November, he declared that Israel should renounce its territorial ambitions in the eastern sector of Jerusalem and accept the return of Palestinian refugees in order to attain a durable peace in the Middle East. On 22 August 2000, he made his first official visit to Tel Aviv, where he was received by Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Before his trip Abdullah had talked with Yasir Arafat and had reaffirmed to him Jordanian support for the Palestinian cause. The alAqsa Intifada, however, which began in September 2000, has reduced Jordan’s ability to mediate, as well as threatened the peace within Jordan. The king implicitly supported the U.S. campaign to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2002–2003, but opposed the war, refusing U.S. forces the use of Jordanian airspace. In June 2003 Abdullah hosted the Aqaba Summit, which was intended to work out the means of implementing the Road Map plan put forth that April by the so-called Quartet. The king met privately with Ariel Sharon in Israel in March 2004 to discuss the “separation wall” Israel was building around Palestinian areas in the West Bank; aside from his opposition to the wall as inflammatory, he was concerned that it would eventually cause a mass movement of new Palestinian refugees into Jordan, resulting in economic stress and upsetting the demographic balance between Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians that already threatens the political stability of the country. The international context of Jordanian politics in 2004 is largely shaped by the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories and by the American “war on terror.” The king, concerned mainly with the survival of the Hashimite regime and heavily dependent on aid from the West, remains active in his attempts to encourage a political settlement for the Palestine-Israel issue while cooperating with the United States. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Aqaba Summit; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Higher Committee; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Arafat, Yasir; Baghdad Pact; Black September 1970; Black

The new king, Abdullah II, spent his first months traveling extensively and making himself known on the international political scene. On 5 September

218

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JORDANIAN-PALESTINIAN ACCORD

LEADERS FOR PEACE. ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN (LEFT) AND KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN TALK ALONG THE SEA OF GALILEE AFTER SIGNING A HISTORIC PEACE TREATY BETWEEN THE TWO NATIONS ON

lient feature of these agreements, to which the Palestinians were not a party, was that in each case the claims of the Palestinians were ignored. The Jordanians had undermined their claims to a share of Jordan River water, to custodianship of the holy sites, and above all to the refugees’ right of return. These points were to have been part of the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians that were to have taken place under the terms of the Oslo Accords and subsequent Declaration of Principles that had been signed the previous year. The Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty was condemned by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian organizations, by Syria, and by Lebanon, and it was extremely unpopular with ordinary Palestinians and other Arabs as well. SEE ALSO Hussein ibn Talal; Oslo Accords; Rabin, Yitzhak.

26 OCTOBER 1994. THIS ENDED FORTY-SIX YEARS OF HOS-

TILE RELATIONS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND JORDAN. (© Photograph by Ya’acov

Sa’ar. Government Press Office [GPO] of Israel)

September Organization; Camp David; Haram al-Sharif; Hashim, al-; Hebron; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Intifada (1987– 1993); Iran-Iraq War; League of Arab States; Madrid Conference; Mubarak, Husni; Occupied Territories; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Organization of the Islamic Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Road Map (2002); Sharon, Ariel; Suez Crisis; West Bank.

JORDANIAN-ISRAELI PEACE TREATY: Signed on 26 October 1994 by Jordan’s King Hussein and Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at a ceremony on the Israel-Jordan border, attended by U.S. president Bill Clinton. This treaty, the second signed by the Jewish state with an Arab country, put an official end to the state of war existing between Israel and Jordan since 1948. The principal elements of the accord were an agreement to fix the international border at the 1922 Mandate frontier between Palestine and Transjordan, with minor adjustments; an agreement regarding Jordan River water sharing; an agreement that Palestinian refugees in Jordan would be settled in that country (for which purpose Jordan would receive American aid); an agreement that the Muslim holy sites of Jerusalem would be controlled and maintained by Jordan; and an agreement regarding cross-border trade and economic exchanges. A saD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

JORDANIAN LABOR PARTY (JLP): Jordanian socialist political party, created in February 1998. Most of its founding members, with close ties to the Israel Labor Party, were from the Irbid region, a Jordanian-Israeli industrial area. Favoring a normalization of relations with Israel, this group benefited from official support of the Jordanian government. The current secretary general is Muhammad al-Khataibah. JORDANIAN-PALESTINIAN ACCORD: Signed 11 February 1985 in Amman between King Hussein of Jordan and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, this accord envisioned a common action meant to conclude in a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict. The accord stipulated 1) the application of the principle “land in exchange for peace,” according to United Nations resolutions, including those of the Security Council; 2) the right of the Palestinian people to selfdetermination; 3) a solution of the problem of Palestinian refugees, according to the UN resolutions; 4) a solution to the Palestinian question in all its aspects; 5) that peace negotiations will take place at an international conference, participants to include the five states that are permanent members of the Security Council and all the parties involved in the conflict, including the PLO, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, in the framework of a common (Jordanian-Palestinian) delegation. On 25 February 1985, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak asked the United States to organize direct Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian negotiations. In the course of the autumn, discussions between the different parties were suspended after the failure of a

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

219

JORDANIAN PALESTINIAN CONFEDERATION

Jordanian-Palestinian meeting that had taken place in London on 14 October. In February 1986, because of a lack of full support of the PLO for United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, King Hussein of Jordan halted the application of the accord. A year later, on 22 April 1987, the Executive Committee of the PLO, meeting in Algiers, abrogated the Amman Accord. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Mubarak, Husni; Resolution 242; Resolution 338.

JORDANIAN PALESTINIAN CONFEDERATION: Proposed solution to the Palestinian issue, associating an autonomous Palestinian territory with Jordan. Since the 1930s a number of proposals have been made for uniting Palestinian territory with Jordan, but until 1977 they involved the merger of such territory into the Jordanian state (as actually happened when Abdullah I incorporated the West Bank into Jordan after the 1948 War), rather than a confederation between sovereign political entities. In 1972 King Hussein proposed that the West Bank be merged with Jordan as the United Arab Kingdom, but the idea was rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1977 he revived the idea as a federation between an autonomous Palestinian West Bank and Jordan. This too was rejected. In 1982, the Reagan Plan proposed by the United States provided for Palestinian autonomy in association with Jordan, and Hussein again offered the PLO a confederation. This time the Palestine National Council approved the federation in principle, but only when both parties were sovereign. In 1985 Hussein and the PLO agreed to make a joint proposal for a settlement that included a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation, based on United Nations resolutions, to be negotiated at an international conference including the permanent members of the UN Security Council, Israel, and a joint Jordanian-PLO delegation. It was opposed by the United States and Israel; both refused to settle the matter in an international conference or to negotiate with the PLO, and Israel claimed the right to approve the Palestinian negotiators. Hussein and the PLO also had disagreements over UN Security Council Resolution 242. This proposal was given up in February 1986. In March 1992, during the Madrid Conference talks, which were then stalled, Yasir Arafat proposed to King Hussein that the PLO and Jordan form a confederation in order to get the talks moving and to strengthen both their hands in the negotiations. It is not clear how far the proposal went toward being realized; Hussein was agreeable and even discussed the matter with his contacts in the US govern-

220

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ment. Many Palestinian leaders were opposed, including Saib Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator in Madrid, who believed it was premature given that the negotiations were over interim arrangements only. Others believed it was mainly a way for Arafat to regain some control over the Palestinian negotiators. In any case, before anything concrete resulted, Arafat, without informing Hussein or the Madrid negotiators, started an entirely new set of negotiations directly with Israel, in Oslo; King Hussein is known to have felt betrayed by Arafat, and the confederation proposal, as well as the Madrid talks, became moot. Thereafter when the issue was raised with the king he took the position that confederation might be discussed when there was a sovereign Palestine for Jordan to deal with, but not until then. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Arafat, Yasir; Erekat, Saib Muhammad; Hussein ibn Talal; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Reagan Plan; Resolution 242; West Bank.

JORDANIAN PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY (HASHD): Palestinian-Jordanian left-wing political party (Hizb al-ShaDb al-Dimuqrati al-Urduni, known by the acronym HASHD) created in October 1989 by the leadership of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Jordanian authorities opposed the constitution of Jordanian parties with foreign ties. Nayif Hawatma, head of the DFLP, hoped to integrate his movement into the Jordanian political scene. In 1990, a split in HASHD led to the creation of the Jordanian Progressive Party (al-Hizb al-Taqaddumi al-Urduni), headed by Ali Amr. At the beginning of the 1994, following the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993, a new rift surfaced in HASHD, resulting in divergent tendencies. The first tendency was called the “democratic current,” under the leadership of Bassam Haddadin and Nurad Abu Ghoush; the second, called the “historical current,” headed by Taysir al-Zeiri and Salim alNahas; and a third tendency, under the impetus of Azmi al-Khawaja. All three of these tendencies were opposed to the policies of the DFLP. In 1994, Azmi al-Khawaja became secretary general of his own movement, the Jordanian United Democratic Popular Party. The principal figures in HASHD are Taysir al-Zeiri, Bassam Haddadin, Hussein Abu Rahman, and Jamal Toumari. The secretary general is Salim al-Nahhas. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JUDAISM

SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Hawatma, Nayif; Jordanian Progressive Party.

JORDANIAN

PROGRESSIVE PARTY: PalestinianJordanian socialist political party (al-Hizb alTaqaddumi al-Urduni), founded in 1990 following a split in the Jordanian People’s Democratic Party, or HASHD. Its leading figures were Ali Amr, Salah Raafat, and Yussef Hurani. The secretary general in 2004 is Fawaz al-Zubi.

of the water used by Israel comes from the Jordan River and its tributaries; none of it goes to the Palestinians. SEE ALSO BETselem; Green Line; Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty.

JRA SEE

Japanese Red Army.

JTIC Palestine Development and Investment Company.

SEE

JORDAN RIVER: River roughly 200 miles or 320 kilometers long, flowing from northernmost Israel to the Dead Sea. The Jordan is formed from the confluence of three streams just south of the Israel-Lebanon border: the Hasibani and the Dan Rivers, originating on the Lebanese side of Mount Hermon (Jabal alShaykh), and the Baniyas, arising on the Syrian side of Mount Hermon. It flows into Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee) at the point where the Syria-Israel border meets the lake; it flows from the lake south within Israel until it is joined by the Yarmuk River. From there to the Green Line east of Jenin it forms the border between Jordan and Israel; from the Green Line to the Dead Sea, it forms the border between Jordan and the West Bank. An overall plan for cooperative use and development of the Jordan’s water by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel was negotiated in 1953–1955 by an American mediator, Eric Johnston, but its final acceptance by the Arab states was conditional on the resolution of the Palestinian issue. The plan was therefore never ratified, although until 1967 both Israel and Jordan adhered to its terms. In 1964, however, Israel began pumping water from Lake Tiberias for use on the coastal plain and in the Negev. The Arab states objected to this unilateral diversion and planned to counter it with their own diversion project on the Jordan’s tributaries inside Lebanon and Syria. Israel destroyed the project by bombardment. Currently Israel controls all use of Jordan River water; it is partially regulated by the 1994 JordanianIsraeli peace treaty, but Israel has no such agreements with Lebanon or Syria. Israel now pumps far more than was contemplated under the Johnston Plan. Israel’s use of water per capita is the highest in the Middle East. According to BETselem, the Israeli human rights organization, Israeli consumption (from all sources, and for all purposes) is 128 cubic meters per person per year (350 liters per day); Palestinian consumption is 26 cubic meters per person per year (70 liters per day). Approximately one-third D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

JUDAISM: Religion, philosophy, and lifestyle of the Jewish people. In its modern meaning, this word designates the teaching dispensed by the Torah. This word was first utilized by the Hellenized Jews of the first century B.C.E. Its Hebrew equivalent, yahadut, was not employed until modern times. Judaism is based on the belief in a single god, and on the covenant God made with a people whose history dates from the period of Abraham, 4000 years ago. At the demand of God, Abraham left his native region of Ur, in Chaldea, to go to Canaan, where he was to found a great nation. His descendants became known as “Israelites” or “Hebrews.” Judaism came into its own after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, in 586 B.C.E., and the exile of its population to Babylon. Making no distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, Judaism is at once a religion and a philosophy that concerns every aspect of daily life, including food, rest, sexuality, medicine, and holidays. Presently there exists, parallel to the traditionalist or orthodox currents of Judaism, two other tendencies: liberal or Reform Judaism, mainly centered in the United States; and Conservative Judaism. The Jewish diaspora has led to some differences in the traditions of Judaism, particularly among the Sephardic Jews—who were exiled from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula—and the Ashkenazic Jews—whose origins are from France and German-speaking countries, but who spread throughout Europe and the Americas. Both traditions are based on the Torah, though each has distinct rituals and customs based on ethnic experiences as well as their different chief rabbis and interpretations of the Torah that have guided them over the years. Even so, Rashi, an eleventh-century Ashkenazic exegete, and Maimonides, a twelfth-century Sephardic rabbinic codifier, are recognized by all Jewish traditions to be authoritative interpreters of Judaism.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

221

JUDEA AND SAMARIA

Besides the religious convictions specified in some Knesset parties (particularly notable among them: SHAS and the National Religious Party), politics and religion also have strong ties in the rulings of the rabbinate of Israel. The chief rabbis of Israel— representing the Sepharadic and Ashkenazic traditions—preside over the Rabbinical Supreme Court (bet din gadol), which primarily hears appeals, while a rabbinical council of judges (dayanim) delivers regular rulings. The council of the chief rabbinate typically makes decisions on matters of religious law and supervises Kashrut—the strict observance of dietary laws, including how foods must be prepared in order to be deemed kosher—in addition to overseeing the activities of ritual circumcisers (mohalim) and Torah scribes in Israel. Among other responsibilities, the council maintains contacts with Orthodox rabbis in the diaspora and links Jewish communities around the world with spiritual leaders. In relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict,, the chief rabbinate has expressed definitive political opinions, such as “Eretz Yisrael ha-Shelema” (the Individual Land of Israel) and “no return of territories for peace.” Recently, however, the standing of the chief rabbinate has declined as non-official rabbinic institutions, such as the ultra-Orthodox Eda Haredit, compete for a larger Orthodox following. Some decisions made by the Supreme Court of Israel— overruling decisions of the chief rabbinate on the grounds that they exceeded their jurisdiction—have also hindered the rabbinate’s standing. Generally, Judaism defines a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother or someone who has submitted to religious conversion. Although debate abounds around what constitutes the minimal requirements of conversion, the halakhic (Judeo-legal) minimum requirement consists of male circumcision, immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh), a period of Torah study, and a commitment to be bound by all the laws of Judaism. During the twentieth century, some non-Orthodox Jews expanded the definition of a Jew to include children of a Jewish parent and they do not require all of the aforementioned laws to be kept. Yet, the debate over what constitutes a Jew is a controversial one in Israel, which guarantees full citizenship rights to all Jews under the “Law of Return.” The Law of Return defines Israel as a Jewish state and grants automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants who settle in Israel.. Non-Jewish spouses and children of Jews were granted similar rights in 1970, although the Orthodox and Conservative movements in particular do not accept this amended law.

222

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Within Israel, the generic term for non-Jews is “minorities.” This group includes mainly Muslim Arabs, but also Christians who are primarily Arabs, as well as Druze, Bahai, Circassians, and Samaritians. “Jewishness” tends to hold religious and political meaning to the majority of Israeli Jews, who recognize Israel as a “Jewish State” and who seek a reflection of this in the state’s conduct. In 1948, with the founding of the state of Israel, the Jewish Sabbath—25 hours, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, each week—was branded the official day of rest for the Jewish population. An allowance was made for Muslims to have a day of rest on Friday, and for Christians to rest on Sunday.The Work and Rest Hours Law of 1951 legislated that Jews be given days off on the Sabbath and festival holidays. Businesses that aim to stay open on the Sabbath must obtain a license from the Israeli Ministry of Labor. In the biblical account of creation, this seventh day marks God’s rest after his work and is intended to be a day of spiritual refreshment and joy. Thus, on Saturdays, observant Jews wear special clothes, enjoy festive meals, and attend synagogue. For non-Orthodox Jews, the Sabbath is largely a day of leisure, perhaps a time to spend at a sporting event, café, or the beach. Traditional festivals (Rosh ha-Shana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simhat Torah, Shavuot, and the first and last days of Passover) are also days of rest, as is Independence Day (5 Iyer), though the extreme Orthodox do not typically observe the latter.Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in particular, is respected by all Israeli Jews. On that day, broadcasting is suspended and the streets are open only to pedestrians. SEE ALSO Abraham; Ashkenazi; Covenant; Diaspora; Halakhah; Jewish Religious Holidays; Knesset; Law of Return; National Religious Party; Sephardi; SHAS; Torah.

JUDEA AND SAMARIA: Biblical names for the territory known in the twentieth century as the West Bank of the Jordan River. SEE ALSO West Bank.

JULAN, SEE

AL-

Golan Heights.

JULIAN CALENDAR: Established by Julius Caesar and used in the West until the Gregorian reform of 1582, this calendar is still in use in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and in some Orthodox churches. SEE ALSO Eastern Orthodox Church. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JUMAYYIL, AMIN

rael, which bombarded Beirut, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was headquartered, for weeks. After a ceasefire negotiated by the United States, the PLO left Lebanon for Tunis, the withdrawal supervised by a Multinational Force (MF) composed of American, French, and some Italian troops, and the Israelis and Syrians withdrew from the city. On 23 August 1982, Bashir Jumayyil, an asset of both the CIA and the Mossad, was elected president of the republic. On 10 September, the last MF troops departed.

AMIN JUMAYYIL. A SON OF ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE CHRISPHALANGE PARTY, HE WAS CHOSEN TO BE PRESIDENT OF LEBANON AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT-ELECT, HIS BROTHER, IN 1982. NEAR THE END OF A TERM MARKED BY FACTIONAL FIGHTING AND PRESSURE FROM SYRIA, ISRAEL, AND THE UNITED STATES, JUMAYYIL WENT INTO EXILE FOR TWELVE YEARS. (© Corbis) TIAN

JUMAYYIL, AMIN (1942– ): Lebanese Maronite political figure, born on 22 January 1942 at Bikfaya, in a politically active family. His father, Pierre Jumayyil, was the founder of the right-wing nationalist Christian Phalange (KataDib) Party, and his younger brother, Bashir, was president-elect of the republic (but did not take office) in 1982. A lawyer by training, Amin Jumayyil went into politics early on, encouraged by his family. He joined the Phalange in 1961, and nine years later became a deputy, taking the seat of his uncle Maurice, who had recently died. He was reelected in 1972, but ceded his place as the head of Phalange to his younger brother, Bashir, leader of the Phalangist militia. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), his public image was that of a “politico,” while Bashir, who commanded the Lebanese Forces (LF), an alliance of Maronite Christian militias formed in 1976, was an active, enthusiastic participant in the war. In 1981, Amin Jumayyil was elected secretary general of the Phalange. In June 1982 Lebanon was invaded by IsD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

On 14 September, a week before he was to take office, Bashir Jumayyil was assassinated. The next day Israeli forces, violating the ceasefire agreement, moved into Beirut to help the Lebanese Forces secure the city. With the help of the Israelis, the LF moved into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and murdered an estimated 1500–3000 civilians, ostensibly in reprisal for the assassination of Bashir Jumayyil (who had actually been killed by Syrian nationalists who wanted to annex Lebanon). On 21 September 1982, parliament elected Amin Jumayyil president in place of his brother. After the massacres, the United States and France returned the Multinational Force to Beirut. In May 1983, under pressure from the United States, Jumayyil agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which was actually ratified by parliament. Opposition to this treaty among Lebanese—and by the Syrians—was so great, however, that Jumayyil felt obliged to refuse to sign it. The Syrians would not negotiate, and the Israelis, who had been protecting Jumayyil’s government from its factional enemies, withdrew their forces from the Shuf district southeast of Beirut to South Lebanon. Fighting among the factions then broke out again. The “peacekeepers” became involved in the fighting on the Christian side—American warships shelled Syrian positions in the mountains (killing many civilians in the process)—which provoked retaliation on the ground. In October, suicide bombings, probably carried out by Hizbullah, killed 241 American and 56 French soldiers. The Multinational Force troops were kept in their barracks and eventually left Lebanon in the spring of 1984. By February 1984 so many Muslim and Druze soldiers had deserted the army, many to factional militias, rather than fight on behalf of a sectarian Christian government, that the army disintegrated. Jumayyil repudiated the agreement with Israel in March 1984. However, opposition to him increased, while the death of his father in August 1984 further accentuated his isolation in the Christian camp, resulting in bloody confrontations between his sup-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

223

JUMAYYIL, BASHIR

porters and members of the militia that was led by Elie Hobeika and Samir Geagea. On 12 March 1985, these two took over the command of the Lebanese Forces. A year later, he backed Samir Geagea, who, on 15 January 1985, expelled Elie Hobeika from the leadership of the LF. In the following month, he refused to resign the presidency of the republic, in spite of intense pressure from the opposition. The latter reproached him for not having ratified the accord between the militias that was signed on 14 January by the leaders of the ShiEite AMAL, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), and the Maronite LF, and which was thought amenable to bringing back peace. In spite of the opposition of Christian leaders, whose chief he was supposed to be, he made overtures to Syria, which led to a schism in the Christian camp. On 17 January 1987 he took part in the “Christian summit” of Smar Jubayl, with former presidents Camille Chamoun, Charles Hilu, and Sulayman Franjiyya, to try reunifying their movement. On 12 February 1988, he narrowly escaped death when a bomb was discovered in an airplane that was about to take him from Cyprus to Sanaa, Yemen. On 22 September, just before the end of his presidential term and without a successor having been elected, in order to maintain the Christian camp in power, he formed a provisional government led by the Maronite general Michel Aoun, while the official prime minister, Selim al-Hoss, was refusing to resign. At the beginning of October, after receiving death threats from the Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea, he left Lebanon to go to Paris. In June 1991, he met with Shimon Peres in Brussels and discussed the situation in South Lebanon. In 1992, after returning home to attempt to persuade the Phalangist party to boycott the legislative elections, he was obliged, under government pressure, to cut his stay short. In July 2000, after twelve years as an exile, he returned to Lebanon, where the situation had changed, due to the death of Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon. He made an attempt to regain the leadership of Phalange, but was frustrated, and later formed a splinter group called KataDib al-QaEida (the Phalange Base). In 2002 he was expelled from the party, and sued, for insulting the leadership (he used the term “prostitution” in reference to the leadership of current secretary general Karim Pakraduni). SEE ALSO AMAL; Aoun, Michel; Asad, Hafiz al-; Chamoun, Camille; Druze; Franjiyya, Sulayman; Geagea, Samir; Hizbullah; Hobeika,

224

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Elie; Jumayyil, Bashir; Peres, Shimon; Phalange; Sabra and Shatila.

JUMAYYIL, BASHIR (1947– ): Lebanese political figure, born on 10 November 1947 in Beirut, Bashir Jumayyil was the son of Pierre Jumayyil, founder of the Phalange (KataDib), and the younger brother of Amin Jumayyil. A lawyer by training, he worked for a law firm in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s and was recruited by the CIA. He launched his political career in 1972, becoming the head of the Phalange for the Ashrafiah sector. His brother Amin, who had just been elected deputy, yielded his place to Bashir as the leader of the party. In 1974 Bashir became the head of the Phalange militias. When the civil war broke out in Lebanon, in 1975, he became totally involved in the fighting. On 13 July 1976, he became commander-in-chief of the military council of the Phalange. A few days later he became head of the Lebanese Forces (LF), the militia of the Lebanese Front, an alliance of several rightwing Christian parties, dominated by the Phalange. Under his guidance, and with substantial military and financial assistance from Israel and from the CIA, the LF became the largest Maronite paramilitary force in Lebanon. Bashir Jumayyil wanted to be president of Lebanon, and worked to eliminate potential rivals. In June 1978 he had a Phalangist commando attack the home of Tony Franjiyya, son of former president Sulayman Franjiyya, killing him and his family. On 23 February 1980 Bashir escaped an assassination attempt in the course of which eight people died, including his daughter. In the same year his Phalangist forces engaged in a series of battles with the Tigers, the militia of the National Liberal Party, led by Dany Chamoun, culminating in the “Day of the Long Knives,” 7 July 1980, in which the Tigers were effectively wiped out. Chamoun was the son of former president Camille Chamoun, who was the political head of the Lebanese Front. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, partly to go after the Palestine Liberation Organizatin (PLO), which was headquartered there, and partly to help support Bashir Jumayyil, a client through whom they hoped to impose control over Palestinian and Muslim forces. The PLO was defeated, and in August and September, after an American-sponsored truce, the PLO leadership and about 14,000 fighters were evacuated from Beirut. On 23 August 1982, parliament elected him president of Lebanon. On 14 September he was assassinated when the Phalange headquarters was bombed. The PLO was blamed, although the real assassins T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

JUMBLATT, WALID KAMAL

were Syrian nationalists. This led the IDF to return to Beirut to assist the LF in controlling the situation, as well as letting the LF into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they perpetrated a horrifying massacre. On 21 September, Amin Jumayyil was elected president in his brother’s place. SEE ALSO Franjiyya, Sulayman; Jamayyil, Amin; Lebanese Forces; Lebanese Front; Phalange; Sabra and Shatila.

JUMBLATT, KAMAL (1917–1977): Lebanese political figure, belonging to the important Druze clan of Jumblattis, Kamal Jumblatt studied law, obtaining a degree in 1942. The next year, he was elected deputy, and in 1946 became minister of economy and agriculture. Three years later he founded the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP). After having pushed for the resignation of President Beshara al-Khuri, then broken with the new president, Camille Chamoun, Jumblatt joined the opposition. After the accession to the presidency of FuDad Chehad in 1958, he assumed various governmental functions: minister of national education (1958), public works and planning (1961), interior (1961, 1964). In 1964, with Rashid Karame, he played an important role in the election of Charles Hilu to the presidency of the republic. After the Arab-Israel War of June 1967, he drew progressively closer to Palestinian organizations and formed a radical front of the left. In 1969, he was named minister of the interior, responsible mainly for the application of the Cairo accords granting the PLO operational independence in areas of Lebanon with large Palestinian refugee populations. He denounced the involvement of the army in Lebanese political life, which was growing ever greater. In the following month of August he decided to back the candidacy of Sulayman Franjiyya for the presidency. But in May 1973, following Lebanese-Palestinian confrontations, he took a position against the chief of state. At the time of the Lebanese civil war of 1975, he became the leader of the Lebanese left and one of the principal supporters of the Palestinian resistance. He became president of the political council of the Lebanese National Movement, which allied parties and organizations of the left and made common cause with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) against the right-wing Christian Lebanese Front (LF), dominated by the Phalange. The success of this alliance, particularly in the “Battle of the Mountain” against the Christian militias in March 1976, provoked Syrian intervention in June on the side of the LF. On 16 March 1977, he was assassinated in his car on the road to Moukhtara by pro-Syrian D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

KAMAL JUMBLATT. THE DRUZE FOUNDER OF LEBANON’S PROGRESSIVE SOCIALIST PARTY IN 1949, JUMBLATT SERVED IN VARIOUS MINISTERIAL POSTS BEGINNING IN THE 1940S AND LATER SUPPORTED OPERATIONS BY THE PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION IN HIS COUNTRY, BEFORE HIS ASSASSINATION IN 1977.

factions of the Lebanese Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP). Awarded the Lenin Prize in 1972, Kamal Jumblatt was the author of a number of works about Lebanon. His son, Walid, succeeded him as head of the PSP and the Lebanese National Movement. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Lebanese Front; Lebanese National Movement; Palestine Liberation Organization.

JUMBLATT, WALID KAMAL (1949– ): Lebanese political figure, born in 1949 in Moukhtara, in the Lebanese Shuf, Walid Jumblatt belonged to one of the most important Druze clans in Lebanon, the Jumblattis. During his youth, drawn to Arab nationalism, Nasserist in inspiration, he met Gamal Abdel Nasser a number of times. In 1973, he obtained a degree in political science from the American University of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

225

JUSTICE IS DONE OPERATION

WALID KAMAL JUMBLATT. A DRUZE LEADER AND HEAD OF LEBAPROGRESSIVE SOCIALIST PARTY AFTER HIS FATHER’S ASSASSINATION IN 1977, HE SUPPORTED THE PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION AND BATTLED RIGHT-WING MARONITE MILITIAS. JUMBLATT LATER HELD VARIOUS CABINET POSTS AND WORKED FOR LEBANESE UNITY AND INDEPENDENCE FROM SYRIAN CONTROL. (AP/Wide World NON’S

Photos)

Beirut. In 1975, when the Lebanese war started, he participated in recruitment for the militia of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) led by his father, Kamal Jumblatt. In April 1977, after Kamal’s assassination, Walid Jumblatt became the head of the PSP and of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), a federation of parties of the left opposed to the confessional system and favorable to the Palestinian cause. Although a supporter of the PLO, he opposed settling Palestinian groups in his fief of the Shuf. As his father’s son, he also became an important leader of the Druze, in spite of the reservations of religious leaders, and he tried, vainly, to unify the different Druze currents. In June 1982, at the time of the Israeli invasion, he ad-

226

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

vocated “passive resistance.” In September of the following year, backed by Syrian artillery and Palestinian fighters, he emerged victorious in combats in the Shuf district lasting several months, between Druze and Maronite militias, thereby consolidating his position as head of the Druze community. After Lebanese president Ilyas Sarkis constituted a committee of national salvation, he participated in the work of this group, upholding at once Lebanese unity and the Palestinian cause. From April 1984, when he entered the government of Rashid Karame, until December 1998 (with only a four-month hiatus in 1991), he held various cabinet posts in several governments. From then on, Jumblatt become one of the leaders of the opposition to the new president, Emile Lahhud. After the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, he demanded that the Syrians also withdraw from the country. For the 2000 parliamentary elections, he joined with the Christian antiSyrian faction, the National Bloc. As a result of this election, Jumblatt consolidated his position as opposition leader, most of his party’s candidates defeating those backed by President Lahhud or by Damascus. He then refused an invitation to join the new government of Rafiq Hariri, to emphasize his opposition to the presence of Damascus in Lebanese affairs. He became persona non grata to the Syrians for some months after this. On 4 August 2001, he received Msgr. Nasrallah Sfeir, patriarch of the Maronite Church, thereby sealing the reconciliation of the Druze and Maronite communities. On 16 August, he participated in the national congress for the defense of liberty and democracy, held at Beirut, in the course of which he reaffirmed his desire to unite opponents to the Syrian presence in Lebanon. Since the attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001, he has made a number of public statements explicitly critical of American policies, and has grown friendly once again with the Syrians, although still advocating Lebanese independence of them. He has also parted ways with Msgr. Sfeir by advocating the reelection of Emile Lahhud as president. SEE ALSO Jumblatt, Kamal; Karame, Rashid; Lahhud, Emile; Lebanese National Movement; Sfeir, Nasrallah; South Lebanon.

JUSTICE IS DONE OPERATION: Code name of the Israeli military operation, launched on 25 July 1993, against Hizbullah bases in Lebanon. SEE ALSO Hizbullah.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY 1878

First Jewish settlement in Palestine. Petah Tikvah, several miles outside Tel Aviv, is founded by a group of religious Jews from Jerusalem. By 1882, the Jewish population in Palestine is about 24,000.

1881

Russian czar Alexander II assassinated by revolutionaries. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee the pogroms (1881–1884) in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Russian Zionist movement, Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), establishes the first European Jewish farming colonies in Palestine. Because the settlers speak many different languages, Hebrew is revived and used as a common tongue.

1881– 1903

First Aliyah. About 30,000 to 40,000 Jews, mostly Eastern European fleeing the pogroms, settle in Palestine during this first wave of immigration.

1896

Publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Book written by Theodor Herzl, primarily as a response to European antiSemitism, claiming that both the world and Jews need a Jewish state. At the First Zionist Congress, the author establishes the Zionist Organization (later known as the World Zionist Organization), which forms the foundation of the Zionist movement.

1897

First Zionist Congress, Basel, Switzerland. Meeting of Jewish leaders to discuss the ideas in Der Judenstaat of establishing a Jewish state. Issues the Basel Programme, which calls for a “home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law.”

1901

Fifth Zionist Congress. Establishes the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to raise funds and buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlers. By the early 2000s, the JNF owns about 14% of the land in Israel.

1903

Sixth Zionist Congress, Uganda proposal. A Zionist homeland is proposed in Uganda in East Africa by Herzl and Great Britain. The suggestion bitterly divides the congress because many Jews trace their homeland back to biblical territories (Palestine) and want to establish a state there.

1903– 1914

Second Aliyah. About 35,000 to 40,000 Jews, mostly socialist-Zionists, immigrate to Palestine and establish the kibbutz and Zionist labor movements.

1905

Failed revolution in Russia. Pogroms (1903– 1906) force thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands settle in Palestine.

227

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1914– 1918

World War I. As a result of the Allies’ victory, lands previously under Ottoman rule are divided between France and England; Palestine lands under British rule.

1915– 1916

Husayn-McMahon correspondence. Series of ten letters between Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, a leader of the Arab nationalist movement and king of the Hijaz, and Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt. British pledge support for Arab independence in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans and an alliance between the sharif and Britain.

1915

Sykes-Picot Agreement. Secret agreement between the French and British that divides Middle Eastern lands between the two countries after World War I. Formally known as the Anglo–Franco–Russian agreement, Britain receives common-day Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine; France receives commonday Syria and Lebanon.

1916

1916– 1919

Balfour Declaration. Letter drafted by Zionist leaders of the British government calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This declaration is in direct conflict with the Husayn-McMahon correspondence (1915–1916), which called for an independent Arab state. Arab revolt against Ottomans. Arab nationalist movement against Turkish rule of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and most of the Arabian Peninsula. Backed by British supplies and led by Husayn ibn Ali and his four sons, the Arabs gain control of Mecca and other Ottoman garrisons, thus proclaiming their independence.

1917– 1918

British troops occupy Palestine to secure a sea and land route to India.

1917– 1922

Russian revolution and civil war. Pogroms (1919–1921) force many Jews to flee Russia, and thousands settle in Palestine.

1918

Muslim-Christian Association formed. Palestinian nationalist organization opposed to Zionism.

1919

Paris (Versailles) Peace Conference. Produces the Treaty of Versailles (1920), which ends World War I and establishes the League of Nations and the mandate system of lands surrendered by Germany. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) virtually dismantles the Otto-

228

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

man Empire. Britain gains control of Palestine. 1919

King-Crane Commission. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson sends two representatives, Henry C. King and Charles R. Crane, to Palestine and Syria to gather local reactions to rule under Britain and France. They find that the Palestinians and Syrians are opposed to the mandate system, perceiving it as a form of colonial rule, and want national independence for their countries. Zionists also oppose. British and French disregard the report.

1919– 1924

Third Aliyah. About 35,000 Jews, mostly from Poland and Russia, immigrate to Palestine in response to the Russian Revolution.

1920

San Remo (Italy) Conference. Palestine and Iraq are assigned to Britain and Syria and Lebanon are assigned to France as Class A mandates, or trusteeships. Independence is promised only when the British or French determine that political systems are developed enough to be admitted to the League of Nations.

1921

Faisal I ibn Hussein—Amir Faisal—expelled from Syria by the French. A leader of the Arab revolt for nationalism from the Ottomans and king of Syria (1920) and Iraq (1921–1933), Faisal is forced to leave Syria shortly after he is appointed constitutional monarch by a congress of Arab nationalists.

1921

British accept Emir Abdullah as client ruler of Transjordan, install Faysal in Iraq. Britain grants the Palestinian Mandate east of the Jordan River to Abdullah II, who forms the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. Jewish settlement is outlawed.

1922

Churchill White Paper. Policy paper by British government on the tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. The statement claims equal protection and rights to both groups: Jewish immigrants should continue to settle in Palestine and have the right to do so; Arabs should not be subordinated by the immigration; and immigration should be economically sustainable by the region.

1922

British and French Mandates confirmed. League of Nations confirms British Mandate

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1924– 1930

1929

1930

1930

1930

1931

in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. Syria and Lebanon are given to French Mandate.

1931– 1939

Fourth Aliyah. Due to tough economic conditions, about 80,000 Jews from Poland immigrate to Palestine.

Fifth Aliyah. About 225,000 Jews, mostly educated and professional, immigrate to Palestine to flee the Nazis’s increasing hold over Germany.

1933

Nazi accession to power in Germany. AntiSemitic policies lead many Jews to flee Eastern Europe. At first, Nazis support the immigration to Palestine, as it helps their ethnic cleansing policies. However, once the Jewish population seeks statehood, Hitler sees a possible threat in the eastern European refugees.

1933– 1945

Holocaust in Europe. Anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich (Nazi Germany, 1933–1945) that include land and rights seizures; forced migrations into ghettos, work camps, and concentration camps; and the systematic genocide of six million Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee Europe to Palestine, as both legal immigrants and refugees.

1936

General strike and formation of the Arab Higher Committee. Palestinians strike against the British and the Jewish economy, determined to continue until Jewish immigration ceases, land sales are prohibited to Jews, and a national government and elected assembly are established. Five days into the strike, Palestinians form the Arab Higher Committee to present Arab demands to the British government.

1936– 1939

Palestinian insurrection (“Arab Revolt”). Revolt against British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Beginning with the general strike in 1936, the revolt escalates to full combat with the British and Jewish population from 1937–1938. About 10% of the adult male Palestinian population is killed, injured, or detained; the revolt has disastrous consequences for the Palestinian economy and leadership.

1937

Peel Commission Report. British Royal Commission Report that outlines solutions to tensions and unrest between the Arab Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. It concludes that the mandate system cannot work without repressing the Arab population and recommends that Palestine be divided into two nations, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish Agency accepts the plan, but opposes the borders and insists that the Palestinian population be deported from the Jewish

Zionist demonstrations over prayer rights at Western (Wailing) Wall; Palestinian attacks on Jews. At the Western (Wailing) Wall, a holy site to both Jews and Muslims, Zionists protest when the British tear down a partition they had built to separate men and women. Palestinians attack religious Jewish communities, and Jews riot, killing Palestinians. British and police open fire in an attempt to stop the violence. About 250 people die that year. Passfield White Paper. Policy paper by British government on tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine finds that Arabs fear their economic, political, and national future is obstructed by Jewish immigration and land ownership, which results in violence against the Jews. Recommends clear policy statements protecting Arab rights and regulating Jewish immigration and land purchase. Shaw Commission. Commission of inquiry by British government on the violence between Arabs and Jews at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Palestine, 1929. Finds that Arabs are hostile toward immigrating and land-owning Jews because they pose a threat to the future of their economic and political stability and control. Calls for a policy that limits Jewish immigration. Sir John Hope-Simpson White Paper. Policy paper by British government on the tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. Calls for drastic reduction in the number of Jewish immigrants and restrictions on land purchase because of widespread Arab unemployment and lack of farmable land. MacDonald Letter. Written by British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929– 35) to Zionist leader and future president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. The letter reaffirms British support for Arab and non-Arab people in Palestine while expressing a responsibility to establish Jewish homeland in the region.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

229

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

state. The Palestinians’ Arab Higher Committee denounces the plan, arguing that they have 70% of the population and 90% of the land and that Palestine should remain a unified state. 1937

Bludan Conference. Meeting of delegates from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to discuss the Peel Commission. They reject the recommendation of splitting Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and call for a boycott of Jewish goods and British goods if the commission is carried out.

1938

Publication of The Arab Awakening. Book written by George Antonius, an Egyptianborn Christian and member of the British Palestine Administration. Discusses, from an Arab point of view, the origins of Arab nationalism, the significance of the Arab Revolt (1916), and the consequences of the British mandate system of dividing the Arab world after World War I.

1938

Woodhead Partition Commission. British report that retracts the Peel Commission’s suggestion to partition Palestine.

1939

London (St. James/Roundtable) Conference. British host discussions between Arabs and Jews of Palestine on the future political situation in the Mandate. Talks held through British intermediaries, as the Arabs and Jews will not meet face-to-face. The Arabs call for the end of the mandate system, the creation of an independent Arab state, an end to Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews, and minority rights for Jews. The Jews call for an increased immigration to Palestine, especially with Hitler’s rise to power and growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

1939

230

MacDonald White Paper. Policy paper issued by the British government outlining Britain’s proposals from the London Conference on the post-Mandate government of Palestine. It calls for Jewish immigration to be limited to 75,000 over five years, after which Arab approval will be needed, limited land purchase by Jews, and promised selfgovernment for Palestinians within ten years. Jews will have minority rights. Because of the outbreak of World War II, this policy is largely unimplemented. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

1939– 1945

World War II. British and French fight to secure their interests in the Middle East from the Germans. At the end of the war, Britain and France maintain control of the region.

1942

Biltmore Conference. New York City conference of about 600 American Zionists, plus many from around the world. They demand implementation of the Balfour Declaration (1916), which calls for a Jewish homeland, denounce the 1939 MacDonald White Paper as “cruel” in its quota of Jewish immigration to Palestine during a time of persecution and genocide in Hitler’s Germany, and declare that there will never be peace in the world without a Jewish homeland. Sponsorship for Jewish immigration to Palestine shifts from Britain to the United States.

1943

National Pact in Lebanon, effective independence established. Christian and Muslim leaders come together to negotiate terms of a government independent of French influence in Lebanon.

1945

Arab League (League of Arab States) established. Formed to express the economic and security needs of Arab states. First founded with 7 Arab states; In 2004, it has 22 members.

1946

Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. American and British collaboration formed to address the Arab-Israel conflict and Jewish refugees and survivors of the Holocaust.

1946

Morrison-Grady Plan for Palestine. Report by Britain’s Herbert Morrison and United States’ Henry Grady calling for a semiautonomous Palestine divided into Jewish and Arab regions. Limits Jewish immigration to 100,000 in the first year, then to be determined by Britain, with Britain controlling the military, foreign relations, immigration, and customs. Rejected by both the Jews and Arabs.

1946

Anglo-American Conference (second Bludan Conference). Arab League meets to discuss Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry report. They criticize American interference in Palestine, suggest a boycott of Jewish goods, and vow to help the Palestinian Arabs.

1946

France leaves Syria and Lebanon; British end Mandate over Transjordan.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1947

United Nations votes partition plan (Resolution 181). Award Jews a homeland in Palestine. With one-third of the population and 7% of the land ownership, Jews are awarded 55% of Palestine. The plan is violently rejected by Arab Palestinians.

1948

Dayr Yasin (Deir Yasin) massacre. Surprise attack and massacre on Palestinian village outside Jerusalem kills 105 to 205 people and leaves the village in ruins. Conducted by Jewish paramilitary units, National Military Organization (led by Menachem Begin) and Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.

1948

British Mandate on Palestine expires on 14 May. British relinquish Mandate. Next day Jews proclaim the independent State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader, becomes Israel’s first prime minister. Neighboring Arab countries send in troops to combat the Jews as British depart.

1948– 1949

Arab-Israel war; known as Nakba to the Arabs and the War of Independence to the Jews. In Arabic, Nakba means “disaster” or “catastrophe.” This war over the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine results in the displacement of 700,000 to 750,000 Arabs (more than half the Arab population in the Mandate), confiscation of property, massacres, and the loss of a Palestinian homeland and society. Neighboring Arab countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq) come to the aid of the Palestinians. Israel extends its boundaries by about 2,500 square miles.

1948

Count Folke Bernadotte assassinated; UN General Assembly passes Resolution 194. Bernadotte, a United Nations mediator in Israel and Palestine, proposes a truce between Arabs and Jews, which is broken and restored several times. In the two versions of the Bernadotte Plan for Arab-Israeli Settlement, boundaries are proposed in which Jerusalem goes to Transjordan (version 1) or is placed under United Nations control (version 2). Displaced Palestinians are offered repatriation or compensation for resettlement. Israel is to be recognized as an independent state. Both Arabs and Israelis reject his plan. On September 17, Bernadotte is gunned down by the Israeli group LEHI in Jerusalem.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1948

All-Palestine government; Palestine declaration of independence. In response to the formation of the Israeli state, the Palestinians declare the need for an Arab government to represent and defend their interests. It is backed by surrounding Arab countries, but ultimately is ineffective.

1949

General armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Peace agreements, sponsored by the United Nations and mediated by Ralphe Bunche, put an end to the 1948 Arab-Israel War.

1951

King Abdullah I is assassinated by a group of disgruntled Palestinians thought to have been working for Egypt’s intelligence agency. In 1950, Abdullah I had held a conference in which it was proposed that the East and West Banks of Palestine were to be part of Jordan with parliamentary representation. The proposition was adopted unanimously and Abdullah became king of Palestine.

1953

Revolution in Egypt. Led by Nasser and the Free Officers, the coup overthrows the monarchy of King Farouk installed by the British. A republic is formed.

1954

Lavon Affair. Also known as the “mishap.” Israeli-trained espionage group of Egyptian Jews are caught in mid-sabotage. They claim orders came from the head of the Intelligence Division of the Israeli Defense Forces, Colonel Benjamin Gibli, who in turn cites orders from Pinchas Lavon, the minister of defense. Lavon’s involvement cannot be proven. The scandal extends into the 1960s and ultimately leads to the temporary withdrawal of David Ben-Gurion from politics in 1963.

1954

Moshe Sharett becomes prime minister of Israel when Ben-Gurion resigns.

1955

David Ben-Gurion elected prime minister of Israel for the second time.

1956

Arab-Israel War; Suez Crisis and War. The United States, Britain, and the World Bank pull out support for loans to Egypt after ties between Egypt and the Soviet Union grow closer. Egypt retaliates by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, of which Britain is the largest shareholder. In response, Britain and France declare war on Egypt with support

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

231

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

and troops from Israel. Under pressure by the United States, Britain, France, and Israel accept a cease-fire after about ten days of fighting. 1958

Founding of United Arab Republic (UAR). The UAR combines Syria and Egypt from 1958–1961 and poses a threat to the West with Nasser’s pan-Arab mission and antiWestern stance.

1958

Civil war in Lebanon, U.S. intervention. Sparked by the killing of a journalist, but rooted in grievances of political access, corrupt elections, elitist politics, and representation in government. Lebanon’s president, Camille Chamoun, blames the UAR for inciting the violence and requests military intervention by the United States on his behalf.

1958

1959

1961

Revolution in Iraq. Hashemite monarchy, installed by British in 1921, violently overthrown in military coup led by the Free Officers. The revolution’s goals are to rid the region of imperialistic forces and promote social and cultural reform. It results in a republican government and a foreign policy of nonalignment. Al-Fatah (Palestinian Liberation Movement) founded. Palestinian nationalist movement founded by Yasir Arafat. Its mission is to liberate Palestine by Palestinians, not by outside Arab assistance, through methods of armed struggle, not negotiation. Dissolution of UAR. Syria becomes increasingly dissatisfied with its diminishing role in the government; the BaEthist party is dismissed and Nasser’s policies seem more like an occupation than a collaboration. Syria’s contingency in the army mounts a coup, which is met by little resistance from Nasser.

1963

Levi Eshkol becomes prime minister of Israel upon Ben-Gurion’s resignation.

1964

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestine National Council (PNC) founded; Palestine National Covenant approved. Formed as a result of the first Arab Summit in Cairo, the PLO’s mission is to be an organized representative body of Palestinian nationalism and liberation. The PNC is its parliamentary branch. The Covenant

232

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

calls for a liberation of Palestine by the Palestinians and the end of Israel. 1967

Arab-Israel War, also known as the Six-Day War. Issues left simmering from the British Mandate period—Palestinian refugees, water rights, and border with Arab States, arms race, growing Arab nationalism, and Israel’s right to exist—lead to war between Israel and Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. As a result of the war, Israel increases its land mass by almost three times and includes Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

1967

UN Security Council Resolution 242. The “land for peace resolution” calls for peace in the region based on Israel’s withdrawal from lands won during the 1967 war and a recognition of secure boundaries. Little progress is made on the resolution.

1967

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) founded. Unites three groups: Heroes of the Return, the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Independent Palestine Liberation Front. Mission based on Palestinian national sovereignty, Arab unity, opposition to the State of Israel, and Marxist-Leninist ideology, borrowing some of Fidel Castro’s methods. Second in importance and influence to al-Fatah.

1968

Palestine National Charter revised. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, the charter is revised to emphasize an Arab Palestinian homeland, national sovereignty, and selfdetermination. Calls for armed struggle to gain liberation.

1969

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) founded. Marxist-Leninist group organized to liberate Palestine.

1969

Golda Meir becomes prime minister of Israel upon Eshkol’s death.

1970

“Black September.” Term used by some Palestinians (PLO and PFLP) to describe their defeat in the Jordanian Civil War. They had staged attacks against Israel from the Jordanian border since 1967, which provoked Israeli counter-attacks. The Jordanian army wins after ten days and thousands of casualties, many of which are civilian Palestinian refugees. A radical Palestinian terrorist

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

group founded by members of al-Fatah takes this name. 1970

Gamal Abdel Nasser dies. President of Egypt from 1956–1970 and figurehead of pan-Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, and anti-Israel policies dies of a heart attack.

1971

PLO expelled from Jordan. At the end of the Jordanian Civil War (1970–1971), the Jordanian army ousts the PLO from the country, pushing them into southern Lebanon.

1973

1973

Arab-Israel War, also known as the October War, Yom Kippur War, or Ramadan War. Caused by failure to resolve territorial disputes from the 1967 war. After diplomatic efforts fail, Egypt and Syria, backed by Soviet Union arms, plan a secret two-front attack on Israel, which is supported by United States weapons. A cease-fire is called when the United States proclaims a military alert in response to the Soviet Union’s offer to send troops to Egypt. The war results in thousands of dead and injured and a dependence on the Soviet Union (Egypt) and the United States (Israel) for military support. UN Security Council Resolution 338. Passed during the cease-fire of the 1973 war. Calls for an immediate end to military operations, implementation of Resolution 242 (from 1967), and a start to peace negotiations.

1974

Yitzhak Rabin elected prime minister of Israel. First native-born prime minister. Makes major strides in diplomacy with Jordan and Palestine. Shimon Peres succeeds him in 1977 after a financial scandal.

1974

PLO implicitly accepts two-state solution. At the PNC in 1974, the PLO modifies its goal of liberating all of Palestine and focuses on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

1974

UN and Arab League accept PLO as sole legitimate representative of Palestinians. Yasir Arafat makes first appearance at the UN proposing peace.

1974

Suez I, or Sinai I, agreement between Israel and Egypt. Cease-fire agreement ending the 1973 war; moderated by U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger. Israeli troops pull back west from the Suez Canal and east on the Sinai front of the canal. Three buffer security

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

zones are created for Israel, Egypt, and the UN. 1975

Suez II, or Sinai II, agreement between Israel and Egypt. Cease-fire agreement ending the 1973 war moderated by U.S. secretary of state Kissinger. Israel withdraws troops an additional 12 to 26 miles and the UN occupies buffer zone.

1975

UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Equates Zionism with racism.

1975– 1990

Lebanese Civil War. Series of domestic disruptions in southern Lebanon where the PLO is based and many Palestinian refugees live. Much fighting occurs in the region between Israelis and Palestinians.

1977

Menachem Begin elected prime minister of Israel. First right-wing prime minister. His term is marked by diplomacy with Egypt.

1978

First Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israel backs the Lebanese Forces, a coalition of right-wing militias, and Syria backs the Palestinians. Israel invades to rid the region of pro-Palestinian groups and PLO training camps and occupies a strip of land called “the security zone.”

1978

Camp David Accords. Peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, mediated and hosted by the United States. Calls for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 “land for peace” principle whereby Israel will return the Sinai to Egypt (pre1967 borders) in exchange for peace. Palestine and Lebanon oppose the accords. The establishment of an autonomous Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is not achieved. The accords mark the first time an Arab nation officially recognizes the statehood of Israel.

1979

Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Treaty signed by Egypt and Israel as a result of the Camp David Accords. The two agreements include “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East” and “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel.”

1979

Revolution in Iran. Overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last monarch of the 450-year old Safavid dynasty. The shah had used the secret police to repress dissident voices during a period of social, economic, and cultural change. Its leader, Aya-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

233

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

tollah Khomeini, opposed the shah’s alliance with the United States and his support of Israel. A religious Islamist state replaces the monarchy. 1980– 1988

1981

1982

1982

Iran-Iraq War (First Gulf War). Iraq launches a surprise attack on Iran in 1980 because, according to Iraq, Iran was plotting raids across the border. Missile attacks and raids last for eight years, mostly on Iraqi soil, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. The UN Security Council intervenes in 1987 when international ships are threatened in the Gulf. Anwar al-Sadat assassinated. President of Egypt and successor to Nasser killed by three Egyptian soldiers discontented that Sadat did not ensure a liberated Palestine at the Camp David Accords and by Egypt’s deteriorating economic condition. Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon (“Operation Peace for Galilee”). A PLO rocket attack on Israel prompts Israel to invade Lebanon and rid the area of PLO forces and Syrian troops. Israeli forces reach Beirut and the conflict takes over 20,000 lives. The U.S. mediates and expels PLO and Syrian troops from Beirut. Sabra and Shatila massacre. From 800 to 2000 Palestinian refugees, mostly women, children, and the elderly, are massacred at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by the Phalange (Lebanese Christian militias). Israeli troops, which had invaded West Beirut and surrounded the camps, stand back while the massacres take place. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon is found indirectly responsible for the killings.

of land and property seizure and demolition, censorship, restricted travel and construction, and military tribunals instead of civilian courts. The uprisings escalate from labor strikes, boycotts against Israeli goods, demonstrations, and Palestinian youths throwing stones at Israeli troops in 1987 to riots and violence in 1994. More than 20,000 people die. 1987

HAMAS founded. Palestinian liberation group with the mission of establishing an Islamic Palestinian state. Employs methods of terror and violence.

1988

Algiers Declaration. Palestinian statehood proclaimed at PNC meeting.

1990

Iraq occupies Kuwait. After eight years of fighting with Iran, Iraq is left in severe debt. Accuses Kuwait of overproduction of oil to lower the price per barrel, which is seen as an act of war. U.S. forces are sent to protect Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, under the operation Desert Shield. TaDif Accord ends Lebanese Civil War. Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria make recommendations to Lebanon and Syria to end the war and establish Syria and Lebanon’s relationship with Israel.

1990

1991

Multinational war against Iraq (“Operation Desert Storm,” Second Gulf War). A major five-week air offensive and 100-hour ground campaign, led by the United States, drives the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

1991

UN General Assembly Resolution 4686. Revokes Resolution 3379, which equates Zionism with racism.

1991– 1993

Madrid Peace Conference. U.S.-led and -mediated talks between Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. First time Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab diplomats (except Egypt) meet for public peace talks. Arab states recognize Israel as a nation.

1982

PLO expelled from Lebanon. Although the mission of the Israeli invasion is to wipe out the PLO in Beirut, they succeed in transplanting the PLO to Tunis, Tunisia.

1983

Yitzhak Shamir becomes prime minister of Israel.

1992

Shimon Peres becomes prime minister of Israel.

Yitzhak Rabin elected prime minister of Israel for second time.

1993

Oslo Accords I; Palestinian-Israeli “Declaration of Principles.” Secret talks between PLO and Israel resulting in a land-for-peace agreement. PLO and Israel agree to recognize each other and sign the “Declaration of Principles,” which outlines sovereignty for

1984

1986

Yitzhak Shamir becomes prime minister of Israel for second time.

1987– 1994

First Intifada. Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli policies

234

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for five years. PLO gives up claims to territory won by Israel in the 1967 war. 2000–

Institution of Palestinian Authority. Autonomous Palestinian government set up in the West Bank and Gaza, chaired by Yasir Arafat and comprised of other PLO ministers.

Second Intifada (al-Aqsa Intifada). In reaction to Ariel Sharon’s tour of the al-Aqsa mosque (Islam’s third holiest shrine) with 1000 riot police, Palestinians take to the streets in demonstration. Israeli police shoot live ammunition and rubber bullets at the crowd, killing six. Fundamentally, the Palestinians rise up against the dead-end peace process. They are against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the growing number of settlements in the area, land seizures, home and property destruction, and restricted travel.

2001

Oslo Accords II (Taba Accord). Set the stage for Palestinian elections, security, economic relations, and legal and civil matters. The accords do not lead to peace. Instead, escalating violence and terrorism rack the area in the late 1990s and into the 2000s.

Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Taba. U.S. -mediated talks that lay the final plans for Israeli withdrawals and Palestinian refugees. Time runs out on the accords before the details can be agreed upon and the proposals are not followed through.

2001

Ariel Sharon elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon advocates harsh punishments for Palestinian terror groups and campaigns against the Oslo peace accords. He wants a Greater Israel and encourages the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Violence escalates and Israel re-occupies almost all of the West Bank during Sharon’s time in office.

2001

Palestinians claim Zionism is racist. At the World National Conference Against Racism, Palestinians claim that they are victims of crimes against humanity and the Zionist movement is racist.

2003–

U.S.-UK war against, and occupation of, Iraq. Without UN support, the United States, Britain, and a coalition of countries send troops into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Although the stated mission is to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, none are found.

2004–

Israel to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza Strip. Announcement made by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in February seen as source of clashes with settlers, bitter disagreements in Israel, and potential split within Likud. On 26 October, the Knesset approves Sharon’s plan, which calls for Gaza’s complete evacuation by end of 2005.

1994

Hebron massacre. U.S.-born Israeli settler opens fire on Palestinian worshippers at the al-Haram al-Ibrahimi mosque, killing 29.

1994

Cairo Agreement. Outlines Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza. A five-year plan is laid out for further Israeli withdrawals, negotiations on Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and Palestinian sovereignty.

1994

1995

1995

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. Israeli prime minister killed by Jewish extremists who are opposed to his peace negotiations with Palestine. Shimon Peres succeeds him.

1996

First Palestinian elections for PLO president and Palestinian National Congress. Arafat wins election for president.

1996

Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu’s Likud Party campaigns against the Olso Accords and Peres and Rabin’s peace process with Palestine.

1998

Wye River Memorandum. Document produced by talks between Israel and the United States after an 18-month stagnation of the peace process. Calls for Israel to hand over 80% of Hebron and outlines further withdrawals from the West Bank.

1999

Ehud Barak runs on a Labor platform and is elected prime minister of Israel. Barak, running on a platform of bringing peace between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, wins the election and resumes peace talks with Palestine.

2000

tains is Syrian territory and therefore can occupy with troops.

Israel withdraws from Lebanon. Barak calls the army out of the region, except for the area of the Shab’a Farms, which Israel main-

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

235

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

2004

236

In mid-October, Yasir Arafat grows increasingly weak with an unknown illness. On 29 October he is allowed to leave his compound in Ramallah to seek medical help. He is taken to a military hospital outside Paris for diagnosis and treatment.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

2004–

T H E

Yasir Arafat dies 11 November from an unknown illness. Mahmud Abbas sworn in as PLO chairman. Rawhi Fattuh sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority. Faruq Qaddumi named al-Fatah leader.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT 1897

First Zionist Congress discusses plans to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

1914– 1918

World War I; the Ottoman Empire is defeated.

1916

Sykes-Picot Agreement divides Ottoman Arab lands into zones controlled by either the French or the British.

1917– 1918

Palestine comes under British control, as British troops move northward from their bases in Egypt.

1917

Britain issues the Balfour Declaration, supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, . . .it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. . .”

1920

1922

League of Nations at San Remo divides Arab lands into mandates, which are supposed to eventually create nation states for the indigenous peoples. Britain holds the Mandate for Palestine. British create the Amirate of Transjordan out of Mandatory Palestine east of the River Jordan. The Jewish national home provisions of the Balfour Declaration will be applied only west of the Jordan.

1933

Adolf Hitler begins his rise to power in Germany. Jewish immigration to Palestine increases.

1936– 1939

The Arab Revolt against British pro-Zionist policy and in a quest for an independent Arab state in Palestine.

1946

Hostilities in Palestine escalate and include Jewish terrorism against Britain. U.S. president Harry S. Truman expresses support for partition and a “viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine.”

1947

The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommends the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with greater Jerusalem to be an international city. The resolution is adopted by a vote of 33-1310, but rejected by Arab and Muslim delegates.

1948

Israel declares statehood as the British Mandate over Palestine ends. Arab armies attack Israel. The resulting war leaves Jerusalem divided and 650,000 Palestinians refugees. UN Resolution 194 declares that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, and establishes a commission to facilitate their repatriation or compensation.

237

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

1949

An armistice is signed at Rhodes between Israel and Egypt. Similar agreements with Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria follow. U.N. conference at Lausanne produces no agreement between Israeli and Arab delegations.

1949– 1950

Israel holds 77 percent of the former Palestine. Jordan annexes East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Egypt controls the Gaza Strip. The United Nations Relief and Work Agency is established. Jews from several Arab countries begin migration into Israel.

1956– 1957

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal leads to military action by Israel, Britain, and France. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatens economic sanctions against Israel and succeeds in forcing Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza. United Nations puts UNEF [Emergency Force] along the Egyptian-Israeli frontier.

1964

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is established.

1967

Israel captures the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. As many as 600,000 Palestinians become refugees. UN Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal and establishes the “land for peace” principle.

of its Arab neighbors. The Arab League expels Egypt. Israel invades Lebanon in response to terror attacks and in an attempt to clear out Palestinian fighters along the border. 1980

The Israeli government declares Jerusalem its capital. Ambassadors are exchanged between Israel and Egypt.

1981

Israel annexes the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967. Sadat is assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists.

1982

Israel invades Lebanon a second time, laying siege to Beirut. The PLO moves its headquarters from Beirut to Tunis. The Reagan Peace Initiative and the Fez Summit Peace Proposal are launched.

1987

Palestinian uprising, known as the Intifada, begin in Gaza and spread to the West Bank. Over the next several years, several thousand Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis are killed in the fighting.

1988

The Palestinian National Council (PNC) accepts UN Resolutions 242 and 338, tacitly recognizing Israel, and declares a Palestinian state. The United States government begins dialogue with the PLO.

1991

The Gulf War begins in January. Later that year, a Middle East peace conference opens in Madrid between Israel and Arab nations, including, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Palestinian representative participate, for the first time, in such an international forum as part of the Jordanian delegation.

1969– 1970

Israel begins establishing settlements in disputed areas. Egypt’s War of Attrition against Israel, with Soviet aid, leads to the Rogers Plan, which uses UN Resolution 242 as the basis for negotiations.

1973

Egypt and Syria attack Israel. No territorial changes result. UN Resolution 338 calls for negotiations between the parties. Minor border changes result as U.S. helps to broker disengagement agreements.

1992

The administration of U.S. president George H. W. Bush stops $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel in an attempt to curtail the spread of Israeli settlements into disputed areas.

1977

Menachem Begin and the Likud coalition win Israeli elections. Settlements in Occupied Territories increase. Egypt’s president Anwar al-Sadat goes to Israeli Knesset in the first efforts toward an Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

1993

1978

Negotiations between Sadat and Begin are brokered by U.S. president Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland, and result in the Camp David Accords, followed in 1979 by the first peace treaty between Israel and one

The Oslo Process begins during the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin meet at the White House. The PLO and Israel sign the Declaration of Principles, outlining a plan for Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories.

1994

The Cairo Accords between the PLO and Israel establish Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho but allow Israeli settlements to remain in place. Jordan and Israel sign a

238

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

peace treaty with Clinton in attendance. Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Rabin receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nativity in Bethlehem is stormed by armed Arab Palestinians. A Saudi peace plan, endorsed by the Arab League, promises recognition of Israel in exchange for ending occupation of all Arab lands. UN Resolution 1397 affirms a two-state vision for Israel. U.S. president George W. Bush announces a plan for a “viable Palestinian state next to a secure Israel.” Israel begins construction of a highly controversial “security fence” around the West Bank in response to suicide bombing inside Jewish civilian population areas.

1995

The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II, establishes three areas in the West Bank, one under direct Palestinian control, one under both Palestinian civilian control and Israeli security, and one under Israeli control. Rabin is assassinated in Tel Aviv.

1996

Benjamin Netanyahu is elected Israel’s prime minister. Israel launches Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon. Arafat, Jordan’s King Hussein, Netanyahu, and Clinton participate in a political summit in Washington, DC to negotiate for peace.

2003

The Hebron Protocol divides the city of Hebron. Palestinians protest the building of an Israeli settlement, Har Homa, on a hill overlooking East Jerusalem.

The United States invades and begins its occupation of Iraq. The Road Map for Peace, sponsored by the “Quartet” (U.S., U.N., Russia, and the European Union), is released.

2004

Ariel Sharon’s government promotes a plan that involves Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip and the abandonment of the settlements there. In October the Knesset votes to back Sharon’s plan to remove Israeli troops, as well as twenty-one settlements from Gaza and four small settlements from the northern part of the West Bank. The vote—sixtyseven for, forty-five against, and seven abstentions—marks the first time in twenty years that the parliament had favored the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the region. Sharon rejects a call for a referendum by the Likud which creates turmoil in the Knesset.

2004

In mid-October, Yasir Arafat, suffering from an unknown illness, is allowed to leave his compound in Ramallah to seek diagnosis and treatment in France. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon states that if Arafat dies, he will not allow Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem.

2004–

Yasir Arafat dies 11 November from an unknown illness. Mahmud Abbas sworn in as PLO chairman. Rawhi Fattuh sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority. Faruq Qaddumi named al-Fatah leader.

1997

1998

The Wye River Memorandum is signed but not implemented.

1999

The PLO postpones a declaration of statehood. Ehud Barak, newly elected prime minister of Israel, pledges to work for peace. The Sharm al-Shaykh memorandum is signed between Israel and the PLO. Clinton attends a PNC meeting in Gaza to witness the elimination of Palestine National Covenant clauses calling for the destruction of Israel.

2000

Israeli Army withdraws from South Lebanon. At the Camp David II meetings in July, Clinton chairs negotiations between Arafat and Barak. Negotiations break down. The alAqsa Intifada begins, fueled by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al– Sharif.

2001

Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel.

2002

Israeli troops reoccupy Palestinian areas in response to a terrorist suicide bombing of elderly people celebrating Passover at a resort hotel. Arafat is placed under house arrest in his Ramallah compound. The Church of the

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

239

GLOSSARY ADAR: Name

of the sixth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of the month of February and the beginning of the month of March. A second month of Adar is added every 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th years of the calendar’s nineteen-year cycle to align with the lunar calendar.

AGHA: Socio-political

title of authority. Agha (“chief,” “master”) was associated with certain administrators in the Ottoman empire. It is also used in other settings, such as among Kurds. Name of the central platform in a synagogue, from which the rabbi officiates. Also called a bima.

ALMENOR:

AMIR:

Political title. See dictionary entry “Emir.”

ASHUR: Islamic

tithe. Also called zakah or zakat, ashur (from the Arabic word for “ten”) is a charitable tithe prescribed in Islam. In North Africa, ashur also denotes the tenth month of the Islamic calendar, Muharram.

AV:

Eleventh month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of July and the beginning of August. The destruction of the Temple of Solomon is commemorated on the 9th of Av (Tish’a b-Av). “Son of the commandment,” in Hebrew. Jewish religious ceremony celebrating the passage from adolescence to majority and one’s ad-

BAR-MITZVA:

mission into the adult community. During the ceremony the 13-year old “mitzva” reads from the Torah and puts on phylacteries, symbolic of the commandments to which he will henceforward submit. The equivalent of bar-mitzva for young women is the bas-mitzva, which is celebrated at the age of 12. BEIT MIDRASH: School of rabbinical studies, generally attached to a synagogue. BETH: Also “beir, bait, bayt, beit.” Hebrew word meaning “house,” often figuring in composite names such as Bethel (house of God), Bethlehem (house of bread) or Beth Din (house of the law). BEY: Political title. Bey is a Turkish term often translated as “prince.” In the Ottoman empire’s administration and military, it was given to midlevel officers. In modern Turkey, it is often used as a suffix to a man’s first name as a polite form of address. BINT: Arabic, “girl.” Female children in the Arab world sometimes are referred to by making reference to their father. Thus, “so-and-so, bint [daughter] so-and-so.” CASBAH: Old quarters of an Arabic city. From the Arabic qasaba (“divide,” “cut up”; also, “citadel” or “capital”), it is a term often used by Europeans to denote the older, native quarters of a town, as distinct from the newer areas in which foreigners lived.

241

GLOSSARY

DARB: Street or path. Has come to refer to a neighbor-

hood, especially in Morocco. DEY:

Political title. The Turkish word for maternal uncle, the position of dey originally was military, but came to denote administrative power as well. Deys were found in North Africa, especially Tunisia and Algeria, from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

DHU

AL-HIJJAH: Name of the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar.

DHU AL-QIEDAH:

NAME OF THE ELEVENTH MONTH OF THE IS-

LAMIC CALENDAR.

Monetary unit. Dinar is derived from the Greek “dinarion” and the Latin “denarius.” During the early Islamic period, it was a type of gold coin. Currently it serves as the currency of Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, and Tunisia.

DINAR:

DIRHAM: Monetary

unit. During the early Islamic period, the dirham was a type of silver coin. Currently it is used in Morocco, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Honorific title. The origins of this title are Greek, and refer to a man of property or education. During the late Ottoman period, it was used as a sign of respect for middle class males as well as for some bureaucratic positions. Another form of the word, effendum, is still used in Egypt to mean “mister” or “sir.”

EFFENDI:

“Leader of the exile” (rosh ha-gola, in Hebrew; resh galonta, in Aramaic). Lay head of some Jewish communities settled outside of Israel.

EXILARCH:

FEDDAN: Unit

of surface area. Deriving from an Arabic term for a yoke of oxen, it referred to the amount of land such animals could farm. Thus the actual surface area called a feddan varied from region to region. In Egypt, where it remains the standard unit of surface area today, it equals 4,200.883 square meters, slightly more than one acre. Peasant. Fellah (also fallah; plural: fallahun, but more commonly fallahin following colloquial usage) derives from the Arabic verb falaha (“cultivate”). It refers to small scale, subsistence level cultivators in Arab countries, but can be used, often derisively, by urbanites to refer to the rural population generally.

FELLAH:

GENTILE: Word

used by Jews, from the time of the end of the Second Temple (between 19 and 70 C.E.)

242

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

to designate non-Jews, then used by Christians to designate pagans. GHAZEL: Type of poetic form. The word is Arabic (ghazal; “flirtation” or “love poem”), and is also seen as gazel or ghazal. A lyrical poetic mode often expressing romantic love or eroticism, the form passed into Turkish, Persian, and Urdu poetry as well. GOY: (Goi, pl. goyim) “Nation or people” in Hebrew. Word used by Jews currently to designate “gentiles”, that is, non-Jews. HAZAN: Hebrew word used to designate the performer of a Jewish religious office, especially having to do with chanting prayers and teaching children. HESHVAN: Name of the second month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the end of October and the beginning of November. HOCA: Honorific title. Hoca is a Turkish word derived from the Persian khwaja. In the Turkish speaking parts of the Ottoman empire, it denoted religious scholars and certain administrative bureacrats. It is still used in modern Turkey to refer to teachers and religious scholars. See also “khawaja.” HOFSHI: Hebrew word meaning “free.” By extension designates a secular Jew. HOSAINIYEH: Place of a certain type of religious ceremony. In Iran, it is a place where the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn ibn Ali is commemorated, especially on Ashura, the tenth day of the Islamic month of Muharram. It refers to the death of Husayn, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in 680 at the hands of the Umayyads at Karbala, in Iraq. Traditionally, a hosainiyeh was a different structure than a mosque, and was a populist institution rather than one under the control of the Islamic clerics. INQILAB: Revolution or uprising. In modern Arabic political usage, the term inqilab is usually used to connote a sudden seizure of political power, often via a military coup d’état. In Persian, the term means “revolution,” such as the 1979 revolution in Iran. IYAR: Name of the eighth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to late April and early May. JUMADA AL-AWWAL: Name of the fifth month of the Islamic calendar. JUMADA AL-THANI: Name of the sixth month of the Islamic calendar. KADDISH: Hebrew word, from Aramaic, meaning “sanctification.” Prayer of praise, addressed to T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

God and recited periodically in the course of a synagogue service, by men in mourning. Also called the prayer of the dead. Hebrew term designating someone who reads and interprets sacred writings without the help of commentaries.

KARA:

KAZA: Ottoman

administrative unit. Kaza is a Turkish word derived from the Arabic qada. By the late Ottoman empire, a province (vilayet; Arabic: wilaya) was divided into governorates called sanjaks (Arabic singular: sanjaq) or livas (Arabic singular: liwa). These in turn were divided into smaller units called kazas. Kaza can also refer to the judgment of a qadi, or judge. See also “liwa,” “qaDimmaqam,” and “vilayet.”

Highway inn for travelers, or a warehouse for merchandise. Khans were built as rest stops for travelers and caravans. A khan was also an urban complex for storing merchandise and hosting merchants.

KHAN:

KHANJAR: Type

of Arabic dagger. A khanjar usually refers to a slightly curved, double edged dagger that tapers to a point. The hilt is often decorated.

KHATIB: Islamic preacher. A khatib is the religious offi-

cial who delivers the sermon during Friday prayers in a mosque, usually from a raised pulpit called a minbar. See also “minbar.” Honorific title of Persian origin. In Egypt and parts of the Fertile Crescent, khawaja was a title used to denote a non-Muslim, both foreigners as well as native Christians and Jews. The term comes from the Persian khwaja. See also “hoca.”

KHAWAJA:

KHAWR: Natural

harbor; also part of place names. The term is used in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region. High-level title used in Egypt from 1867– 1914. Khedive is a Persian word for a high prince that was used by the governors of Ottoman Egypt from 1867–1914 to replace the title “pasha” carried by other governors in the empire. It was first used by IsmaEil Pasha, grandson of Muhammad Ali, who secured this right from the Ottoman sultan in order to differentiate and elevate himself from other provincial governors. The term was replaced with “sultan” by the British, who occupied Egypt starting in 1882. See also “pasha.”

KHEDIVE:

Blessing pronounced at a meal, or during Jewish religious holidays.

KIDDUSH: KIDDUSH

HA-SHEM:

Hebrew word for Jewish martyrs in

general. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

(“yarmulka” in Yiddish) Skullcap worn by observant Jews, as a sign of submission to God. KISLEV: Word for the third month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of November and the beginning of December. On 25 Kislev, the holiday of Hanukkah is celebrated. KORAN: See dictionary entry “QurDan.” LAILAT AL-QADR: Muslim holiday, celebrated on 27 Ramadan, commemorating the night of Qur’anic revelation. LIRA: Ottoman monetary unit. The lira, or pound, was named after an Italian silver coin, and was the currency used in the Ottoman empire. Modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon continue to use the lira as their national currencies. LIWA: Ottoman administrative unit. During the late Ottoman empire, a province (vilayet; Arabic: wilaya) was divided into liwas (called liva in Turkish). A liwa was also called a sanjak (Arabic: sanjaq). These in turn were divided into smaller units called qadas or kazas. LUTI: Term implying deviation from moral standards. In Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term originally referred to a member of a chivalrous brotherhood. It later assumed more negative connotations implying drunkenness and moral deviation. In parts of the modern Arab world, luti is a term used for a homosexual. Some surmise that the term derives from the biblical figure Lot, son of Noah. MAJLES: Legislature or parliament. Majles is the Persian form of the Arabic majlis (in Turkish, meclis), which is derived from the verb jalasa (“to sit”). It can mean a meeting, or sitting, in a number of senses, both private and public. In the public realm, it became the term used for legislatures in the Middle East and North Africa once these began to emerge in the nineteenth century. It can also refer to an appointed consultative body. MALIK: “King” in Arabic. Malik derives from the Arabic verb malaka (“to own”). It has been used in the modern Arab world to mean king. MAEPALIM: Illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine. MaEpalim (Hebrew, “the daring ones”) were Jewish immigrants who entered Palestine in violation of immigration quotas established by the British Mandate in Palestine, especially after the 1939 White Paper. The Zionist community in Palestine established the clandestine organization Mossad le-Aliyah Bet in 1938 to assist Jews KIPPAH:

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

243

GLOSSARY

fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe in reaching Palestine. British forces intercepted many maEpalim and interned them in camps in Cyprus, including the 4,515 passengers aboard the ship Exodus, whose detainment in 1947 helped turn international sentiment against British rule in Palestine. MENORAH: Hebrew word for the seven-branch candela-

bra, principal object of worship in the Jewish temple. Its shape was inspired by a plant known in antiquity under the name of moriah. When the first temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, the candelabra disappeared with all the other sacred objects. Little case in wood or metal, containing a verse of the Torah, attached to the frame of the door to a house.

MEZUZAH:

MIKVAH:

Purifying bath, a practice of Orthodox Jews.

MINBAR: Pulpit

in a mosque. In a mosque, the sermon (khitab) is delivered by the preacher (khatib) from a raised pulpit called a minbar, derived from the Arabic nabara (“to raise the voice”). See also “khatib.”

MINHA: Hebrew word for “offering.” Name of the Jew-

ish afternoon prayer. MINYAN: Hebrew

word meaning “number.” A quorum of ten adult males is required for Jewish public prayer. Hebrew word used to designate a Jew who is opposed to the Hasidic movement.

MITNAGDI:

Practical commandments of Judaism. According to tradition, the Torah contains 613 commandments, of which 248 are “positive” (obligations) and 365 are “negative” (interdictions).

MITZVA:

MOSLEM

See the dictionary entry “Muslim.”

MUEZZIN: The

one who calls Muslims to pray. A muezzin (Arabic: mu Dadhdhin) calls the Muslim faithful to pray, usually from a minaret. The call to prayer must be in Arabic, even though most of the world’s Muslims do not speak Arabic.

MUHARRAM: Name

of the first month in the Islamic calendar. The first of Muharram is New Year’s Day; the tenth of Muharram, the Feast of Ashura, commemorates at once the meeting of Adam and Eve, the end of the deluge, and the death of Husayn. Among the ShiEa, Ashura is celebrated in distress, since they commemorate on this day only the death of Husayn. Before the Islamic epoch, the month of Muharram corresponded to a period of sacred repose. Concerning New

244

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Year’s Day, the Iranians continue to celebrate the “Naw Rouz” (new light), the Sassanid New Year’s Day, having survived the coming of Islam, which falls after the spring equinox, 21 March. MUKHTAR: Chief or headman. Deriving from the Arabic word khatara (“to choose” or “select”), a mukhtar (“selected one”) was an official appointed by the Ottoman authorities to serve as a go-between between the government and a tribe, village, or urban quarter. The function was part of the Ottomans’ centralization efforts, efforts that included attempts to undercut traditional religious figures who had maintained levels of local influence. The position is still found in parts of the Arab world. MULAI: Title and form of address. In Arabic, “my lord.” Also mawlai, mawlay. A form of address formerly used when speaking to a king, sultan, or caliph. It is still used in Morocco when referring to the crown prince. MUTASARRIF: Ottoman provincial official. A mutasarrif was the recipient of taxes from sub-provincial governorates in the Ottoman empire. By the late Ottoman era, the term denoted the governmentappointed head of a governorate, or sanjak (also liwa). See also “liwa.” NARGHILA: Water pipe. A narghila (also called arghila, qalyan, and shisha) is a water pipe used in the Middle East and North Africa to smoke tobacco, usually flavored tobacco called tombac. They are commonly seen in all-male coffee houses. NISSAN: Month of the Hebrew calendar, occurring between late March and early April. The holiday of Pesach (Passover) is celebrated from 15 to 21 Nissan. Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), observed on 27 Nissan, is a national day of mourning in memory of Jews who died in the Holocaust during World War II. OASIS: Watered area surrounded by desert. An oasis is a fertile area, watered by wells, that is found in the midst of a desert. They can be small or large. PESH MERGA: Kurdish, “those who face death.” Modern term used to denote armed Kurdish fighters. It first appeared during the Kurdish war against the Iraqi government that began in 1962. QADID: Arabic for “leader.” Arabic term denoting political leadership. QADIMMAQAM: Ottoman provincial official. The term itself is Arabic, and was the title given by Ottoman authorities to the official appointed to head a subgovernorate called a kaza (also qada). See T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

also “kaza,” “liwa,” and “vilayet.” It was also used to denote a low ranking military officer. Canal. A qanat (also qana) can mean an underground water channel for irrigating fields, but can also denote a surface level canal, both small and large (such as the Suez Canal).

QANAT:

QAT: Plant

with mildly stimulant effect. The leaves of the qat (also khat) plant, Catha edulis, are chewed in southwestern Arabia and eastern Africa for their mildly stimulant effect. Similar to the stimulant qualities of caffeine, qat is chewed in the company of others as an important form of social gathering. In this regard, gathering together to chew qat is akin to gathering in a coffee house to drink coffee or tea.

QIBLA: Direction

of Islamic prayer. The qibla is the direction in which Muslims must pray. The first qibla was Jerusalem, but this was quickly changed in the seventh century to the direction of Mecca. Muslims around the globe all pray in the direction of Mecca. Monetary unit. The Arabic word qirsh, and Turkish word ghurush or kurus¸, is translated as piastre, itself the Italian name for the medieval peso duro. The qirsh was introduced into the Middle East in the early seventeenth century and became a unit of Ottoman currency equivalent to one-hundredth of a lira. It is still used as a small unit of currency in parts of the Middle East.

QIRSH:

Name of the third month of the Muslim calendar. The 12th of this month is celebrated as the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Muhammad. In the Maghreb, this holiday is called al-Mawled (Muled, Mulud).

RABI AL-AWWAL:

Name of the fourth month in the Muslim calendar.

RABI AL-THANI: RAJAB: Name

of the seventh month of the Muslim calendar, during which, on the 27th, the Muslims commemorate the ascension of the prophet Muhammad. During this month, some believers also celebrate the birth of Zaynab, eldest daughter of the Prophet.

RAMADAN: Ninth month of the Islamic calendar, lasting

twenty-nine or thirty days. Ramadan is a month of fasting, which is one of the five obligations of Islam, and so between sunrise and sunset the believer abstains from smoking; partaking of food or drink; telling lies, gossiping and engaging in other unethical behavior; and engaging in sex. At sunset everyone breaks the fast, usually in a large meal with family and friends (iftar). The end of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

the month of Ramadan is celebrated with a feast, the EId al-Fitr. Between the 27 and 28 Ramadan falls the Night of Destiny (lailat al-qadr), when according to a widespread belief everyone’s fate is decided. For some this date marks the first revelation of the QurDan to Muhammad. HA-SHANAH: (Rosh Hashana; head of the year, in Hebrew) Jewish New Year’s Day, celebrated on the first and second days of the month of Tishri (September-October). This holiday, after which, for a period of ten days, every Jew shows penitence, is extended by the additional day of Yom Kippur. On the afternoon of the first day the tashlih occurs, a purification ceremony. In the Old Testament, Rosh ha-Shanah was called Yom Teru Eah (Day of the Trumpet), since the new moon on that day was announced by the sound of the shofar.

ROSH

SAFAR: Name

of the second month of the Islamic cal-

endar. Arabic word for “master,” “lord,” “chief,” or “mister.” Prior to the coming of Islam, sayyid (plural: sada or asyad) was used in Arabia to denote a tribal chief. After the coming of Islam, it assumed a particular meaning: descendants and certain relatives of the prophet Muhammad. The term sayyid thereafter came to denote the direct descendants of the Prophet through his two grandsons, Hasan and Husayn, the sons of the union of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and his son-in-law (and cousin), Ali. In some part of the Arab world, notably in the Hijaz region of Arabia and parts of the Fertile Crescent, sayyid came to denote those who were part of the lineage of Husayn, while the term sharif denoted those descendant from Hasan. Sayyids were held in high social esteem. However, the terms sayyid or sid (also, “sidi”: “my lord”) have also been used in a variety of Islamic societies as a form of address for holy men and religious figures. It also is the modern Arabic equivalent of “mister.”

SAYYID:

Group of Western oil companies in the Middle East. The Seven Sisters were a cartel of Western oil companies that dominated the Middle Eastern oil industry from 1930–1970. They were: Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Mobil, and Gulf Oil. They increasingly lost power starting in the 1950s and 1960s as Middle Eastern countries began nationalizing their oil industries. With the merger of Chevron and Gulf in 1986, the number of “sisters” dropped to six,

SEVEN SISTERS:

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

245

GLOSSARY

which remain important companies in the fields of oil refining and distribution. SHAEABAN: Name of the eighth month of the Islamic calendar. According to a belief dating back to the 10th century, for every Muslim, the night of 14–15 of this month is considered as the “night of destiny,” in the course of which everyone finds out what the year to come has in store. Others think this “revelation” occurs on the night of 27–28 Ramadan. SHAWAL: Tenth month of the Islamic calendar, following the month of Ramadan. On the 1st of this month Muslims celebrate the end of the fast (Id el-Fitr). SHEVAT: Name of the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of January and the beginning of February. SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY: Term denoting a diplomatic intermediary shuttling back and forth between countries in an effort to arrange an agreement among contending countries. The term was first raised to the level of public discourse to describe the efforts of American secretary of state Henry Kissinger to bring about a disengagement of forces after the October 1973 Arab–Israeli war. Kissinger had to shuttle back and forth between the capitals of Egypt, Syria, and Israel, carrying his proposals, because the parties could not agree to meet together. SITT: Arabic for “lady.” Sitt is often used in female royal titles. SIVAN: Nine month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of May and the beginning of June. On 6 Sivan the holiday of the first fruits takes place (Shavuot). TAMMUZ: Name of the tenth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of June and the beginning of July. TAQLID: Islamic legal term. In Sunni Islam, the term taqlid came to mean “deference” or “imitation,” in the sense that religious jurisprudents were obliged to defer to the doctrinal precedents of their respective schools of law (the ShafiEi, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Maliki schools). This, then, reduces the realm of individual interpretation (ijtihad). In ShiEite Islam, however, the position of marja al-taqlid is quite different, and denotes an elite jurist who is spiritually empowered to employ ijtihad. TARIQA: Sufi order or brotherhood. Tariqa is an Arabic word derived from the term meaning “the way.” It is used to denote sufi mystical orders.

246

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Hill or mound. The Arabic word tall means a hill, and is used to describe such geographical features. In archeological parlance, however, it refers to a mound containing ancient archeological remains. Finally, it also refers to a large region of North Africa from Morocco to Tunisia.

TELL:

TEVET: Name

of the fourth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of December and the beginning of January.

Maritime boundary. The thalweg principle of international law, whereby a river or some other body of water constitutes an international border, was most notably used in the Middle East in the case of the border between Iraq and Iran.

THALWEG LINE:

TISHRI: Name

of the first month in the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of September and the beginning of October. On 1 and 2 Tishri the holiday of Rosh ha-Shana falls, on the 10th that of Yom Kippur, and on the 21st, Simhat Torah.

Arabic term for the tenth and eleventh months of the Gregorian calendar. In the modern Arab world, Tishrin al-Awwal (“First Tishrin”) refers to the Gregorian (Western) month of October, while Tishrin al-Thani (“Second Tishrin”) refers to November. Some Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia, do not use the Gregorian calendar but only the Islamic (hijri) calendar. It is also the name of a newspaper in Syria, named after the initial Arab victories in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

TISHRIN:

TU B’SHVAT: Name

of the Jewish holiday, called “of the trees,” celebrated on 15 Shevat, month corresponding to the period between the end of January and the beginning of February. Turkic peoples in Turkmenistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The Turkmen are speakers of Western Oghuz Turkic, and were originally pastoral nomads. They lived east of the Caspian Sea and west of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River. In addition, Turkmen minorities today reside in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

TURKMEN:

URF:

Arabic customary law. Urf refers to largely unwritten tribal or customary codes that govern social relations, in contradistinction to Islamic law (shari Ea) or state legal codes (qanun). Arabic for “teacher” or “master.” This term (also ostad or ustaz) is used to denote a teacher or professor, but can also be used as a polite form of address for any educated person.

USTADH:

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

UZI: Type

of Israeli firearm. The uzi is a short submachine gun designed by the Israeli army office Maj. Uziel Gal, after whom it is named. Ottoman provincial governor. The term vali is the Turkish and Persian rendition of the Arabic wali, referring to someone who has been deputized to exercise authority. It meant “governor.” The Mamluks assigned valis to their smallest administrative units, whereas in Iran and later in the Ottoman empire, a vali was the governor of the largest type of administrative unit. In the Ottoman empire, a vali was head of a vilayet, or province. See also “kaza,” “liwa,” and “vilayet.”

VALI:

Ottoman Turkish term for province. A vilayet, from the Arabic word wilaya, was the largest

VILAYET:

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

administrative unit within the Ottoman empire. See also “vali.” Type of government official; “minister.” Under the Ottomans, the vizier (Arabic: wazir; Turkish: vezir) served as a government minister. The vezir-i azam, or grand vizier, was the functional equivalent of a prime minister under the sultan. The Ottomans replaced the term with vekil (Arabic: wakil) in the 1830s, although wazir is still in use to denote a government minister in the Arab world.

VIZIER:

ZAEIM:

Arabic for “boss” or “leader.” Usually used in an informal manner to denote a strong leader. It is also used as a military rank in some Arab countries.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

247

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbas, Mahmoud. Through Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo. Readings. Reading, UK: Garnet, 1995. Abed, George T. The Economic Viability of a Palestinian State. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1990. Abu-Amr, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994. AbuKhalil, AsEad. Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s New “War on Terrorism.” New York: Seven Stories, 2002. ———. Historical Dictionary of Lebanon. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. ———. “Lebanon.” Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Frank Tachau. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Aburish, Said K. Arafat: From Defender to Dictator. New York: Bloomsbury, 1998. ———. Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Adelson, Roger. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Alexander, Yonah. “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Palestinian Secular Terrorism. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2003. Algar, Hamid. “A Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order.” In Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, edited by Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone. Istanbul and Paris: Editions Isis, 1990. Almog, Oz. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, translated by Haim Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Alterman, Jon. New Media, New Politics?: From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998. Amery, Hussein A., and Aaron T. Wolf, eds. Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Arian, Alan, and Michal Shamir. The Elections in Israel, 1996. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Arian, Asher. The Second Republic: Politics in Israel. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1998.

249

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Ballantine, 1997. Arnow, David. “The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel: Reassessing the Causal Relationship.” Journal of Israeli History 15, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 257– 281. Aronoff, Myron. Israeli Visions and Division: Cultural Change and Political Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1990. Aronson, Geoffrey. Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts in the West Bank. London and New York: Kegan Paul, 1990. Aronson, Shlomo. The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Aruri, Naseer H. The Obstruction of Peace: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1995. Arzt, Donna E. Refugees Into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997. Ashrari, Hanan. This Side of Peace: A Personal Account. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Avruch, Kevin, and Walter P. Zenner, eds. Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion and Government. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Awaisi, Abdal-Fattyah Muhammad al-. The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, 1928–1947. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998.

Beinin, Joel, and Joe Stork. Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Ben-Eliezer, Uri. The Making of Israeli Militarism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and S. Sharot. Ethnicity, Religion and Class in Israeli Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. Crisis and Transformation: The Kibbutz at Century’s End. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. ———. Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Benvenisti, Meron. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Berg, Nancy E. “Transit Camp Literature: Literature of Transition.” In Critical Essay on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government: Books on Israel, Vol. 4, edited by Kevin Avruch and Walter P. Zenner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Berkowitz, Michael. Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bickerton, Ian J., and Carla L. Klauser. A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.

Baker, Raymond William. Sadat and After: Struggles for Egypt’s Political Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Binur, Yoram. My Enemy, My Self. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Bar-On, Mordechai. The Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Suez and Back, 1955–1957. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Black, Ian, and Benny Morris. Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

———. In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1996.

Bohn, Michael K. The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1999.

Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov. Israel and the Peace Process, 1977–1982: In Search of Legitimacy for Peace. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Bose, Meena, and Rosanna Perotti, eds. From Cold War to New World Order: The Foreign Policy of George H. W. Bush. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Bass, Warren. Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Beaumont, Peter. “Water Policies for the Middle East in the Twenty-first Century: The New Economic Realities.” International Journal of Water Resources Development 18, no. 2 (2002): 315–334.

250

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Boyd, Douglas A. Broadcasting in the Arab World: A Survey of the Electronic Media in the Middle East, 3d edition. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999. Brentjes, Burchard. The Armenians, Assyrians, and Kurds: Three Nations, One Fate? Campbell, CA: Rishi, 1997. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brom, Shlomo, and Yiftah Shapir, eds. The Middle East Military Balance, 2001–2002. Cambridge, MA, and London.: MIT Press, 2002.

Cobban, Helena. The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 1991–1996 and Beyond. Washington, DC: Institute of Peace Press, 1999.

Brooks, David B., and Ozay Mehmet, eds. Water Balances in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2000.

———. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Brown, Nathan. Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Brynen, Rex. Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1990. Brynen, Rex; Bahgat Korany; and Paul Noble, eds. Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, 2 volumes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995. Burdett, Anita, ed. The Arab League: British Documentary Sources, 1943–1963. Slough, UK: Archive Editions, 1995. Burrows, William E., and Robert Windrem. Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Corbin, Jane. The Norway Channel: The Secret Talks that Led to the Middle East Peace Accord. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994. Cubert, Harold. The PFLP’s Changing Role in the Middle East. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Davila, James R., ed. The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity: Papers from an International Conference at St. Andrews in 2001. Boston, MA: Brill, 2003. Davis, Joyce M. Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Caplan, Neil. Futile Diplomacy, Vol. 4: Operation Alpha and the Failure of Anglo-American Coercive Diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1954–1956. Totowa, NJ; London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Deeb, Marius. Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Carey, Roane. The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid. London: Verso, 2001.

Diskin, Abraham. The Last Days in Israel: Understanding the New Israeli Democracy. London: Frank Cass, 2003.

Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Caspi, Dan, and Yehiel Limor. The In/Outsiders: The Mass Media in Israel. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999. Cassese, Antonio. Terrorism, Politics, and Law: The Achille Lauro Affair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989. Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. 2d ed. Boston: South End, 1999. Choueiri, Youssef M. Arab Nationalism: A History: Nation and State in the Arab World. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Ciment, James. Palestine/Israel: The Long Conflict. New York: Facts on File, 1997. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Divine, Donna Robinson. Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival. Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1994. Doumain, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Dowty, Alan. The Jewish State: A Century Later. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Drezon-Tepler, Marcia. Interest Groups and Political Change in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Dumper, Michael. Islam and Israel: Muslim Religious Endowments and the Jewish State. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994. ———. The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974, 3d edition. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1992.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

251

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eban, Abba. Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes. New York: Putnam, 1992. Eisenberg, Laura Zittrain, and Neil Caplan. Negotiating Arab–Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, and Possibilities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Elad-Bouskila. Modern Palestinian Literature and Culture. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Elmusa, Sharif S. Water Conflict: Economics, Politics, Law, and the Palestian-Israeli Water Resources. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997. El-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Adel Iskander. Al Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002. Elon, Amos. Herzl. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1975. Enderlin, Charles. Shamir. Paris: Orban, 1991. ———. Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002. New York: Other Press, 2003. Eshed, Haggai. Reuven Shiloah: The Man behind the Mossad, translated by David and Leah Zinder. London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Freedman, Lawrence, and Efraim Karsh. The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Friedland, Roger, and Richard Hecht. To Rule Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Friedman, Robert I. Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement. New York: Random House, 1992; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Friedman, Thomas L. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. Fry, Michael, and Miles Hochstein. “The Forgotten Middle East Crisis of 1957: Gaza and Sharm el Sheikh.” International History Review 15 (1993): 46–83. Gal, Allon. David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Gawyrch, George W. The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Fahmy, Ninette. The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship. New York; Routledge, 2002.

Geddes, Charles L., ed. A Documentary History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Praeger, 1991.

Falk, Richard. “Azmi Bishara, the Right of Resistance, and the Palestinian Ordeal.” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 2 (winter 2002): 19–33.

Gerner, Deborah J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine, 2d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.

Farsoun, Samih K., and Christina Zachharia. Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1996.

Gilbert, Martin, ed. The Illustrated Atlas of Jewish Civilization: 4,000 Years of Jewish History. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Feiler, Gil. From Boycott to Economic Cooperation: The Political Economy of the Arab Boycott of Israel. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

———. Israel: A History. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, and Hocking, Mary Evelyn, eds. The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Finlan, Alistair. The Gulf War 1991. New York: Routledge, 2003. Firro, Kais. The Druzes in the Jewish State. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001. Fleischmann, Ellen L. “Selective Memory, Gender and Nationalism: Palestinian Women Leaders in the British Mandate Period,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 141–158. Fraser, T. G. The Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.

252

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Glock, Albert. “Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, edited by Philip Mattar. New York: Facts On File, 2000. Glubb, John Bagot. The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography. London: Quartet, 1983. Golani, Motti. Israel in Search of A War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955–1956. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1998. Goldberg, Harvey E., ed. Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East, 4th edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gollaher, David L. Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gordon, Haim, ed. Looking Back at the June 1967 War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Gorman, Anthony. Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation. London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Government of Palestine. A Survey of Palestine for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946), 2 vols. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Gowers, Andrew, and Tony Walker. Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution. London: W. H. Allen, 1990. Greilsammer, Ilan. “The Religious Parties.” In Israel’s Odd Couple: The 1984 Knesset Elections and the National Unity Government, edited by Daniel J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Grossman, David. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. Haddadin, Munther J. Diplomacy on the Jordan: International Conflict and Negotiated Resolution. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Haidar, Aziz. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Halamish, Aviva. The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, translated by Ora Cummings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Halper, Jeff. Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Halpern, Ben, and Reinharz, Jehuda. Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hart, Alan. Arafat: A Political Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hatina, Meir. Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001. Hazan, Reuven. Reforming Parliamentary Committees: Israel in Comparative Perspective. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2001. Heiberg, Marianne, and Geir Ovensen. Palestinian Society in Gaza, West Bank and Arab Jerusalem: D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

A Survey of Living Conditions. Oslo, Norway: FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science), 1993. Heilman, Samuel C. Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. New York: Schocken, 1992. Heller, Joseph. The Birth of Israel, 1945–1949: BenGurion and His Critics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. ———. The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics, and Terror, 1940–1949. Portland, OR, and London: Frank Cass, 1995. Herb, Michael. All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Monarchy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Hersh, Seymour. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1991. Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997. Herzog, Chaim. Living History: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Hetzron, Robert, ed. The Semitic Languages. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hilal, Jamil. “PLO Institutions: The Challenge Ahead.” Journal of Palestine Studies 89 (1993): 46–60. Hiro, Dilip. Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of the Israelis and Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch, 1999. Hitti, Philip K. History of the Arabs: From the Earliest Times to the Present, revised 10th edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Hourani, Albert. History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002. Hroub, Khaled. Hamas: Political Thought and Practice. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000. Ilan, Amitzur. Bernadotte in Palestine: A Study in Contemporary Humanitarian Knight-Errantry. London: Macmillan, 1989. ———. The Origin of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race: Arms, Embargo, Military Power and Decision in the 1948 Palestine War. New York: New York University Press; London: Macmillan, 1996. Inbar, Efraim. Rabin and Israel’s National Security. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

253

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Institute for Palestine Studies. The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement: A Documentary Record. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994. ———. United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1998. 4 vols. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988-99. Jaimoukha, Amjad. The Circassians: A Handbook. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Jankowski, James. Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Jumayyil, Amin. Rebuilding Lebanon’s Future. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992. Kaikobad, Kaiyan Homi. The Shatt-al-Arab Boundary Question: A Legal Reappraisal. New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1991. Kamalipour, Yahya R, and Hamid Mowlana, eds. Mass Media in the Middle East: A Comprehensive Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. ———. Mass Media in the Middle East. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Kaminer, Reuven. The Politics of Protest: The Israeli Peace Movement and the Palestinian Intifada. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1996. Kark, Ruth. Jaffa: A City in Evolution, 1799–1917, translated by Gila Brand. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1990. Katz, Yossi. Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998. Kawar, Amal. Daughters of Palestine: Leading Women of the Palestinian National Movement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Kennedy, Valerie. Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Khalaf, Issa. Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

254

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Khalidi, Rashid; Lisa Anderson; Muhammad Muslih; et al., eds. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Khan, Saira. Nuclear Proliferation Dynamics in Protracted Conflict Regions: A Comparative Study of South Asia and the Middle East. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Kimche, David. The Last Option: After Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein—The Quest for Peace in the Middle East. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991. Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel S. Migdal. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993. ———. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Kolars, John. “The Spatial Attributes of Water Negotiation: The Need for a River Ethic and River Advocacy in the Middle East.” In Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace, edited by Hussein A. Amery and Aaron T. Wolf. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Kurzman, Dan. Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin, 1922–1995. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Kyle, Keith. Suez. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Landau, David. Who Is a Jew? A Case Study of American Jewish Influence on Israeli Policy. New York: American Jewish Committee, Institute on American Jewish-Israel Relations, 1996. Lahav, Pnina. Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies, 2d edition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Laqueur, Walter, and Barry Rubin, eds. The IsraelArab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 6th revised edition. New York and London, Penguin Books, 2001. Laqueur, Walter, and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Laskier, Michael M. Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood to Oslo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lesch, Ann Mosely. Transition to Palestinian SelfGovernment: Practical Steps toward IsraeliPalestinian Peace. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Lesch, Ann Mosley, and Dan Tschirgi. Origins and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Westport, CT: Greenwoood Press, 1998. Lesch, David W., ed. The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, 3d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. Livingstone, Neil C., and David Halevy. Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secret Funds, and the War against Israel and the United States. New York: Morrow, 1990. Lorch, Netanel. Shield of Zion: The Israeli Defense Forces. Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, 1991. Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Lowi, Miriam. Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lucas, W. Scott. Divided We Stand: Britain, the US, and the Suez Crisis. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Lukacs, Yehuda, ed. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, 1967–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Mahler, Gregory S. Politics and Government in Israel: The Maturation of a Modern State. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Makovsky, David. Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government’s Road to the Oslo Accord. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Marr, Phebe. “The Iran-Iraq War: The View from Iraq.” In The Persian Gulf War: Lessons for Strategy, Law, and Diplomacy, edited by Christopher C. Joyner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Massad, Joseph A. Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Masud, Muhammad Khalid; Brinkley Messick; and David S. Powers, eds. Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Mattar, Philip. “The PLO and the Gulf Crisis.” Middle East Journal 48, no. 1 (winter 1994): 31–46. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Lunt, James. Glubb Pasha: A Biography. London: Harvill, 1984.

McGowan, Daniel, and Marc H. Ellis, eds. Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine. Brooklyn, NY: Olive Branch Press, 1998.

Lustick, Ian S. For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988.

Medoff, Rafael, and Chaim I. Waxman. Historical Dictionary of Zionism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

———. Arab-Israeli Relations: A Collection of Contending Perspectives and Recent Research. 10 vols. Hamden, Conn.: Garland, 1994.

Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991.

Luz, Ehud. Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement, 1882–1904, translated by Lenn J. Schramm. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988.

Meyers, Eric M., ed. Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures. Duke Judaic Studies Series, vol. 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999.

MaDoz, Moshe, and Gabriel Sheffer, eds. Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002.

Miller, Anita; Jordan Miller; and Sigalit Zetouni. Sharon: Israel’s Warrior-Politician. Chicago: Academy Chicago, Olive, 2002.

MacDonald, Eileen. Shoot the Women First. New York: Random House, 1991.

Mintz, Jerome R. Hasidic People: A Place in the New World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Magnes, Judah Leon. The Magnes-Philby Negotiations, 1929: The Historical Record. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1998.

Mishal, Shaul, and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

255

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mitchell, John, et al. The New Economy of Oil: Impacts on Business, Geopolitics, and Society. London: Earthscan, 2001.

Newman, David, ed. The Impact of Gush Emunim: Politics and Settlement in the West Bank. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Momen, Moojan. An Introduction to Shi Ei Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi Eism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Newman, David. Population, Settlement and Conflict: Israel and the West Bank. Update Series in Contemporary Geographical Issues. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Moosa, Matti. The Maronites in History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Morris, Benny. Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Oren, Michael B. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Pappé, Illan. The Israel-Palestine Question. London: Routledge, 1999.

———. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist– Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Parker, Richard B., ed. The Six-Day War: A Retrospective. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Moussalli, Ahmad. Historical Dictionary of Islamic Fundamentalist Movements in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999.

Peres, Shimon. Battling for Peace: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1995.

Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999.

Peres, Shimon, and Robert Littell. For the Future of Israel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Peretz, Don. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

Munthe, Turi, ed. The Saddam Hussein Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.

———. Palestinians, Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993.

Muslih, Muhammad Y. The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Peters, F. E. Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Mutahhari, Morteza. Jihad: the Holy War in Islam and the Legitimacy in the Qur Dan, translated by Mohammad Salman Tawhidi. Tehran, Iran: Islamic Propagation Organization, 1998.

———. The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Nashashibi, Nasser Eddin. Jerusalem’s Other Voice: Ragheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920–1948. Exeter, UK: Ithaca, 1990. Nassar, Jamal R. The Palestine Liberation Organization: From Armed Struggle to the Declaration of Independence. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991. Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995.

Peterson, Erik R. The Gulf Cooperation Council: Search for Unity in a Dynamic Region. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988. Postel, Sandra. Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? New York: Norton, 1999. Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, revised edition. Berkeley, CA: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. Rabin, Leah. Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy. New York: Putnam, 1997.

Netanyahu, Benjamin. A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

Rabinovich, Itamar. The Brink of Peace: Israel and Syria, 1992–1996. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Newman, D. “Boundaries in Flux: The Green Line Boundary between Israel and the West Bank.” Boundary and Territory Briefing 1, no. 7 (1995).

Ranstorp, Magnus. Hizb Eallah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

256

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raswamy, P. R. Kuma, ed. Revisiting the Yom Kippur War. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000.

Rubinstein, Amnon. From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism. New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000.

Raviv, Dan, and Yossi Melman. Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Rubenstein, Danny. The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home. New York: Times Books, 1991.

Rebhun, Uzi, and Chaim I. Waxman, eds. Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/ Brandeis University Press, 2004.

Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal. Hizbullah: Politics and Religion. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

Reeve, Simon. One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation “Wrath of God.” New York: Arcade Books, 2001.

Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2d edition. New York: Knopf, 1996. Said, Edward. Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992.

Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.

———. End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Pantheon, 2000.

Reiter, Yitzhak. Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem under British Mandate. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

Sakr, Naomi. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. New York and London: I. B. Taurus, 2001.

Rogan, Eugene L., and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Savir, Uri. The Process: 1,100 Days that Changed the Middle East. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Rogers, Peter, and Peter Lydon, eds. Water in the Arab World: Perspectives and Prognoses. Cambridge, MA: Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 1994. Rolef, Susan Hattis, ed. Political Dictionary of the State of Israel, 2d edition. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Ron, James. Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Ross, Dennis. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. Rossoff, Dovid. Safed: The Mystical City. Spring Valley, NY, 1991. Rouhana, Nadim. Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Rouyer, Alwyn R. Turning Water into Politics: The Water Issue in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Roy, Sara. The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, 2d edition. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2001. Rubin, Barry. Revolution until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949– 1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Schiff, Benjamin N. Refugees unto the Third Generation: UN Aid to Palestinians. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Schiff, Ze>ev, and Ehud Ya’ari. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising—Israel’s Third Front. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Schumacher, Gottlieb. The Golan: Survey, Description and Mapping. Jerusalem, 1998. Seale, Patrick. Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. New York: Random House, 1992. ———. Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the Mandate, translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Seikaly, May. Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Selim, Mohammad El Sayed, ed. The Organization of the Islamic Conference in a Changing World. Giza, Egypt: Center for Political Research and Studies, Cairo University, 1994. Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

257

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Simon, Reeva S.; Michael M.Laskier; and Sara Reguer, eds. The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Slater, Robert. Warrior Statesman: The Life of Moshe Dayan. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.

Shapland, Greg. Rivers of Discord: International Water Disputes in the Middle East. New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Hurst, 1997. Sharkansky, Ira. The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics: Looking at Israel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. Sharon, Ariel (with David Chanoff). Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, 2d Touchstone edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Sharoni, Simona. Gender and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Smith, Barbara J. The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Smith, Pamela Ann. Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876–1983. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Smith, Peter. The Babi and Baha Di Religions: From Messianic Shi Eism to a World Religion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Sofer, Sasson. Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988.

Shavit, Yaacov. Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948. Totowa, NJ; London: Frank Cass, 1988.

Sprinzak, Ehud. Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Shemess, Moshe. The Palestinian Entity, 1959–1974: Arab Politics and the PLO. 2d ed. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1995.

Sternhell, Ze’ev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Shlaim, Avi. Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.

———. “The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza.” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 1 (autumn 1990). ———. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World since 1948. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Shlonsky, Ur. Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State. New York: Scribner’s, 1993.

Swedenburg, Theodore. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Takkenberg, Lex. The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1998. Tejirian, Eleanor H., and Reeva Simon. Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Sifry, Micah L., and Christopher Cerf, eds. The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Times Books, 1991.

Telhami, Shibley. Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Silberstein, Laurence J., ed. New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

258

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Teveth, Shabtai. Ben-Gurion’s Spy: The Story of the Political Scandal that Shaped Modern Israel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Touval, Saadia. The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1979. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Troen, Selwyn Ilan. Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Troen, Selwyn Ilan, and Moshe Shemesh. The SuezSinai Crisis, 1956: Retrospective and Reappraisal. New York: Columbia University Press; London: Frank Cass, 1990. Victor, Barbara. Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2003. ———. A Voice of Reason: Hanan Ashrawi and Peace in the Middle East. New York; Harcourt Brace, 1994. Wallach, Janet, and John Wallach. Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990. Wasserstein, Bernard. The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929, 2d edition. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1991. Waterbury, John. The Nile Basin: National Determinants of Collective Action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Weaver, Many Anne. A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey through the World of Militant Islam. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998. Wilson, Mary C. King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Wolfe, Michael, ed. One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing About the Muslim Pilgrimage. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Zerubavel, Yael. “The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Zipperstein, Steven J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

259

File not found (FNF)

Dictionary

of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Dictionary of the Israelipalestinian Conflict Culture, History, and Politics VOLUME 2: K-Z

MACMILLAN REFERENCE USA An Imprint of Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation

Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Culture, History, and Politics

Based on Shalom, Salam: Dictionnaire pour une meilleure approche du conflit israélopalestinien, by Claude Faure, ©Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2002. ©2005 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. Thomson and Star Logo are trademarks and Gale is a registered trademark used herein under license. For more information, contact Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems— without the written permission of the publisher. For permission to use material from this product, submit your request via Web at http://www.gale-edit.com/permissions, or you may download our Permissions Request form and submit your request by fax or mail to: Permissions Department Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Permissions Hotline: 248-699-8006 or 800-877-4253, ext. 8006 Fax: 248-699-8074 or 800-762-4058

Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgments constitute an extension of the copyright notice. While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Thomson Gale does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Thomson Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Faure, Claude. [Shalom, salam. English] Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict : culture, history and politics / by Claude Faure. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-02-865977-5 (set hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-02-865978-3 (vol 1)—ISBN 0-02-865979-1 (vol 2)—ISBN 0-02-865996-1 (e-book) 1. Israel—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 2. Jews—Politics and government— Encyclopedias. 3. Israel—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Arab-Israeli conflict— Encyclopedias. 5. Palestinian Arabs—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 6. Palestine—History—Encyclopedias. I. Title. JQ1830.A58F3813 2005 956.9405’03—dc22 2004018641

This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN 0-02-865996-1 Contact your Thomson Gale sales representative for ordering information. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS Introduction

. . . . . . . . . . . . vii

VOLUME 1: A-J

. . . . . . . . . . . 1

Timeline of Modern Arab-Israeli History . . . 227 Timeline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Glossary

. . . . 237

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

VOLUME 2: K-Z . . . . . . . . . . 261 Timeline of Modern Arab-Israeli History . . . 485 Timeline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Glossary

. . . . 495

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 499

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . 507

v

K KAEBA (Kaaba; from the Arabic word for “cube”): Also called Bait Allah al Haram (“Holy House of God,” in Arabic), this is the sacred building in Mecca, square in form, on the corner of which is found the “Black Stone” (al hajr al-aswad), which had pre-Islamic religious significance. Built by Adam, according to tradition, and destroyed in the Deluge, the KaEba was reconstructed by the prophet Abraham, who made of it a site dedicated to the cult of a singular god, replacing the multitudinous idols in the city. Thereby, the Black Stone, which was white at the beginning and was supposed to have been given to him by the archangel Gabriel, became an object of veneration, thought to eliminate all humankind’s impurities. In his turn, Ishmael, the son of Abraham, was thought to have discovered the Zamzam spring, located in the courtyard of Hijr, at the foot of the KaEba, a spring that became a symbol of purity. The tombs of Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, are located in this courtyard. In 630, after having conquered Mecca, Muhammad had all the idols and their temples destroyed, except for the KaEba and the Black Stone. Mecca became the goal of a ritual pilgrimage and the pole of orientation of Muslim prayer, wherever it is practiced in the world. On the northwest side of the building is found the “gutter” (mizab), coated with gold, called the “gutter of pity” (mizab al-rahma). The KaEba is covered by a precious drapery, al-Kiswa al-Sharifa, black in color, made long ago in Egypt

and offered by the caliph. In the twenty-first century, the upkeep of the KaEba is the responsibility of the personnel of the Waqf. SEE ALSO Abraham; Adam; Ishmael; Muhammad; Waqf.

KABARITI, ABDUL KARIM (1949–): Jordanian political figure, born in 1949, at Amman, descended from an important Aqaba family. After studying geology at the American University of Beirut, Abdul Karim Kabariti obtained a degree in financial management and a master’s degree in business administration in the United States. He started on a career in business, particularly in the United States, before being elected a deputy from Ma’an (Jordan), in 1989; in December, he was named minister of tourism and antiquities in the government of Mudar Badran. In June 1990, he joined the National Bloc as an independent deputy, then was renamed to his previous posts, one year later, in the cabinet of Mai Masri. Between November 1991 and May 1993 he was minister of labor in the government of Zayd Bin Shakir. The following November, he was reelected deputy. In January 1995 he became foreign minister in the cabinet of Bin Shakir. The policies advocated by his ministry allowed Jordan to effect a rapprochement with the United States, and to renew its ties with the Gulf states, interrupted since the war of 1991. On 4 February 1996, anticipating this appoint-

261

KABBALAH

ment for more than a year, he was named prime minister, replacing Bin Shakir. The new head of government was also foreign minister and defense minister. On 20 March 1997, his manner of governing and his differences with Crown Prince Hassan led to his being dismissed by King Hussein. Returning to business, Kabariti became president of the administrative council of the Jordan Kuwait Bank, and the following November was named vice president of the Jordanian senate. In March 1999 Kabariti was named head of the Royal Court by the new king of Jordan, Abdullah II, having acceded to the throne after the decease of his father, King Hussein, who had stripped Prince Hassan of the title of crown prince. In January 2000 Kabariti resigned his duties in the Royal Court, to be replaced by the former prime minister, Fayiz al-Tarawneh, and returned to his position of chairman of the Jordan Kuwait Bank. SEE ALSO Bin Shakir, Zayd.

KABBALAH (Kabballah): Word from the Hebrew, kabbalah, which signifies “reception, transmission”; used in the Talmud in the sense of “tradition.” Also designates the body of Jewish mystical and esoteric commentaries on biblical writings and their oral tradition. With roots in the period of the Second Temple (first century C.E.), Kabbalah, from the thirteenth century on, developed into a distinct doctrine. The basic idea of this mystical teaching, composed in Aramaic, was to attain to knowledge of the infinite based on an analysis of the finite through all of its elements. Born from this principle was Gematria, a branch of numerology that allows an interpretation of the meaning hidden in each word and letter of the Torah. Cabalistic mysticism, based on ecstasy and meditation, exerted a great influence in the Jewish world and also on Christianity during the Renaissance. The significance of the messianic idea in Cabala was emphasized by Isaac Luria (1534–1572), called Ari the Lion. The great schools of Kabbalah were in Provence, France, in the twelfth century; Gerona, Spain, in the thirteenth century; and Safed, Palestine, in the sixteenth century. SEE ALSO Christianity; Hebrew; Talmud; Torah. KACH PARTY (“As it is,” “thus!,” in Hebrew): Israeli ultranationalist movement. At the beginning of 1968 in New York, Rabbi Meir Kahane announced the coming of the messianic era and the constitution of the theocratic state of Judea during the exultation rising out of the Israeli conquest of the West Bank (the Arab-Israel War of 1967). In 1971, after having emigrated to Israel, he created the ultranationalist

262

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Kach Movement, preaching the creation of a Greater Israel, from which the Arabs would be excluded. This movement attracted a few hundred members, mostly of U.S. origin, and had a militia, Ronen (also known as the “Committee of Road Security”), which was under the direction of Baruch Marzel and Tiran Polack. In July 1984, Kach won two seats at the Knesset, and, in the following September, Rabbi Kahane proposed a draft bill for discrimination between Jews and non-Jews. On 18 October 1988, confronted with their indelibly racist attitudes, the Knesset passed a basic law outlawing any party whose platform contained racist provisions. As a result, Kach was banned from participating in the 1988 elections. Having returned to the United States, Rabbi Kahane was assassinated in New York on 5 November 1990, which brought on a split in the movement. Some members, under the impetus of Baruch Marzel, decided to keep the name of Kach, while others followed the rabbi’s son, Binyamin ZeDev Kahane, who left the party to found Kahane Hai. On 25 February 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a member of Kach, killed twenty-nine Arabs praying in the Mosque of the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron. On the following 13 March, the Israeli Supreme Court declared Kach and Kahane Hai illegal, and several of their members were placed in preventive detention. So as to keep up the activities of Kach, its supporters decided to create a new clandestine movement, Koach. Accused of inciting to rebellion, Baruch Marzel was interrogated by the police, and then sentenced to house arrest. On 15 May 1995, the Israeli minister of the interior dismissed Baruch Marzel from his duties on the municipal council of Kiryat Arba. On 3 October, approximately twenty Kach members, among them Avigdor Askin, gathered in front of the house of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, praying that he die and accusing him of treason for the accords passed with the Palestinians. The prayer was chanted in Aramaic, under the leadership of Rabbi Yosef Dayan. On the following 4 November, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist belonging to a splinter group close to Kach. In July 1997, after he had been sentenced to four months of prison for having organized the ceremony of malediction against Rabin, Askin announced the creation of a new extremist movement, the “Camp of Israel.” According to his declarations, this movement “aimed at exploding the myth of peace and substituting a military alternative for it. The people of Israel needed to choose between war or the destruction of Israel.” In July 2000, while IsraeliPalestinian negotiations were taking place at Camp T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

KAHANE HAI

David, members of the movement made death threats against Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. During the following month of October, confronted by the threat of expulsion hanging over the settlers following the Israeli-Palestinian accords, Kach and Kahane Hai decided to join forces. With Kach officially outlawed (though assembly was still tolerated), Marzel ran unsuccessfully for the Knesset in the 2003 general elections on the Herut Party list. In early September 2004, Marzel and other Kach members announced the creation of a new political party—Hil, an acronym for Jewish National Front—dedicated to preventing the removal of Jewish settlements and transferring 2 million Arabs “over the Jordan River.” SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Herut Party; Judea and Samaria; Kahane Hai; Kiryat Arba; Koach.

KADESH OPERATION: Operation launched by Israel against Egypt on 29 October 1956. SEE ALSO Suez Crisis.

KAFR: Arabic word (sometimes spelled kufr) meaning “village.” The equivalent word in Hebrew is kfar. SEE ALSO Kfar.

KAHAL (pl. Kehalim): Hebrew word meaning “a Jewish congregation.”

KAHALANI, AVIGDOR (1944– ): Israeli politician; minister of public security (June 1996–July 1999). Born in Mandatory Palestine in 1944, Kahalani was a career officer in the Israel Defense Forces, serving in the Arab-Israel War of 1973 and achieving the rank of brigadier general. He was elected to the Knesset in 1992 as a member of the Labor Party, serving on various committees, including Foreign Affairs and Defense, and Education and Culture. One of the founders of the Third Way Party, he led the party in the 1996 Knesset elections. In June 1996 Kahalani was appointed minister of public security, a post he held until July 1999. In 2001 he was acquitted of charges alleging that during his term as minister he had passed information to publisher Ofer Nimrodi regarding a police investigation against him. KAHANE HAI (“Kahane lives,” in Hebrew): Israeli extremist splinter group, formed in 1991, after a split in the Kach Party, following the assassination of its leader, Meir Kahane. The latter’s son, Binyamin Ze’ev Kahane, left Kach to found Kahane Hai, which advocated the instauration of a religious state based D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

BORN IN VIOLENCE. DEMONSTRATORS SUPPORT EL SAYYID NOSSAIR MEIR KAHANE, FOUNDER OF THE ISRAELI EXTREMIST GROUP KACH, IN 1991. KAHANE’S SON, BINYAMIN ZE’EV KAHANE (WHO WAS KILLED IN 2000), THEN FOUNDED KAHANE HAI, A SPLINTER GROUP THAT ADVOCATES A RELIGIOUS STATE OF ISRAEL AND VIOLENCE AGAINST OPPONENTS.

AFTER HE WAS ACQUITTED OF KILLING

(AP/Wide World Photos)

on observance of the Torah. In March 1994, following the slaughter of Muslim worshipers in Hebron by Kach supporter Dr. Baruch Goldstein, this movement was banned by Israeli authorities. Members were arrested by the police, accused of being responsible for the death of a number of Arabs. Subsequent to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on 4 November 1995, members demonstrated publicly in approbation of this act. In October 2000, when the Israeli government was at the point of signing new accords with the Palestinians, Kahane Hai and Kach decided to merge in order to oppose them. On the following 31 December, Ze’ev Kahane and his wife were killed in a Palestinian attack on the Jewish settlement of Ofra. SEE ALSO

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

Kach Party; Torah.

C O N F L I C T

263

KALAM

KALAM: Arabic word meaning “speech” or “dis-

KARAME, RASHID (1921–1987): Lebanese political

course.” In Muslim usage, kalam Allah means “the revealed word of God.” EIlm al-kalam means “the science of theology.”

figure, ten times prime minister, born in 1921 at Miriata in North Lebanon, into a distinguished Sunni Muslim family, died in June 1987. Between 1948 and 1951, having obtained a degree in law from the University of Cairo, Rashid Karame practiced law. Elected deputy in 1951, several times a minister between 1953 and 1955, he became on 19 September 1955 the youngest-ever prime minister of Lebanon. Opposed to certain policies of President Camille Chamoun, he resigned on 19 March of the following year. In October 1958, converted to the reformism of the new president, FuDad Shehab, he formed a new government, which he led until 1964, except between May 1960 and October 1961. Head of the Shehabist parliamentary bloc, he supported the election of Charles Helu to the presidency of the republic in 1964. Once again prime minister between 1965 and 1969, he was confronted by the first violent incidents between the Palestinian resistance and the Lebanese state. His resignation led to a stalemate that lasted six months and was only resolved by the accord between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese authorities, signed in Cairo on 3 November 1969.

KARAITE (“Son of the Bible,” in Hebrew): A Jew who rejected the oral tradition and rabbinical law, recognizing only a literal interpretation of the texts of the Bible. This religious sect, founded in eighth-century Iraq by Anan Ben David and Yacub Abu Yussef alKirkichani, who contested the oral law codified in the Mishna and the Talmud, existed in perfect harmony with the Muslims. In the early twenty-first century, there are about 30,000 Karaites, approximately 9,000 of which are in Israel, mainly settled at Ramla, Beersheba, and Ashod. The Jewish status of Karaites is ambiguous. In Israel, Karaites have the option of holding identity cards that label them either as “Karaite” or “Karaite-Jew.” SEE ALSO Mishna; Talmud. KARAME, OMAR (1935–): Lebanese political figure, Sunni, born in 1935. Trained in law, Omar Karame became secretary general of the Arab Liberation Party (ALP) in 1970. On 1 June 1987, Lebanon’s prime minister, his brother Rashid, was assassinated. A few days later Omar replaced him at the head of the council of Tripoli, then became president of the coordinating committee for North Lebanon. During the month of July he tried vainly to restart the Arab Liberation Party, with the help of the Syrians. In June 1988, he failed to form a parliamentary bloc with the deputies of North Lebanon in support of the candidacy of Sulayman Franjiyya to the presidency of the republic. On 25 November 1989, he became minister of education in the government of Salim al-Hoss. On 24 December 1990, he was named prime minister by the president of the republic, Ilyas al-Hirawi. In May 1991, he was appointed deputy from Tripoli. In March 1992, he was confirmed at his post of prime minister. On the following 6 May, when a general strike protesting the cost of living turned into a riot, he resigned. He was elected as a deputy in the 1992 election, the first since before the civil war (1975– 1990), and reelected in 1996 and 2000. In September 2003 he joined a new political grouping, the National Front, a multisectarian alliance of six prominent politicians promoting reform (in 2004, other members included al-Hoss, former house speaker Hussein Hissein, former minister Albert Mansour, Butros Harb, and Nayla Moawad). SEE ALSO Hoss, Salim al-; Karame, Rashid.

264

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

The failure of the Shehabists in the elections of 1970 relegated him to the corridors of political power. On 28 May 1975, when the civil war had just broken out in Lebanon, the Palestinians and their allies forced him on President Sulayman Franjiyya as prime minister. Very quickly, he found himself at odds with the Christian camp, which demanded the intervention of the army in the conflict with the Palestinians. In March 1976, Franjiyya stripped him of all portfolios in favor of Chamoun, but Karame did not present his resignation to the new president, Ilyas Sarkis, until September. Not siding unequivocally either with the Syrians or the Palestinians, he found himself progressively losing influence. In July 1983, a year after the invasion of Lebanon by Israel, he joined a pro-Syrian coalition, which allowed him to return to power and become, the following year, prime minister in a government of national reconciliation. In 1986 he failed to persuade President Amin Jumayyil to endorse a truce agreement signed by the leaders, or warlords, of the three largest sectarian militias. Confronted by hostilities between these militias, the “war of the camps” between the Amal and the Palestinians, plus a significant financial crisis, he offered his resignation on 4 May 1987, but it was not accepted. On 1 June Karame was assassinated in an attack that brought down the helicopter returning him to Beirut from Tripoli. His brother, Omar T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

KEREN KAYEMET LE-YISRAEL

Karame, succeeded him politically and became prime minister in December 1990. SEE ALSO Jumayyil, Amin; Karame, Omar. KARMEL, AL-: A Palestinian literary journal founded in Beirut in 1981 by the poet Mahmud Darwish. It was relocated to Cyprus in 1982 and to Ramallah in 1996. Al-Karmel has an international scope, publishing such writers as Russell Banks, J. M. Coetzee and José Saramago, in addition to Arab and Palestinian writers. Unique among Arab publications, it also regularly publishes the work of Israeli authors. It is run by the al-Karmel Cultural Foundation from offices in the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. In 2004, the editor is Hassan Khader, although Darwish remains editor-in-chief. In April 2002, the Israeli army entered the Sakakini Center, including the offices of al-Karmel, and destroyed files, papers, and equipment as they vandalized the building, while officially seeking those responsible for recent suicide bombings. SEE ALSO Darwish, Mahmud.

latter. During the following month of October, his name was mentioned for the portfolio of Arab affairs. In May 1999, he was reelected Likud member of the Knesset. On 1 August 2000, he became eighth president of the State of Israel, having carried the second ballot of the vote by 63 votes against 57 for his rival, Shimon Peres. Two days later, on Israeli radio, he announced his conviction that the city of Jerusalem should remain under Israeli sovereignty. On the following 22 August, when King Abdullah of Jordan was visiting, he refused to attend the ceremony that took place in Tel Aviv because, in his opinion, it should have been held in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Knesset; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon.

laws, as defined by the Jewish religious law.

KATZ, YISRAEL (1955– ), Likud Party member of Knesset. Born in Ashkelon in 1955, Yisrael Katz received a bachelor of arts degree from Hebrew University. First elected to the Knesset in 1998, he served on several committees, including Finance, Constitution, Law and Justice, and Foreign Affairs and Defense. In February 2003 he was appointed minister of agriculture and rural development.

KASSAM

KEDEM (Rainbow of Eastern Democratic Union, in

KASHRUT (“purity,” in Hebrew): Body of dietary

SEE

Hebrew): Israeli political party, created on 27 May 1997, by Maxim Levy, advocating secularism in the Sephardi milieu and the revaluation of eastern culture. This bloc attempts to counter the influence of the SHAS religious party in this community. SEE ALSO SHAS.

Qassam.

KATADIB SEE

Lebanon.

KATSAV, MOSHE (1945–): Israeli political figure, born in 1945 in Iran, Moshe Katsav arrived in Israel in 1951, when his family settled in the refugee camp of Qiryat Malachi. While he was a student he became a militant in the Gahal. With degrees in agriculture, economics, and history, he became mayor of the city of Qiryat Malachi in 1969. In 1977, he was elected deputy of Likud. Three years later, he was named deputy minister of housing and construction in the government of Menachem Begin, then minister of labor and social affairs in the Begin-Peres National Unity cabinet. Between 1988 and 1992 he was minister of transportation. In 1992, after the electoral victory of the Labor Party, he became leader of the Likud parliamentary bloc in the Knesset. The following year, after having failed in an attempt to become speaker of the Knesset, he was awarded the number two position in the party, after Benjamin Netanyahu. On 18 June 1996, he was named deputy prime minister and minister of tourism in the government of the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

KEREN HAYESOD (also Keren ha-Yesod): Fundraising division of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Jewish foundation fund for amelioration and assistance, created in 1920 as the major fundraising division and financial institution of the WZO. Prior to 1948, Keren Hayesod was involved in financing immigration, housing, and rural settlement. During the Arab-Israel War in 1948, the agency purchased arms for the Jewish military. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Keren Hayesod focused on economic development in partnership with the private sector. In the United States, the agency functions as part of the United Jewish Appeal, raising funds for immigration and social services in Israel. KEREN KAYEMET LE-YISRAEL (KKL; Jewish National Fund; Fund for Land Acquisition): Jewish organization founded in 1901, for the purpose of purchasing

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

265

KFAR

land in Palestine for new immigrants wanting to settle there. The political and economic role it played in the construction of the State of Israel was primordial. As the owner of much of the land in Israel, the KKL signed, on 1 August 1960, an accord with the government that stipulated that the land is an inalienable national property, not susceptible to ownership, but only held in trust for a period of forty-nine years, as in the biblical Jubilee.

KFAR: Hebrew word often used in Israeli toponymy, meaning “village”; for example, Kfar-Chabad (pop. 4,000). Often the term is applied to places with large populations; for example, Kfar-Saba (pop. 78,000).

KHADR, HUSAM (1961–): Palestinian political figure born in 1961 in Kufr Ruman, near Hebron in the West Bank, to which his family had fled from Jaffa in 1948. After spending his childhood in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, Husam Khadr joined alFatah in 1978. He was arrested by the Israelis twentythree times and spent a year and a half in an Israeli prison, as well as a year under house arrest. In the first Intifada, he organized several youth groups that participated in the uprising. After being wounded in a demonstration, he was deported to Lebanon in January 1988. In 1990 he was elected to the executive committee of the Palestine Students General Association, and became a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and was on its political committee. In 1994, under the terms of the Oslo Accords, he returned to the Palestinian territories. In February 1996 he was elected as a deputy from Nablus to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and was a member of its political and human rights committees. He also worked in the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s Ministry for Youth and Sports, and was the founder and chairman of the Palestinian Refugees’ Rights Defense Committee, which undertook a campaign for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. In the autumn of 2001, when the al-Aqsa Intifada was intensifying, he denounced the PLO/PA leadership for clinging to their belief in the Oslo process and its various offshoots such as the Mitchell Plan, and called the Intifada a “blessing” for countering Palestinian despair and humiliation. He has been Yasir Arafat’s severest critic, denouncing him as corrupt and undemocratic, and calling his cabinet “a bunch of thieves.” Khadr was represented widely in the media as a member of a new generation of Palestinian leaders likely to take over from Arafat and his

266

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

group. When Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities in 2002, Khadr went into hiding. In March 2003, occupation troops attacked his home in the Balata camp and arrested him, confiscating his computer and files and destroying the contents of his home. He has been imprisoned under extremely harsh conditions ever since, while being “investigated” for “jeopardizing the region’s safety” and “engaging in militant activities against Israeli targets.” SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Hebron; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; West Bank.

KHALAF, SALAH (Abu Iyad; 1933–1991): Palestinian, born 31 August 1933 in Jaffa. In 1948 Khalaf and his family took refuge in Gaza, where he joined a paramilitary youth group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1952, when a student at the University of Cairo, he made the acquaintance of Yasir Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) at the General Union of Palestinian Students, becoming Arafat’s deputy and eventually president of the organization. After earning degrees in philosophy and psychology, as well as a teacher’s diploma, he decided to devote himself to the Palestinian cause. He returned to Gaza in 1957 to teach, and in 1959 to Kuwait. In October of that year, he participated with Arafat, Wazir, Faruk Qaddumi, and Khalid al-Hasan in the creation of al-Fatah, within which he was responsible for the “mobilization of the masses.” From 1960 to 1970 he traveled widely to various Arab countries in the Middle East, as well as to Germany, to sensitize young Palestinians and to win support from the leaders of these countries. At the end of 1967, he was named head of internal security, intelligence, and counterintelligence in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was often charged with advocating al-Fatah’s positions to the more radical members of the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP); he was also to some extent their advocate within al-Fatah, protecting them against the hostility of the more conservative members of the leadership. Although Khalaf advocated peace with Jordanian authorities, they held him largely responsible for the events of Black September 1970, and that month arrested him and sentenced him to death. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser intervened personally to have him released. He is believed to have created in July 1971 in Lebanon, with Ali Hassan al-Salama, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

KHALIDI, HUSAYN FAKHRI AL-

an operational group called Black September, whose object it was to avenge the death of the Palestinian freedom fighters (fida Diyyun) killed in Jordan the previous year. In November 1973, he was one of the first Palestinian leaders to advocate the two-state solution, with the establishment of a democratic, secular Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. In October 1974, he was arrested by Moroccan authorities as he prepared an assassination attempt against King Hussein of Jordan, expected shortly in Rabat for an Arab League summit. In July 1981, he was named head of the security departments of al-Fatah and the PLO. In carrying out these functions he was assisted by Khalil al-Wazir, Hayel Abdul Hamid, and Amin al-Hindi (Abu Zuhayr). In this capacity he met often with many leaders of Arab and Western special services; he is said to have supplied them with information about attacks planned by other Palestinian organizations, particularly that of Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna), the Fatah Revolutionary Council. In 1982, when the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, for the sake of unity in the Palestinian movement, and wanting to remain loyal to Yasir Arafat, he refused to make common cause with al-Fatah and PLO dissidents. Just prior to then he had been to Moscow, asking the mediation of the USSR in resolving the differences between Syria and the PLO. In 1988, when the first Intifada was intensifying in the occupied territories, Khalaf participated in coordinating activities in the West Bank. During the crisis leading to the Gulf War of 1991, Khalaf dissented from the PLO position of support for Iraq, and criticized Saddam Hussein. In the night of 14–15 January 1991, Khalaf and Hayel Abdul Hamid were assassinated in Tunis by a bodyguard who was an agent of the Abu Nidal group, possibly at the behest of Hussein. The death of Khalaf, who was very popular in the Palestinian community, was a heavy blow to the Palestinian central command, and especially to its leader, Arafat. A man of action, and also admired for his intellect, entrusted frequently with the most delicate missions, Khalaf was considered to be Arafat’s second in command. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Black September 1970; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Fatah, al-; Fatah Revolutionary Council; Hindi, Amin al-; Hussein, Saddam; League of Arab States; Palestine Liberation Organization; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Wazir, Khalil al-; West Bank.

KHALED, LAYLA (1944–): Palestinian activist, born in January 1944 at Haifa. Layla Khaled fled Palestine for D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Lebanon with her family during the Arab-Israel War of 1948. In 1962 she entered the American University of Beirut, where she joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). In 1963 she went to Kuwait to teach, and after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 War she joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash. After paramilitary training in Jordan, she led a commando in hijacking a TWA plane from Rome to Tel Aviv, via Athens, on 30 August 1969. During this flight she made the pilot fly over Haifa, so she could see the hometown she was not allowed to visit. The commandos forced the plane to land at Damascus, allowed the passengers to leave, then blew up the airplane. In exchange for the life of the hostages, thirteen Palestinian prisoners were released. Overnight Khaled become a heroine of the Palestinian resistance; her face was so recognizable that she had plastic surgery to disguise it. On 6 September 1970, she participated in a second hijacking, this time of an El Al plane flying between Amsterdam and London. This hijacking was foiled by Israeli guards, who shot her accomplice, and she was arrested when the plane landed in the British capital. Imprisoned for three weeks, she was released as part of a prisoner-hostage exchange deal with another PFLP group that had hijacked three airliners to a remote airstrip in Jordan. Between 1971 and 1978 she participated in various activities in the PFLP. In July 1980 she was part of the Palestinian delegation that went to Copenhagen to attend the United Nations world conference on women. In April 1981, she was elected to the Palestine National Council (PNC), representing the General Union of Palestinian Women. Opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, she has lived in Jordan since 1992. Khaled is a member of the central committee of the PFLP and has devoted much of her time to the cause of Palestinian women and of the refugees. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab Nationalist Movement; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Oslo Accords; Palestine National Council.

KHALIDI, HUSAYN FAKHRI AL-: Palestinian political figure (1894–1962) from a Jerusalem notable family with a tradition of scholarship and public service. Educated as a medical doctor at Beirut and Istanbul, he served in the Ottoman army during World War I but left it to join the Arab Revolt. He served in the department of health of the Syrian government of Emir Faysal ibn Husayn al-Hashem until Faysal was expelled by the French. He held a similar post in the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

267

KHALIL, AL-

mandatory government of Palestine from 1921 to 1934. From 1934 to 1937 he was mayor of Jerusalem, the last mayor to be elected in the undivided city. In 1935 Khalidi founded a political party, the Reform Party (Hizb al-Islah). In 1936 he was a member of the Arab Higher Committee, formed to coordinate the activities of that spring’s general strike (that evolved into the Palestine Arab Revolt [1936–1939]). In 1937 Khalidi was deported to the Seychelles Islands by the British for his political activities, although he was allowed to take part in the London Conference of 1939. In 1946 he joined the reconstituted Arab Higher Committee. After the Arab-Israel War (1948), the West Bank was annexed by Jordan, and Khalidi served in the Jordanian government. He was foreign minister in 1953 and 1955, and very briefly prime minister in 1957. Afterward he retired to Jericho where he wrote commentary for a Jerusalem newspaper and also wrote two books, The Arab Exodus (al-Khuruj al-Arabi) and an unpublished autobiography. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; Arab-Israel War (1948); West Bank.

KHALIL, AL-: Arabic name for the city of Hebron, meaning “the Friend.” This is a reference to the Biblical patriarch Abraham, whose tomb is believed to be located in the city. Abraham is known in sacred Muslim literature as “the Friend of God” or “the Friend of the Merciful” (Ibrahim al-Khalil alRahman). SEE ALSO Hebron. KHATIB, GHASSAN (1954–): Palestinian politician, born 1954 in Nablus. Educated at Bir Zeit University and Manchester and Durham Universities in Britain. Khatib was active in the Palestinian National Front (PNF), a militant organization created by the Jordanian Communist Party in the West Bank, and as a result was jailed by the Israeli authorities from 1974 to 1977. He has worked as a lecturer at Bir Zeit University and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991, as well as a participant in the direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of 1991–1993. He has served on the boards of the Arab Development Center (an agricultural organization), the Democracy and Worker’s Rights Center, and the Friends Schools in Palestine, and is on the editorial board of the Israel-Palestine Journal, which publishes Palestinian and Israeli perspectives on political issues. He is a cofounder and codirector of Bitter Lemons, a Palestinian-Israeli Internet-based political magazine. Khatib is director of the Jerusa-

268

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

lem Media and Communications Center, which conducts opinion polls and provides support to journalists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He is also director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. An active member of the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), he was appointed Minister of Labor in the PNA in 2002. He has published many articles of political commentary and analysis. SEE ALSO Bir Zeit University; Gaza Strip; Madrid Conference; Palestinian National Front; Palestinian People’s Party; West Bank.

KHUTBA: Arabic word designating the sermon pronounced by the imam, who conducts the Muslim Friday prayer service.

KIBBUTZ (pl. kibbutzim; Hebrew for “gathering”): Jewish collective farm, from which all notions of salary and property are excluded. Originally, the land was rented by the Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael and necessary capital was advanced by the Keren Ha-Yessod. The first kibbutz in Palestine was established in 1910 at Deganya, near Tiberias. In a few years there were twenty-five of them, making the kibbutz the principal element in the Jewish population of Palestine before 1948. Attracting people who were totally imbued with Zionist-Socialist ideals, it played a notable role in the creation of the State of Israel. Traditionally, each kibbutz has been socially and economically autonomous. Yet, kibbutzim commonly belong to movements with political affiliations that provide them with services. Kibbutz members and kibbutzim served as solid role models for Israeli youth. Many kibbutz members became political leaders. Over the years, the kibbutz has diminished in significance, due in part to a growing desire of parents to be the primary socializers of their children, with increased educational aspirations for them, as well as the increased industrialization of the larger Israeli society. SEE ALSO Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael. KIMCHE, DAVID (1928– ): Israeli intelligence officer and diplomat. Born in London in 1928, David Kimche immigrated to Israel in 1948. He received a doctorate from Hebrew University and later worked as a journalist for the Jerusalem Post. In 1953 Kimche joined the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, working in Paris under cover as a journalist. He rose in Mossad’s ranks, becoming deputy director under Yitzhak Hofi. Kimche left the Mossad in 1980 after a disagreement over policy concerning Lebanon. Under Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

KIRYAT SHMONA

KIBBUTZ YAVNE. VOLUNTEERS FROM OVERSEAS HELP WITH THE APPLE HARVEST IN 1970. ISRAEL EXPORTS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF CITRUS FRUITS, EGGS, AND PROCESSED FOODS, WITH A SIZABLE PORTION OF THE COUNTRY’S CROPS PRODUCED BY COLLECTIVE FARMS LIKE THIS ONE.

(© Ted Spiegel/Corbis)

Kimche was appointed director-general of the Foreign Ministry. He served as chief Israeli delegate at Khalde, Lebanon, in December 1982, at the talks with Lebanon and the United States after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. After his retirement in 1987, Kimche lectured and authored several books, including The Last Option (1991).

KINGS OF JORDAN Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Hashim, al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Talal of ibn Abdullah.

SEE

KIRYAT ARBA (Qiryat Arba; “City of the Four,” in Hebrew): Name of the sepulcher that contains the remains of the great patriarchs of Israel (Tomb of the Patriarchs). Biblical tradition identifies this place with the city of the Hebron. This name is also that of a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Hebron known for its militant leadership and commitment D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

to the extension of Jewish sovereignty over disputed territories. Under the 1997 Hebron Agreement, Kiryat Arba retained a link to the site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, while the rest of the city of Hebron was transferred to the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo Accords. SEE ALSO

Hebron.

KIRYAT SHMONA: A city in northern Israel, Kiryat Shmona was founded in 1949 on the site of the Arab village of Helsa. Its names means “town of the eight,” commemorating Zionist Joseph Trumpeldor, who was killed with seven others in a battle against Arab Palestinians at Tel Hai in 1920. The city had a population of approximately 21,000 in 2003. In April 1974, Kiryat Shmona was the site of a suicide raid by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, who entered an apartment building, killing all eighteen Israeli civilians who were in the building. Prior to the Arab-Israel

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

269

KNESSET

War of 1982, Kiryat Shmona’s location, less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the border with Lebanon, made it the frequent target of rockets fired from southern Lebanon by Palestinian militants. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1982).

KNESSET: Hebrew word meaning “assembly.” A unicameral parliament, the Knesset is the legislative assembly of the State of Israel. Its name recalls the great legislative assembly of the epoch of the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 C.E. Created in January 1949, the Knesset met for the first time in Tel Aviv, then it was moved to Jerusalem. At the beginning it was supposed to be a constitutional assembly, but the religious parties opposed this, arguing that the Jewish people could have only one supreme law, that of the Torah. The powers of the Knesset were then established by the Basic Law of 1958, amended in 1986, and completed in 1992. Renewed every four years, the Knesset consists of 120 deputies, members chosen wholly on the basis of proportional representation, through a ballot list of candidates, which allows any minority to have at least one representative. To be represented, a party needs only 1.5 percent of the votes cast. The Basic Law, amended in 1992, established a new electoral system, effective for the elections of 29 May 1996. For the first time, Israelis chose, by separate ballots, both the future government leader (prime minister) and the MKs (Knesset members) who would represent them in the Knesset. In June 1996, when the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, having narrowly defeated the Labor Party’s Shimon Peres, the composition of the Knesset was as follows: Labor Party: 34 seats; Likud-Tsomet-Gesher Bloc: 32 (Likud: 22, Gesher: 5, and Tsomet: 5); SHAS: 10; Meretz: 9; NRP: 9; Israel be Aliyah: 7; Hadash: 5; United Torah Judaism: 4; United Arab List: 4; Third Way: 4; Moledet: 2. The new electoral reform had produced an anomalous situation in which the left, which had won 53 seats, found itself in the opposition, while the right, which had only 43, but whose candidate for prime minister had been elected, was in power. In the 1999 elections, Netanyahu was soundly defeated by Labor’s Ehud Barak (as head of the One Israel coalition), with Barak receiving 56 percent of the vote to Netanyahu’s 44 percent. In the Knesset, 26 seats went to One Israel and 19 to Likud. Following Barak’s defeat by Ariel Sharon in the prime ministerial election of 2001, Likud regained its prominence. In the 2003 Knesset elections (which abandoned the separate ballot for prime minister instituted in 1996), Likud received 29 percent of the vote (37 seats); the

270

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Labor-Meimad coalition received 14.5 percent (19 seats). The remaining seats were distributed as follows: Shinui: 15; SHAS: 11; National Unity: 7; Meretz: 6; National Religious Party: 6; Torah and Shabbat Judaism: 5; Hadash: 3; Am Ehad: 3; National Democratic Assembly: 3; Israel be Aliyah: 2; United Arab List: 2. SEE ALSO Netanyahu, Benjamin; Torah.

KOACH (“force, strength,” in Hebrew): Israeli ultranationalist clandestine movement, created in March 1994, to replace the Kach Party banned by Israeli authorities. SEE ALSO Kach Party.

KOLLEK, TEDDY (1911– ): Israeli politician; mayor of Jerusalem (1965–1993). Born in Hungary, Teddy Kollek moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1934. He was recruited in 1942 by the Jewish Agency to serve as an intelligence officer in Istanbul. After returning from Istanbul, he continued to work for the intelligence branch of the Jewish Agency, procuring arms, primarily in the United States, for the Zionist movement. Following the creation of the State of Israel, he returned to the United States to work in the Israeli embassy, then in 1949 was made head of the United States desk of the Foreign Ministry. From 1952 to 1964 Kollek was director general of the prime minister’s office. Kollek first ran for mayor of Jerusalem as representative of the new Rafi Party in 1965. As mayor, following the Arab-Israel War of 1967, he worked toward the unification of Jerusalem, including overtures to the Palestinian population. In 1988 he received the Israel Prize. During his later years in office, Kollek was criticized for devoting more attention to the development of Jewish Jerusalem than to Palestinian Jerusalem. He was defeated in 1993 by Likud candidate Ehud Olmert. KOL YISRAEL (“Voice of Israel,” in Hebrew): Name of Israeli state radio, established in 1948. Kol Yisrael was government controlled until 1965, when it was replaced by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, a public, nongovernmental body broadcasting in Hebrew and Arabic.

KOSHER (“suitable, apt,” in Hebrew): Term describing food that is authorized by Jewish religious law. In general, only the meat of herbivorous animals slaughtered by cutting their throats and drained of their blood is considered suitable for consumption. Scaly fish and ruminants with cleft hoofs are also T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

KUFR

permitted, although pork, an omnivorous animal, is thought of as a carnivore and, therefore, forbidden. It is forbidden to mix meat and milk or meat and milk products. Equivalent to the Muslim halal. SEE ALSO Halal.

KOTEL SEE

Western Wall Disturbances.

KRAV MAGA (Hebrew for “contact combat”): Kind

KUFIYYA: A cotton white-and-red or white-andblack headscarf traditionally worn by Arabian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Syrian, and Palestinian peasants and Bedouins. In the 1930s the kufiyya became a symbol of Palestinian national sentiment. Peasants largely led the 1936–1939 revolt, and men in cities were discouraged from wearing the Turkish fez and the Western fedora. It became a nationalist act to wear a kufiyya. It has since become the symbol of the Palestinian cause. Yasir Arafat has made it an internationally recognized icon, wearing it on all occasions.

of martial art taught in the Israeli army.

KUFR

KREI, AHMED SEE

Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

Kafr.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

271

L LABIB, ABDULLAH ABD AL-HAMID SEE

Hawari Group.

LABOR PARTY SEE

Israel Labor Party.

LADEN, OSAMA IBN SEE

Bin Ladin, Osama.

LADINO (also called Spanyol or Judezmo): JudeoSpanish dialect, used by the Sephardim—Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghrib (North Africa) after their 1492 expulsion from Spain. The language makes use of significant Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, while its written form uses Hebrew characters. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ladino was the primary language of learning among Jews in the Ottoman Empire. In modern times, Ladino has largely been forgotten due to language policies of the post–World War I Republic of Turkey, the significant destruction of Balkan Jewry during World War II, and the migration of most of North African and Levantine Jews to Israel, Spain, South America, and France. SEE ALSO Ottomans.

LAG B’OMER: Name of a Jewish holiday that is celebrated each May at Meron, near Safed in Galilee,

where the tomb of the great Kabbalist, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, is located. “Lag” is not actually a word, but it stands for the number 33 in Hebrew. Lag B’Omer takes place on the thirty-third day within a seven-week countdown from the second night of Passover to the day before Shavuot. Every night during this period, Jews recite a blessing and state the count of the omer (a unit of measure used in the early days of the temple) in both weeks and days. The countdown itself is a reminder of the connection between Passover, which commemorates the exodus from Egypt, and Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah, and that redemption from slavery was not complete until Jews received the Torah. During this time of partial mourning, weddings and parties with dancing are forbidden, as are haircuts. The thirty-third day of the Omer—called the eighteenth of Omer—is celebrated as Lag B’Omer, a holiday to celebrate a break among the deaths of the Torah scholar Rabbi Akiva’s 24,000 students by plague. All mourning practices are lifted on this day. In Israel and throughout the diaspora, family and communal picnics, ballgames, and mock bow-andarrow fights mark the holiday. Also common is the lighting of bonfires, around which signing and dancing take place. Tens of thousands of Jews gather at Meron, the burial place of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son, Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon. Many parents hold off on cutting their sons’ hair until the age of

273

LAHAD, ANTOINE

three, and then they do so on Lag B’Omer at the burial place in Meron. SEE ALSO Diaspora; Iyar.

LAHAD, ANTOINE: Lebanese general, Christian Maronite, born in 1927 at Kfar al’Katra, in the Shuf. Antoine Lahad joined the Lebanese army as an infantry officer in 1948. Between 1954 and 1958 he was assistant to the head of the Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence) and vice commander of the South Lebanon region. In 1966, he was interim head of intelligence for a few months. Four years later, Lahad studied at the general staff school in Paris, and, between 1971 and 1975, was assistant commander, then commander of the Baqaa region of Lebanon. Meanwhile he was following a course of studies at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, in Paris. In 1978 Lahad was named brigadier general and assigned to reserve status two months later. In 1981 Lahad resumed serving and in the following year, participated in the fighting triggered by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Lebanese army, which had been much weakened by desertions during the civil war, functioned in effect as a Christian militia, tacitly supporting the Israelis and their allies in the Lebanese Forces by fighting mainly against the AMAL and Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran). During 1983, as the government reorganized the army, Lahad resigned his commission. On 3 April 1984 he was recruited by Israel to become the commander of its proxy force, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), replacing SaEd Haddad, who had died a few weeks earlier. During the night of 7–8 November 1988, Lahad was wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by a young Lebanese woman, Suha Beshara, a member of the Lebanese Communist Party. He was evacuated to Israel, where he received medical care for a few months. The following year, he traveled to Germany to receive further care, but one arm remained paralyzed. On 17 January 1996 Lahad went to Israel and was received by Shimon Peres, who assured him of the support of Israel. On 23 January Lahad was indicted in absentia by the Lebanese military tribunal for “dealings with the enemy,” an accusation that made him liable for the sentence of death. On 6 December of the same year, Lahad was condemned to death, also in absentia, by the same tribunal. At the end of May 2000, following the definitive withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon and the disbanding of the SLA, Lahad took refuge in Israel. General Lahad belonged to the National Liberal Party (NLP) of Camille Chamoun.

274

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

EMILE LAHOUD. YEARS AFTER REORGANIZING THE LEBANESE ARMED GENERAL LAHOUD WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF LEBANON IN 1998. LAHOUD, WHO SUPPORTS TIES WITH SYRIA, FACED OPPOSITION AND DISCONTENT OVER THE NEXT SIX YEARS. (© 2001 by Jacques Lengevin/

FORCES,

Corbis Sygma)

SEE ALSO AMAL; Lebanese Forces; Pasdaran; Peres, Shimon; South Lebanon; South Lebanon Army.

LAHHUD, EMILE (1936–): Lebanese military and po-

litical figure, born in 1936, at BEabda. Emile Lahhud was descended from a family of Lebanese notables, Maronite in confession. His father, Jamal Lahhud, a military officer and labor minister in the presidency of Charles Helu, was nicknamed “the red general,” for having legalized the leftist unions. In 1959 Lahhud entered the military academy of Fayadiyeh. After choosing the navy, he studied for a few semesters abroad: first in Great Britain, where he obtained a degree in naval engineering, then later in France and the United States. In 1980 he was named military staff director in the Lebanese defense ministry. Two years later, under the mandate of President Amin Jumayyil, he was promoted general. In 1984 Lahhud became chief of staff of the defense minister, Adel Osseiran. In September 1988 the interim prime minister, General Michel Aoun, renamed him to this

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LAPID, YOSEF “TOMMY”

post. A year later, dismissed from his functions, Lahhud rejoined the general staff, President Ilyas alHirawi naming him, on 28 November, commanderin-chief of the Lebanese army. This nomination came shortly before Aoun was dismissed from his post as the head of the Lebanese armies. As commander-in-chief, Lahhud undertook a complete reorganization of the Lebanese armed forces, in the hope that they would become a factor in national unification. Having established religious parity within units, he made attempts to reduce political obtrusion into military affairs. At the beginning of 1991, his relations with the defense minister, Ilyas al-Murr, began to deteriorate, and in August 1992, he interdicted military participation in the legislative election campaigns. Supported by the army chief-ofstaff, Hikmat Shehabi, his relations with the new Lebanese defense minister, Mohsen Dalloul, improved, and he made attempts to be on good terms with the new Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-Hariri. He was successful also in winning the backing of a majority of the members of the high military council. On 31 January, 1993 Lahhud went to Damascus, where he was welcomed by President Hafiz al-Asad. Confident because of this support, he did not hesitate to confront the Lebanese prime minister, whom he reproached for relying on internal security forces (ISF), to the detriment of the army. Favoring good relations between Syria and Lebanon, Lahhud worked to improve cooperation between the Lebanese and Syrian general staffs. In April 1994, when he was planning to compete in the presidential election of 1996, the council of ministers voted unanimously to prolong his tenure as the head of the Lebanese army for two years, allowing him to keep his post until the vote. President Hirawi was also a candidate, and relations between the two men deteriorated. The crisis reached its apogee in November 1995, at which time the mandate of President Hirawi was renewed. Three years later, benefiting from the open support of Asad, Lahhud was elected president with 118 of the 128 votes in the Chamber of Deputies—the others, followers of Walid Kamal Jumblatt, boycotted the election. As soon as he entered office, he came up against the opposition of the prime minister, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-Hariri. The latter, when asked by the Chamber of Deputies to stay on in his position, refused to form a new government. Thirtyone deputies then decided to leave the choice of whether or not to renew Hariri as prime minister to the new president. Citing the principle of parity, whereby the president could not himself designate the prime minister, Hariri resigned, replaced by D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Salim al-Hoss. There were delays in President Lahhud’s effecting the economic reforms expected by the Lebanese population, which resulted in general discontent. In 1999 Lahhud ordered security forces to storm college campuses to stop anti-Syrian demonstrations. On 3 September 2000, the failure of a number of his supporters in the legislative elections, and the brilliant victory of Hariri’s slate in Beirut, weakened Lahhud’s position considerably in relation to Hariri and Jumblatt, and Hariri once again became prime minister. In October 2000, Lahhud was scheduled to give a speech at the League of Arab States summit in Cairo, but because President Bashshar al-Asad was late in giving his approval, Lahhud was unable to speak. In 2001 Lahhud found it necessary to execute another campaign of suppression against anti-Syrian nationalists. His prospects for reelection in 2004 were said to be slim. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Hariri, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-; Hoss, Salim al-; Jumayyil, Amin; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; League of Arab States.

LAILAT

AL-QADR: Muslim holiday, celebrated on 27 Ramadan, commemorating the night of QurDanic revelation. SEE ALSO Ramadan.

LAND FOR PEACE: Basic principle of the Israeli-Arab peace process, which first emerged in Resolution 242 and later in discussions surrounding Resolution 338 of the United Nations Security Council. Demands were made that Israel withdraw from “the territories” it had been occupying since 1967 (the ArabIsrael War) as the Arab countries were ready to make peace on condition that Israel restore the lands it occupied. The concept was incorporated into the Madrid Conference on the Middle East in October 1991. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Madrid Conference; Resolution 242; Resolution 338.

LAND OF ISRAEL SEE

Eretz Yisrael.

LAPID, YOSEF “TOMMY” (1931–): Israeli politician. Born as Tomislav Lampel in Novi Sad, on the border of Hungary and Yugoslavia, Yosef “Tommy” Lapid immigrated with his mother to Israel in 1948, after his father was abducted and murdered by Nazis. A journalist by profession, who also holds a law degree, Lapid first came to public attention as a regular pan-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

275

LARF

elist on the talk show Pop-Politika. There, he would verbally attack political guests and even fellow journalists, actions that gave him a reputation for being outspoken. In March 1999, the then-sixty-eightyear-old was approached by Shinui Party leader Avraham Poraz to take his place as party head in the Knesset. Under Lapid, the party stressed its opposition to ultra-Orthodox parties and legislation. Lapid has served on various committees, including Foreign Affairs and Defense, Constitution, Law and Justice, and the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the Location and Restitution of Property of Holocaust Victims. In February 2003, Lapid gained greater popularity as the appointed minister of justice and deputy prime minister. Some commentators considered him a rival to Ariel Sharon, particularly after allegations of corruption were leveled against Sharon in early 2003. SEE ALSO Sharon, Ariel.

claimed that, having received oral orders from Lavon, he had no other recourse to avoid assuming all blame for the incident. Ben-Gurion insisted on a judicial investigation, while Lavon, then secretary-general of the Histradut (the powerful trade-union umbrella organization), demanded a public exoneration from Ben-Gurion. The incident split not only the Labor Party, but the entire country. Levi Eshkol, then minister of finance, asked Pinhas Rosen, minister of justice, to lead a committee of investigation, which ruled that Lavon had not ordered the operation and that the document had been forged. Ben-Gurion nevertheless insisted on Lavon’s resignation of his post at the Histradut. Ben-Gurion’s position damaged his already eroding support, and he resigned in June 1963. Eshkol replaced him as prime minister and minister of defense. SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David; Eshkol, Levi; Histradut.

LARF SEE

Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction.

LASHON

HA-KODESH (“The holy tongue,” in Hebrew): A mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic used in prayer books and holy texts read by all Jews. The term is also used as a name for the classical Hebrew language in ways that emphasize its ancient, holy aspects, rather than its modern incarnations.

LAVON AFFAIR: Political crisis in Israel that eventually led to the resignation of Prime Minister David BenGurion in 1963. The crisis was sparked by what the Israeli press called the “mishap.” In 1954, under orders from Colonel Benjamin Gibli (Givly), head of the Intelligence Division of the Israel Defense Forces, a group of Israeli-trained Egyptian Jews were instructed to detonate firebombs in U.S. and British institutions in Cairo and Alexandria, in order to disrupt negotiations on the evacuation of British troops from bases along the Suez Canal. The group was captured by Egyptian security services; two of the leaders were sentenced and hanged, one of the Israeli spies committed suicide in prison, and the others were sentenced to long prison terms. Gibli claimed he had received orders from Pinhas Lavon, who was replacing David Ben-Gurion as minister of defense. A committee of inquiry could not reach a decision on the matter, and both Gibli and Lavon resigned their posts. Four years later, the commander of the special unit in charge of the Egypt operation disclosed that one of the documents presented to the committee had been forged. Gibli admitted to the forgery but

276

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

LAW OF RETURN (Hoq ha-Shvut, in Hebrew): Passed by the Knesset on 5 July 1950, this Israeli law allowed Jewish immigrants to settle in Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship. On the underlying premise that Israel is a Jewish state and the state of the Jews, the law provides that a Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel and received the status of oleh, an immigrant with automatic citizenship. In 1954, the law was amended to exclude individuals with a criminal past that might endanger public welfare. Citizenship rights were extended to non-Jewish spouses and children of Jews in a 1970 amendment. The law and its amendments have stirred up many debates between Jews and Palestinians, who regard the law as discriminatory, as well as among Jews in Israel and the diaspora. The Law of Return brings into question the definitions of Jewish identity, and there have been periodic calls for the law’s repeal from those who believe Israel should hold only to laws that do not discriminate on the basis of religion or ethnicity. SEE ALSO Diaspora. LAWRENCE, T. E. (called Lawrence of Arabia, 1888– 1935): British soldier, adventurer, and writer, Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 at Tremadoc, in Wales, and died in 1935. Early in life, Lawrence became interested in archaeology, which he then studied at Oxford. Under the influence of Professor George D. Hogarth, he specialized in the history of the Middle East. In 1909, after a study trip to Palestine and Syria, he wrote a brilliant thesis on medieval military architecture. Between 1910 and T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LAWRENCE, T. E.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. THE ENIGMATIC BRITISH OFFICER T. E. LAWARAB REVOLT AGAINST THE TURKS DURING WORLD WAR I. ARDENTLY, BUT FUTILELY, ADVOCATING ARAB CAUSES AT THE PEACE CONFERENCE AT VERSAILLES, HE BECAME EMBITTERED BY BRITISH POLICIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND SOUGHT OBSCURITY AS A PSEUDONYMOUS SOLDIER—EVEN WHILE GAINING NEW FAME FOR HIS WRITINGS ON ISLAM AND THE ARABS.

RENCE HELPED COORDINATE THE

1914 he participated in numerous archaeological expeditions in Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, led by Professor Hogarth, and accompanied by Leonard Woolley and R. Campbell Thompson. Lawrence was associated with a number of archaeological discoveries, including some at the site of Karkemish, in Syria. During his travels he formed close ties with members of nationalist movements, particularly with the councils of Armenian and Kurdish revolutionary forces, and he wrote a number of reports on the political situation in these countries. In January 1914, in his capacity of reserve officer, Lawrence joined the cartographic service of the British army, where he was responsible for establishing an accurate cartography of the Sinai and Syria. In December he was assigned to the military and political intelligence section (MPI), based in Cairo, and D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

headed by Ronald Storrs. In May 1916, still in Cairo, he was assigned to the Arab Bureau, headed by his former director of archaeological research, Professor Hogarth. On 6 June, Sherif ibn Husayn unleashed the “great revolt” against the Ottoman Empire, placing his Arab troops under the command of his three sons, Ali, Abdullah, and Faisal. In the following October he participated actively in numerous Arab attacks against Turkish troops, allowing the right flank of the British expeditionary force in Palestine to disengage and open the way to the liberation of a part of the Hijaz. Promoted to the rank of major, Lawrence was recommended for the British Order of Bath, and cited for the Order of the French Army. On 11 December 1917, he accompanied Edmund Henry Allenby in the official entrance of British troops into Jerusalem. From January to September 1918, he led a few of the attacks against Turkish positions defending the Hijaz railroad. On 1 October 1918, after entering Damascus in triumph, alongside of the Emir Faisal, Lawrence decided to leave the Middle East and return to England. During January 1919, he accompanied Emir Faisal, who had come to Versailles, at the peace conference. At this meeting, he ardently defended the Arab points-of-view. On 9 March, the American journalist, Lowell Thomas, organized a conference on Lawrence, whom he called “Lawrence of Arabia,” and introduced him to the American and British public. In May, Lawrence went to Egypt, to be demobilized. Returning to London, he stayed with Sir Herbert Baker, where he worked on his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In March 1921, Lawrence became Arab affairs counselor in the British ministry of colonies, headed by Winston Churchill, and, in this capacity, participated in the Cairo conference that year. In October, he was named counselor to Prince Abdullah of Transjordan. On 3 July 1922, confronted by the hostility of Emir Husayn and his sons, who accused him of not having kept his promises of the creation of a “Great Arab empire,” he left Transjordan, where he was replaced for a time by Harry St. John Philby. Disappointed in the British policies in the Middle East, Lawrence resigned after having refused the post of British high commissioner in Egypt, offered by Winston Churchill. In the following September, he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a simple soldier, under the borrowed name of John Hume Ross. Obliged to quit aviation in January 1923 because of his fame, which annoyed certain military leaders, he was able to join a tank unit, under the name of T. E. Shaw. Three years later, his major work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published in a limited edition, was

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

277

LEAGUE OF ARAB STATES

very successful. He composed a shortened version of it called Revolt in the Desert. In spite of the success of the so-called Arab Revolt of 1916–1918, Lawrence, who narrated his adventures in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, thought that his battle for an “Arab cause” was “lost” because “the old men came out again and took from us our victory” in order to “re-make [the world] in the likeness of the former world they knew.” Unable to cope with his fractured self and with the historical necessities of British imperialism, Lawrence ultimately stopped believing in a meaningful Arab national movement. He rejoined the air force in 1925 and served as an enlisted man until 1935. In March 1935, Lawrence resigned definitively from the army to retire to a cottage in Clouds Hill, in Dorset. On the following 19 May, he was killed in a motorcycle accident. Other that the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence was also author of The Womb, Crusader’s Castle, and Letters. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Allenby, Edmund Henry; Philby, Harry St. John.

LEAGUE OF ARAB STATES: An international institution, the Arab League (officially the League of Arab States) was founded in Cairo on 22 March 1945. At its creation the Arab League comprised Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. The first secretary general of the organization was Abd al-Rahman al-Azzam, an Egyptian diplomat. The Arab League proposed strengthening ties between Arab states and coordinating regional economic and military policy, while refraining from intervening in any conflict between league members. The impulse to create a pan-Arab organization was the product of the ongoing Arab nationalist movement, but during World War II it was also encouraged by the British as a means of influencing Arab public opinion at a time when it appeared that the Germans might well conquer North Africa. With British help, an international conference was convened in Alexandria in September 1944, producing an agreement called the Alexandria Protocol on 7 October. The formal creation of the League—an association of independent Arab states rather than the pan-Arab federation its original promoters had envisioned—followed the next year. In 1958 the League was recognized by the United Nations (UN) as a regional intergovernmental organization, and it has coordinated with the UN in its various social, cultural, and scientific programs. Headquartered in Cairo, it is the most important Arab venue for official cooperation in matters of ed-

278

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ucation, social, and health issues, mainly through its Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ALESCO), founded in 1964. In 2004, the League has twenty-two members: the original seven plus Libya (joined 1953), Sudan (1956), Tunisia (1958), Morocco (1958), Kuwait (1961), Algeria (1962), Bahrain (1971), Oman (1971), Qatar (1971), the United Arab Emirates (UAE, 1971), Mauritania (1973), Palestine (originally as the PLO, 1974), Somalia (1974), Djibouti (1977), and the Comoros Islands (1996). South Yemen was also a member from 1967 until 1990, when it united with Yemen. It is believed that the League employs some 540 staff and has a budget of around $27 million. From its very beginnings the Arab League supported the Palestinian cause, although it was often ineffective due to political differences and rivalries among the Arab states. The League provided for permanent Palestinian representation on the League Council, the main policy-making body; the first Palestinian representative was Musa al-Alami, who had taken part in the Alexandria conference. In September 1946, the League helped to reestablish the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) to represent the principal Palestinian political forces. In July 1948 it attempted to create a civil administration for the areas of Palestine not yet occupied by the Israelis, but was unable to overcome both political dissension within the AHC and opposition within the League by King Abdullah I of Transjordan, who wished to annex those areas. In September 1948, at the insistence of Egypt, which opposed Abdullah’s plans, the League helped the AHC to create the All-Palestine Government in Gaza, which lasted only a few weeks. After the 1948–1949 War the League adopted a policy of nonrecognition of Israel and supported the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. It rejected all later proposals to resettle the refugees permanently outside Palestine. It also cooperated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to assist the refugees. The League declared that, although it supported the liberation of Palestine, it would not use military force to achieve it. In 1950, however, it created the Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation Treaty (JDECT) as a defensive measure against Israel. The League also instituted an economic boycott of Israel, at first (1946) against Zionist-produced goods from Palestine, later (1948) banning all trade between Arab states and Israel or companies doing business with Israel; it established a Central Office for the Boycott of Israel (OB) in Damascus in 1951. Enforcement was voluntary and inconsistent, and the boycott never seriously affected the Israeli economy. Other major actions T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LEAGUE OF ARAB STATES

Issues at Arab League summits No.

Date and location

Resolutions, outcomes

1st 2nd

January 1964, Cairo September 1964, Alexandria

3rd 4th

September 1965, Casablanca 29 August–1 September 1967, Khartoum

5th 6th 7th

December 1969, Rabat November 1973, Algiers 30 October–2 November 1974, Rabat

8th 9th

October 1976, Cairo November 1978, Baghdad

10th

November 1979, Tunis

11th 12th

November 1980, Amman November 1981/September 1982, Fez

13th

August 1985, Casablanca

14th

November 1987, Amman

15th 16th

June 1988, Casablanca May 1989, Casablanca

17th 18th

May 1990, Baghdad August 1990, Cairo

19th 20th

June 1995, Cairo October 2000, Cairo

21st

March 2001, Amman

22nd

March 2002, Beirut

23rd

March 2003, Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt

24th

May 2004, Tunis

Agreed to oppose “the robbery of the waters of Jordan by Israel.” Supported the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its effort to liberate Palestine from the Zionists. Opposed “intra-Arab hostile propaganda.” Held post-1967 Arab-Israeli War, which ended with crushing Israeli victory; declared three “no’s”: “no negotiation with Israel, no treaty, no recognition of Israel.” Called for the mobilization of member countries against Israel. Held in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, it set strict guidelines for dialogue with Israel. Declared the PLO to be “the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” who had “the right to establish the independent state of Palestine on any liberated territory.” Approved the establishment of a peacekeeping force (Arab Deterrent Force) for the Lebanese Civil War. Condemned the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, and threatened Egypt with sanctions, including the suspension of its membership if Egypt signed a treaty with Israel. Held in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1978, it discussed Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Formulated a strategy for economic development among League members until 2000. Meeting was suspended due to resistance to a peace plan drafted by Saudi crown prince Fahd, which implied de facto recognition of the Jewish state. In September 1982 at Fez, the meeting reconvened to adopt a modified version of the Fahd Plan, called the Fez Plan. Failed to back a PLO- Jordanian agreement that envisaged talks with Israel about Palestinian rights. Summit boycotted by five member states. Supported UN Security Council Resolution 598 regarding cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War. Also declared that individual member states could decide to resume diplomatic ties with Egypt. Decided to financially support the PLO in sustaining the Intifada in the occupied territories. Readmitted Egypt into Arab League, and set up Tripartite Committee to secure a cease-fire in the Lebanese Civil War and re-establish a constitutional government in Lebanon. Denounced recent increase of Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel. 12 out of 20 members present condemned Iraq for invading and annexing Kuwait. Agreed to deploy troops to assist Saudi and other Gulf states’ armed forces. Held after a hiatus of five years. Iraq not invited. Set up funds to help the Palestinians’ Second Intifada against the Israeli occupation, and called on its members to freeze their relations with Israel. Iraq was invited. Held after the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister, it appointed Egypt’s Amr Mousa as the Arab League’s new secretary-general. Adopted the Saudi Peace Plan of Crown Prince Abdullah, which offered Israel total peace in exchange for total Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories conquered in the 1967 war. Opposed the use of force against Iraq. Agreed not to participate in the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, but allowed the United States to use military bases in some of their countries. Rejected stand taken by the U.S. and Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict and supported a peace process founded on international legitimacy, UN resolutions and the principle of land against peace.

taken by the League affecting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were: In April 1959, at the urging of Egypt, the League adopted a resolution providing for the expulsion of any member state that negotiated a separate peace with Israel. In May 1964, at the urging of Egypt, the League supported the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). The League regularly supported the PLO’s efforts to achieve international recognition. In September 1967, after the June 1967 War, the League declared its continuing support for the Palestinian cause and established a policy of not recognizing or negotiating with Israel. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In November 1973 the League set conditions to be met for members to engage in talks with Israel. The following November the League recognized the PLO as the only legitimate representative body of the Palestinians, recognized its right to establish a Palestinian state, and admitted it as a full member of the League. In October 1976 the League agreed to form an Arab Deterrent Force to intervene in the Lebanese Civil War. In November 1978 the League condemned the Camp David Accords and invoked sanctions against Egypt. They failed to agree on a response to the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon from March to June. In 1979, after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in March, the League expelled Egypt under the terms of the 1959 resolution (member states also suspend-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

279

LEBANESE ARMED REVOLUTIONARY FACTION

ed diplomatic relations); moved the League’s headquarters to Tunis. This was the beginning of a period of crisis and dissension in the Arab world, in large part over Israel and the status of Palestine, that affected the League’s functioning. Some League summit meetings were boycotted by some states, at least one summit was canceled, and few accords were ratified by the Council. In September 1982 they approved the Fez Initiative, based on the Fahd Plan, disagreement over which had caused the cancellation of a League summit the previous year. It called for withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Territories and eventual establishment of a Palestinian state in them— amounting to a tacit recognition of Israel within the pre-1967 borders. In August 1985 the League could not agree to support an agreement between the PLO and Jordan. In November 1987 the League declared that members were free to resume diplomatic relations with Egypt. In June 1988 the League agreed to assist the PLO financially in the Intifada, and in May 1989 readmitted Egypt to membership. They also agreed to mediate a truce in the Lebanese Civil War. In August 1990 the League was divided over the issue of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. League headquarters returned to Cairo in October of the same year. In March 2000 the League passed a resolution reaffirming the right of Lebanon to fight against the Israeli occupation and demanding that the right of return of the Palestinian refugees be respected. In October, after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, they called on members to suspend relations with Israel and agreed to financial aid for the Palestinians. In January 2001 the League accorded its unanimous support to the position of the Palestinian Authority on peace conditions with Israel. On 24 March of that year, Amr Mousa, Egyptian minister of foreign affairs, was chosen, unanimously, as secretary general of the League. (Except for the period 1978– 1990, the secretary general of the League has always been an Egyptian.) A restructuring plan was put into effect, with the principal innovation being the establishment of positions of general commissioners. These posts have been given to influential personalities of the Arab world. In July, Hanan Ashrawi, an important Palestinian political figure, became commissioner for information. The following month, the former Jordanian prime minister, Taher al-Masri, was named commissioner for civil society affairs, and the former Egyptian minister of culture, Ahmed Kamal Abul Magd, became commissioner for “dialogue among civilizations.”

280

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

In late May 2004, while Israeli forces were attacking the Rafah Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, in a show of force involving rocket attacks on civilian neighborhoods and mass house demolitions, the Arab League held a summit meeting in Tunis. It was to have been held earlier but had been postponed over disagreements about the issues of democratic reform on the agenda. Some governments skipped the meeting. Although individual governments and politicians had condemned Israel’s actions and American support for them, the League summit generally avoided the subject. SEE ALSO All-Palestine Government; Arab Deterrent Force; Arab Higher Committee; Fahd Plan; Intifada, al-Aqsa.

LEBANESE ARMED REVOLUTIONARY FACTION (LARF): Lebanese armed group, created in 1979 by Georges Ibraham Abdallah, after the breakup of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations (PFLP–SO), of WadiD Haddad. The hard core of this group was made up of approximately thirty members from five important families from the north of Lebanon. Backed by Syria, the LARF wanted to free Lebanon from all foreign presence. This group was responsible for many attacks, some of which were carried out in the West against Israeli citizens or offices. The LARF ceased to exist in 1986. Abdallah himself has been in prison in France since 1984. He was convicted in 1987 for the killing of an Israeli diplomat in 1982. SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations.

LEBANESE COMMUNIST PARTY (LCP): Lebanese political party, legalized in 1969 by the interior minister, Kamal Jumblatt. The LCP grew out of the Lebanese People’s Party, founded in 1924. At the beginning hostile to the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon, the LCP gradually changed its views, conforming to the directives of the Soviet CP, which decided to back the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). At its beginning the majority of its members were Christian, but it became mostly Muslim eight years later. In 1971, a splinter group, Trotskyist in tendency, left the party, in order to create the Lebanese Revolutionary Communist Party. The LCP was opposed to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon and advocated resistance. It has supported Syrian intervention in Lebanese politics. The LCP’s influence has shrunk since 1989. SEE ALSO Jumblatt, Kamal; Palestine Liberation Organization; South Lebanon. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LEBANESE NATIONAL MOVEMENT

LEBANESE FORCES (LF): Lebanese Christian militia

LEBANESE FRONT (LF): An alliance of several right-

created in 1976 as the militia of the Lebanese Front, an alliance of several right-wing Christian parties, dominated by the Phalange. Its first commander was Bashir Jumayyil, younger son of Phalange boss Pierre Jumayyil. Under his guidance, and with substantial military and financial assistance from Israel and from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the LF became the largest Maronite paramilitary force in Lebanon and a major factor in the Lebanese Civil War. After the Lebanese Front alliance fell apart in 1978, the Lebanese Forces were primarily an arm of the Phalange (and are sometimes referred to as “the Phalange militia”). After the Israeli invasion of June 1982, the LF worked closely, and after Bashir Jumayyil’s assassination in September 1982, openly, with Israeli forces, carrying out the brutal Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982 and fighting various Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim and leftist factions. Jumayyil was succeeded as commander by Fadi Afram, by FuDad Abu Nadr in 1984, and by Samir Geagea in 1985. In 1989–1990 the LF fought the Lebanese Army, then commanded by Michel Aoun, over the TaDif Accords and the presence of the Syrians in the country, which Aoun opposed. Because of his support of the government, Geagea was included in the first post–civil war government in December 1990. He failed to become Phalange leader, however, and led the LF on a course separate from the party. In 1991, under the terms of the TaDif Accords, all sectarian militias—with the exception of those in South Lebanon, under Israeli control—were officially dissolved; about two-thirds of the LF’s troops were absorbed into the army. The Lebanese Forces then reconstituted itself as a political party, but was discovered to be hoarding weapons. It was banned in 1994 after the bombing of a church in Junieh in which ten people were killed, and the assassination of Dany Chamoun, a rival Maronite militia leader, and a number of other people, were traced to Geagea. Geagea received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment, for the Chamoun killing. A rump Lebanese Forces organization remains in the Lebanese Christian community, animated by Strida Geagea, the wife of Samir Geagea. In 2001–2002, FuDad Malik attempted to reconstitute the LF as a legal party, but as that necessarily meant accommodating the Syrians, he alienated many LF followers. In 2001 it was reported that LF was still in contact with the Israelis.

wing Christian parties and prominent individuals established in 1976. Members included the Lebanese Phalange Party of Pierre Jumayyil, the National Liberal Party of former president Camille Chamoun, the Guardians of Cedars and several smaller groups, as well as former president Sulayman Franjiyya. It was dominated by Jumayyil and the Phalange. The front created a militia called the Lebanese Forces (LF), commanded by Bashir Jumayyil, son of Pierre. Franjiyya left the front in 1978 over the collaboration of Jumayyil and Chamoun with the Israelis, who had invaded Lebanon in March. The alliance distintegrated after that and the Lebanese Forces were thereafter primarily an arm of the Phalange. In June 1978 Bashir Jumayyil had Tony Franjiyya, son of Sulayman, killed along with his family. SEE ALSO Chamoun, Camille; Franjiyya, Sulayman; Guardians of Cedars; Lebanese Forces; Phalange.

SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Geagea, Samir; Jumayyil, Bashir; Lebanese Front; Phalange; Sabra and Shatila; TaDif Accords.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

LEBANESE ISLAMIC GROUP SEE

JamiEa al-Islamiyya Libnaniyya al-.

LEBANESE KATADIB SEE

Phalange.

LEBANESE NATIONAL MOVEMENT (LNM): Lebanese political bloc organized at the beginning of 1975. The LNM, comprised of fifteen political organizations of the left, with the exception of those close to Syria, succeeded the Alliance of National and Progressive Parties, formed in 1969. Among these organizations were: the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) of Kamal Jumblatt; the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP); the Communist Action in Lebanon Organization of Mohsen Ibrahim; the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP); the BaEth Party of Abdul Majid Rafei; the Independent Nasserite Movement of Ibrahim Koleilat; the Arab Socialist Union; the Union of Nasserite Forces; the Lebanese Fatah Support Movement; the Kurdish Democratic Party Organization; the Arab Socialist Organization; the Socialist Action Party of Hussein Hamdan; the Christian Patriots Front of Suleiman Suleiman; and the Union of the Forces of the Working People. The Lebanese National Movement was financed mostly by Iraq. It was dominated by Jumblatt’s PSP, and its political council was presided over by Jumblatt. Its platform, constituted on 18 August 1975, demanded nonsectarian government, proportional representation, limits on ministerial and parliamentary power, the reorganiza-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

281

LEBANESE NATIONAL RESISTANCE FRONT

tion of the army, the application of human rights, restructuring of the administration, and adoption of the principle of popular referendum on questions of national interest. These proposals, notably those related to institutional reform and the secularization of the state, were opposed by established Lebanese political figures. Supporting the Palestinian resistance actions in Lebanon, the LNM created a common command with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to coordinate the military actions of the two movements. Their success provoked the Syrian intervention on the side of the Christians of the Lebanese Front (LF) in 1976. This made of Jumblatt an enemy of the Syrians. In March 1977 Jumblatt was assassinated by pro-Syrian factions of the SSNP, and his son Walid Kamal Jumblatt took over the leadership of the PSP and the Lebanese National Movement. Walid Jumblatt accommodated himself to the Syrians and attempted to use their support against the Maronites. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, which resulted in the expulsion of the PLO fighters from the country, severely weakened the LNM, which was dissolved in October. In 1983 leading members joined with the Syrians and other Lebanese political factions successfully to pressure President Amin Jumayyil to abandon a proposed Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty, but the the alliance was not revived. SEE ALSO Jumayyil, Amin; Jumblatt, Kamal; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Lebanese Communist Party; Lebanese Front; Palestine Liberation Organization.

LEBANESE NATIONAL RESISTANCE FRONT: An umbrella organization of leftist parties—the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), the Organization of Communist Action, and the Socialist Action Party—created after the siege of Beirut in September 1982 to organize resistance against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. After Israel withdrew from Beirut and the Shuf area to South Lebanon, the movement came—with Syrian assistance—to be dominated by Islamic groups such as AMAL and Hizbullah, and the secular, leftist groups were marginalized. SEE ALSO AMAL; Hizbullah; Lebanese Communist Party.

LEBANESE PHALANGE SEE

Phalange.

LEBANESE WAR SEE

282

Arab-Israel War (1982). D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

LEBANON: Lebanon, like most of the Arab East, was under Ottoman rule until World War I. It was a semiautonomous province, much smaller than the present state, consisting of two districts, one populated mainly by Maronites and the other by Druze. It was governed by a sectarian power-sharing arrangement that had been negotiated in 1861 by the European Great Powers to settle a civil war between the two communities. After World War I, in accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and in breach of the promises made by the Allies to the Arabs during the war, Greater Syria, including Lebanon, was occupied by France. In 1920 the League of Nations formally gave the French a mandate over Syria, and the French expelled Emir Faysal, an al-Hashim prince who had been chosen by Syrian notables to be their king. (Faysal was the son of King Husayn of Hijaz, Sharif of Mecca, who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans with the encouragement of the British, who promised to support an independent pan-Arab state.) The presence of the French, who, since the mid-seventeenth century, had acted as protectors of the Ottoman Empire’s Catholics, allowed the Maronite political elite to reinforce its hold over state institutions. After the Ottoman Empire fell, the Maronites agitated for a Greater Lebanon, and the French annexed to the original Ottoman province of Mount Lebanon the surrounding, predominantly Muslim, districts from Syria. This annex expanded the country to its present borders, giving it relative autonomy under the Mandate. In 1926 a new constitution was promulgated that reformed the administration but preserved the sectarian basis of government (the highest posts were reserved for Maronites), and the country was renamed the Republic of Lebanon, although the French maintained ultimate control through their High Commissioner, the Mandate’s chief executive. In June 1941, during World War II, British and Free French forces captured Lebanon and Syria from the Vichy government, and the Free French, under political pressure, proclaimed the independence of both in November. The independence was only nominal, since the French had no intention of respecting it. In March 1943, Bishara al-Khuri and Riyad as-Sulh, the leading politicians of the Maronite and Sunni Muslim communities, respectively, established the unwritten National Pact. The Pact fixed a ratio for allotting parliamentary seats (six Christian to five Muslim), and assigned the three highest state offices to representatives of three communities: the president would be a Maronite, the prime minister T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LEBANON

a Sunni, and the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies a ShiEa. No one from the ShiEa, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Melkites or other community was consulted. In September 1943 a new parliament was elected; Khuri became president and Sulh prime minister. That November, parliament amended the constitution to eliminate the position of High Commissioner, and the French arrested the president, the prime minister, and the cabinet. Under pressure from the Lebanese and the Arab world, as well as from Britain and the United States, the French released them on 22 November, tacitly putting an end to the Mandate. The last French troops were finally withdrawn 31 December 1946. Lebanon expressed its opposition to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and sent its small army to join the Arab forces that attacked the Israelis. By the time of the 1949 truce agreement, approximately 100,000 Palestinian refugees had fled into Lebanon, mostly in the south, from which they expected to return. They were welcomed by the Lebanese authorities—partly for domestic political reasons—but not a great deal was done for them. Many Palestinians are still living in camps established at that time. The presence of so many Palestinians, and more, the embedding of the Palestinian issue in Lebanese politics, helped to destabilize the country later on. Meanwhile, Lebanon was ruled by the sectarian elites, for their own benefit and enrichment; Lebanese government was (and still is) legendarily corrupt. In 1952, however, Khuri was forced to resign when the failure to address serious social and economic issues, combined with blatant corruption—including the rigging of the 1947 election to allow him a second term—aroused social unrest and political opposition throughout Lebanese society, culminating in a general strike. Khuri was replaced by Camille Chamoun, who had been expected to be more accommodating toward the Muslim and Druze communities. Instead, Chamoun continued the favoritism toward Christians built into the National Agreement, and aligned Lebanon with the West, adopting its antiNasser/anti-Arab nationalist policy. Muslims resented the social and political inequities that underlay National Agreement, which was based on a highly questionable census conducted in 1932. They demanded a new census, but the Christian parties would agree only on condition that Lebanese emigrants in other countries, who were primarily Christians, be counted. Lebanese society, and particularly Muslims, were meanwhile affected by developments relating to the larger world, especially Nasserist panArabism, increasingly strong in the 1950s. Political rivalry between sectarian leaders became intense. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In 1957 Chamoun, needing a constitutional amendment to run for a second term, gained a twothirds majority in parliamentary elections by what most considered questionable means that eliminated many Muslim representatives from parliament. The result was the civil war of 1958, in which sectarian, social, economic and political grievances all exploded at once. It was set off by the assassination of a journalist. The government blamed outside agitators from the newly constituted United Arab Republic (UAR) and took the matter to the League of Arab States and the United Nations. The simultaneous revolt that overthrew the Iraqi monarchy caused United States president Dwight Eisenhower, at Chamoun’s request, to send American forces to Lebanon in July to protect the government. The Americans stayed long enough to oversee the election of a new president, FuDad Shehab, former commander of the Lebanese army, who had remained nonpartisan during the 1952 and 1958 disturbances. Shehab, whose first act was to ask the United States to withdraw, made a serious effort to reform government administration, appointing Muslims to his cabinet and increasing the size of the Chamber of Deputies in order to represent Muslim communities more equitably. He also devoted state resources to improving the infrastructure of the country, such as roads, electricity and water distribution systems and rural health facilities. Although he did not directly address the structural issues that had generated the unrest of 1958 and attempted to keep within the terms of the National Agreement, he aroused the opposition of the Maronite leaders. An autocrat rather than a politician, he ruled through the use of the military intelligence apparatus. His successor in 1964, Charles Hilu, a founder of the Phalange who had left that party and who also had not taken sides in 1958, was less able to force through reforms and also ruled with military help. Lebanon did not take part in the 1967 War (the prime minister, Rashid Karame, a Sunni Nasserist, wanted to do so but did not have the support of the president), but the aftermath affected the country deeply. It had become clear that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return home, and increasingly politicized Palestinians in the camps turned to armed resistance through guerrilla groups based in Lebanon. Their activities in turn tended to polarize the Lebanese, undermining the National Agreement and government authority, particularly in the south. On 28 December 1968, in reprisal for an attack on an Israeli airliner in Athens by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was based in Lebanon, an Israeli helicopter raid destroyed thirteen Lebanese planes at the Beirut air-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

283

LEBANON

port, prompting a break between Lebanese supporters and opponents of the Palestinian resistance. In January 1969, a new coalition cabinet was formed that excluded right-wing Maronite parties. This government proclaimed its support for the Palestinian resistance, while allowing the army and police organizations to take measures to repress political activity in the camps and reduce the activity of Palestinian guerrillas on Lebanese territory. Fighting broke out between the army and the fida Dyyun. Pressure brought by supporters of the Palestinians both inside Lebanon and in other Arab governments prompted negotiations, and in November, accords were signed in Cairo between the government and representatives of the Palestinians, establishing new legal relations between them. Palestinians now had the right to reside, work and travel in Lebanon; the right to govern the camps themselves; the right to police the camps; and the right to maintain military organizations in Lebanon and to use them in the struggle against Israel. In effect, government ceded the Palestinians a kind of autonomous state within the state. Moreover, between the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, large numbers of Palestinians arrived in Lebanon, including many Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters who had been expelled from Jordan in the wake of Black September 1970. Polarization between Lebanese supporters and opponents of the Palestinians increased greatly. Opponents, a coalition of Christians, nationalists and conservatives, objected to the violation of Lebanese sovereignty represented by the Cairo agreement, and particularly feared the consequences of Palestinian guerrilla activity against Israel; as supporters of the National Pact, they also opposed increased access to power for Muslims. Hilu’s weakness and attempts to please every faction led to the election of Sulayman Franjiyya as his successor in 1970. Although he had supported the Nasserists in 1958, Franjiyya was a nationalist and an enemy of the PLO, which set up its headquarters in Beirut in 1972. His government also did almost nothing to provide security against Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory in the south, which were indiscriminately hitting Lebanese— predominantly poor ShiEa in that area—as well as Palestinian targets. Tens of thousands of South Lebanese Shiites migrated to Beirut to escape Israeli shelling, and little provision was made for them. Lebanon remained neutral in the October 1973 War. Franjiyya tried to use the army against the PLO, but when it proved ineffective (many units were Muslim or Druze), he encouraged it to arm and train the Maronite militias, which could be less restrained. On 13 April 1975, unknown persons attempted to as-

284

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

sassinate the Phalange leader, Pierre Jumayyil; in retaliation, Phalangists attacked a bus carrying Palestinian civilians through a Christian area of East Beirut, killing twenty-six. Fighting then broke out between armed factional groups and violence spread around the country. Consisting at first of street fighting and random killings, it gradually involved battles between militias, and the country was engulfed in a sectarian civil war. The main antagonists at first were the Phalange and its milita, and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), which loosely united fifteen organizations of the left around the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt and advocated reform of the Lebanese system. The PLO was aligned with the LNM and established a joint command with its militia. The Phalange was joined by other right-wing Maronite groups (soon to form an alliance, the Lebanese Front [LF], and later a joint militia command, the Lebanese Forces [also LF]). In January 1976 the LF besieged and overran a Palestinian refugee camp at Tal al-ZaDatar and destroyed a Muslim neighborhood in East Beirut. Later the PLO and LNM captured a Maronite town south of Beirut. By early 1976 the Lebanese army was disintegrating. In March Muslim troops mutinied and formed the Lebanese Arab Army, which joined with the LNM. It attacked Christian areas of Beirut and forced President Franjiyya to flee. In May Ilyas Sarkis, with Syrian support, was elected to become president in September at the end of Franjiyya’s term. At the end of May, when the LF was about to be defeated, Syria, after having for months attempted to mediate a settlement, intervened militarily against the LNM and the Palestinians. This move was supported by Jordan, Israel, France and the United States. By mid-August the Syrian forces had gained control and agreed to a cease-fire. A peace conference in Riyadh and an League of Arab States meeting in Cairo, both in October, resulted in a truce and the creation of an Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) (consisting almost entirely of Syrian troops already in place) to be deployed to keep the peace, under the nominal command of the Lebanese president. The ADF and Lebanese government authority did not extend to South Lebanon, largely controlled by the PLO (parts of it were known as “Fatahland”), where Israel and Christian militias backed by Israel continued to attack. The diplomatic peace offensive by Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat toward Israel—Sadat made his dramatic trip to Jerusalem in 1977—drove the Syrians closer to the PLO and away from the Sarkis government. By 1978 the Lebanese Forces (essentially the Phalange militia, the Lebanese Front alliance having deteriorated) were firmly allied T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LEBANON

with Israel and operating independently of the government, and Syria switched its support to their opponents, the LNM. After a PLO attack within Israel, the IDF invaded South Lebanon in March 1978, intending to destroy PLO bases and drive PLO fighters away from the border by creating a “security zone” on the Lebanese side. The Israelis organized, trained and armed a Christian militia called the South Lebanon Army (SLA) as their proxy to patrol the border area after they withdrew in October. In 1980 and 1981 there was fighting between the LF and the ADF, in which Israel at least once intervened significantly in support of the LF. In June 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon again, this time going as far north as Beirut and besieging the city for weeks, using artillery shelling and aerial saturation bombing, including phosphorus bombs. A cease-fire was arranged by the United States, and a withdrawal of the PLO leadership along with about 13,000 PLO and Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) fighters to Tunis was arranged under the supervision of a Multinational (American, British, French and Italian) Force (MF). Israel’s other goal was to ensure that Bashir Jumayyil, the Phalange leader and an asset of both the CIA and the Mossad, became president. Jumayyil was duly elected on 23 August. The MF left Beirut on 10 September. On 14 September Jumayyil was assassinated by Syrian nationalists. Israel then moved in to help the Phalange secure the city. Two days later the IDF helped the Phalange militia enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, where from 16–18 September they slaughtered approximately 1,500–3,000 civilians, ostensibly in reprisal for Jumayyil’s assassination. On 20 September the Multinational Force was redeployed to Beirut. On 21 September Amin Jumayyil, Bashir’s brother, was elected president, and at the end of September the Israelis left the city. In May 1983, under pressure from the United States, Jumayyil agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which was actually ratified by parliament. Opposition to this treaty among Lebanese— and by the Syrians—was so great, however, that Jumayyil felt obliged to refuse to sign it. The Syrians would not negotiate, and the Israelis, who had been protecting Jumayyil’s government from its factional enemies, withdrew their forces from the Shuf district southeast of Beirut, a largely Druze area held by the Phalange. Fighting broke out between the Phalange and the Druze militia directed by Walid Jumblatt, which had Palestinian and Syrian support. These were some of the biggest battles of the war. The “peacekeepers” became involved in the fighting on the Christian side; American warships shelled D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Syrian positions in the mountains (hitting many civilians). After several months the Phalange were expelled from the area. The MF involvement also provoked retaliation. In October, suicide bombings in Beirut, probably carried out by Hizbullah, killed 241 American and 56 French soldiers. The MF was henceforth kept in its barracks and eventually left Lebanon in the spring of 1984. Jumayyil, with support from Syria, repudiated the agreement with Israel in March 1984. That month a national reconciliation government was formed. In June 1985, Israel withdrew most of its forces from Lebanon, but it maintained the “security zone” manned by the SLA and a battalion of IDF troops. In December an agreement for peace and political reform was signed by the leaders of the LF, the ShiEite AMAL and the Druze militia, but it never took effect because there was no support for it within the LF leadership. In early 1987 there was fighting between AMAL and the Druze in Beirut. Syria, which had withdrawn its troops from the city as part of the cease-fire in 1982, sent a force in to separate them. In the spring of 1988 there was fighting between AMAL and Hizbullan in the south. In September 1988, just before leaving office and with no successor chosen by parliament, Jumayyil appointed General Michel Aoun, commander of the army, as “interim president.” Aoun, a Maronite, turned the army against the Phalange, and in early 1989, the Syrians. In May the League of Arab States sponsored a commission composed of the heads of state of Morocco, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia to resolve the Lebanese civil war. In August a broad coalition of Lebanese political groups opposed to Aoun was formed. In October the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies (last elected was in 1972) met in TaDif, Saudi Arabia, and debated the Arab League’s proposals, adopting a compromise version called the National Reconciliation Charter, known as the TaDif Accords. This contained a number of political reforms, chief of which, was an agreement that Muslims and Christians should have an equal number of parliamentary seats; these had previously been apportioned based on the fiction of a Christian majority. (There has still been no census since 1932; it has been estimated that Lebanon is approximately 70–75 percent Muslim.) The president would remain a Christian, but the prime minister would be the executive head of government; the sectarian basis of Lebanese politics was basically unchanged. The presence of Syrian troops was ratified (the League of Arab States mandate had expired in 1982, after several extensions). The TaDif Accords were accepted by all parties except for General Aoun. On 4 November 1989 parliament elected Rene

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

285

LEHI

Muawad president; he was assassinated on 22 November. On 24 November Ilyas al-Hrawi was elected. A new national unity government was installed in December 1989. From January 1990 on there was fighting between the forces of Aoun and the LF, which was now loyal to the government. In August parliament amended the constitution according to the provisions of the TaDif Accords. Aoun’s forces were isolated, and in October, during the crisis leading to the Gulf War (1991), Syrian forces defeated them. Aoun himself fled to France, where he remains, as of 2004, leading an organization called the Free Patriotic Movement, devoted to opposing Syrian hegemony in Lebanon. An arrest warrant was issued for him in 2003. The total number of fatalities in the 1975–1990 civil war are estimated to be over 150,000. The Lebanese economy was crippled, and much of Beirut was destroyed, as were many towns in the southern half of the country. No political initiative can be undertaken without the support of the Syrian government. Emile Lahhud was elected president in 1998. Parliamentary elections were held in 1992 for the first time since before the civil war. Rafiq BahaDuddin al-Hariri has been prime minister for all but two years since 1992. Through the 1990s Hizbullah consolidated its influence in South Lebanon and its armed wing launched frequent attacks against Israeli forces there. In 2000 the Israelis at last withdrew from its “security zone,” leaving it in occupation only of the disputed Shebaa Farms area. The SLA was disbanded, and its commander, Antoine Lahad, is living in Israel as of 2004. SEE ALSO AMAL; Aoun, Michel; Arab Deterrent Force; Black September 1970; Chamoun, Camille; Druze; Franjiyya, Sulayman; Gulf War (1991); Hariri, Rafiq BahaDuddin al-; Hashim, al-; Hizbullah; Jumayyil, Amin; Jumayyil, Bashir; Jumblatt, Kamal; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Karame, Rashid; Lahad, Antoine; Lahhud, Emile; League of Arab States; Lebanese Forces; Lebanese Front; Lebanese National Movement; Maronites; Melkites; Mossad; Palestine Liberation Army; Phalange; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Sabra and Shatila; Sadat, Anwar al-; Shebaa Farms; South Lebanon; South Lebanon Army; Sykes-Picot Agreement; TaDif Accords; United Arab Republic.

LEHI SEE

286

Lohamei Herut Yisrael. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

LEVY, DAVID: Israeli political figure, born in December 1937, in Morocco. After immigrating to Israel in 1957, Levy worked as a mason, then began a career as a union organizer, for the Labor Party, MAPAI. In 1966, he was a member of the municipal council of Beit Shean, and three years later he was elected member of Knesset for the right-wing party, Herut. In 1977, after having failed in a bid to become secretary general of the Histadrut union organization, he became minister of immigrant absorption in the government of Menachem Begin, leader of Herut. Between 1978 and 1980, as minister of housing and construction, he favored the development of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, all the while backing the restitution of the Sinai to Egypt, in exchange for a peace agreement. In 1981, he was once again a losing candidate for the post of secretary general of Histadrut. Between 1981 and 1984, Levy was deputy prime minister and minister of housing in the government of Yitzhak Shamir. In Herut, where he represented the Sephardi community, David Levy was among the candidates to succeed Menachem Begin as party leader, a position finally won by Yitzhak Shamir. From 1988 to 1990 he was minister of housing and construction, then foreign minister from June 1990 to June 1992, in the Shamir government. In this capacity he participated in the Middle East peace conference, held in Madrid, in 1991, where his relations with Benjamin Netanyahu, spokesperson for the Israeli government and rising star of the Israeli right, were strained. During the first part of 1995, his conflict with Netanyahu, who had meanwhile become Likud leader, prompted him to quit this bloc and create his own party, Gesher “Bridge” Party. On 8 February 1996, in anticipation of the general elections of the following May, he accepted an alliance with Likud and the Tzomet Party, to constitute a common list in support of the candidacy of Netanyahu for the post of prime minister. On 29 May 1996, his party won five seats in the Knesset. On 18 June, he became foreign minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. As soon as his assumed this post, Levy found himself isolated in a cabinet that was dominated by ultranationalists, and where all matters of importance were dealt with by the prime minister himself, which prevented him from having any impact on the course of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On 7 July 1997, he was officially mandated to handle negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, which, provisionally, ended his conflict with the prime minister. On 25 August, he became deputy prime minister, all the while keeping his foreign minister’s portfolio. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LIKUD

On 5 January 1998, judging that, decidedly, he had no real power, Levy resigned from his positions. During the month of February 1999, looking forward to the general elections of the following May, he joined with the Israel Labor Party and with Meimad to constitute the electoral list of “One Israel,” which, on 18 May, won twenty-six seats, while the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, was elected prime minister. On 5 July, he joined the Barak government as foreign minister. On 8 September, three days after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Sharm al-Shaykh Summits, the Israeli prime minister asked him to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians on the final status of the Palestinian territories. Five days later, he reaffirmed the determination of Israel to maintain its sovereignty over Jerusalem and to refuse to return to the frontiers of pre-June 1967. At the end of July 2000, he expressed, publicly, his opposition to the offers made by the Israeli prime minister at the Israeli-Palestinian summit which was taking place at the Camp David Accords. On 2 July, following, he resigned his post as minister, and, a few days later, decided to join Likud. When, in March 2001, Likud leader Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister, Levy was not part of the new government. Levy later served as minister without portfolio in Sharon’s coalition government, but resigned in July 2002 in protest over planned budget cuts and the exclusion of the cabinet from the decision-making process. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; Camp David Accords; Gesher “Bridge” Party; Herut Party; Histadrut; Israel Labor Party; Likud; MAPAI; Meimad; Palestinian Authority; Shamir, Yitzhak; Sharm al-Shaykh Summits; Tzomet Party.

LF SEE

Lebanese Forces.

LIEBERMAN, AVIGDOR (1958– ): Israeli politician. Born in the Soviet Union in 1958, Lieberman immigrated to Israel in 1978. Chief of staff under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lieberman founded the Israel Beiteinu Party in 1999. An immigrants’ rights party, Israel Beiteinu seeks to curb what Lieberman has called the excessive powers of the police and the ministry of justice. He was elected to the Knesset in 1999, and served on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. In March 2001 Lieberman was appointed minister of national infrastructures. SEE ALSO

Israel Beiteinu.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

LIKUD (Hebrew for “Assembly” or “Union”): Israeli political bloc, constituted in July 1973, under the impetus of Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin. Conscious of the necessity of moving toward the center, the leadership of Herut decided to ally with three other groups: the Liberal Party, the “Free Center,” and the State List. This alliance, called the Likud, became the biggest parliamentary bloc in the Knesset. Representing a threat to the Israeli left, the creation of Likud prompted the Labor Party to adopt a more nationalistic stand. At the end of 1973 through the beginning of 1974, the Arab-Israel War (1973)—which had revealed a certain unpreparedness of the government in facing a major crisis—led to some major changes in the Israeli political configuration. The drift toward the right began to be felt, especially among young soldiers and the lessprivileged. In 1976, Sharon resigned from Likud to create his own party, Shlomzion. In the Knesset elections of May 1977, due in part to the Sephardic vote, Likud won forty-three of the 120 seats in Knesset, outdoing the Labor Party, which won only thirtytwo. The Labor votes were lost not to Likud but to a new centrist group, Dash, and to the ultraOrthodox National Religious Party (NRP). The Shlomzion of Ariel Sharon, which had won two seats, rejoined the Likud. The leader of Herut, Menachem Begin, became prime minister, ending thirty years of Labor hegemony. After assuming office, Begin responded to calls by the Soviet Union and the United States to hold an international conference on peace in the Middle East by instead hastening secret bilateral contacts, actions that Anwar al-Sadat took as well. In order to compensate for the extremist image of his bloc, Begin named the Laborite, Moshe Dayan, as his minister of foreign affairs. When the Likud came to power, inflation had risen to 42 percent, which prompted the Begin government to apply an ultraliberal economic policy. Appointed minister of agriculture, Ariel Sharon favored the development of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, which obstructed the IsraeliEgyptian negotiations that were going on. In September 1978, Israel signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt, and in March of the following year, in spite of disagreement on the Palestinian question, Begin and Sadat initialed the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. In March 1980, prominent Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir became foreign minister, replacing Moshe Dayan, who had resigned in disappointment over the results of the Camp David Accords. On 30 July 1980, the Knesset passed a law on Jerusalem, “united city, eternal capital of Israel,” provoking a

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

287

LIKUD

LIKUD SUCCESS. MENACHEM BEGIN, HEAD OF THE ULTRA-NATIONALIST HERUT PARTY, CELEBRATES WITH OTHER MEMBERS OF LIKUD AFTER THE MAY 1977 KNESSET ELECTIONS THAT BROUGHT THE RIGHT-WING POLITICAL ALLIANCE TO POWER, ENDING TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF LABOR PARTY DOMINATION OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT. BEGIN WAS PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL UNTIL 1983. (AP/Wide World Photos)

wave of international protest. Likud came out ahead once more in the Knesset elections of June 1981, but only by a slim margin: it won forty-eight seats in the Knesset, to the forty-seven of the Labor Party. This forced Begin, on 15 July, into an alliance with certain religious groups so as to form a government. In June 1982, under pressure from Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister gave the green light to Operation “Peace for Galilee” in Lebanon, in the course of which the massacres at the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila camps occurred, which aroused widespread outrage in Israeli society and around the world. On 10 October 1983, succeeding Menachem Begin, who had resigned his post for reasons of ill health and because of his responsibility in the Lebanon affair, Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister. He held onto the foreign ministry, and named David Levy as deputy prime minister and minister of housing and Moshe Arens as minister of defense. In July 1984, Likud finished behind the Labor Party in the

288

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Knesset elections with forty-one deputy seats against Labor’s forty-four seats. On 13 September 1985, Likud and the Labor Party signed an accord for a government of national unity, providing for alternation of their parties every two years for the prime ministership. The leader of Herut and Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, was named foreign minister in a government headed by the leader of the Labor Party, Shimon Peres. In 1986, much dissension surfaced in Herut, and at the same time in Likud, provoked by the “war of succession” for the leadership of the party, in the course of which Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Moshe Arens, Benny Begin, and David Levy were all competing against each other. During October, as provided in the accord between Likud and Labor, Shamir became prime minister and Peres became foreign minister. On 22 December, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the policies of Israel in the Occupied Territories. On 25 August 1988, the central committees of the Liberal Party and Herut decided to merge their two T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LIKUD

blocs to found the “Likud-National Liberal Movement” Party, wherein Herut remained the keystone of the organization. In November, Knesset elections confirmed the previous political situation, to the benefit of Likud, which obtained forty deputy seats. A national unity government was formed under the leadership of Shamir, yet no alternation with the Laborites was going to take place. On 25 December 1988, Benjamin Netanyahu, the new rising star of Likud, was named deputy foreign minister under foreign minister Moshe Arens. Three factions quickly emerged in Likud: The majority view—upheld by Shamir, Arens, and Netanyahu—and two others— one of which was headed by Sharon and Benny Begin; the other by Levy and Yitzhak Modai. On 15 March 1990, a motion of censure, raised by the religious parties, caused the fall of the Shamir “Unity” government. Shamir then formed a cabinet based on an alliance between Likud, the religious parties, and the extreme right. The new government had to confront the crisis of the Gulf War, during which it had decided not to take reprisals against the attacks of Iraqi missiles. Under U.S. pressure, Shamir agreed to participate in the Middle East peace conference in Madrid on 30 October 1991. The Israeli delegation’s spokesperson was Netanyahu, which made him appear to some as Shamir’s heir. Following this conference, the extremist parties withdrew their support from Shamir’s government. The prime minister, no longer controlling the majority in the Knesset necessary to apply his policies, decided to call for new Knesset elections. In the Likud primaries, Ariel Sharon obtained 22 percent of the votes, becoming Shamir’s principal rival. In March 1992, a split appeared in Likud following the departure of Yitzhak Modai, who formed his own organization, the New Liberal Party. In June, Likud was defeated in the Knesset elections by the Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin, who became prime minister. Likud’s share of seats dropped from thirty-eight to thirty-two. Weakened by this electoral failure and internal dissension, Likud was taken over by a new generation of militants, who, on 25 March 1993, chose Netanyahu as party leader by 52 percent of the votes of the members against 26 percent for David Levy and 15 percent for Benny Begin. The first Sabra, or Jew born in Israel, to lead the nationalist right, Netanyahu advocated its core beliefs: maintaining “Greater Israel” from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, keeping the Golan Heights, and not negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). By the following autumn, Netanyahu was being openly criticized by a majority of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Likud’s members, reproaching him for his inability to come up with a credible alternative to the new situation created by the Israeli-Palestinian accord (Oslo Accords). During the first trimester of 1995, in the middle of an upsurge in anti-Israel attacks, Likud was ahead in the polls, though internally it was being weakened by a power struggle between Netanyahu and Levy. The latter resigned from Likud to create his own party, Gesher. On 10 November, following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist, the popularity of Likud fell in the polls. A majority of politically conscious Israelis blamed Likud for having supported the vilification campaign against the Rabin government, which had contributed to the climate of hate that led to the murder of the prime minister. In January 1996, after Sharon declined to become a candidate for the post of prime minister, Netanyahu began an electoral campaign on the theme of maintaining the territorial unity of Israel and rejecting the creation of a Palestinian state. On 8 February, through the impetus of Sharon, Likud signed an accord with the party of the extreme right, Tzomet, headed by Rafael Eitan, then with Levy’s center-right party, Gesher. Netanyahu thus became the unique candidate of the right for the post of prime minister, which was to be filled for the first time by direct universal suffrage against Peres of the Labor Party. On 25 March, the “hawks” of the party carried the primaries of Likud, organized in anticipation of the Knesset elections. On 29 May, the head of Likud was elected as prime minister, by a slim margin and with only 50.4 percent of the ballots cast. In spite of this victory, the Likud-Tzomet-Gesher alliance won only thirty-two seats in the Knesset, of which twentytwo were Likud, against thirty-four for the Labor Party. The left, which had fifty-three seats, found itself in the opposition, while the right, which had only forty-three, was in control of the government. On 18 June, Netanyahu presented his cabinet, which included, with Likud, two religious parties (National Religious Party and SHAS), a party of the extreme right (Tzomet), and three centrist groups (Gesher, Third Way, and Israel be Aliyah), thereby disposing of the support of sixty-six members of the 120 in the Knesset. On the next 24 September, the Netanyahu government’s approval of the opening of an archaeological tunnel near the Esplanade of Mosques in Jerusalem provoked three days of rioting in the Palestinian territories, causing the death of more than eighty people, most of them Palestinians. On 15 January 1997, Netanyahu and Yasir Arafat came to an agreement on Israeli withdrawal from the city of Hebron. This was the first agreement ever signed be-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

289

LIKUD

tween the Israeli right and the PLO. Between 1997 and 1998, Netanyahu’s policies and his manner of running the cabinet were criticized, even within his own party, which prompted the departure of some important figures, such as Yitzhak Mordechai, Benny Begin, and Dan Meridor. A number of the founding fathers of Likud, called the “princes” of the party, denounced the “duplicity and lack of principles” of the prime minister. Meridor and Mordechai created their own political bloc, the Center Party. On their side, the Sephardim—whose head, David Levy, resigned on 4 January 1998—considered themselves betrayed by the Likud leader for not keeping the promises he made during his electoral campaign, in particular, to appoint more members of their community to positions of responsibility. A number of them turned to the new Center Party, then headed by the former defense minister of the Netanyahu cabinet, the Sephardi Yitzhak Mordechai. On 9 October 1998, Netanyahu named Ariel Sharon foreign minister, which gave cause to the Palestinians and their partners to fear that the IsraeliPalestinian peace negotiations would be definitively obstructed. On 25 January 1999, the leadership of Likud designated Netanyahu as their candidate for the post of prime minister in the elections that May. In his party’s primaries, Netanyahu obtained 75 percent of the votes against his rival, Moshe Arens, but with a voting participation rate of only 30 percent. On 17 May, Netanyahu became a victim of his own mistakes and lost to his adversary of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, who won 56 percent of the votes. Likud won only nineteen seats, losing three seats compared to the previous Knesset, the worst it had ever done. After these results were known, Netanyahu resigned from the leadership of Likud, and Sharon replaced him, making him responsible for the interim, until new elections could be organized to choose a new party leader. Other than Sharon, among the pretenders to the succession of Netanyahu there figured Ehud Olmert, Moshe Arens, Meir Shitreet, Limor Livnat, and Silvan Shalom. After its electoral failure in the month of May, Likud tried to strengthen its base by recruiting Golan Heights inhabitants and settlers in the Gaza Strip. On 3 September 1999, Sharon was elected to head Likud against his two rivals, Ehud Olmert and Meir Shitreet.

mon Peres. On 28 September, Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount that provoked anger among the Palestinians, triggering the Intifada in the Palestinian territories. During the election campaign of January 2001 for the post of prime minister, Sharon made efforts to win support from the Netanyahu’s partisans. He entrusted his campaign to his son, Omri Sharon, and to Silvan Shalom, assisted by Mrs. Limor Livnat. On 6 February, Sharon was elected prime minister, with 62.5 percent of the votes cast, running against Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The following month, Sharon formed a government uniting eight different political parties, affording him the support of seventy-three of the 120 members of the Knesset. His foreign minister and defense minister were the Laborites Shimon Peres and Benyamin Ben Eliezer, respectively. In his inaugural speech, Sharon declared that peace with the Palestinians could be achieved without “painful compromises.” A few weeks later, when the Intifada was intensifying in the Palestinian territories, he undertook a campaign of very harsh reprisals against those responsible for anti-Israel attacks. At the beginning of December 2001, concluding that Yasir Arafat was behind the continuing Intifada, Sharon decided to isolate Arafat by preventing him from leaving his headquarters in Ramallah. After a suicide bombing at a Netanya resort hotel in March 2002, Sharon ordered the invasion and reoccupation of West Bank cities. In May 2002, at a Likud Party conference, the Likud central committee voted—over Sharon’s objection—almost unanimously for a resolution, proposed by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. Yet Sharon retained leadership, surviving allegations of financial improprieties. In the 2003 elections, in an apparent endorsement of his policies, voters gave the Likud 29.4 percent of the vote (thirty-eight seats in the Knesset). Some commentators, however, interpreted the vote as an indication of disillusionment with Labor rather than support for Sharon or for the Likud. Under intense pressure from the United States, Sharon’s cabinet voted in May 2003 to approve the internationally backed “road map” for peace. Sharon and the Likud continued to attempt to find a difficult balance between right-wing commitment to disputed territories and a more pragmatic approach to an eventual resolution of the conflict.

In the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Likud began systematically opposing all the proposals of the Barak government. On 31 July 2000, surprising everyone, Likud candidate Moshe Katsav was elected president of the State of Israel by sixtythree votes against fifty-seven for his Labor rival, Shi-

In 2004, Sharon presented a plan to disengage from settlements in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, which was strongly opposed in a referendum conducted among Likud members. Many questioned the wisdom of Sharon’s decision to resort to an internal party referendum, given the unexpected rebuff to his

290

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LITANI OPERATION

leadership and the overall popularity of the Gaza redeployment proposal among the general (nonLikud) population of Israel. In July 2004, Sharon sought a coalition with United Torah Judaism and others, while at the same time the hawks of Likud, led by Netanyahu, opposed not only the coalition, but also the disengagement plan. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; Ben Eliezer, Benyamin; Camp David Accords; Center Party; Dash; Dayan, Moshe; Gesher “Bridge” Party; Gulf War (1991); Herut Party; Katsav, Moshe; Knesset; Levy, David; Madrid Conference; Mordechai, Yitzhak; National Religious Party; Oslo Accords; Peres, Shimon; Sabra; Sabra and Shatila; Sadat, Anwar al-; Sephardim; Shamir, Yitzhak; SHAS; Sharon, Ariel; Shlomzion; Third Way.

LIPKIN-SHAHAK, AMNON: Born in January 1944, in Tel Aviv, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak began his military career in 1962. During the 1967 War, he served as assistant commander of the Parachute Brigade, and he participated in a special unit (sayeret), in which he would remain for six years. In 1972, he was part of a commando unit—along with Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Dani Yatom—that neutralized Palestinian terrorists who had taken over a Sabena airplane at the Tel Aviv airport with one hundred passengers aboard. In April 1973, LipkinShahak participated, along with Ehud Barak, in an operation in Beirut in which three Palestinian leaders were killed. Rumors abounded that the commandos’ initial objective was the elimination of Yasir Arafat or Ali Hasan al-Salama, both of whom were absent on the night of the raid. In 1976, Lipkin-Shahak was promoted to the rank of colonel and became director of the “deployment” section for parachute troops at the general staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). Two years later, as brigadier general, he was given command of an armored division. In 1982, in the context of the “Peace in Galilee” operation in Lebanon, LipkinShahak was in charge of operations in the zones of Beirut and the Shuf. From October 1983 to February 1986, he was in command of the central military region of Israel, and was promoted to the rank of major general during his tenure. He became director of military intelligence in March 1986, succeeding Ehud Barak. Four years later, when Barak became chief of staff of the IDF, Lipkin-Shahak became his assistant. Between 1993 and 1994, Lipkin-Shahak was part of an Israeli delegation that participated in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

peace negotiations with the Palestinians, as well as with the Syrians. On 1 January 1995, Lipkin-Shahak became chief of staff of the IDF. As such, he supervised the “Grapes of Wrath” operation, launched against the Hizbullah in April 1996, and participated in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the withdrawal of the IDF from the Palestinian territories. On 9 July 1998, Lipkin-Shahak resigned from the army, replaced as chief of staff by General ShaEul Mofaz. In late December, after the Knesset announcement of upcoming elections, Lipkin-Shahak declared himself a “centrist” candidate for the post of prime minister, running against Benjamin Netanyahu, whose policies he denounced as “dangerous.” In January 1999, he withdrew his candidacy and joined with Roni Milo, Dan Meridor, and Yitzhak Mordechai to form the new Center Party in time for the May elections. When the Center Party won six seats in the Knesset, Lipkin-Shahak became a deputy. Shortly thereafter, in July, he was named tourism minister in the government of Ehud Barak. On 5 March 2001, after the electoral defeat of Barak by his Likud adversary, Ariel Sharon, Lipkin-Shahak retired from politics. In 2002 he became the honorary president of the Israel Humanitarian Foundation. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1982); Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Center Party; Grapes of Wrath Operation; Likud; Meridor, Dan; Milo, Roni; Mordechai, Yitzhak; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sayeret; Sharon, Ariel; Yatom, Dani.

LITANI OPERATION: Code name of the military operation launched by Israel against Lebanon, on 14 March, 1978. The operation followed an attack on a bus, near Tel Aviv, by a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) commando group that was based in Lebanon. The PLO assault on the civilian bus, traveling on Israel’s Haifa–Tel Aviv highway, resulted in the deaths of thirty-seven Israelis. In response, 20,000 Israeli troops of the Israel Defense Force invaded Lebanon, advancing to the Litani River. The goal of the operation was the destruction of PLO bases south of the Litani and the removal of PLO guerrillas from the area, within range of the Israeli border. An estimated one thousand Lebanese and Palestinian casualties resulted from the invasion, and the United Nations Security Council responded with Resolution 425, calling for Israeli withdrawal and the creation of a United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) as a peacekeeping force. After three months, Israel ceded a 37-mile-long area of Lebanese territory, 3 to 6 miles deep, to UNIFIL and to an Is-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

291

LOCAL AID COORDINATION COMMITTEE

raeli-supported Lebanese militia. The PLO nevertheless regained a presence in south Lebanon, and the failure of the Litani Operation figured in Israel’s subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

LOCAL AID COORDINATION COMMITTEE (LACC): Organization created in 1994, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, to coordinate donor policies in the Palestinian territories. This organization worked with the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee on Aid to the Palestinians and the Joint Liaison Committee (JLC).

LOHAMEI HERUT YISRAEL (LEHI; Hebrew for “combatants for the liberty of Israel”): Jewish extremist underground organization, founded in Palestine in October 1940, following a schism in Irgun. Supporters of radical action against the English and Arabs, the LEHI was also called the “Stern Group,” after the name of its founder, Abraham (“YaDir”) Stern, a former Irgun member, who claimed to represent the “true Irgun.” In December 1940, seeing in Germany the only power able to rid Palestine of the British presence, Abraham Stern sent Naftali Lubentchik to make contact with representatives of the German Third Reich in Lebanon in order to propose an alliance with the German army. Lubentchik was not able to transmit the German reply to Stern after being arrested in June 1941 by French authorities. Stern then sent a second emissary, former Irgun member Nathan Yalin Mor, who was arrested soon after in Syria. This attempt to join up with the Germans prompted a few LEHI members to quit the group. Those remaining faithful to YaDir decided to launch a series of attacks against British police forces, as a consequence of which many members of the group were arrested and imprisoned. On 12 February 1942, the British police killed Stern in Tel Aviv, beginning a crisis period for LEHI. By 1943, the organization had been reconstructed, moving toward the left and openly embracing the Soviet Union and class struggle, under the leadership of Natan Yellin-Mor, Israel Eldad, and Yitzhak Shamir. The LEHI, which considered itself to be the spearhead of the national movement of Hebrew liberation, tried in vain to coordinate its actions with those of Irgun. On 6 November 1944, two LEHI members killed the British minister for the Near East, Walter Edward Guinness (Lord Moyne), who was stationed in Cairo. Confronted by the wave of repression unleashed by the British police, the movement suspended its operations until the end of World War II. In October 1945, Haganah, Irgun, and

292

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

LEHI decided to coordinate their actions against the British forces of order in Palestine by forming a united front, the “United Hebrew Resistance,” directed by Committee X of the Haganah. On 26 June 1946, British authorities—who were unable to put an end to the operations of the movement—launched the “Agatha” operation, in the course of which almost 2,700 people were arrested and a large arsenal of weapons was seized. On 22 July, an Irgun commando exploded part of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the headquarters of the civil and military administration of Palestine. The attack caused ninety-one deaths. Many LEHI and Irgun leaders were arrested, among them was Yitzhak Shamir, who was deported to Eritrea, effectively putting an end to the existence of the United Hebrew Resistance. In October 1946, after reorganizing their forces, Irgun and LEHI began a wave of anti-British operations, which continued until November 1947, when the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two states: one Jewish and the other Arab. From this time onward, Arabs became the principal target of Irgun and LEHI operations. On 9 April, more than one hundred Irgun and LEHI men attacked the Arab village of Deir Yasin, massacring inhabitants. During the following June, LEHI participated in a campaign against the proposal of the special envoy of the UN, Count Folke Bernadotte, who was recommending modifying the plan of partition of Palestine in favor of the Palestinians and Transjordan. On 17 September, a LEHI commando killed Count Bernadotte and Colonel Sérot, head of the UN French observers, in Jerusalem. The next day, the Israeli army proceeded to arrest members of LEHI en masse, but the perpetrators of the crime were not discovered. Sentenced for belonging to a terrorist organization, the LEHI members later benefited from a general amnesty, and many of them joined Herut, the political party founded by the former head of Irgun, Menachem Begin. Yitzhak Shamir became a member of Mossad from 1955 to 1969, and then after joining Herut, he began a political career, which led him to become Israeli prime minister in the autumn of 1983, succeeding Menachem Begin. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Bernadotte, Folke; Haganah; Herut Party; Irgun; Mossad; Shamir, Yitzhak.

LOVERS OF ZION (English translation of the Hebrew, Hovevei Zion): A group founded in the 1882 by Leo Pinsker, a Russian doctor, and other European Jews living in Europe who dreamed of emigrating to Palestine, and who actively organized people to live out T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

LUBAVITCHER HASIDIM

that dream. Advocates of Zionism, they organized the creation of Jewish colonies in Palestine. They founded, among others, the cities of Rishon LeTzion and Hadera. SEE ALSO Zionism.

LUBAVITCHER HASIDIM (Habad, chabad): Important Hasidic movement, founded in Belorussia by Shneur Zalman, at the end of the eighteenth century. At first called Chabad (acronym of “hokhma, binah, da’at”: wisdom, reason, knowledge), it developed in the vicinity of the city of Lubavitch, the name of which it adopted. Following the First World War, its epicenter moved to Warsaw, then, after the Second World War, to the United States, specifically to Brooklyn. In 1950, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn took over the leadership of the movement, attempting to maintain its anti-Zionist perspective. At the same time, Israel was becoming the world center of Torah study, and the Lubavitch leader induced some of his faithful to settle there. The movement, which was very quiet

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

for many years, became much more prominent in the middle of the 1980s, when it benefited from the financial support of the Australian millionaire rabbi Joseph Gutnik. Centered around its chief rabbi in Brooklyn, its activity expanded, having vast resources at its disposal, in particular the largest Jewish publishing house in the world, Kehot. Followers of a very strict regimen, the Lubavitch preach the observance of the 613 Torah commandments, and oppose assimilation. After the death, in June, 1992, of Menachem Schneersohn, considered by some as the Messiah (“Moshiach”), two currents surfaced in the movement: the first uniting the messianics, the second uniting the pragmatics. Since then, Rabbi Gutnik has been the political and secular leader of the Lubavitch, while Rabbi Krinsky has been in charge of its overall functions. The Lubavitch movement has opposed any peace accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). SEE ALSO

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

Messiah; Torah.

C O N F L I C T

293

M MAEABARAH: Hebrew word utilized to designate transit camps for new arrivals to Israel at the time of the great waves of immigration of the 1950s.

MAEA LOT: An urban community in Upper Galilee, Israel, MaEa lot was founded in 1956 to replace two temporary settlements of mostly North African Jewish immigrants. Located about 6 miles (10 km) south of the border with Lebanon, MaEa lot had a population of approximately 20,000 in 2002. It was the site of a terrorist attack on 15 May 1974, when three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, disguised in Israeli uniforms, took control of a MaEa lot school building, where a group of ninety children on a field trip were sleeping on the floor. Some of the children were killed on the spot, and some escaped by jumping out a window. The terrorists held the remaining children hostage, threatening to kill them if demands for the release of Arab guerrillas from Israeli prisons were not met by 6:00 P.M. At 5:45 P.M. a unit of the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade stormed the building, killing the three terrorists. Sixteen children were killed and seventy were wounded. SEE ALSO Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. MA’ARAKH PARTY SEE

Alignment Party.

MAEARIV (Evening, in Hebrew): Israel daily, centerright, founded in 1948 by journalists who had quit Yediot Aharonot. In 1992 its majority stockholder, Robert Maxwell, sold his interest to the Nimrodi family. In September 1995 a telephone-tapping incident, in which Yediot Aharonot was also mixed up, obliged its editor to resign. In July 1998 Ofer Nimrodi, president of the administrative council of the newspaper, was sentenced to eight months in prison as a result of this incident. As of 2004, Ma Eariv defines itself as an apolitical paper with appeal to both secular and religious Israelis. Although it once had the largest readership of any paper in Israel, its circulation has decreased. SEE ALSO Yediot Aharonot.

MACCABEES (Hammer, in Hebrew): Name of the Jewish family, founders of the Hasmonean dynasty, that led the uprising of the Jews against the Seleucid kings (175–135 B.C.E.), who wanted to impose Greek culture upon them. Mattityahu and his five sons, fighting to rid ancient Palestine of Hellenism, succeeded in restoring the sacrificial altar to the Temple. This event is celebrated during the Jewish holiday Hanukkah. According to legend, during the rededication of the Temple the lamps stayed lit for eight nights, although there was only enough oil for one night’s light—a miracle commemorated by the lighting of the menorah.

295

MACCABIAH

MADRID CONFERENCE. PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH (RIGHT) MEETS WITH PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK SHAMIR OF ISRAEL AT THE MIDDLE EAST PEACE CONFERENCE IN MADRID IN LATE 1991. SEVERAL SESSIONS OF BILATERAL NEGOTIATIONS TOOK PLACE, BUT THE TALKS BROKE OFF WITHOUT ANY CONCLUSIVE PROGRESS. (© Peter Turnley/Corbis)

SEE ALSO

Hanukkah.

MADRID CONFERENCE: International Middle East

MACCABIAH: Name of the Jewish Olympic games that take place every four years in Israel. MADRASA: Also medersa, from the Arabic darasa, “to learn,” and darrasa, to teach. The contemporary use of Madrasa designates a school, secular or religious, public or private. Historically a madrasa was a QurDanic school, generally established near a mosque. It could be small or a large complex characterized by medieval architectural structure. A typical madrasa had one entrance leading to an interior courtyard with a richly decorated fountain and basin at the center. This couryard was surrounded by tiers of galleries containing openings into student rooms and halls used for prayer and study.

296

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

peace conference held in Madrid from 30 October to 4 November 1991. A consequence of the Gulf War, the conference was part of a concerted effort by the United States and the Soviet Union to establish a definitive peace in the Middle East. It took place only after the United States had reaffirmed its commitment to guarantee Israel’s security. Because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was excluded from the discussions, Palestinians were represented by delegates from the occupied territories included in the Jordanian delegation. The conference, based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, comprised three phases: 1) A plenary meeting during which the positions of the participants (United States, USSR, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan-Palestinians, Syria, European Union) were argued before the observers (UN, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MAHIR, AHMAD

Gulf Cooperation Council, Maghrib States). Also discussed were proposals for negotiations that set the stage for the two succeeding phases of the conference. 2) Bilateral negotiations (Israel, JordanPalestinians, Syria, Lebanon) to resolve territorial conflicts. 3) Multilateral negotiations to solve problems of regional interest (security, economic development, refugees, water resources, environmental protection). During these negotiations, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, made no concessions to the Arab countries, particularly regarding the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. Under pressure from the United States, however, he was obliged to be more flexible in matters of procedure. The first direct talks between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians, which began in Madrid on 3 November 1991, were followed by many sessions of bilateral negotiations, but were broken off. While the discussions among the three Arab states were directed toward peace treaties, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were based on a two-step formula: agreement about the arrangement of internal autonomy, and negotiations regarding permanent status for the Palestinian autonomous territories. Following the Madrid Conference, although not directly a result of it, two agreements, negotiated through different channels, were finally forged: on 13 September 1993 the IsraelPalestinian Declaration of Principles was signed in Washington; and on 26 October 1994 the IsraeliJordanian peace treaty was signed at the Araba/Arava crossing between Jordan and Israel. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991); Oslo Accords; Resolution 242; Resolution 338; Shamir, Yitzhak.

MAFDAL SEE

National Religious Party.

MAGEN DAVID SEE

Star of David.

West—North Africa and, before 1492, Spain. The Arabic word (sometimes rendered “maghreb”) means “west” or “place of the sunset.” Maghrib is also the name of the fourth Muslim prayer of the day, occuring at sunset, and the Arabic name for the country of Morocco. SEE ALSO Mashriq. O F

MAHAL: Abbreviation of the Hebrew Mitnadev huts la-Aretz (foreign volunteers), utilized to designate foreign volunteers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who came to Israel in 1948 to fight with the Israelis against the Arab armies. MAHDI: Arabic for “the Guided One.” The title given the expected deliverer or messianic figure in Islam. The term and concept are from Muslim eschatological tradition, both Sunni and ShiEa, rather than from the QurDan. False Mahdis have sometimes arisen at times of crisis in Muslim history. The concept is not current in modern mainstream Sunni Islam, but is sometimes made use of by radical Islamist or Sufi movements to motivate their followers. In ShiEa Islam anticipation of the Mahdi’s arrival is a standard component of pious belief.

MAHIR, AHMAD (1935–): Egyptian politician and

MAGHRIB: Geographical term indicating the Arab

D I C T I O N A R Y

MAGNES, JUDAH (1877–1948): U.S. reform rabbi, founder and first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in San Francisco, Judah Magnes received rabbinic ordination at Hebrew Union College in 1900 and his doctorate in philosophy at the Universities of Bern and Heidelberg. He served as rabbi of New York’s Temple Emmanuel and later of B’nai Jeshurun. One of the founders of the American Jewish Committee, he also helped found the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Tag, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Magnes immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1922, becoming the first president of the Hebrew University in 1925. He rejected the notion of the “negation of the diaspora,” contending that both Zion and the diaspora were of equal importance to Jewish life. He was prominent in the Ihud (unity) movement, a small group of intellectuals who argued for the establishment of a binational state rather than a Jewish state in Palestine. At the end of his life, following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, he lobbied for a humanitarian resolution to the conflict.

T H E

diplomat, born in 1935. In 1957, Ahmad Mahir joined the Egyptian foreign ministry. Between 1958 and 1970 he was assistant secretary in the Egyptian embassies at Paris and Zurich. Between 1971 and 1974 he was counselor for security affairs to the presidency of the Egyptian Republic. The following year he became bureau chief of community affairs in the Egyptian foreign ministry. Between 1978 and 1980 he was head of the cabinet of the foreign minister,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

297

MAHMIR

Kamel Hassan Ali. In this capacity, he participated in the Camp David negotiations. In 1980 he was named Egyptian ambassador to Portugal. Two years later, he filled the same position in Belgium. In September 1988 he was named Egyptian ambassador to Moscow, then, four years later, to Washington. As such, he participated in much negotiation, making him a known figure in the context of the Israeli-Arab peace process. On 15 May 2001, while directing the Arab and African aid fund of the Arab League, he was appointed foreign minister, replacing Amr Musa, who had just been elected secretary general of the League. On 27 July 2001 Mahir undertook a European trip that led him to France and Italy as part of the efforts being made to find a solution to the IsraeliPalestinian crisis. He has continued to work toward mediation of relations between Israelis and Palestinians. In December 2003, while visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to improve strained ties between Egypt and Israel, he was shoved and heckled by Palestinian worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque, who objected to his visit to a holy site under Israeli occupation. SEE ALSO Camp David Accords; League of Arab States; Musa, Amr Muhammad.

MAHMIR: Word designating a Jew who observes religious commandments in an extremist manner.

MAIMONIDES (1135–1204): Jewish theologian, philosopher, and doctor born in Cordoba in 1135. His real name was Moshe ben Maimon, but he was also known as Ramban and Abu Imran Mussa ibn Maymun. Forced to leave Spain, Maimonides settled for a time in Morocco, then went to Egypt in 1165 where he was named head rabbi of Cairo and doctor to the vizier of Saladin. A rationalist, he codified the Jewish law and wrote a number of philosophical and theological treatises. His two principal works are the Mishneh Torah and the Guide for the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Ha’irin). His encyclopedic work, in Hebrew as well as Arabic, influenced not only Jewish thought, but Christian philosophy as well. He died in 1204 at Fustat (Old Cairo) and is buried in Tiberias.

MAJALI, ABD AL-SALAM (1925–): Jordanian political figure, born in 1925 at al-Karak, Abd al-Salam Majali obtained a diploma in 1949 in general medicine. Specializing in ENT, Majali was one of the first Jordanian doctors in the Jordanian army where he was director of a military hospital. After resigning

298

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

from the army at the rank of general, he became personal physician to King Hussein in 1967. In 1969, he was named minister of health, and the following year, minister of the presidency of the Council. Between 1976 and 1979 Majali was minister of education, then counselor to the king. Several times a university president, he was also general director of the Jordan Health Institute in 1990 and 1991. In October 1991 Majali was named head of the Jordanian delegation for bilateral negotiations with Israel, and on 29 May 1993 he became prime minister while simultaneously holding the portfolios of the defense and foreign ministries. On this authority he participated actively in Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiations and in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, serving as a signatory on 26 October 1994 to the peace accord between Jordan and Israel. On 8 January 1995 Majali resigned his post as head of government to retake his senator’s seat and was again named prime minister on 19 March 1997. On 19 August of the following year, a few days after King Hussein had delegated his powers to his brother, Prince Hassan, Abd al-Salam Majali resigned his posts, yielding his place to Fayiz al-Tarawneh. Today Majali is the vice president of the senate and undertakes semiofficial travel. SEE ALSO Hassan of Jordan; Hussein ibn Talal; Tarawneh, Fayiz al-.

MAJDAL SHAMS FIRST PLAN: Name of a plan for withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Golan Heights proposed in 1994 by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as a prelude to a potential Syrian-Israeli peace treaty. Based on a partial withdrawal spread over three years, this plan provided for the return of all five of the Druze villages occupied by Israel since 1967, including the important Druze locality of Majdal Shams—thereby testing the security accords that would have been signed with Syria. This plan also provided for setting up a military early-warning system, which would have involved the participation of the United States. Negotiations began later that year in Washington and continued through early 1996. The Syrians took the consistent position that only a complete withdrawal was acceptable, although they appeared to be flexible about the timing. In February and March of 1996 there was a series of suicide bombings in Israel carried out by Islamist fanatics; and Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who had taken office after Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish fanatic, broke off negotiations with Syria. Peres T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MAPAI

faced a strong challenge in the upcoming Israeli elections from Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud opposed any Israeli withdrawal from occupied land. There were no further negotiations while Netanyahu was in office. SEE ALSO Golan Heights; Israeli-Syrian Negotiations, 1994–2000; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak.

MAJLES

AL-SHURA: Arabic for “consultative assembly.” By extension it designates the advisory council that is a part of state institutions and most Arab movements or political parties.

MAJLIS AL-SIYASI: Arabic for “political assembly.” By extension it designates the political council in state institutions as well as in most Arab political organizations.

MAJMAE AL-ISLAMI, AL-: Muslim charity organization (“Islamic Collective”) sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood, started in the Gaza Strip in 1973 by Sheikh Ahmed Yasin who later became the spiritual leader of HAMAS. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Muslim Brotherhood.

MAMLUKS: Dynasty that reigned over Egypt from 1250 to 1517, after seizing state power following the death of the last Ayyubid sultan. The name derives from an Arabic word meaning “possessed” or “slave”; the Mamluks had first established themselves in Egypt as slave soldiers serving the Ayyubid sultans, who were subordinate to the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad. The Abbasids were overthrown by the Mongols, who then moved into Syria and Palestine, where the Mamluks defeated them, thus adding those countries to their Egyptian empire. In 1517, after the occupation of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks, the Mamluks coalesced with the Ottomans. In 1811 the Ottoman sultan Muhammad Ali, sent to Egypt after the Napoleonic expedition, had the Mamluks massacred. During the era when the Mamluks occupied Jerusalem, it became an important Muslim religious center and many elaborate buildings were constructed, giving a Muslim architectural character to the city. However, the Mamluks took no other interest in Jerusalem; and because of neglect and heavy taxes, the city’s economy and population declined under their rule. SEE ALSO Abbasids; Ottomans.

MAPAI (Mifleget Po’alei Eretz Israel—Workers MAKHTERET: Hebrew word meaning “underground,” used to refer to groups like Etzel and Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI) during the British Mandate. In addition it refers to a Jewish group (also known as “TNT,” or Terror Neged Terror, “terror against terror”) that in 1984 carried out five attacks against Palestinian mayors in the West Bank, then tried to blow up the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Lohamei Herut Yisrael.

MAKI SEE

Israel Communist Party.

MAKTAB AL-SHURA: Arabic for “advisory office,” designating one of the infrastructures of a movement or party such as a “consultative bureau.” MAKTAB

AL-SIYASI:

Arabic for “political depart-

ment.”

MAMLAKHTI’UT: Hebrew word for “statism.” it is used to designate the unitary and centralized organization of the State of Israel. The concept is attributed to David Ben-Gurion. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

party of Eretz Israel): Socialist political party, created in 1930 under the impetus of David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson from the merger of two groups, Ahdut ha-Avoda and ha-PoEel ha-TzaEir. Under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, MAPAI confirmed its reformist orientation by framing the policies that led to the creation of the State of Israel. The first Israeli Knesset elections in February 1949 resulted in MAPAI obtaining 46 seats out of 120, with the radical socialist party MAPAM winning 19. The most important political party in the State of Israel, MAPAI ran the Israeli government for twenty consecutive years. MAPAI supporters had a quasi-monopoly on principal Israeli institutions such as the Jewish Agency for Israel—in charge of immigration—a portion of the army, and Histadrut—the confederation of labor unions. However, because he despised Menachem Begin so deeply, David Ben-Gurion refused to share power with the Herut Party throughout his several terms of office. In December 1953 Ben-Gurion resigned from his post of prime minister to be replaced by Moshe Sharett, but increasing internal frictions led to the emergence of factions within MAPAI, and in February 1955 Ben-Gurion again took office, this time as defense minister. In elections the following June,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

299

MAPAM

MAPAI, weakened by internal quarrels, lost five seats in the Knesset, and it was not until November, after five months of haggling and attempts to build a coalition cabinet, that Ben-Gurion presented his new government. In June 1956, Ben-Gurion appointed Golda Meir as foreign minister, replacing the “dovish” Sharett, and for the next nine years MAPAI reigned supreme, imposing its policies on the Jewish state and provoking both ideological and personal conflicts. In 1963 Ben-Gurion resigned as prime minister, and from MAPAI, after the Lavon Affair, a controversy that divided the party. In November 1965 MAPAI accepted the participation of the parliamentary oppositional bloc, GAHAL, which had won 26 seats in the government of Levi Eshkol, and in February 1966 Golda Meir was elected secretary general of MAPAI. The party underwent an internal crisis in 1967 with the surfacing of a reformist movement led by Abba Eban, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres. After the War of 1967, this became the majority leaning. In 1968, MAPAI merged with the RAFI and Ahdut haAvoda PoEalei Zion parties to create the Israeli Labor Party (ILP). MAPAI remained the most significant element in this alliance although the 1965 election was the last one in which MAPAI ran candidates under its own party name. In February 1969 Golda Meir became prime minister, replacing Levi Eshkol. The Knesset elections of the following October resulted in the Labor Party–MAPAM alliance winning 56 seats. During the mandate of Meir, MAPAI was confronted by the crisis of the 1973 War, discrediting the entire party. The Knesset elections of December 1973 brought Labor 51 seats, but the Likud bloc grew stronger, winning 43 seats. In April, accused of a negligent defense policy, Meir and Moshe Dayan resigned from the government, yielding to the new Laborite generation cenetered on Generals Chaim Bar-Lev, Aharon Yariv, and Yitzhak Rabin, with Rabin replacing Meir as prime minister. MAPAI was weakened by dissension in the Labor Party prompted by power struggles and corruption scandals among several prominent leftist politicians. The elections of May 1977 won the Labor front only 32 seats, with the loss of 19 seats, mainly to the centrist bloc, Dash. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avodah; Begin, Manachem; Ben-Gurion, David; Dash; Dayan, Moshe; Eban, Abba; GAHAL Party; Herut Party; Histadrut; Israel Labor Party; MAPAM; Meir, Golda; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; RAFI Party.

300

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

MAPAM (Mifleget Po’alim Me’uhedet): Israeli radical socialist party, created in 1944 by dissident members of MAPAI. The ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir (“the Young Guard”) later joined this new political party. In January, 1949 MAPAM won 19 of the 120 seats in the first Knesset elections. This made it the second most important Israeli political party after MAPAI which won 46 seats. During this time, MAPAM, considered to be an extreme leftist group piloted by the ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir, greatly influenced the Kibbutzim. In 1954 there was a split in the party with former members of ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir remaining in MAPAM and former members of Ahdut ha-AvodahPoEalei-Tziyon forming Ahdut ha-Avodah. Other MAPAM members left to join MAPAI or the Communist Party, further weakening MAPAM, but after creating an alliance with the Labor Party (ILP) in October 1969, the unified parties won a total of 56 Knesset seats, leading to a government coalition. By June 1974 two MAPAM members, Messrs. Shemtov and Rosen, had joined the Rabin government as ministers of health and immigrant absorption. MAPAM continued to back the Labor Party until 1984 when the National Unity accord was signed by the ILP and Likud. In November 1986 MAPAM leaders participated in an meeting in Romania that brought together Jewish and Arab intellectuals from Israel and Palestine who favored peace. This led to MAPAM basing its platform for the 1988 Knesset elections on the principle of “the territories in exchange for peace.” In 1992 MAPAM leadership decided to ally with the Movement for Civil Rights and Peace (RATZ) and the Shinui Party to form the Meretz parliamentary bloc and Labor’s primary partner in the government coalition. This left-wing coalition won 61 seats in the June 1992 Knesset elections, with Meretz winning 12 of those seats. Subsequently, four important Meretz figures joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin, one of these being MAPAM leader Yaïr Tsaban, who was appointed minister of immigration. In October 1993 Hadash and the Progressive List for Peace made common cause with MAPAM during the municipal elections. In the Knesset elections of 1996, which saw the victory of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Meretz won nine seats, three of which went to MAPAM. Three years later when Ehud Barak, head of the Labor Party, won the elections, Meretz obtained ten seats, two of whom joined the new government as ministers of education and of commerce. This alliance was reversed on 21 June 2000 when Meretz decided to leave the cabinet of T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MASADA

Ehud Barak because of concessions his administration had made to the ultra-Orthodox party SHAS. In the 2003 elections Meretz received 5.2 percent of the vote or six seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Ha-Shomer ha-TzaEir; Likud; MAPAI; Meretz Party; Movement for Civil Rights and Peace; Progressive List for Peace; Rabin, Yitzhak; SHAS, Shinui Party.

MARONITES: The largest Christian community in Lebanon. They are members of the Maronite Catholic Church, a Uniate Church—affiliated with, but not under the control of, the Roman Catholic Church— that follows its own rites, customs, and liturgy. The church is led by a patriarch, currently Nasrallah Sfeir, who, because of the sectarian political arrangement of Lebanese society, is a politically significant person. The church was founded in the fifth century at a monastery south of Antioch by followers of the hermit St. Maron. The Maronites emigrated to Mount Lebanon in the seventh century to escape the persecution of the Greek Orthodox Church of Byzantium. They made common cause with the European Crusaders and affiliated with the Roman church in 1182. The first sectarian struggles between the Maronites and the Druze occurred in 1841. In the following year an era of instability commenced in Lebanon, due to, among other causes, the intervention of European powers into Ottoman politics. Since 1648 France had guaranteed the protection of Catholics in general and Maronites in particular, while Russia supported the Greek Orthodox, and Great Britain, the Druze. In May 1860 an incident between Christians and Druze degenerated into a civil war, which led to the intervention of the French army. A commission of the European Great Powers negotiated an arrangement called the Règlement Organique in 1861 in which the Mount Lebanon province, with a Maronite district and a Druze district, became autonomous within the Ottoman Empire. Owing to its ties with France, the Maronites experienced significant social, as well as cultural and economic, development. Following World War I and the end of Ottoman rule, France received a League of Nations mandate over Greater Syria, which included Lebanon. At the urging of the Maronites, the French created a Greater Lebanon, taking predominantly Muslim territory from Syria and annexing it to the original autonomous province establishing the current borders. In 1926 the French promulgated a constitution establishing a strong presidential regime D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

headed by a Christian, with a controlling role for the Maronites. The amended constitution of independent Lebanon in 1943 was based on a National Pact agreed to by the leaders of the Maronite and Sunni Muslim communities that reserved the presidency for a Maronite and the prime ministership for a Sunni, and confirmed the sectarian basis of Lebanese politics. The Maronite political elite dominated Lebanon before the civil war of 1975–1990 and has continued to do so since (with Israeli and Syrian help)—a domination at least partly based on the fiction that the Maronites are the largest confessional community in the country. It is estimated that the population of Lebanon is at least 70 percent Muslim, with 45 percent of that being ShiEa. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1982); Druze; Jumayyil, Bashir; Lebanese Forces; Lebanese Front; Lebanon; Phalange; Sabra and Shatila; Sfeir, Nasrallah.

MARRANO: Pejorative word used by the Christian populace to designate a Jew ostensibly converted to Catholicism during the fourteenth century persecutions in Spain and Portugal, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. MASADA: Fortress, located on a rocky peak beside the Dead Sea, where a historic battle took place between the inhabitants and the Romans from 70 to 73 C.E. and around which an extremely important myth/ legend emerged, especially in the twentieth century. Basically composed of Sicarii and Zealots under the command of Elazar ben Yair, the population of Masada (Kasr el-Sebbeh in Arabic), after a three-year siege conducted by the Roman general Flavius Silva, decided to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. According to tradition, two women and three children were excepted, so as to transmit the story of this sacrifice to the Jewish community. In 1927, the poem “Masada,” composed by Isaac Lamdan, became the watchword of Zionist youth. At the end of 1941, when Palestine was threatened by the German troops of General Erwin Rommel, some Jewish leaders proposed a withdrawal of the population to Carmel, where resistance would be organized. The plan was called “Masada.” In January 1942 these leaders met on the Masada site to study the plan, but it was not put into effect. The word “Masada” symbolizes the resistance of Israel to invaders of today and yesterday. But it also carries the not-soacceptable suggestion that suicide is preferable to surrender. Until the end of the 1980s, young recruits

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

301

MASALHA, NAWAF

to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) were sworn into the service on the site of Masada. Because of its symbolism, Masada today is the most popular destination after Jerusalem of Jewish tourists visiting Israel. Since the excavation of the fortress in 1964, cable cars have enabled tourists to reach it; now with new larger cars and an elegant tourist center at the base of the mountain, thousands of visitors ascend daily.

MASALHA, NAWAF: Israeli Arab politician, born in November 1943, at Kufr Qara, Palestine. After studying to be a teacher, Nawaf Masalha joined the Israeli Labor confederation, Histadrut, where he quickly became a member of the central committee and head of the Arab section. In the elections of 1988, he was elected as a Labor Party member and deputy speaker of the Knesset. Re-elected a Labor MK in June 1992, he joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin the following 3 August as a deputy minister of health. In May 1996, after the Right was returned to power, he was again appointed deputy speaker of the Knesset. On 5 August 1999, he was named deputy-foreign minister under David Levy in the government of Ehud Barak, the first appointment of an Israeli Arab to this post. In the Knesset he also sat on the powerful foreign affairs and defense committees. Masalha gave up his seat in the Knesset in 2003. He has been an ardent defender of equal rights for Israeli Arabs and joined with like-minded Israeli Jews in supporting initiatives for Arab-Israeli peace. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Histadrut; Knesset; Levy, David; Rabin, Yitzhak. MASAR SEE

Islamic National Way Movement.

MASHRIQ: A geographical term designating the Arab East, the part of the Arab world in Asia—the Arabian peninsula, and from the Levant to Iraq. The Arabic word means “east” or “place of the sunrise.” SEE ALSO Maghrib.

MASJID: Mosque. The Arabic word means “place of prostration” and indicates the customary place for performing an obligatory ritual prayer. MASORTI (Conservative, in Hebrew): Traditionalist Jew who is neither Orthodox nor secular and who observes some of the religious commandments for

302

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

familial, social, or sentimental reasons. This word also designates one of the currents of liberal Judaism, which advocates respect for the halakhah while being in favor of adaptability to modern life. The Masorti Movement in Israel is affiliated with Masorti Olami (the World Council of Masorti/Conservative Synagogues) as well as with the international association of Conservative rabbis and other organizations representing Conservative Judaism throughout the world. SEE ALSO Halakhah; Rabbi. MASSAR, AL-: Palestinian political and cultural bimonthly published by the al-Massar Studies Center in Ramallah, Palestine.

MATZPEN (Compass, in Hebrew): Small Israeli political party, founded by students in 1963 after a split with the Communist Party. In 1967 it attracted public attention by protesting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. From then until the early 1970s, when it supported Palestinian resistance in the Occupied Territories, it was Israel’s most hated anti-Zionist group. Although it never had more than a few dozen members and nearly dissolved after the 1993 Oslo Accords, former members became increasingly influential, especially with regard to its assertion that Jewish colonization was the primary cause of the IsraelArab conflict. SEE ALSO Israel Communist Party; Oslo Accords. MEAH SHEEARIM (Hundred Gates, in Hebrew): Name of the main Jewish ultra-Orthodox quarter in Jerusalem, built in the second half of the nineteenth century by Hungarian immigrants. One of Jerusalem’s most densely populated neighborhoods, it houses hundreds of yeshivas and synagogues and is known as a center of Orthodox anti-Zionist activity. A majority of its inhabitants devote their time to religious study. Its streets are closed to traffic on the Sabbath.

MECCA: Ancient city (sometimes rendered as Makka) in the Hijaz region of the Arabian Peninsula; the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad and the holiest city in Islam. Mecca has been the spiritual and historical pole of the Muslim faithful since the seventh century; it is the place toward which all Muslims orient themselves during prayer, and the destination of the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, made by pious Muslims. It is the site of the KaEba and the well of Zamzam, sites of veneration since, as Muslims believe, Abraham passed by them. Near the KaEba are T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MEIMAD

MECCA. A HUGE CROWD OF PILGRIMS GATHERS TO WORSHIP ALLAH IN THE MOST SACRED OF MUSLIM HOLY CITIES, THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD. PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA, LOCATED IN SAUDI ARABIA, IS ONE OF THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM; MORE THAN ONE MILLION MUSLIMS UNDERTAKE THE HAJJ EVERY YEAR.

the tombs of IsmaEil (Ishmael) and his mother, Hagar. Mecca is located east of the Red Sea port of Jeddah, and is dominated by Mount Arafat. Once an important commercial station on the road between Syria and Yemen, this city was in ancient times already a place of pilgrimage for Arab tribes, where polytheistic cults abounded, although archaelogical excavations are rarely conducted because of the growth of the city and religious sensibilities. SEE ALSO

Hajj; KaEba; Muhammad.

MEDINA: Second holiest city of Islam, after Mecca. This little Arabian oasis, formerly called Yathrib, is where the prophet Muhammad emigrated in 622 C.E., fleeing the hostility of the Meccans, when he began his teaching of the Muslim faith. After the Muslim conquest of Mecca, the oasis changed its D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

name to Medinat al-Nabi (the City of the Prophet, in Arabic). SEE ALSO Mecca; Muhammad.

MEDO SEE

Middle East Defense Organization.

MEIMAD (Dimension, in Hebrew): Israeli religious political party, created in 1988 by Rabbi Yehuda Amital as a Zionist religious alternative the National Religious Party (NRP), considered to be too nationalist. This center-left party supports the idea of a territorial compromise in exchange for peace with the Palestinians. In the elections of 1988 Meimad obtained no seats in the Knesset. In November 1995, when the Shimon Peres government was being constituted following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Rabbi Yehuda Amital was named minister without portfolio.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

303

MEIR, GOLDA

Since that time, the leadership of Meimad has hoped to create a center bloc. In February 1996, looking forward to the Knesset elections of the following May, Meimad supported Peres in his candidacy for the post of prime minister against Benjamin Netanyahu, who won the elections. In February 1998 the death of the NRP leader Zevulun Hammer prompted many of the members who had left the NRP in the 1988 split to rejoin. On 22 March 1999, anticipating the Knesset elections, Meimad decided to ally itself with the Israel Labor Party and Gesher to create the “One Israel” (Israel Ahat) coalition. The following May, this list won twenty-six seats, while the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, became prime minister. A few weeks later Rabbi Michael Melchior, one of the main leaders of Meimad, was named minister without portfolio in charge of relations with the diaspora. In 2000 the Gesher members left One Israel, leaving Labor and Meimad allied. In March 2001, when the head of Likud, Ariel Sharon, was elected prime minister, Melchior was named deputy minister of diaspora affairs. The Labor-Meimad coalition had nineteen seats in the 2003 Knesset. As of 2004 the leaders of Meimad are Yehuda Amital, Michael Melchior, Aviezer Ravitsky, Tova Ilan, Benjamin Segal, and Jonathan Shiff. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Gesher “Bridge” Party; Israel Labor Party; Likud; National Religious Party; One Israel; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; Third Way.

MEIR, GOLDA (Golda Myerson, born Mabovitch; 1898–1978): Israeli political figure, born in Kiev in 1898, died in Jerusalem in 1978. Having been a refugee in the United States since 1906, Golda Meir emigrated to Palestine in 1921, where she was active in union organizations. Rapidly, with David BenGurion, she became one of the leaders of the MAPAI labor party and of the Histadrut union, directing its women’s section. In 1934 she was elected secretary of the executive committee of Histadrut. In 1946 she was interim chairwoman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. In 1947, following the United Nations decision on the partition of Palestine (Resolution 181), she went to New York to collect funds for arms for the Haganah. In 1948, as a member of the provisional government, she was the first ambassador of Israel to the USSR after the proclamation of the Jewish state. From 1949 to 1956 Meir was minister of labor and social affairs in the governments of David BenGurion and Moshe Sharett. In 1955, in the municipal

304

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

GOLDA MEIR. SEEN HERE WITH PRIME MINISTER DAVID BENGURION, HER LONGTIME MAPAI COLLEAGUE, C. 1961, MEIR SERVED IN UNION AND GOVERNMENT POSTS FOR DECADES BEFORE BECOMING PRIME MINISTER IN

1969. UNDER PRESSURE FOR FAILURES RELATED TO

THE OCTOBER 1973 WAR, SHE RESIGNED IN APRIL 1974. (© Bettmann/

Corbis)

elections, she led the MAPAI list to victory in Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, religious groups opposed her becoming mayor of the city. From June 1956 to January 1966, she was foreign minister in the governments of Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol. For ten years she advocated an intransigent foreign policy, in particular toward Arab countries. In February 1966 she was elected secretary general of MAPAI. In 1968 she participated in the creation of the Israel Labor Party (ILP), which came out of the merger of MAPAI with RAFI and Ahdut ha-Avoda PoEalei Zion. The following year, in February 1969, after the death of Levi Eshkol, she became prime minister. During her tenure (1969–1974), she was confronted with three important crises: the breakup of the national unity coalition, when the Israeli government accepted to consider withdrawal from the Occupied Territories; the tragedy of the assassination of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972; and the October (“Yom Kippur”) 1973 War. In spite of the victory of Labor in the Knesset elections of DeT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MERETZ PARTY

cember 1973, Meir was unable to withstand accusations that she bore overall responsibility for that war, which caught Israel by surprise and resulted in heavy losses. She was therefore obliged, on 10 April 1974, to resign her post of prime minister; she was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avoda; Arab-Israel War (1973); Eshkol, Levi; Haganah; Histadrut; Jewish Agency for Israel; MAPAI; Munich; RAFI Party; Resolution 181; Rabin, Yitzhak.

MELKITES: Members of the Melkite (sometimes rendered Melchite), or Greek Catholic, Church. This is a Uniate Church—that is, one affiliated with, but not under the control of, the Roman Catholic Church— which follows its own rites, customs, and liturgy. The name is derived from the Syriac melek, which means “belonging to the king” (the Byzantine emperor Marcian), and was possibly derisive when first used. The name was given to the Christians of Syria and Egypt who remained faithful to the Byzantine emperor after the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 C.E. Separated from Rome in 1054, some of them rejoined the Roman family in 1724 when a Roman Catholic was elected patriarch, splitting off from the Greek Orthodox Church, which also follows the Byzantine rite but is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. MERETZ PARTY: Israeli center-left parliamentary political bloc, separated from the Labor Party, created in 1992 by the union of three political groups: MAPAM, RATZ (Movement for Civil Rights and Peace), and Shinui. The three parties that made up Meretz supported the Israeli-Arab peace process and rejected religious coercion. They were favorable to the existence of a Palestinian entity, coexistence between Israel and Arab states, and opposed to the division of Jerusalem. In the socioeconomic domain, on the other hand, profound differences opposed the Shinui, propounding liberal capitalism, to RATZ and MAPAM, which were openly radical-socialist. In the elections of June 1992, Meretz won twelve seats in the Knesset, contributing to the return of the Israeli left to power under Yitzhak Rabin, and Meretz became Labor’s main coalition partner. Four of its members joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin: Shulamit Aloni (education minister), Amnon Rubinstein (science and energy minister), Yair Tsaban (immigration minister), and Ran Cohen (deputy minister of housing). Tension between Meretz and the SHAS religious party was a factor in the weakening of the Rabin government, which Meretz reD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

proached for the absence of “tangible progress in the domain of peace with the Palestinians and with Syria.” In May 1993, a cabinet reshuffle allowed Walid Tsadik, Israeli Arab member of Meretz, to join the Rabin government as deputy minister of agriculture, thereby strengthening this party’s position in the government coalition. The naming of Meretz member Walid Tsadik provoked resentment on the part of the Arab Democratic Party, which had been supporting the Labor Party since 1988, without obtaining any ministerial post. During the first semester of 1994, Meretz threatened to quit the government, after it was announced that Tzomet would be joining the government and SHAS entering the Rabin cabinet. Internal conflicts, provoked by ideological divergences between the three parties constituting Meretz, and personal differences within each of the parties, resulted in a weakening of Meretz, which emerged from the elections of June 1996 with nine seats in the Knesset. In August 1997, a delegation of some thirty Israeli Arabs made an official visit to Damascus, where it was received by Hafiz al-Asad. This visit was the first of its kind since the creation of the State of Israel. In the municipal elections of 10 November 1998, Meretz won ten seats on the city council of Jerusalem. On 18 May 1999, in the Knesset elections that saw the victory of Ehud Barak, Meretz strengthened its position, obtaining ten seats. One of these seats was taken by Husniya Jabara, who became the first Arab woman to enter the Knesset. On 6 July, in spite of significant participation of members of SHAS in the cabinet of Ehud Barak, three members of Meretz accepted ministerial portfolios: Yossi Sarid in education, Chaim Oron in agriculture, and Ran Cohen in commerce and industry. On 21 June 2000, facing constant opposition from SHAS members, the Meretz ministers resigned from the Barak government, but the movement decided to continue supporting the government in the Knesset. The principal members of Meretz in 2004 were: Yossi Sarid (RATZ), RaDan Cohen (RATZ), Anat Maor (MAPAM), Avraham Poraz (Shinui), Yair Tsaban (MAPAM), Chaim Oron (MAPAM), Walid Tsadik, Amos Oz, Husniya Jabara, Shulamit Aloni (RATZ), Zahava Galon. In the 2003 election Meretz received 5.2 percent of the vote (six seats in the Knesset). Arab Democratic Party; Barak, Ehud; MAPAM; Movement for Civil Rights and Peace; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sarid, Yossi; SHAS; Shinui Party. SEE ALSO

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

305

MERIDOR, DAN

MERIDOR, DAN (1947–): Israeli politician. Born in Jerusalem, Dan Meridor holds a law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as cabinet secretary under Menachem Begin (1982–1983) and Yitzhak Shamir (1983–1984). Elected to the Knesset in 1984, Meridor served as minister of justice from 1988 to 1992. In June 1996 he was appointed minister of finance, a post he resigned in June 1997. In 2001 he was appointed minister without portfolio, responsible for national defense and diplomatic strategy; he held this post until February 2003. Meridor serves as the international chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation. MERIDOR, YAACOV (1913–1995): Irgun commander, member of Knesset. Yaacov Meridor was born in Poland in 1913. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1932. In 1933 he joined the Irgun, later serving as chief commander. In 1943 Meridor relinquished command of the Irgun to Menachem Begin, but he continued to hold senior positions in the Irgun until his capture by the British. He was held in various detention camps until 1948, when he escaped, arriving in Israel on the day statehood was declared. At Begin’s request, Meridor assumed responsibility for the integration of the Irgun into the Israel Defense Force. Meridor was elected to the Knesset, serving in the First to the Sixth, and the Tenth Knesset. In 1981 he was appointed minister of economics and planning. MESSIAH: From the Hebrew word mashiah, meaning “anointed, blessed.” In the Jewish religion this word means God’s envoy on earth, charged with reestablishing universal peace and assuring the resurrection of the dead, still awaited. For Christians this is Christ. SEE ALSO Christianity.

structions that reflect the worldview and political dominance of those who created it in the course of “discovering” and studying the world, which after all is a globe with no central point on its surface. For the Middle East to be “east,” there has to be a (conceptual) center, and that point is Western Europe/North America. The more common term was formerly “Near East” (as distinct from “Far East”), obviously in relation to Europe. The term “Middle East” arose in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century and is now, reflecting the balance of power, the dominant one in the (so-called) West.

MIDDLE EAST DEFENSE ORGANIZATION (MEDO): An international military alliance created in 1950 and comprised of the United States, Britain, France, and Turkey. It eventually failed because of the refusal of Egypt to join. MEDO was a predecessor of the Baghdad Pact. SEE ALSO Baghdad Pact. MIDDLE EAST TREATY ORGANIZATION SEE

Baghdad Pact.

MIFLAGAH DATIT LE’UMIT SEE

National Religious Party.

MIFLAGAH KOMUNISTIT YISRAELIT SEE

Israel Communist Party.

MIFLEGET HA-AVODAH SEE

Israel Labor Party.

MIFLEGET POEALEI ERETZ YISRAEL SEE

MAPAI.

MIFLEGET POEALIM MEDUHEDET METO SEE

SEE

MAPAM.

Baghdad Pact.

MILHEMET HOVA: Hebrew word used in the Jewish MIDDLE EAST: A standard Western term for the area of West Asia and North Africa. The definition is elastic, depending on who is speaking, for what purpose, and whether the context is primarily geographical, political, or cultural. It usually includes the area from Turkey to Yemen, and from Iraq to Egypt. It may also include Iran, the states of North Africa to Morocco, and sometimes Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti. “Middle East,” “Near East,” and “Far East” are not neutral geographical terms, like “West Asia” or “East Asia.” They are historical con-

306

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

religion to designate a “war imposed by an aggressor.”

MILHEMET MITZVAH: Hebrew word, used to designate a “Holy War, obligatory war,” according to the Torah.

MILLET: Turkish word designating non-Muslim religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, officially recognized as having their own hierarchies and legal codes. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MISH E AL, SHARIF ALI

SEE ALSO

Ottomans.

MILO, RONI (1949– ): Israeli politician, minister for regional cooperation (2001–2003). Born in Israel, Roni Milo holds a law degree from Tel Aviv University. The former mayor of Tel Aviv, Milo was a member of the Knesset beginning 1977, serving on various committees, including economics, finance, and foreign affairs and defense. From 1988 until March 1990 he served as minister of the environment, and from March to June 1990 as minister of labor and social welfare. Milo was minister of police from June 1990 until 1992, and from August 2000 to January 2001 he served as minister of health. In August 2001 Milo was appointed minister for regional cooperation. In 2003, having left the Center Party to return to the Likud, he failed to make it into the Knesset on the Likud list. Milo was offered the appointment of Israeli ambassador to London in 2004, which he turned down to opt for a career in business. SEE ALSO Knesset; Likud.

MIERAJ SEE

MIERIJ SEE

IsraD.

IsraD.

MIRO, MUHAMMAD MUSTAFA: Syrian political figure, born in 1941 at Tel Amnin. With a degree in Arab literature and human sciences from the University of Erevan (Armenia), Miro began a teaching career at the end of the 1960s. In 1966, he joined the BaEth Party. In 1971 he was elected vice president of the teachers’ union, then, in 1974, assistant secretary general of the Syrian Arab teachers’ union, becoming its vice president four years later. During this period, he was also editor-in-chief of the review, The Teacher’s Voice. Between 1980 and the beginning of 2000, he was successively governor of DarDa (1980–1986), al-Hasakah (1986–1993), and Aleppo (1993–2000). On 7 March 2000, he was named prime minister, replacing Mahmud ZoEbi, accused of corruption. At this time, he was considered a technocrat, and to be in favor of reforming the Syrian civil service. On the following 18 June, after the death of the president, Hafiz al-Asad, he was elected to the command committee of the BaEth, highest in the hierarchy of the party, while remaining at the head of the government. On 11 August 2001, in the framework of a rapprochement of Syria with its neighbors, undertaken by the new president, Bashshar al-Asad, he traveled D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

to Baghdad and, in November, to Tehran. On 13 December 2001, at the request of the new Syrian president, he formed a new government, in which changes were made particularly in the economic and social ministries. On 10 September 2003, Miro and his cabinet resigned. The president appointed Muhammad Naji al-Utri, with a mandate to speed the pace of reform. SEE ALSO

BaEth.

Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-;

MISHEAL, SHARIF ALI (Abbas Zaki): Palestinian political figure, born in 1943 in the West Bank. After joining Fatah early in the 1960s, MishEal, better known under the pseudonym of Abbas Zaki, became an ardent defender of the Palestinian cause. In 1972, he was arrested by Jordanian authorities for his activism, then expelled to Syria. In 1982, Yasir Arafat, to whom he had drawn close, named him alFatah representative to Yemen. Four years later, forced to leave Aden, he went to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunis, where he became an assistant to Mahmud Abbas, head of the department of national affairs. In 1987 he was in a Palestinian delegation that went to China on an official visit. In August 1989, when the first Intifada was intensifying in the Occupied Territories, he was elected to the central committee of al-Fatah, and he headed the “committee to oversee the uprising in the West Bank,” at the same time as he was in charge of affairs in the Occupied Territories on behalf of the executive committee. That year, he accompanied Arafat on many foreign trips. In January 1990, he was in Jordan, in charge of restarting the Palestinian-Jordanian negotiations. In November 1991, in the framework of the Israeli-Arab peace process, started at the Madrid Conference, he went to Damascus to meet with leaders of the Palestinian opposition, members of the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF). In June 1993, at the meeting of the central committee of al-Fatah, he joined with those who criticized the way Arafat was leading the movement. In September, he came out against the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles signed in Washington that month. In February 1996, he was elected a deputy to the new Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), within which he became president of the commission on education. In 2004 he was head of the International Department of al-Fatah. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Intifada (1987–1993); Oslo Accords;

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

307

MISHMAR HA-GVUL

Palestinian Legislative Council; Palestinian National Salvation Front; West Bank.

MISHMAR

HA-GVUL (MAGAV): The Israeli frontier guard, a branch of the Israel National Police deployed throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories. Its organization is similar to that of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and when necessary it is used to augment the IDF; eighteen-year-old recruits can choose the MAGAV for their mandatory service. Its members receive combat training as well as training in counterterrorism, crowd control, and police work. They serve mainly in rural areas, in Arab villages and towns, near the border and at the West Bank. MAGAV has an excellent record of thwarting terrorist attacks. SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force; West Bank.

MISHNA (“teaching,” in Hebrew): This word designates the traditional teaching of the Jewish religious law by written transmission, as opposed to the Midrash, which involves the interpretation of texts. It designates also the first part of the Talmud, composed by Juda Hanassi (Ha Nassi) in the second century. The latter eschewed apocalyptic traditions to concentrate only on teachings relative to the commandments of the Torah. The Mishna is divided into six “orders” (sedarim), or treatises, relating to different subjects of religious law. SEE ALSO Talmud.

the Common Foreign and Security Policy, European Union. The report called for an immediate and unconditional halt to the violence and the establishment of a six-week cooling-off period, followed by confidence-building measures leading to resumption of negotiations in view of a final resolution of the status of the Palestinian territories. It stated, “The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Initifada. But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen.” An unconditional cease-fire being unobtainable, the U.S. CIA director, George Tenet, tried to arrange a cease-fire for 13 June, which would serve as a week’s test before the Mitchell Report was put into effect. The Tenet Plan was based on two principles: the immediate resumption of security cooperation and withdrawal of Israeli forces to the positions they occupied on 27 September 2000. At the insistence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the plan assumed a period of seven days without attacks as a condition for its initiation; and since no such period occurred, neither the plan nor the Mitchell Report recommendations could be implemented. By March 2002, when Sharon agreed to forego the week of quiet, Israeli forces had invaded Palestinian territories and the Palestinians were no longer willing to negotiate. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Sharm al-Shaykh Summit.

MITHAQ AL-WATANI AL-FILASTINI, SEE

MITCHELL COMMISSION SEE

Mitchell Report.

MITCHELL PLAN SEE

Mitchell Report.

MITCHELL REPORT: Report submitted in May 2001 by the Sharm al-Shaykh Fact-Finding Committee headed by U.S. envoy George Mitchell, which was dispatched to Israel and the Palestinian territories in late 2000 to look into the causes of the al-Aqsa Intifada. This mission’s aim was to assess security issues in the Palestinian territories, as had been arranged at the Sharm al-Shaykh Summit of 16–17 October 2000. In addition to Mitchell, a former U.S. senator who was a member of the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL), the committee included Suleyman Demirel, ninth president of the Republic of Turkey; Thorbjoern Jagland, minister of foreign affairs of Norway; Warren B. Rudman, former U.S. senator; and Javier Solana, high european representative for

308

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

AL-

Palestine National Charter.

MIZRACHI (Merkaz Ruchani; spiritual center, in Hebrew): Religious current that surfaced in 1902 in the World Zionist Organization. Twenty years later, this movement gave rise to the worker’s party, Ha-Po’el ha-Mizrachi. In 1935, the Mizrachi faction became a major influence in the MAPAI labor party. In 1956 the Mizrachi party merged with other religious Zionist groups to form the National Religious Party (NRP) or Mafdal. Today Mizrachi is a worldwide ideological and educational movement that works to strengthen religious Zionist values both in Israel and among Jewish communities in the diaspora. The Mizrachi youth movement, BDnai Akiva, is the largest youth group in Israel. SEE ALSO Ha-Poel ha-Mizrachi; MAPAI; National Religious Party; World Zionist Organization. MIZRAHI (mizrahi, pl. mizrahim) Hebrew word meaning “oriental(s),” “easterner(s),” that is to say, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MOLEDET

Jews from Arab or Muslim countries who have settled in Israel. SEE ALSO Sephardim.

MOABITES: Nomadic people who settled to the east of the Dead Sea in Moab, in what is now Transjordan, toward the thirteenth century B.C.E. The Moab king feared the invasion of his country by the Hebrews. When the tribes of Israel came from Sinai toward the land of Canaan they circumvented this territory, because of their respect for the determination of its inhabitants to defend themselves. According to the Bible, Moab is the son of Lot. SEE ALSO Canaan; Hebrew. MODIEIN: (“information, intelligence,” in Hebrew). Word used to designate Israeli military intelligence, in general.

MOGANNAM, MATIEL: Palestinian feminist (c.1900– 1992), born in Lebanon, raised in the United States. She married Mogannam Ilyas Mogannam, a native of Jerusalem who had emigrated to the United States, and returned with him to Jerusalem in the 1920s. She became active in the Palestinian women’s movement and was a founder and officer of both the Arab Women’s Executive (AWE) and the Arab Women’s Association (AWA) in 1929. These groups were begun in the wake of the Western Wall riots and were nationalist as well as feminist organizations. Their primary purposes were to promote the education of girls and the social and economic status of women, but they actively protested the British Mandate and promoted support for the Palestinian national cause. During a demonstration sponsored by the Arab Women’s Association in 1933, Matiel Mogannam, a Christian, spoke publicly at the Dome of the Rock, warning of the danger to Palestinians of Zionist immigration. During the 1936–1939 revolt, the AWA provided support for the rebels and aided prisoners. Mogannam was the author of The Arab Woman and the Palestine Problem, published in 1937 in London, and of numerous articles in the Palestinian press. She died in the United States.

MOGANNAM, MOGANNAM ILYAS: Palestinian Christian lawyer and political activist. Raised in Jerusalem, he immigrated to the United States before World War I and studied law. Some time in the early 1920s he married Matiel Mogannam and returned with her to Jerusalem (and in 1938 to Ramallah). Mogannam practiced law and was a founding member and offiD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

cer of the National Defense Party, a conservative nationalist group favoring compromise with the Zionists and the British, supported by middle-class elites and associated with the Nashashibi family (in opposition to the Palestine Arab Party, equally conservative but opposed to compromise, associated with the rival Husayni family). As a law student, Ahmad Shuqayri, the first head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), worked in Mogannam’s office. The National Defense Party was defunct by 1941, and Mogannam died in 1945. SEE ALSO Mogannam, Matiel; Palestine Liberation Organization.

MOJHAHED: ShiEite religious figure, authorized to deliver fatwas. MOKED: A short-lived Israeli political entity. In the Knesset elections of 1973, the two Israeli communist parties, RAKAH (Reshima Komunistit Hadashah) and MAKI (Miflagah Komunistit Yisraelit), formed a joint electoral list as Moked (“Focus”), winning five seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Israel Communist Party; RAKAH.

MOLEDET (Homeland, in Hebrew): Israeli political party of the far right, created in 1988 by the former general Rehavam ZeDevi, when the Intifada was in its early stages in the Occupied Territories. The Moledet, which upholds the ideology of “Greater Israel,” preaches the “transfer” of the Arab population of the Occupied Territories to other Arab countries. In the Knesset elections of June 1988, this party obtained two seats, filled by Rehavam ZeDevi and YaDir Shprinzak. The following November, ZeDevi was named minister without portfolio in the government of Yitzhak Shamir. Between 1989 and 1990, Moledet reproached the Israeli government for policies that were “too soft” in the Palestinian territories. In February 1992, for the next Knesset elections, the party allied with ha-Tehiyah. As a result of the ballot, in spite of the defeat of the Israeli right, Moledet strengthened its position, obtaining one more seat than it had in 1988, while ha-Tehiyah disappeared from the political arena altogether. The three Moledet MKs were Rehavam ZeDevi, Rabbi Joseph Bagad, and Shaul Gutman. Between November 1995 and April 1996, Moledet was weakened by the departure of Gutman and Bagad, who, each in his turn, created their own groups: Yemin Israel and Moreshet Avot, respectively. For the next Knesset elections Moledet teamed up with the extremist movement Zu Artzenu to con-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

309

MORASHAH PARTY

stitute a common list. On 30 May 1996, as a result of the Knesset elections, Moledet obtained two seats (ZeDevi, head of Moledet, and Rabbi Benyamin Alon, leader of Zu Artzenu). From 1997 on, the party started recruiting many of its cadres from the ranks of the Russian immigrants, disappointed in Israeli society, where they have problems fitting in. In February 1999, for the general elections of the following May, Moledet decided to join with the extreme right organization, Tekumah, whose key figure was Benny Begin, so as to constitute a common list, the “National Union.” As a result of the ballot of 17 May, which saw the victory of the leader of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, the National Union obtained four seats in the Knesset. In March 2001, when Ariel Sharon, leader of Likud, was elected prime minister, Rehavam ZeDevi was named minister of tourism in the new government. On 17 October, following, while the Intifada was raging in the Palestinian territories, ZeDevi was assassinated by a commando of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Barak, Ehud; Greater Israel; Ha-Tehiyah; Intifada (1987– 1993); Knesset; Likud; Shamir, Yitzhak; Tekuhmah Party; Yemin Israel; ZeDevi, Rehavam; Zu Artzenu.

ter of transport and deputy prime minister. He resigned after accusations of sexual assault. In March 2001 he was convicted of sexually assaulting and harassing two women and was given an eighteenmonth suspended sentence. SEE ALSO Center Party.

MORESHET AVOT (Ancestral patrimony, in Hebrew): Small Israeli religious political party, created in April 1996 by Rabbi Joseph Bagad, a dissident of Moledet, in anticipation of the May Knesset elections. Rabbi Bagad, a member of the Knesset since 1992 and considered to be a bit eccentric by many members of the Knesset, withdrew his candidacy a few days before the elections; but he ran again in 1999, gaining less than 1 percent of the vote. In 2003 the party again dropped out just before the elections. SEE ALSO Knesset; Moledet. MORIAH: Name of a small ultra-Orthodox Israeli party, created in 1990 by Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz-Haim, a dissident from SHAS. For the Knesset elections of June 1992, this party joined with the electoral bloc of United Torah Judaism and won a seat in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Knesset; SHAS; United Torah Judaism Party.

MORASHAH PARTY (Hebrew, “heritage”): Name of an Israeli electoral alliance between the Zionist religious right and the PoEalei Agudat Israel. Under the leadership of Rabbi Chaim Druckman, it broke away from the National Religious Party in 1984; in 1986 it was reincorporated into that party. SEE ALSO PoEalei Agudat Israel.

MORDECHAI, YITZHAK (1944–): Israeli politician, minister of defense (1996–1999). Yitzhak Mordechai was born in Iraq in 1944. He immigrated to Israel with his family at the age of five. Mordechai received a master’s degree in political science from Haifa University. He served in the Israel Defense Forces for thirty-three years, retiring in 1995 with the rank of major general. Upon his retirement, he joined the Likud Party and was elected to the Knesset in May 1996. Within a month, he was appointed minister of defense, holding that position until early 1999, when he was fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mordechai joined a new Center Party and became its candidate for prime minister in the May 1999 elections, but withdrew just before the election. He was reelected to the Knesset in May 1999 as head of the Center Party. In July of that year, the new prime minister, Ehud Barak, appointed Mordechai minis-

310

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

MORIAH, MOUNT: Biblical name of a hill in Jerusalem, which, by tradition, is the place where Abraham prepared Isaac for sacrifice on a rock. The hill is known to Jews as the Temple Mount. At the top of the hill is Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), an enclosure containing the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, enclosing Abraham’s rock, which Muslims also believe is the place to which the Night Journey of the prophet Muhammad brought him, and from which he was taken to receive a message from God. It is the third holiest site in Islam. The Dome of the Rock, which replaced the earlier Mosque of Omar, is built upon what is said to be the site of the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple, or Temple of Herod, of which the Western Wall, or Kotel, is believed by pious Jews to be the remnant. SEE ALSO Abraham; Aqsa, al-; Haram al-Sharif; Western Wall Disturbances. MORISCOS: Spanish Muslims who converted to Christianity. SEE ALSO Christianity. MORRISON-GRADY PLAN: An Anglo-American proposal made in July 1946 to deal with the post–World T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MOSES

War II problem of Jewish refugees needing to immigrate to Palestine, following upon the report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. A commission headed by Herbert Morrison, representing Britain’s Labour government, and Henry Grady, representing the United States, drew up a report that called for the partition of Palestine into semiautonomous Arab and Jewish regions, leaving the British high commissioner in charge of defense, foreign relations, customs, and immigration. This plan was rejected by both Arabs and Jews because it would have meant an increase in British control.

MOSAIC LAW: The Law promulgated by Moses, the Torah.

MOSES (Musa, in Arabic; Moshe, in Hebrew): Hebrew prophet. His existence has been reported in three sources, corresponding to different oral traditions: the elohist tradition (the Eternal is Elohim), the Yahvist tradition (God is Yahweh), and the sacerdotal tradition of the Jewish priests. Moses is considered as the unifier of and lawgiver to the Jewish people, leading them to adopt monotheism and the worship of Yahweh, and the author of the basic elements of the Torah. According to Biblical tradition, Moses, a descendent of Jacob, great-great grandson of Abraham, was born in Egypt around 1300 B.C.E. His father, Aram, was a son of Levi, himself the third son of Jacob. Some scholars believe Moses was the illegitimate son of the pharaoh and a young Jewish girl, Yokebed. To erase the evidence of this, pharaoh ordered all newborn Hebrew males to be put to death. But the child escaped from this fate, due to the intervention of Bitya, a daughter of pharaoh, who then decided to oversee his education. Come of age, Moses entered the court of pharaoh, where he became Mosi (Moses). Around the age of forty, for various reasons, obliged to become an exile, Moses sought refuge in the land of Midian, a region ruled by Jethro, situated east of Sinai. Become a shepherd, Moses married one of the daughters of Jethro, Zipporah, with whom he had two sons, Gershom and Eliezer. One day, when he was watching over his flock at the foot of Mount Horeb (Mount Sinai), he noticed a bush in flames, but which was not being consumed, from which a supernatural voice arose, demanding that his people be led out of Egypt. Moses asked what name he should cite to motivate the Israelites to leave the land of pharaoh. The voice replied to him “Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I am he who is).” The third person form of this was “Yahweh” (He is). D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Accompanied by his brother, Aaron, Moses returned to Egypt to try to convince the Israelites to leave this country for the Promised Land, Canaan, and to persuade pharaoh (Rameses II) to allow the Hebrews to leave. The latter denied the request and even added to the backbreaking labor required of the community. A little later, the kingdom of pharaoh was assailed by a series of catastrophes (ten plagues). When darkness covered the land (ninth plague), Moses renewed his demand to pharaoh, who still refused. Then Moses announced that soon “all the firstborn would die in the land of Egypt.” To protect themselves against this tenth plague, Moses asked the Jews to sacrifice a lamb and to sprinkle blood on their doors; “so, Yahweh, passing by, will recognize his own and spare the children of Israel.” (This “passage” of Yahweh, preceded by a special meal, was commemorated later on as the Jewish Passover or Pesach.) After the death of a number of firstborns, pharaoh decided to let the Jews leave Egypt. On 15 Nissan, around 1250 B.C.E., the Hebrew people set out on an exodus through the Sinai desert. One day, when his people, confronted by famine and the attacks of the Amalekites, began to doubt the existence of God and the Promised Land, Moses climbed to the top of Mount Sinai, to reflect and try to find a solution. There, after a retreat of forty days (a number that had remained symbolic), Yahweh appeared to him for the second time and transmitted the Table of the Law, inscribed in his own hand. This was an ensemble of Ten Commandments that his people were obliged to obey, renewing thereby the covenant that had passed between God and Abraham a few centuries earlier. Returning to his people, he noticed that the latter had lost their faith, and were worshipping a golden calf, a survival of the Egyptian cult of the bull, Apis. Moses broke the holy Tables. At a loss for what to do, he renewed his ties with the clan of Levites. Many of those close to him implored him to return to Yahweh to ask his forgiveness. After having ascended again to the top of Mount Sinai, Moses, “his face shining,” returned with new Tables of the Law on which he himself had engraved the Ten Commandments previously inscribed by Yahweh. He proclaimed the judgment of Yahweh to his people: those who had betrayed him will not come into the Promised Land, only their children will be allowed in. Thereupon, according to Biblical texts, the Hebrews were condemned to wander for forty years, before coming within sight of the land of Canaan. On the twelfth day of the seventh month of the fortieth (symbolic number) year of wandering, having come to Mount Nebo, from which he saw Jericho, Moses showed his people “the land of milk and

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

311

MOSHAV

MOSES. THIS MANUSCRIPT ILLUMINATION, FROM A TENTH-CENTURY BIBLE, DEPICTS A KEY MOMENT FROM THE BOOK OF EXODUS: “MOSES RELEASING THE WATERS OF THE RED SEA AFTER SAFE PASSAGE OF HIS PEOPLE.” THE HEBREW PROPHET IS CONSIDERED THE UNIFIER AND LAWGIVER OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE, THE LEADER WHO BROUGHT THEM OUT OF EGYPT TO THE PROMISED LAND. (© Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis)

honey,” promised by Yahweh. A few days later, after having transferred his power to Joshua, Moses died on Mount Nebo, on the threshold of the Promised Land. According to some scholars, the story of Moses might have been based on Mesopotamian legends. For example, the mystery that surrounds his birth and youth is very similar to the story of Sargon of Akkad, founder of Babylon (twenty-third century B.C.E.). Many resemblances exist between the story of Abraham and that of Moses; the two personages could even have been one. On the other hand, if Moses advocated monotheism, this could be because he revived the idea of a single god, imposed by Pharaoh Amenophis IV (1350–1334 B.C.E.), who supplanted the principal Egyptian divinity, Amon-Re, in favor of Aton, the only god, symbolized by a solar disc. Many Jews having adhered to this new religion,

312

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

in spite of the interdiction of the cult of Aton after the death of Amenophis, it is possible that it was maintained in the Jewish community. Finally, an error in translation of Saint Jerome, author of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible, led to an unfortunate artistic interpretation of the personage of Moses, which held sway for a period of ten centuries: Jerome confused the Hebrew word for the “shining” of the face of Moses, on his descent from Sinai, with another word meaning “horns,” with the result that statues and paintings of Moses were equipped with horns, an attribute possessed by some pagan divinities! SEE ALSO Abraham; Canaan; Covenant; Jacob (Biblical); Jericho; Nissan.

MOSHAV (moshav; pl. moshavim): Jewish community village, where each household is responsible for its T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MOSQUE

MOSQUE. THE MOST FAMOUS MUSLIM PLACE OF WORSHIP IS THE DOME OF THE ROCK IN JERUSALEM, COMPLETED IN 691 ON THE TRADITIONAL PROPHET MUHAMMAD’S ASCENSION TO HEAVEN. (© Scala/Art Resource, New York)

SITE OF THE

farm, but the land belongs to the state. The members of the moshav are committed to help each other mutually, while the product of each farm is sold by the central organization of the village, which in return, supplies the equipment and technology necessary for production.

MOSHAV SHITOUFI: A variant of the moshav, based on a collective property and economy, like those of the kibbutz, with the difference that each household manages its own family budget. SEE ALSO Kibbutz; Moshav. MOSHIACH (Mashiah): Hebrew and Yiddish word designating the messenger of God, announced by the sacred texts of the Hebraic law. Equivalent to the Mahdi for Muslims (and the ShiEite Hidden Imam), D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

or the Messiah for Christians. Whereas Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah already come, Jews are still awaiting the coming of their Messiah. Some members of the Lubavitch sect, however, believe that the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was the Moshiach. SEE ALSO Hidden Imam; Lubavitcher Hasidim; Mahdi; Messiah.

MOSQUE: The mosque is a place of worship where Muslims gather to pray. The building is composed of a prayer hall where the mihrab and the minbar are located, very often including a closed court, in the middle of which is found a fountain for ablutions (mida). Mosques often have a minaret (from the Arabic manara), from which the call to prayer is made. SEE ALSO Minbar.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

313

MOSSAD

MOSSAD (Mossad Le Biyyun U-le-Tafkidim Meyuhadim; Institute for Espionage and Special Tasks, in Hebrew): Founded in 1951, during the regime of David Ben-Gurion, Mossad is the organization charged with the external security of the State of Israel. This service has been known for many operations involving assassination, in particular those responsible for the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972. Despite claims as “the best intelligence service in the world,” Mossad has known many reversals. If it has shown itself capable of realizing audacious operations, the incompetence of some of its members has been equally notable, and it has gone through periods of obvious internal dysfunctionality. Along with its failure to foresee the 1973 Arab-Israel War, between 1984 and 1989 Mossad endured the fiasco of the Jonathan Pollard affair and found itself implicated in the U.S. Irangate scandal. At the end of 1997, an internal report alluded to the lack of serious preparation for certain operations. Additionally, there was a series of failures that led to the resignation, in February 1998, of its director, Dani Yatom, replaced by two directors, charged with reforming the service. The successive heads of Mossad have been: Reuven Shiloah (1951–1953), Isser Harel (1953–1963), Meir Amit (1963–1968), Zvi Zamir (1968–1974), Yitzhak Hofi (1974–1982), Nahum Admoni (1983–1990), Shabtai Shavit (1990– 1996), Dani Yatom (1996–1998), Ephraim Halevy and Amiram Levine (1998–2002), and Meir Dagan (2002–). The Mossad has been criticized for failing to anticipate the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. At the same time, senior Mossad officials have been increasingly involved in the peace process. MOSSAD L’ALIYAH BETH “Institution for Immigration B” (so-called illegal immigration): Service in charge of organizing illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine during the British Mandate. SEE ALSO British Mandate. MOULID: An Arabic word referring to the popular celebrations surrounding the commemoration of the birthdays of any Muslim holy men and women. Moulid al-Nabi is a Muslim religious holiday commemorating the birth of the prophet Muhammad. SEE ALSO Muhammad.

MOUSA, AMR MUHAMMAD (1936–): Egyptian political figure, born in October 1936, in Cairo. With de-

314

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

grees in law from universities in Cairo and Paris, Amr Mousa joined the Egyptian foreign ministry in 1958. Twenty years later, at the ministry of foreign affairs, he participated in the Camp David negotiations with Israel. In November 1983, a member of the Egyptian delegation, he became its interim leader, representing his country at the UN. Having returned to Egypt, he rejoined the department of international organizations. In 1987, he was named Egyptian ambassador to India. Three years later, in January 1990, he became permanent representative of Egypt at the UN. While at the United Nations, he invited the State of Israel to join the treaty of nonproliferation (TNP) of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. In March 1991, he participated in activities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). On the following 20 May, he became the Egyptian foreign minister, replacing Esmat Abdul Meguid, who had been named secretary general of the Arab League. As soon as he entered office, Amr Mousa strove to have his country once more play a central role in the IsraeliArab peace process. In November 1991, he participated in the Middle East peace conference, which was held in Madrid. In February 1993, with the Djibouti minister, Abdu Bolok Abdu, he co-presided the joint Egyptian-Djibouti commission, which dealt with the Somali problem, among others. During the following April, he made many attempts to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which had been adjourned four months earlier, following the expulsion to Lebanon of 415 Palestinians, presumed fundamentalists. Between 1994 and 1995, he campaigned against the Israeli nuclear program, as well as against the proliferation of nuclear arms to certain countries in the Middle East that were starting to want them. On 21 May 1995, he was present in Paris when an accord on arbitrage was signed, in the context of the dispute between Yemen and Eritrea on the Hanish Islands Archipelago in the Red Sea, in which his role as a negotiator was significant. In December 1996, at the Lisbon conference, he spoke in favor of strengthening cooperation between the European Organization for Security and Cooperation (EOSC) and the five Mediterranean countries that were considered as “partners” of the EOSC: Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In November 1997, he was an intermediary in the negotiations between diverse Somali factions, which led to a reconciliation between the parties concerned, signed on 22 December. In February 1998, he became the architect of a rapprochement between Egypt and Iran. During the following October, he served as a mediator in the dispute between Syria and Turkey, conT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MOVEMENT OF THE DISINHERITED

cerning Syrian support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). His intervention enabled the two parties to come to an agreement.

MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE

On 27 July 1988, he met in Paris with his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, to discuss possible ways of restarting the Middle East peace process, in particular, the Franco-Egyptian idea of an international conference, which Presidents Mubarak and Chirac had recommended the preceding May. On 19 August 2000, following the failure of the July IsraeliPalestinian summit of Camp David, he received the American envoy, Dennis Ross, in an attempt to oversee the continuing of negotiations toward a final accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians. On 24 March 2001, after ten years at the head of Egyptian diplomacy, Amr Mousa was elected unanimously as secretary general of the Arab League, succeeding his predecessor in the Egyptian foreign ministry, Esmat Abdul Meguid.

MOVEMENT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND PEACE: Israeli political entity, dissident from the Labor Party, founded in 1973 by Shulamit Aloni, Raanan Cohen, and Yossi Sarid. Favoring peace with Arab countries, the Movement for Civil Rights and Peace (RATZ) upheld human rights, and favored the separation of state and religion. In the elections of 1973, it obtained three seats in the Knesset. In June 1974, Aloni joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin as minister without portfolio. In the Knesset elections of 1977 to 1981, RATZ won only one seat, filled by Aloni. Progressively the leader of RATZ succeeded in becoming visible in the Israeli political arena and, as a result of the elections of 1988, her party captured five deputy seats. In 1992, the leadership of RATZ decided to merge with the Shinui Party and MAPAM, to create a new Parliamentary bloc of the center left, the Meretz Party, which obtained twelve seats in the next Knesset elections (June 1992). The two main figures in RATZ joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin: Aloni (who became minister of education) and Sarid (minister of the environment). The stalling of the peace process with the Palestinians and personal conflict between Aloni and Sarid led to a weakening of RATZ, while also prompting Aloni to resign. Sarid succeeded her as the head of the party. In August 1999, the latter was named minister of education in the Barak government, while Ranaan Cohen was given the portfolio of commerce and industry. SEE ALSO MAPAM; Meretz Party; Shinui Party.

As soon as he assumed his new functions, Amr Mousa put into effect a plan for restructuring the organization, the principal innovation consisting in the establishment of positions of League general commissioners of important areas. These posts have been given to influential personalities of the Arab world. In July, Hanan Ashrawi, an important Palestinian political figure, became commissioner for information. The following month, the former Jordanian prime minister, Taher al-Masri, was named commissioner for civil society affairs, and the former Egyptian minister of culture, Ahmed Kamal Abul Magd, became commissioner for “dialogue among civilizations.” In August, Mousa called on the world conference against racism, meeting in South Africa, to condemn the policies of Israel toward the Palestinians. In late May 2004, while Israeli forces were attacking the Rafah Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, in a show of force involving rocket attacks on civilian neighborhoods and mass house demolitions, the Arab League held a summit meeting in Tunis. It was to have been held earlier but had been postponed over disgreements about the issues of democratic reform on the agenda. Some governments skipped the meeting. Although individual governments and politicians had condemned Israel’s actions and American support for them, the League summit generally avoided the subject. Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Camp David Accords; Gaza Strip; Gulf Cooperation Council; League of Arab States; Ross, Dennis B. SEE ALSO

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

Shinui Party.

MOVEMENT FOR THE TRADITION OF ISRAEL SEE

TAMI.

MOVEMENT FOR THE ZIONIST RENAISSANCE SEE

Tzomet Party.

OF THE DISINHERITED: Lebanese ShiEite organization, created in March 1974 by the Imam Musa al-Sadr, so as to exert pressure on the Lebanese regime to favor the economic development of South Lebanon and the Baqaa Valley, inhabited by a majority of ShiEa. This movement is a branch of the Foundation of the Disinherited (Mustadafin), created in Iran in 1971. Confronted by the lack of responsiveness of the Lebanese government and the degradation of the situation in South Lebanon, the leaders of the movement, in July 1975, decided on armed struggle and created AMAL, the Lebanese Resistance Brigade.

MOVEMENT

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

315

MUBARAK, HUSNI

SEE ALSO

AMAL; South Lebanon.

MUBARAK, HUSNI (1928–): Egyptian military and political figure, born in May 1928 at Kafr al-Musilha. Having chosen a military career, Husni Mubarak graduated with a degree from the Egyptian Military Academy in 1949, then from the Air Force Academy the following year, obtaining his fighter pilot’s credentials. From 1952 to 1957 he was an instructor in the Air Force Academy. Between 1960 and 1964, he studied in the Soviet Union, including courses on piloting heavy bombers, while taking general staff training. In November 1967, he became commandant of the Egyptian Air Force Academy. On 23 June 1969, promoted general, he was named chief of staff of the Air Force, a post he kept until 1971, when he became commander in chief of the Air Force and vice minister of defense. On 27 April 1972, he accompanied the new Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, to Moscow, where they negotiated an agreement for the Soviet Union to supply arms to Egypt. Improvements he made in the Egyptian Air Force allowed the latter to demonstrate a certain measure of efficacy in the 1973 Arab-Israel War. He was promoted air marshal on 19 February 1974, and Sadat named him vice president of the Egyptian state on 15 April, replacing Hussein Shafi. From then on, Mubarak filled the same role for Sadat that the latter had for Gamal Abdel Nasser. As soon as he was appointed, Mubarak began taking an active part in Egyptian political life, in particular in the domains of defense, and foreign relations, which necessitated much travel. In April 1976, shortly after the abrogation of the Egypt-Soviet friendship treaty, he went to Beijing, where he signed a protocol of a military accord with China. In the following October, he was confirmed in his post of vice president. In 1977, when the Egyptian president took the initiative of starting a dialogue with Israel, he defended Sadat to Arab countries. On 14 October 1981, following the assassination of Sadat, Mubarak became president. He affirmed that he would continue the policies of his predecessor at a time when Egypt was isolated from the Arab world, following the peace accord signed with Israel. Internally, Egypt was going through a difficult period economically, and in the domain of security, Islamist groups had proved, with the assassination of President Sadat, their determination and capacity to strike at the head of the state. In January 1982, he was named secretary general of the National Democratic Party (NDP). In March 1983, in the corridors of the seventh summit

316

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

HUSNI MUBARAK. THE COMMANDER OF THE EGYPTIAN ARMY AIR FORCE, MUBARAK BECAME VICE PRESIDENT OF EGYPT IN 1976 AND THEN PRESIDENT AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF ANWAR AL-SADAT FIVE YEARS LATER. SINCE THEN, HE HAS ENCOURAGED THE ISRAELI-ARAB PEACE PROCESS AND MAINTAINED TIES WITH THE UNITED STATES, SUPPORTING ITS ACTIONS IN AFGHANISTAN TO COMBAT TERRORISM. (AP/Wide World Photos)

of nonaligned countries, held at New Delhi, he spoke with many leaders of Arab countries. These were the first meetings between an Egyptian head of state and Arab leaders since the break in relations between Egypt and the Arab states, provoked by the IsraeliEgyptian peace accords. Reelected president of the Republic of Egypt on 5 November 1987, Mubarak proposed a five-point plan on 22 January 1988 for starting a process of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In February 1989, under his leadership, Egypt joined the Arab Cooperation Council, with Jordan, Iraq, and Yemen. At the time of the Gulf crisis, in August 1990, Egypt backed the Western coalition against Iraq. On 31 October, the headquarters of the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MUBARAK, HUSNI

Arab League returned to Cairo, thereby allowing the Egyptian president to assert the hegemony of his country over this organization. Thereafter, in whatever concerned the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he maintained his leadership of the Arab camp that was supporting the Palestinian cause. On 15 May 1991, his foreign minister, Ismat Abdul Meguid, was elected secretary general of the Arab League, which strengthened the role of Egypt and, by the same token, that of the Egyptian president, in the Arab world. Concurrently, Mubarak launched an economic program meant to reduce inflation and his country’s budget deficit, while opening the way to privatization. On 21 July 1992, he received the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had just come to power in Israel. In April 1993, he participated in many meetings with U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian political figures, in an attempt to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that had been stalled for several months following the expulsion by Israel of 415 Palestinians, presumed Islamists, to Lebanon. On 13 September, at the time of the signature of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, the Egyptian president affirmed his support for this new phase in the global Israeli-Arab peace process. On 4 October 1993, for the third time, Mubarak was reelected president of Egypt. On 2 February 1995, he organized a regional summit, in which the participants were King Hussein of Jordan, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasir Arafat, for the purpose of restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On the following 27 June, he escaped an assassination attempt while on an official visit to Addis Ababa, on the occasion of a summit of the Organization for African Unity (OAU). According to the Egyptian authorities, this attack was carried out by a Sudanese Islamist group. From 13 to 16 March 1996, he presided over the international Summit on Terrorism of Sharm al-Shaykh, which assembled twenty-nine world leaders, of whom twenty were heads of state and government, who had determined to combat terrorism. In the following June, with the advent to power in Israel of the leader of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, leading to a blocking of the peace process and a chill in Israeli-Egyptian relations, Mubarak decided to step up his efforts to try to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

president was tireless in denouncing, before international organizations, the Israeli leader’s evasions. On 4 November, following, he was in Damascus, for talks with the Syrian president. On 17 May 1998, Mubarak was in Paris, where, with President Jacques Chirac, he launched the idea of a conference of countries, “determined to achieve peace” in the Middle East. At the end of April 1999, he led the efforts to mediate the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. On the following 9 July, after Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel, he visited Mubarak, so as to reassure him on the Israeli will to pursue the IsraeliArab peace process to a successful resolution. On 5 September, at Sharm al-Shaykh, along with the U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and the King of Jordan, Abdullah II, the Egyptian president initialed an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Two days later, Mubarak was slightly wounded by an man who attacked him with a knife while he was on an official visit to Port Said. On 26 September, reelected with nearly 94 percent of the ballots cast, he began his fourth presidential mandate, with a majority of Egyptians in favor of his designating a vice president. On 5 October, he appointed a new prime minister, Atef Ebeid, an economist, whose main task would be to lift Egypt to the rank of “middle income countries.” On 19 February 2000, the Egyptian president made a quick trip to Beirut, so as to demonstrate his solidarity with the Lebanese people following Israeli raids that had destroyed several electricity stations. On 25 February, following, he welcomed Pope John Paul on an official visit to Egypt. On 15 November, the National Democratic Party, led by Mubarak, won the legislative elections, owing to the rallying to it of 209 independent deputies (members or otherwise close to the NDP). Thereby, the NDP obtained 388 of the 444 seats in Parliament. However, these elections were marked by the electoral defeat of some prominent figures in the NDP and by the return of the Muslim Brothers to the political arena, with seventeen deputy seats. On the following 21 November, the Egyptian president decided to recall his ambassador from Israel, following raids of the Israeli army on Palestinian territories, where the al-Aqsa Intifada was in full force. Five days later, he received an advisor of the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, with whom he discussed the situation in the Palestinian territories and possible ways of restarting the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

On 3 June, he received the Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, with whom he discussed the new regional situation, then, on 18 July, he met with the new Israeli prime minister, who was visiting Cairo. During the mandate of Netanyahu, the Egyptian

Between 24 and 28 April 2001, the Egyptian president was on a European trip, which took him to Germany, Romania, and Russia. On 13 September, two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States, caught between the U.S.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

317

MUFTI

economic aid necessary to Egypt and public opinion which opposed U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, President Mubarak declared that his country supported the United States in its efforts to combat terrorism, but called for an international conference to deal with the issue. He also called upon the United States to change its policy toward Israel, saying that Israeli occupation is the obstacle to peace. Mubarak strongly opposed the Iraq War of 2003 and predicted that “this war will have horrible consequences. Instead of having one [Osama] bin Ladin, we will have one hundred bin Ladins.” SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; Arab Cooperative Council; Arafat, Yasir; Asad, Hafiz al-; Barak, Ehud; Hussein ibn Talal; League of Arab States; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharm al-Shaykh Summits.

MUFTI (“judge,” in Arabic): Islamic law scholar or jurisconsult who pronounces religious judgments (fatwas). SEE ALSO Fatwa.

MUFTI OF JERUSALEM SEE

Husayni, Hajj Amin al-.

MUHAJIRUN, AL-: Saudi Islamist movement (“Exiles” or “Migrants,” in Arabic) started in 1983 by Shaykh Umar Bakri Muhammad. Based in London, this organization is affiliated with the International Islamic Front (IIF), partially financed by Osama Bin Ladin. Its name is a reference to the early Muslim community that followed the prophet Muhammad into exile at Medina. SEE ALSO Bin Ladin, Osama; International Islamic Front; Muhammad. MUHAMMAD: The prophet (al-Nabi) and founder of Islam. Muhammad (“he who is praised”) ibn AbdDAllah ibn EAbd al-Muttalib al-Hashimi is thought to have been born in September 570 C.E., in Mecca, in Arabia, in the clan of Hashim of the tribe of Quraysh. In fact, his date of birth remains uncertain, situated by historians during the “year of the elephant” between 569 and 571, a period marked by an attack against Mecca led by the Christian Abyssinian viceroy of Yemen, Abraha, whose troops had a few elephants at their disposal. His father died before he was born and his mother died when he was around six. Brought up by his uncle Abu Talib, Muhammad, as a youth, accompanied caravans to Syria, affording

318

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

him the opportunity to meet Jews and Christians, among whom was the monk Bahira, in the city of Basra. The latter has been thought to have seen the future prophet in Muhammad. In 595, Muhammad married a rich widow, Khadija, fifteen years older than he was. In the night of 26 to 27 Ramadan of the year 610 (or 611) he had his first revelations in a cave on Mount Hira, near Mecca. Through the intermediary of the archangel JibraDil (Gabriel), God charged him with transmitting the QurDanic message to all of humanity, a message based on the oneness of God. The archangel asked him to be the prophet of the God of Abraham and of Moses. As soon as he started preaching, Muhammad came up against the hostility of the Quraysh, who were afraid that his words might compromise their commercial relations with the people of Mecca, who were polytheists. This hostility prompted him to emigrate to the oasis of Yathrib, a city with a large Jewish community, in July 622. He made a pact with twelve inhabitants of the city (the Oath of Aqaba), allowing him to benefit from the protection of their clan. This emigration marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar named after the emigration (hijra). It was during this epoch, in 622 or 623, that his “Night Journey” (isra D) to Jerusalem took place, in which he rode, according to QurDanic tradition, on a mare that had a woman’s head and a peacock’s tail. When he arrived in Jerusalem he “ascended to Heaven,” where he had been expected by God, who had a message for him. The relations of the first Muslims with the Meccans worsened, leading to a veritable war between the two communities, following which, on 11 January 630, the followers of Muhammad took control of Mecca, emptying the KaEba of its idols, leaving only the Black Stone in place. Meanwhile, the Muslims also fought with and banished or killed those who betrayed their army in the battles, in particular many members of the Jewish tribes of Yathrib (renamed Madinat al-Nabi, the “City of the Prophet,” or Medina). At Medina, he founded the first Islamic city-state and the first Islamic constitution. The house of the prophet Muhammad in Medina became the first mosque, and Bilal, an emancipated black slave, was charged with calling the Muslims to prayer. On 7 March 624, the Battle of Badr, south of Medina, marked for Muslims the end of pagan Arabia. The prophet Muhammad remained monogamous until the death of Khadija, following which he married, successively, Sauda, A’sha, Hafsa, Zaynab bint Khuzayma, Umm Salama, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Juwayriya, Umm Habiba, Safiyya, and Maymuna. He had four sons who died early: Qassim, Tayyib, Tahir, and Ibrahim, and four daughters with Khadija: T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MUKHABARAT

MUHARRAM. THIS ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS A CELEBRATION OF MUHARRAM, THE FIRST MONTH OF THE YEAR, WHICH INCLUDES ASHURA, THE HOLISHIEITE MUSLIMS, WHO COMMEMORATE THE DEATH OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD’S GRANDSON HUSAYN WITH ACTS OF REPENTANCE. (© The Art Archive) EST DAY FOR

Zaynab, Ruqaya, Umm Kulthum, and Fatima. On 8 June 632, Muhammad died at Medina. For Muslims, Muhammad is the last of the prophets (nabi), after, among others, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. SEE ALSO Abraham; IsraD; Jesus; Mecca; Medina; Moses.

tinue to celebrate the “Naw Rouz” (new light), the Sassanid New Year’s Day, having survived the coming of Islam, which falls after the spring equinox, 21 March. SEE ALSO Calendar, Muslim.

MUJAHID (pl., mujahidin; “combatant,” in Arabic): MUHARRAM (Moharam, muharram; “forbidden, sacred,” in Arabic): Name of the first month in the Islamic calendar. The first of Muharram is New Year’s Day; the tenth of Muharram, the Feast of Ashura, commemorates at once the meeting of Adam and Eve, the end of the deluge, and the death of Husayn. Among the ShiEa, Ashura is celebrated in distress, since they commemorate on this day only the death of Husayn. Before the Islamic epoch, the month of Muharram corresponded to a period of sacred repose. Concerning New Year’s Day, the Iranians conD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Arab word used to designate a militant engaged in armed struggle to liberate a territory or to fight against injustice.

MUJTAHID (mojtahed): Someone erudite about Islam, a specialist of religious law, qualified to pronounce an opinion on the law and to interpret it. SEE ALSO Islam.

MUKHABARAT: Arabic word for intelligence services, in general.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

319

MULLAH

MULLAH: Title given to a ShiEite religious figure. MULTILATERAL GROUP FOR REFUGEES SEE

Multilateral Working Group on Refugees.

MULTILATERAL WORKING GROUP

ON

REFUGEES

(MWGR): One of five working groups formed according to the recommendations from the Middle East peace conference held in Madrid in 1991. Its purpose is to deal with the problem of the Palestinian refugees who left Palestine during the various IsraeliArab conflicts. Its most recent meeting, held on 6 February 2000, was attended by the foreign ministers of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, plus a representative of the Palestinian Authority.

MULTILATERAL WORKING GROUP ON REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (MWGRED): One of five working groups formed according to the recommendations from the Middle East peace conference held in Madrid in 1991. Its purpose is to address issues of infrastructure, trade, finance, and tourism development in the region, including the West Bank and Gaza. Among its goals are the encouragement of the free movement of people, goods, services, capital, and information among the partners in the region and the promotion of the region’s integration in global markets.

MUNAZAMAT AL-TAHRIR AL-ISLAMIYYA SEE

Islamic Liberation Organization.

MUNICH: On 5 September 1972, while the Olympic Games were taking place in Munich, eight men belonging to the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) broke into the Olympic Village and killed two Israeli athletes, taking another nine hostage. They demanded the liberation of two hundred Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and safe passage for themselves out of Germany. The Israeli government refused to yield to blackmail and asked the German authorities for permission to intervene to liberate the hostages, but this was not granted; instead, during lengthy negotiations, a plan was made under which the terrorists and their hostages would be flown to Cairo. Although German police intended to kill the terrorists at the airport, they were not aware of how many there were and did not bring a force large or well-equipped enough to do so. As a result, during a bloody firefight during which five terrorists and a policeman were killed, one of the helicopters carrying the hostages was blown up

320

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

OLYMPIC TERRORISM. TWO PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS (ONE AT BOTTOM MEETING WITH A MEMBER OF THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE) AFTER EIGHT OF THEM SEIZED ELEVEN ISRAELI ATHLETES, KILLING TWO, DURING THE 1972 OLYMPIC GAMES IN MUNICH. AFTER A TENSE STANDOFF, A RESCUE ATTEMPT BY GERMAN AUTHORITIES ENDED DISASTROUSLY. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

by a terrorist grenade and the rest of the hostages were shot. A day later, Israel retaliated by launching simultaneous air strikes on at least ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon. Three of the terrorists were captured. On 26 October, more terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airliner, demanding that the Munich killers be set free, and the Germans let them go. The Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, then gave the order to Mossad to eliminate all the terrorists who participated in the killing. This operation, which came to be known as “Operation Wrath of God, ” was designed not only to see justice done but to send a message to all who might contemplate future terrorist acts. One by one the killers were tracked down and assassinated. As of 2004, only the planner of the Munich attack is still alive. SEE ALSO Black September Organization; Mossad.

MUQAWAMA AL-ISLAMIYYA, AL-: “Islamic Resistance,” the military arm of the Lebanese Hizbullah. In 1993, the leaders of this militia attempted to gather under their banner militants of a number of organizations, sometimes opposed to each other, to strengthen the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Islam, opposed to the expulsion from the Muslim community of believers who have been guilty of grievous faults with respect to the QurDanic law. SEE ALSO Islam.

ruption and nepotism, promoting incompetent officers based solely on their loyalty to him. Muragha’s criticism soon became more generally political, and in November he was expelled from the military command of the PLO, along with Muhammad Tariq alKhadra, Muhammad Zahran, Mahmud Hamdan, and Yusef al-Ajouri, all accused of conspiracy against the authority of Arafat. From then on, Muragha obtained support from Syria, to consolidate, with Khaled al-Amlah (Abu Khaled), his movement, the Fatah–Temporary Command (or Fatah-Intifada), in opposition to Fatah. In 1985, he joined the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF), which unified all Palestinian movements that were opposed to Arafat. In 1989, when a split occurred in his own movement, Muragha began to lose his influence over it, and he turned to Iran for financial help. In October 1993, opposing the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, he and his movement joined the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). Muragha has not been active since the early 1990s. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Arafat, Yasir; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian National Salvation Front.

MURID: Arab word meaning “adept, novice, messi-

MUSLIM: From the Arabic muslim, which means

struggle against the Israeli presence in South Lebanon. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; South Lebanon.

MUQAWAMA AL-MUEMINA, AL-: “Believer’s Resistance,” a component of the Lebanese Hizbullah. SEE ALSO Hizbullah. MURABITUN (“Vigilants,” in Arabic): The origin of this word goes back to the fifteenth century, to the epoch of the Almoravids, Spanish descendents of a nomadic Saharan tribe, who, in the name of a renewed and purified Islam, undertook to drive heretics from North Africa and Spain. The founder of this movement, Abdallah ibn Yassin, professed the rules of his order in a military convent (ribat), situated on an island in the Senegal River. There, the warriors (al-murabitun, people of the ribat) lived austerely and strictly.

MURDJITES: Members of a theological movement of

ah.”

MUSA MURAGHA, SAEID (Abu Musa): Palestinian mil-

itary figure born in 1927 in Silwan, Palestine. SaEid Musa Muragha began a military career in the Jordanian army in 1948, training at the British military academy, Sandhurst. In 1969 he was commander of an artillery battalion. In October of the following year, after the confrontations of Black September 1970 between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Jordanian military, he resigned to join with the Palestinian resistance. A member of al-Fatah after 1971, he attained the rank of colonel. He was in command of a battalion of the “Yarmuk” brigade in South Lebanon from 1972 to 1977, and fought the Syrians during their intervention in the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. In 1978 he escaped a Syrian attempt to assassinate him. From 1977 to 1982 he was assistant to General Said Sayel (Abu Walid), head of PLO military operations in Lebanon, and directed the PLO’s defense in Beirut during the siege of the city by the Israelis in 1982. In February 1983, he was admitted to the Palestine National Council (PNC), but in May he had a falling out with Yasir Arafat, whom he reproached for corD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

“submitted to the divine faith; believer, faithful.” Designates those who believe in the Islamic religion. SEE ALSO Islam.

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD: Sunni fundamentalist movement (JamaDat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) created on 11 April 1928, in Ismailia, Egypt, by a young teacher, Hassan al-Banna, who had been influenced by the ideas of the reformer Rashid Rida. The doctrine of this brotherhood stressed the refusal of cultural, political, or economic subservience of the Muslim community toward foreign powers; the establishment of an Islamic political, economic, and social order; the restoration of the shari Ea (Islamic law) in the juridical domain; and the rejection of all nationalism. In the middle of the 1930s, the Muslim Brotherhood started focusing on political action, to the detriment of social action, in opposing the Wafd Party. Between 1945 and 1948, the radical wing of the party orchestrated a number of attacks on highly placed Egyptian political leaders, notably against the prime ministers Ahmad Mahir and al-Nuqrashi Pasha. Reacting to the Arab defeat at the hands of Is-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

321

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

rael in 1948, the brotherhood, allied with the communists, became a threat to the Egyptian regime. On 12 February 1949, Hassan al-Banna was executed by the police. In the early 1950s, the movement became more radical, under the direction of Sayyid Qutb, who introduced a political doctrine based on the theory of an Islamic and socialist state. He recruited many officers in the Egyptian army, and in so doing, participated in the coup d’état of July 1952. Relations were tense between the Muslim Brotherhood and the new Egyptian regime, which led to its banning by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in January 1954. The following 26 October, a member of the Brotherhood, firing several shots with a revolver, tried to assassinate President Nasser. The failed attempt led to massive repression of the movement, which nevertheless succeeded in establishing itself in the Egyptian political picture. Fearing a new attempt on his life, Nasser had nearly 20,000 Muslim Brothers arrested in 1957. Seven years later, they benefited from a general amnesty, which was annulled in August 1965, after another plot against the state was uncovered. Sayyid Qutb, theoretician of the movement, was hanged by Egyptian authorities. According to the indictment, the accused had received financial help from Saudi Arabia via Sudan. Between 1970 and 1981, the policy of openness promulgated by President Anwar al-Sadat allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to reconstitute itself and to become very active, particularly in the universities and among the middle classes. The movement benefited from the religious revival that surfaced after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war. In spite of their opposition to his policy of reconciliation toward Israel, their activities were tolerated by Sadat as a counterweight to the Nasserists and the extreme left. Brothers were allowed to return to alAzhar University, from which they had been forced out. Although Sadat would not legalize the Brotherhood as a political party, they ran candidates in the elections of 1976, supported by a popular base and a significant financial network, either as independents or as members of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), the ruling party in which Sadat allowed factions of left, center, and right to organize and run separate lists. Nine Muslim Brothers were elected deputies as independents and six as ASU members, including one who became the leader of the center faction. Branches of the Muslim Brotherhood were formed in the Palestinian territories, in Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Kuwait, Yemen, and Algeria. In 1979, the installation of an Islamic regime in Iran and the signature of an Israeli-Egyptian peace accord strengthened

322

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

their position, particularly in the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Jordan. The assassination of President Sadat, on 6 October 1981, by a conspiracy of Islamist officers, resulted in new repression of the Brotherhood. In Syria, threatened by a revolt spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, undertook a very harsh campaign of repression. In Aleppo and Hama in early 1980 general strikes were broken up by the security forces with mass arrests and summary executions. After an unsuccessful attempt on Asad’s life in June 1980, membership in the Brotherhood was made a capital offense, and the regime attacked again, putting an end to the rebellion. (Two years later there was an Islamist uprising in Hama that was put down even more brutally by the army, resulting in the death of as many as 10,000 people.) In the Egyptian legislative elections of 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood was present on the lists of the Socialist Workers Party, which won fifty-six deputy seats. In December 1987, when the first Intifada began in the Palestinian territories, members of the Muslim Brotherhood formed HAMAS, an armed resistance organization. In the 1990s, implicated in terrorist actions that were becoming more common in Egypt, the Brotherhood found itself marginalized from Egyptian political life, especially after the vain attempts of one of its moderate currents to form a political party in conjunction with the Copts. Although banned, the movement has been tolerated by the Egyptian regime. In 1990, when it held thirty-seven deputy seats, the movement decided to boycott the legislative elections, and to withdraw provisionally from parliament. At the time of the Gulf War of 1991, the Brotherhood denounced the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, but opposed a foreign presence in the region. In 1995, when the Muslim Brotherhood accounted for sixteen of the twenty-four seats among the Egyptian Attorneys Union, the government passed a law allowing it to exercise control over the principal union organizations. The Brotherhood won no seats at the legislative elections of the same year. In the spring of 2000, the government suspended the activities of the Socialist Labor Party, which had welcomed into its ranks numerous Islamists. As a result of the legislative elections of the following November, while the party of President Husni Mubarak, the National Democratic Party, had won the majority of the 454 seats of the Assembly, the Muslim Brotherhood gained 17 seats, thereby becoming the largest opposition bloc. As of 2004, the Muslim Brotherhood is T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

MWL

headed by Mustafa Mashur, seconded by its spokesperson, Maamun al-Hodibi. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Asad, Hafiz al-; Azhar, al-; Banna, Hassan al-; Gulf War (1991); Intifada (1987–1993); HAMAS; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Sadat, Anwar al-; Wafd.

MUSLIM CALENDAR SEE

1962, at the Islamic summit organized in Mecca, by King Faysal of Arabia. Its goals are to explicate and disseminate Islamic principles of culture and faith, to consolidate unity and solidarity within Islam, and to uphold the rights and interests of Muslims in the world. The League publishes the weekly The Muslim World (Da Dwat al Haqq). SEE ALSO Mecca.

Islamic Calendar.

MUSLIM RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS: EId al-Adha (Feast of

MUSTADAFIN Movement of the Disinherited; Sadr, Musa

the Sacrifice; falls on 10 Dhu al-hijja); EId al-Fitr (End of Ramadan; falls on 1 Shawwal); Mawlid al-Nabi (Birthday of the prophet Muhammad; falls on 12 Rabia al-awwal); Ashura (commemorates the death of Husayn, grandson of the prophet Muhammad) falls on 10 Muharram. SEE ALSO Ashura; EId al-Adha; EId-Fitr.

MUTEAZILITES: Followers of an ascetic and rationalist

MUSLIM WORLD LEAGUE (MWL): International orga-

MWL

nization (Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami) founded in May

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

al-.

Muslim school, heavily favoring the freedom of the human will before God.

SEE

Muslim World League.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

323

N NABI: Arabic word meaning “prophet.” NABLUS: Economically important Palestinian city, forty miles north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. It was called Flavius Neapolis by the Romans, who established it in 72 C.E. near the site of the Biblical Shechem (its name in Hebrew). The 2004 population of the city, eight surrounding villages, and three refugee camps (Balata, Askar, and Camp Number 1) is about 165,000. A number of Israeli settlements and an Israeli military base surround the city on confiscated land (the first was established in 1976). Nablus has been an important center of Palestinian resistance in the 1936–1939 Revolt (it was the birthplace of the Arab Higher Committee); during the period of Jordanian control, when it was a center of guerilla activity; and under Israeli occupation. Al-Najah National University is located in Nablus, as is Jacob’s Well, Joseph’s Tomb, and, near Mount Gerizim outside town, a community of about half of all remaining Samaritans, 200 to 300 people. Mount Gerizim is said by the Samaritans to be the place where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Nablus was part of the Palestinian “autonomous” area under the Oslo Accords and was turned over to the Palestinian Authority on 11 December 1995. Like other West Bank cities, it was invaded and reoccupied by the Israelis in April 2002 with great force and destruction—much of the Old City was damaged by tanks, and the an-

cient casbah was destroyed—as well as with many civilian deaths and injuries, and it has been subject to curfews and violent repressive actions. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Authority; West Bank. NAHAR, AL- (“day,” in Arabic): A pro-Jordanian Palestinian daily newspaper founded in 1987 in Jerusalem. A separate newspaper of the same name also is one of the most important of the Lebanese Arabic dailies.

NAHDA (“awakening,” in Arabic): Word used to designate the Arab cultural renaissance, from about 1830 on. This was a period of cultural and intellectual development that arose in response to the economic reforms of Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 to 1849 and coincided with the development of Arab nationalist ideas and feelings. Muhammad Ali’s reforms represented an effort to revive the declining empire after the shortlived but traumatic Napoleonic invasion of Egypt of 1798 to 1801. Palestinians, like other Arabs in the Mashriq, participated in the nahda by renewing their interest in Arabic literature and poetry, creating new forms of literature and theater, creating an Arab and then Palestinian (as distinct from an Ottoman or Muslim) identity, and pursuing political selfrepresentation.

325

NAJAH UNIVERSITY, AL-

CLASH IN NABLUS. YOUNG PALESTINIANS THROW STONES AT AN ISRAELI TANK IN THE WEST BANK TOWN, A CENTER OF ARAB NATIONALISM, IN EARLY 2002. UNDER PALESTINIAN AUTONOMOUS CONTROL SINCE 1995, NABLUS HAS BEEN THE SCENE OF VIOLENCE BETWEEN PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELIS, IN PART BECAUSE OF THE PRESENCE OF WHAT IS BELIEVED TO BE THE ANCIENT TOMB OF JOSEPH, A JEWISH HOLY SITE. (AP/Wide World Photos)

SEE ALSO

Mashriq.

NAJAH UNIVERSITY, AL-: Palestinian university located in Nablus, in the West Bank. Founded in 1918 as an elementary school, it became a secondary school in 1941 and a two-year community college in 1963. In 1977 it was reconstituted as a university and renamed. Today al-Najah has ten undergraduate faculties, a graduate faculty and a number of technical and professional centers, and continues to operate a separate community college. In addition to the main campus, there is an agricultural campus in Tulkarm and a new campus under construction west of Nablus that will house the medical school, a teaching hospital and a number of other facilities. Al-Najah is the largest university in the West Bank, with over 10,000 students. The student body at the university, as at most Palestinian schools, is politically engaged. As a large school drawing from a wide area of the West Bank, it is greatly affected by the obstacles

326

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

placed in the way of travel by Palestinians, as well as by the depressed economy. During the first Intifada (1987–1993) the university was declared a “closed military area” by the Israelis; no classes were held from 1988 to 1991. It has also been the object of military action more recently, particularly during the Israeli reoccupation of West Bank cities in 2002. SEE ALSO Intifada (1987–1993).

NAKBA, AL- (“catastrophe” or “disaster,” in Arabic): Word used by Palestinians for the consequences of the 1948 War, which included the disappearance of their country and the dispossession, expulsion, and exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. From 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians became refugees outside the 78 percent of Palestine that became Israel, living in temporary camps that soon became permanent, surviving on relief supplied by the United Nations through the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; another 150,000 T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

NASRALLAH, HASAN

were displaced within the territory that became Israel: more than 400 Palestinian villages were physically destroyed—bulldozed out of existence, their names disappearing from the map. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

NAMIR, ORAH (1930– ): Israeli politician. Born in Hadera, Israel, Orah Namir served in the Israel Defense Force in the Arab-Israel War of 1948, then worked for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations in New York, where she attended Hunter College, earning a bachelor of arts degree. She returned to Israel, marrying Mordekhai Namir (1897–1969), a Labor Party leader and mayor of Tel Aviv (1956– 1969). Namir was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 on the Labor Party list. She chaired the Education and Culture Committee (1974–1977) and the Labor and Social Affairs Committee (1977–1992). In 1992 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed Namir minister for the environment; a year later she was appointed minister of labor and social affairs. In 1996 Prime Minister Shimon Peres appointed her Israel’s ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, and she held that post until 2000. NAQIB

AL-SAGGADA: Honorific title given to a personal representative of the shaykh of a Sufi brotherhood. SEE ALSO Shaykh; Tasawwuf.

NAQSHBAND, MUHAMMAD BAHAD AL-DIN AL- (1317– 1388): Sufi mystic, founder of the order of Naqshbandiyya. After having been initiated into Sufism along with Muhammad Baba al-Sammasi, who designated him his caliph, he spent twelve years in service to the sultan Khalil at Samarkand, where he participated, in spite of himself, in the allconquering proselytism of Tamburlaine. Naqshbandiyya is still a significant force in a parallel form of Islam in Central Asia. SEE ALSO Tasawwuf. NAQSHBANDI (Naqshbandite): Member of the Sufi order of Naqshbandiyya. NASHASHIBI, FAKHRI (1899–1941): Palestinian politician. A member of one of Jerusalem’s most prominent families and nephew of Raghib al-Nashashibi, Fakhri Nashashibi was employed in various positions in the British Mandate government until the late D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1920s, when he became his uncle’s chief assistant, organizer, and propagandist. Although the Nashashibis’ National Defense Party was represented on the Arab Higher Committee in the first year of the 1936– 1939 Arab Revolt, they broke with it, and with Hajj Amin al-Husayni and his supporters, over a British partition plan of 1937. Hajj Amin, a strong nationalist, opposed the plan, and the Nashashibis favored compromise. Raghib al-Nashashibi became the main organizer of the Palestinian opposition to Hajj Amin and accepted help from the British and the Zionists in forming “peace gangs” while doing so. Fakhri was assassinated in Baghdad. SEE ALSO Arab Higher Committee; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Nashashibi, Raghib al-; Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939).

NASHASHIBI, RAGHIB

AL- (1883–1951): Palestinian politician. Raghib al-Nashashibi was born into one of Jerusalem’s most prominent families and studied engineering. He was elected to the Ottoman parliament for Jerusalem and served as an officer in the Ottoman army in World War I. He was a founder of the Literary Society, an important political association, in 1918, and of the Palestinian Arab National Party in 1923. In 1920 he was appointed mayor of Jerusalem by the British, replacing a member of the rival Husayni family, a nationalist whom the British suspected of instigating anti-British demonstrations. In 1934, after being voted out of office, Nashashibi founded the National Defense Party, which advocated compromise with the British and the Zionists. He was a member of the Arab Higher Committee from 1936 to 1937 but left because of disagreements with Hajj Amin al-Husayni and his supporters over British proposals to partition Palestine. He attended the London Conference of 1939 and wanted to accept the terms offered by the 1939 MacDonald White Paper. After the West Bank was annexed by Jordan in 1950, he was appointed governor by the government of Abdullah I and later served as a cabinet minister in charge of the Haram al-Sharif. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Arab Higher Committee; Haram al-Sharif; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; West Bank; White Papers on Palestine.

NASI (pl. nessim): Hebrew word meaning “prince, patriarch.” Ancient title of the chief of the Sanhedrin, or of the president of the State of Israel. NASRALLAH, HASAN (1960–): Lebanese ShiEite political leader, born in 1960 in East Beirut, where his

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

327

NASSER, GAMAL ABDEL

family had moved from Bazuriya, near Tyre in South Lebanon. The family returned to Bazuriya in 1975 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out. During this period he also joined the ranks of the moderate Islamic movement, AMAL. In 1976 Nasrallah began a course of ShiEite religious studies at Najaf, Iraq, where he was the student of Muhammad Bakr alSadr and Abbas al-Musawi. Influenced by Musawi, he became a political follower of the more radical Islamist Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. In 1978 he returned to Lebanon with Musawi and taught in a school established by Musawi in BaDalbak in the BaqaDa Valley. In 1982 he became the leader of AMAL in that district, but when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, Nabi Berri, the leader of AMAL, agreed to join a national “Salvation Committee” that included right-wing Maronites. Musawi left AMAL to found a splinter group called Islamic AMAL, and Nasrallah joined a group of followers of Fadlallah who were associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who had been sent to fight the invasion, and helped to create the organization that in 1985 was officially named the Hizbullah (Hizb Allah, Party of God). By 1989 Nasrallah had become an important Hizbullah leader and militia commander. In 1989, after an internal dispute over Hizbullah’s relation to Syria, he traveled to Iran to complete his religious training. On 18 February 1992, Nasrallah was designated secretary general of the Lebanese Hizbullah, replacing Musawi, who had been assassinated two days earlier by an Israeli commando. The policy of openness that Nasrallah advocated was severely criticized within the movement, in particular by Subhi Ali al-Tufayli. Nasrallah, in effect, wanted Hizbullah to participate actively in Lebanese politics, and favored ceasing operations against Israel, in case of Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon. In 1995 Nasrallah was reelected secretary general of Hizbullah for a term of three years. In September 1997, his son Hadi was killed in South Lebanon in a confrontation between Hizbullah members and Israeli soldiers. In November he launched an appeal to volunteers of all faiths to enlist in a new multiconfessional brigade formed for the struggle against the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. In January 1998, the expulsion of Subhi Tufayli from the leadership council (shura) allowed Nasrallah to consolidate his position at the head of the movement. On 24 May 2000, the definitive retreat of the Israel Defense Force from South Lebanon made Nasrallah a hero in the eyes of the Arab world and a formidable political figure in Lebanon. He is said to have made Hizbullah

328

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

autonomous from both the Syrians and the Iranians, who support it, and is admired and respected by the leaders of both countries. On 7 August 2001, he was reelected to a fourth term as the head of Hizbullah; Nawaf al-Musawi is the organization’s foreign minister. Nasrallah has defended the use of suicide bombings in Israel, although Hizbullah condemns terrorism elsewhere. In January 2004 Nasrallah won the release of 429 Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of fifty-nine fighters, in exchange for an Israeli hostage and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers, after negotiations lasting several years through an intermediary. Nasrallah has transformed Hizbullah in Lebanon into a social movement and political party, the largest in the ShiEa community; it and holds nine seats in the Lebanese parliament. The movement has about 50,000 members (and many more supporters), its armed militia, a satellite television station, and a social service network that benefits the largely poor ShiEa population of Lebanon who are not served by the state. Nasrallah is usually known by the honorific Sayyid. SEE ALSO AMAL; Berri, Nabi; Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn; Hizbullah; Israel Defense Force; South Lebanon; Tufayli, Subhi Ali al-.

NASSER, GAMAL ABDEL (Jamal Abd al-Nasir; 1918– 1970): Egyptian military and political figure, born in Upper Egypt. Starting in 1935, Gamal Abdel Nasser criticized the monarchy and demonstrated in favor of applying the constitution of 1923. In 1937 he entered the military academy of Cairo, where he became friends with Anwar al-Sadat. An earnest nationalist, in 1942 he founded, along with Zakariya Muhyi al-Din, the clandestine Free Officers group to combat British intrusion in Egyptian affairs. In May 1948, with the Egyptian army, he participated in the first Arab war with Israel. On 23 July 1952, as the head of the Free Officers, he took part in the coup d’état, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, which brought General Muhammad Naguib to power. The Council of the Revolution exiled King Farouk. In January 1953, after the abolition of political parties, Nasser became secretary general of the only authorized group, the Assembly of the Liberation. On 18 June the Republic of Egypt was proclaimed. In November 1954 Nasser became prime minister, and then president in June 1956, after shunting aside General Naguib. In his Philosophy of the Revolution he expounded his doctrines, which were based on pan-Arabism and support for movements of national liberation. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

NASSER, GAMAL ABDEL

British and French attempted to break him militarily and colluded with Israel to provoke the Suez War, which ended, mostly because of American pressure, in the humiliation and withdrawal of the British and French and the increased Egypt status in the world, and especially among Arabs. Also under American pressure, the Israelis withdrew from the Sinai, destroying roads and military installations as they left. In 1958, partly as a result of the popularity of Nasser’s Arab nationalism, Syria and Egypt created the United Arab Republic (UAR), with Nasser at its head. Political differences with the Syrians (there was a coup d’état in Syria) led to the dissolution of the UAR in 1961. In 1962 Egypt became involved in a civil war in North Yemen, where a coup d’état had overthrown the Saudi-supported monarchy. The conflict was a drain on Egyptian resources for several years.

The Lavon Affair in 1954 and Israeli attacks on Gaza in 1954 and 1955 convinced Nasser that the Egyptian armed forces had to be built up. His refusal to join the Baghdad Pact or take sides in the Cold War—in 1955 Egypt joined the Nonaligned Movement, of which Nasser became a leader, along with India’s prime minister Jawaharal Nehru and Yugoslavia’s president Josip Broz Tito—as well as Egyptian aid to the Algerian nationalists then rebelling against French rule, made it impossible to obtain Western arms and prevented an agreement in ongoing negotiations with Britain over its occupation of the Suez Canal zone, which continued under a 1936 treaty. Nasser concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, then part of the Soviet bloc; the United States withdrew its offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, an important economic project. Nasser’s response was to seize and nationalize the Suez Canal. Although he offered financial compensation, the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Internally the constitution of the charter of May 1962, as well as the agrarian reform and social measures Nasser undertook, assured him great popularity among the Egyptians. To consolidate his position, he created a single party, the Arab Socialist Union in December 1962. 0n 9 March 1962 he proclaimed the independence of the Gaza Strip, over which Egypt had exercised administrative control since the Israeli-Egyptian armistice of 1949. In April 1963 he failed in his project of a tripartite union of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. In 1964 Egypt, with Syria and Iraq, sponsored the Arab League’s creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a means to channel— and keep under control—the activities of Palestinian nationalists. It was largely beholden to Egypt for material support, although its leader, Ahmad Shuqayri, indulged in belligerent rhetoric, to the detriment of Palestinian as well as Egyptian interests, particularly in the months before the 1967 War. On 18 December 1964 Nasser named Anwar alSadat vice president. In autumn 1966 he was severely criticized by Arab countries, who reproached him for a lack of determination toward Israel; that year Egypt entered into a mutual defense treaty with Syria. In the spring of 1967 the Israelis began massing troops along the Egyptian border. In mid-May the tension between Egypt and Israel was at its peak. After an Israeli raid on a Syrian unit in the Golan, Nasser mobilized the Egyptian army, moving troops to the border. He requested the removal of the United Nations Emergency Force, which had guarded the border since 1956, and on 21 May blockaded the Straits of Tiran. Egypt and Jordan then signed a mutual defense treaty.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

329

NATIONAL AGREEMENT CONCERNING NEGOTIATIONS FOR A FINAL SETTLEMENT WITH THE PALESTINIANS

These acts were the culmination of the long period of tension and provocation that led to the 1967 War. Israel began the hostilities on the morning of 5 June by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. The war was a disaster for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians: The Arab armies were routed and Israel was left in possession of the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula as well as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; hundreds of thousands of new Palestinian refugees were created. Nasser’s government and international prestige were undermined, and the PLO began to distance itself from Egypt, beginning with the resignation of Shuqayri. Nasser resigned, but his resignation was refused by the National Assembly. Nevertheless, in his weakened position he was constrained to reconcile with King Faysal of Saudi Arabia, who had been supporting the other side in the North Yemen dispute. Nasser also accepted massive aid from the Soviet Union. Gradually Nasser’s stature as leader of the Arab world diminished. On 8 January 1969 his party obtained the quasi-totality of the seats in the Assembly. In April he began the War of Attrition against Israel in the Sinai, although later that year he accepted the Rogers Plan providing for a cease-fire, which went into effect on 7 August 1970 along the Suez Canal. His last action was to negotiate a cease-fire in the Black September conflict between Jordan and the PLO in September 1970. On 28 September 1970 Nasser died of a heart attack. He was replaced at the head of the Egyptian state by his vice president and army colleague Anwar al-Sadat. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Baghdad Pact; Black September; Gaza Strip; Golan Heights; Lavon Affair; League of Arab States; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestine Liberation Organization; Rogers Plan; Sadat, Anwar al-; Suez Crisis; United Arab Republic; United Nations Emergency Force; West Bank.

NATIONAL AGREEMENT CONCERNING NEGOTIATIONS FOR A FINAL SETTLEMENT WITH THE PALESTINIANS: An Israeli document edited in January 1997 by several Likud and Labor Party representatives. Signed by Likud members Yehuda Lancry, Ze’ev Bo’m, Eliezer Zandberg, Meyer Sheetrit, and Michael Eytan, and by Labor Party members Yossi Bellin, Haim Ramon, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, this document established the minimum that Israel was prepared to accept in preparation for talks on the definitive status of the Palestinian territories. The document provided notably that most of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and

330

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

the Gaza Strip would stay “in territorial contiguity” under Israeli sovereignty and that no settlement would be dismantled. Settlers living in territory that was to come under Palestinian control would be accorded “special arrangements, guaranteeing their specific ties with Israel.” The settlements situated in the Jordan Valley would be considered a “special security zone,” either to be annexed by Israel or to serve as a base for Israeli troops. Jerusalem would remain the capital of Israel, “united under Israeli sovereignty recognized by the Palestinians.” In exchange, Israel would “recognize the center of government of the Palestinian entity, situated within the frontiers of this entity, but outside of the current town lines of Jerusalem.” SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Israel Labor Party; Jerusalem; Likud; West Bank.

NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONAL PARTY: Jordanian political party, created in May 1997 on the impetus of Abdul Hadi Majali, brother of Prime Minister Abdul Salam Majali. A union of nine pro-monarchy centrist parties, formed at the behest of King Hussein, the National Constitutional Party was meant to strengthen the king’s hand in dealing with the demands of the Jordanian-Palestinian movements in future negotiations on the definitive status of the Palestinian territories. SEE ALSO Hussein ibn Talal.

NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE SEE

Democratic National Alliance.

NATIONALIST ALLIANCE Fatah-Intifada; Fatah Revolutionary Council.

SEE

NATIONAL

PROGRESSIVE FRONT (al-Jabha alTaqaddumiya al-Wataniya, in Arabic): A coalition of Syrian political parties established on 7 March 1972. The National Progressive Front consists of six parties led by the BaEth Arab Socialist Party. The other five are the Syrian Communist Party, the Arab Socialist Union, the Socialist Unionist Party, the Arab Socialist Party, and the Socialist Unionist Democratic Party. The front plays a significant role in Syrian decision-making. NATIONAL

RELIGIOUS PARTY (Miflagah Datit Le’umit, in Hebrew): Israeli religious party, founded in 1956 by the merging of two religious blocks, Mizrachi and Ha-Poel ha-Mizrachi. The objective of the

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

NATUR, MAHMUD AHMAD AL-

Mafdal, or National Religious Party (NRP), was to restore Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine as it existed in the time of King Solomon. Supporting the expansion and development of Jewish settlements, the NRP opposed restitution of even the tiniest piece of the territories occupied by Israel. In 1974, a new current in Mafdal, rising from the 1973 War, led to the creation of the Gush Emunim movement, which became the spearhead in settling the Occupied Territories. Mafdal’s support of the Labor Party waned until it broke with Labor in 1977, contributing to Likud’s coming to power. In 1981, a split caused by opposition between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim in the NPR led to the creation of a new bloc, the TAMI. During the Knesset elections of July, the NRP obtained six deputy seats. Two party members, Yossef Burg and Zevulun Hammer, joined the government of Menachem Begin, the former in the ministry of the interior, the latter in education. In March 1989 two members of the party received appointments in the Yitzhak Shamir government: Hammer as minister of religious affairs and Avner Shaki as minister without portfolio. Between 1994 and 1996, as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian accord of September 1993, the NRP was radicalized and obtained nine seats in the Knesset elections of May 1996. Three of its members joined the government of Benjamin Netanyahu: Hammer became deputy prime minister and minister of education, Yitzhak Levy became minister of transport, and Yigal Bibi became deputy minister of religious affairs. Nahum Lagental, political secretary of NRP, was named general director of the ministry of transport. In February 1998, after the death of Hammer, the NRP named Yitzhak Levy its party leader but his extremist positions prompted some members to resign, joining the Meimad, a religious party of the center-left. On 18 May 1999, in the Knesset elections that brought Laborite Ehud Barak to power, the NRP won only five seats. Three members of the party joined the Barak government: Levy as minister of housing, Bibi as deputy minister of religious affairs, and Shaul Yahalom as deputy minister of education. The following December, the party’s leadership threatened to withdraw its support from the government if it retreated from the Golan Heights. On 9 July 2000 the NRP ministers, along with those of Israel be-Aliyah and SHAS, resigned, reproaching Barak for the concessions he was about to make to the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at Camp David. In March 2001, after Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister, no member of the NRP figured in the new government. However, the party leadership assured the new prime minister D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

of its continued support for him in the Knesset. In the 2003 elections the NRP received 4.2 percent of the vote and six seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Ashkenazi; Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; Israel beAliyah; Israel Labor Party; Likud; Meimad; Mizrachi; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sephardim; Shamir, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; SHAS; TAMI.

NATIONAL RENAISSANCE SEE

ha-Tehiyah.

NATIONAL UNION (Ha-Ihud Ha-Leumi, in Hebrew): Israeli electoral list, constituted in February 1999, anticipating the general elections scheduled for the following May. The National Union was comprised of the extreme right party, Tekumah, headed by Benny Begin, and the extreme right party, Moledet, led by Rehavam ZeDevi, and Israel Beiteinu, headed by Avigdor Lieberman. As a result of the ballot of 17 May 1999, this list won four seats in the Knesset, taken by Michael Kleiner, Benyamin (Benny) Elon, Hanan Porat, and Rehavam ZeDevi, while the head of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, was elected prime minister. In March 2001, after the election of the leader of Likud, Ariel Sharon, to head the government, ZeDevi was named tourism minister. On the following 17 October, the latter was assassinated by a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine commando. The National Union coalition opposes concessions to the Palestinian Authority and the creation of a Palestinian state. In the 2003 elections, the National Union received 5.5 percent of the vote (seven seats in the Knesset). SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Elon, Benny; Kleiner, Michael; Moledet; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Porat, Hanan; Sharon, Ariel; Tekumah Party; ZeDevi, Rehavam.

NATUR, MAHMUD AHMAD AL- (Abu Tayib; 1945– ): Palestinian activist. Mahmud Ahmad al-Natur joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) security services in 1970. In 1979 he became assistant to SaEad Sayel (Abu Walid), the new leader of Force 17 whose former chief, Ali Hassan al-Salama, had been assassinated by the Mossad. Force 17 was mainly responsible for the security of Yasir Arafat and his close associates, as well as for missions connected directly to the PLO leader. It was also in charge of security for PLO representatives abroad. Between 1979 and 1981 Natur was the target of several assassination attempts. At the end of 1982 he became the lead-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

331

NAW ROUZ

er of Force 17 when Sayel was assassinated by a Syrian commando. In 1984 Force 17 took the name Presidential Security Service (Amn al-RiDasa). During the 1980s it carried out numerous attacks on Israeli interests and Palestinian opponents. On 25 September 1985 a Force 17 commando assassinated three Mossad agents at Larnaka, Cyprus, one of whom was Sylvia Raphael, who was considered responsible for Salama’s death. In August 1987 Natur reorganized the security service, in which a number of Arafat’s opponents had assumed leadership positions. Between 1988 and 1992, in coordination with the Western Sector of al-Fatah, he organized a number of terrorist operations in the Occupied Territories. During the spring of 1992, when he was hoping to head the al-Fatah security services following the assassination, a year earlier, of Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Arafat shunted him aside. Between 1993 and 1994 he was stripped of his command in response to demands of the Israeli authorities, who refused to negotiate with Palestinians who had been involved in terrorist acts. At the beginning of 1995 al-Natur went to the Palestinian autonomous territories, unofficially taking control of the Presidential Security Service, which was officially headed by Faysal Abu SharEa. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Force 17; Khalaf, Salah; Mossad.

NAW ROUZ: BahaDi New Year festival, celebrated on 21 March. SEE ALSO

BahaDi.

NCP SEE

National Constitutional Party.

NEBIM: Hebrew word meaning “annunciators,” used to designate the prophets.

NE’EMAN, YUVAL (1925– ): Israeli scientist and military and political leader. Born in Mandatory Palestine, Yuval Ne’eman graduated as an engineer from the Technicion Institute in Haifa. He was a member of Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, and participated in the 1948 Arab-Israel War, remaining in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) until 1961. As head of the IDF strategic planning department from 1954 to 1955, Ne’eman created the Lavie File, which dramatically changed Israel’s security policy from defensive to offensive. From 1958 to 1960 Ne’eman served as Israeli military attaché in London, where he resumed his studies in nuclear physics. He later pursued research in nuclear physics in the Unit-

332

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ed States, gaining international recognition for his work. He taught at Tel Aviv University in the 1970s, serving as university president from 1971 to 1975. Ne’eman entered politics as one of the founders of ha-Tehiya, a right-wing party. He served in the Knesset from 1981 to 1990 and was minister of science and technology from 1982 to 1984, then minister of energy and infrastructure as well as science and technology from 1990 until 1992. He retired from politics in 1992. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Haganah; Israel Defense Force.

NESTORIAN: A follower of the doctrine of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, who taught that there were two persons in Christ, the man and the son of God. Condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431, the Nestorians rallied in Syria-Mesopotamia, from where they evangelized some of Asia. SEE ALSO Christianity.

NETANYAHU, BENJAMIN: Israeli politician, born in 1949, in a family of university academics close to the Zionist right. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the secretary of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In 1968, after studying in the United Sates, Benjamin Netanyahu enlisted in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and volunteered to perform his military service in an elite Israeli unit, in which he remained for five years. In May 1972, at the Tel Aviv airport, he participated in neutralizing a Palestinian group that that taken over a Sabena airliner, with some hundred passengers aboard. In the same combat unit were also Ehud Barak, future prime minister, Amnon LipkinShahak, future Army chief-of-staff, and Dani Yatom, future head of Mossad. He was discharged from the IDF in 1972 having reached the rank of captain following the Yom Kippur War. After the army, he completed his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving his master’s degree in management studies in 1976. He remained in the United States where he was involved in various commercial activities. During the summer of 1976, after the death of his brother Yonatan, during the famous Israeli raid on Entebbe, Netanyahu joined the party of Menachem Begin, the Herut. The following year, in memory of his brother, he founded the Jonathan Institute for Terrorism Research, at Jerusalem. In 1982, recommended by Moshe Arens, an important figure in Herut and Israeli ambassador to the United States, he joined the staff of the Israeli embassy in Washington, then filled, from 1984 to 1988, the post of Israeli T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

NETANYAHU, BENJAMIN

joined the cabinet of Prime Minister Shamir, to handle specifically the peace process. This appointment was a consequence of some differences that had surfaced between Shamir and the new foreign minister, David Levy. In April 1992, Netanyahu’s name came up as a replacement for Levy, thought likely to resign.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU. AFTER SERVING IN AN ELITE MILITARY UNIT, NETANYAHU BECAME A RISING STAR IN THE RIGHT-WING LIKUD PARTY, ITS LEADER IN 1993, AND PRIME MINISTER THREE YEARS LATER. HE SUPPORTED ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS AND OPPOSED AN INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN STATE, YET HE ALSO AGREED TO ISRAELI WITHDRAWAL FROM HEBRON AND OTHER OCCUPIED TERRITORIES. NETANYAHU LOST A REELECTION BID IN 1999. (AP/Wide World Photos)

ambassador to the United Nations. His tenure at the UN took place under the Israeli Likud-Labor coalition, with alternation of the prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. On 1 November 1988, having returned to Israel, he was elected a Likud member of Knesset, then was named, on 25 December, deputy foreign minister in the coalition government led by Yitzhak Shamir, becoming thereby the rising star of Likud. Within this party, Netanyahu belonged to the current of Herut, led by Shamir and Arens, while two other tendencies were significant, one headed by Ariel Sharon and Benny Begin, the other by David Levy and Yitzhak Modai. In October 1991, he was the spokesperson of the Israeli delegation to the Middle East peace conference, at Madrid. The tone of his remarks there made many think of him as the heirapparent to Yitzhak Shamir. In November 1991, he D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

After the Labor Party came to power, in July, 1992, Benyamin Netanyahu focused all his efforts on becoming the leader of Likud. On 25 March, 1993, he was elected to lead this party, with 52.1 percent of the votes, against 26.3 percent for Levy. The first sabra to head Likud, he committed himself to upholding the dogmas of the nationalist right. At a congress of the party, which took place between 16–18 May, he consolidated his position at the top of Likud by obtaining control of its executive organs. On 19 October, following, after the Israeli-Palestinian accord, signed in Washington in September, he conceded that the peace process with the Palestinians was irreversible, but insisted on maintaining Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories. During the first six months of 1995, his quarrels with Levy weakened Likud, intensifying personal animosities and social-ethnic cleavages. During the month of November, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, his popularity dropped in public opinion, which reproached him for having contributed, through his extremist political rhetoric, to a climate of hate, with the end result that the prime minister was assassinated. In February 1996, in anticipation of Knesset elections, in the course of which the prime minister would be, for the first time, chosen by direct universal suffrage, Likud joined with the ultranationalist party, Tzomet, headed by General Raphael Eitan. A few weeks later, it expanded this alliance, to include the Gesher “Bridge” Party of Levy, who had resigned from Likud. Thereby he became the sole candidate of the Israeli right, confronted by that of the Labor Party, Shimon Peres, favored to win. On 31 May 1996, Netanyahu was proclaimed prime minister, elected with 50.4 percent of the votes cast, against 49.5 percent for Peres. He became the youngest prime minister ever of the State of Israel and the first head of government chosen by universal direct suffrage. On 18 June, he presented his government, constituted around the Likud-Gesher-Tzomet alliance, along with representatives of two ultra-Orthodox religious parties (SHAS and the National Religious Party) and two centrist groups (Third Way and Israel be-Aliyah). In his program, the new prime minister affirmed his desire to pursue the peace process, but

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

333

NETUREI KARTA

announced his intention of redefining the Oslo Accords, signed between the Israelis and Palestinians. Opposing the creation of an independent Palestinian state, he advocated the development of Jewish settlements, upheld the unity of Jerusalem, and favored maintaining Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Between 1996 and 1997, his intransigence and many turnabouts wound up blocking the IsraeliPalestinian negotiations on the application of the Oslo Accords, leading to much criticism from the international community and a part of Israeli society. On 15 January 1997, Netanyahu and Yasir Arafat signed an accord on Israeli withdrawal from the city of Hebron. This was the very first accord signed between the Israeli right and the Palestinians. On the following January, the “Bibigate” scandal burst out, when Netanyahu made a public statement that he had cheated on his wife and his political opponents were trying to blackmail him. On 8 January 1998, David Levy, his foreign minister and rival for leadership of the party, resigned in response to the charges concerning the alleged blackmail. Pressed to make some concessions, Netanyahu signed, on 23 October 1998, the Oslo Accords II, providing for the withdrawal from an additional 13 percent of the territories to the Palestinians. On 21 December, when he was being repudiated for his policies, particularly concerning the Palestinians, both by the opposition as well as by some of his supporters, the Knesset passed a motion authorizing elections, by 81 votes of the 120 in the Knesset, a vote confirmed in a final ballot, on 4 January 1999, by 85 votes. Previously the Knesset had rejected, by majority vote, the five conditions Netanyahu intended to impose on the Palestinians before putting into effect the withdrawal, provided for in the Oslo Accords II. On 25 January 1999, as a result of the primaries of Likud, he obtained 75 to 80 percent of the votes cast, running against Moshe Arens, becoming again his party’s candidate for the post of prime minister. On 17 May following, defeated by the candidate of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, and having obtained only 43 percent of the votes against 56 percent for his adversary, Netanyahu resigned from the leadership of Likud, where he was replaced by Ariel Sharon. His party had won only nineteen Knesset seats. On 28 March 2000, an investigation of him was opened, for embezzlement of funds, breach of trust, and obstruction of Israeli justice. On the following 27 September, the justice department declined to prosecute him, for lack of sufficient evidence. Netanyahu returned to the Knesset in the elections of 2003 and was appointed minister of finance by Sharon. Within the Likud, Netanyahu assumed a leadership role among the

334

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

“hawks,” opposing Sharon’s proposed plan for disengagement from disputed territories and opposing the prime minister’s apparent acceptance of the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Begin, Menachem; Gesher “Bridge” Party; Golan Heights; Herut Party; Israel be-Aliyah; Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev; Knesset; Levy, David; Likud; LipkinShahak, Amnon; National Religious Party; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sabra and Shatila; Shamir, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; SHAS; Third Way; Tzomet Party.

NETUREI KARTA (“guardians of the [holy] city,” in Hebrew): Extremist Jewish anti-Zionist movement, which opposes Zionism prior to divine redemption and considers the existence of the State of Israel a heresy. The movement favors the peace process with the Palestinians and some of its leaders have been in contact, from 1975 on, with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). When the PLO proposed creating a government-in-exile, one of the leaders of the Neturei Karta, the rabbi Amram Blau, offered to be part of this government. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Zionism.

NEW WAY PARTY: Parliamentary group formed during the Fifteenth Knesset in 2001 by Dalia RabinPelossof, a dissident from the Center Party, along with two other MKs, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Uri Savir, both of whom resigned from the Knesset two days later. After some time Rabin-Pelossof joined One Israel, and the New Way ceased to exist. SEE ALSO Rabin-Pelossof, Dalia.

NEW ZIONIST ORGANIZATION (NZO) SEE

Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev.

NPF SEE

National Progressive Front.

NRP SEE

National Religious Party.

NUSABAYA, SARI (Nuseibeh; 1949– ): Palestinian academic and activist, born in Jerusalem into an old and distinguished upper-class Palestinian family. From the epoch of Caliph Omar (638 C.E.), the Nusabayas, along with the Judeh family, were in charge of openT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

NUSEIBEH, SARI

ing and closing of the gates of the Holy Sepulcher every day. The father of Sari, Anwar Nusabaya, was defense minister in the Jordanian government. With degrees from Oxford and Harvard, Sari Nusabaya became a professor of political science at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. Close to al-Fatah and in favor of dialogue with Israel, from 1987 on he participated in many encounters with important Israeli figures, both intellectual and political. In September 1987 he was expelled from the teachers’ committee of Bir Zeit for having suggested that since neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians could crush each other Palestinians should ask that the West Bank be annexed by Israel so that they could become Israeli citizens, forcing Israel to give them the rights it was currently denying them. On 8 January 1988, when it became clear that the Intifada would not be a short-lived phenomenon, he helped organize the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising and participated in composing its first communiqué. Considered one of the main organizers of the Intifada by Israeli authorities, he was forced to close his office at the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (on whose board he continues to sit). U.S. intervention saved him from being imprisoned. In January 1991, in the context of the Gulf War, he was imprisoned for three months, accused of having transmitted information meant for Iraq to the Palestine Liberation Organization. After he was freed, he laid the groundwork, along with Faysal al-Husayni and Hanan Ashrawi, for the negotiations that took place at the Madrid Conference on Middle East peace. In 1992, during the peace process that started at this conference, he was named head of the technical committees, setting up structures that would be charged with preparing for autonomy in the Palestinian territories. In 1991, with Mark Heller, he published No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In January 1994, while Palestinian autonomy was being established as provided for in the Oslo Accords, he was named assistant director of the governing committee of Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction. He has been president of al-Quds University in Abu Dis in East Jerusalem since 1995. In October 2001 Yasir Arafat named him to replace Faysal al-Husayni, who had died in May, as minister of the Palestinian Authority responsible for Jerusalem. He proposed organizing a general assembly of representatives of East Jerusalem to uphold the interests of its Palestinian inhabitants. His position is usually referred to as the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic representative in Jerusalem; he dovotes himself to activities designed to create dialogue with Israelis of good will. In 2001 Nusabaya published an essay proposing that, if there were to be a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine issue, Palestinians would have to give up the right of return to anyplace within the boundaries of the State of Israel. This point of view was and continues to be extremely controversial among Palestinians, and it provoked outrage and condemnation, with many calling for Nusabaya to be dismissed from his post. Abu Dis; Arafat, Yasir; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Bir Zeit University; Fatah, al-; Husayni, Faysal al-; Intifada (1987–1993); Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction; Quds University, al-; West Bank.

SEE ALSO

NUSEIBEH, SARI SEE

Nusabaya, Sari.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

335

O OAPEC Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries.

SEE

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: The Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian territories occupied by the Israeli army since the 1967 War: the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Gaza Strip; Golan Heights; West Bank. ODA SEE

Organization for Democratic Action.

ODEH, MUHAMMAD (Abu Daud; 1937– ): Palestinian activist, born in Silwan, Palestine. Muhammad Odeh studied law in Damascus, where he joined the BaEth Party. Between 1962 and 1967 he taught in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, then obtained a post in the justice ministry in Kuwait. In 1968, having returned to Jordan, he joined al-Fatah and in 1970 was elected to the revolutionary council. In 1971 he was one of the main leaders of the Black September group, created to avenge Palestinians who died in September 1970 in confrontations with the Jordanian forces. On 5 September 1972 he participated in taking hostage a number of Israeli athletes competing in the Munich

Olympics; eleven of the athletes were killed. On 10 February he was arrested in Jordan with a group of Palestinians accused of planning to assassinate King Hussein. On 1 March a Palestinian commando demanding his release took over the embassy of Saudi Arabia in Khartoum. Three Western diplomats died in the course of the operation. On 8 March the Soviet Union asked King Hussein to pardon him. On 5 September a Palestinian commando took the members of the Saudi embassy in Paris hostage, demanding Odeh’s release. Sentenced first to death by Jordanian justice, and then to life imprisonment, he was amnestied by the king on 19 September 1973. Banished from Jordan, Odeh joined the ranks of a Jordanian National Revolutionary Movement that was demanding that King Hussein be deposed. On 7 January 1977, while he was in Paris for the funeral of a Palestinian leader who had been assassinated a few days earlier, he was arrested by the French internal security service on an international arrest warrant. He was freed four days later, provoking a wave of international outrage. He returned to Lebanon but traveled widely in the Eastern bloc countries, escaping a 1981 assassination attempt in Warsaw. In 1996 Israel allowed him to return to the Palestinian territories to participate in a meeting of the Palestine National Council. In June 1999, after publishing his memoirs, in which he acknowledged his responsibility in the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games, he was named on an international

337

OIC

arrest warrant from Germany and was banned from returning to the Palestinian territories. SEE ALSO BaEth; Black September Organization; Fatah, al-; Hussein ibn Talal; Palestine National Council.

OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

SEE

OPERATION DESERT FOX SEE

OIC SEE

Organization of the Islamic Conference.

OPERATION DESERT SHIELD SEE

OLMERT, EHUD (1945– ): Israeli politician, born in Binyamina, Mandatory Palestine. Ehud Olmert served in the Israel Defense Force and holds a law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. First elected to the Knesset on the Likud list in 1973, Olmert served on various committees, including housing, law and justice, and education. He served as minister without portfolio from 1988 to 1990, and from 1990 to 1992 as minister of health. Elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993, Olmert resigned from the Knesset in 1998. He was reelected to the Knesset in 2003 and was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of industry and trade. SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force; Knesset; Likud.

ONE ISRAEL (Israel Ehad, “One Israel” in Hebrew): Israeli electoral coalition, formed on 22 March 1999, by the leader of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, in anticipation of general elections the following May. This bloc united the Labor Party, Gesher of David Levy, and the Meimad of Yehuda Amital. As a result of the elections of 17 May, this list won 26 seats in the Knesset, and the leader of the Labor Party was elected prime minister. For the Labor Party, this result represented, nevertheless, a relative failure compared to the 1996 elections, when it won 34 seats for itself alone, even though party leader Shimon Peres had been defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu in the election for prime minister. On 20 February 2001, One Israel was weakened by the defeat of Ehud Barak in the election for prime minister, running against the head of Likud, Ariel Sharon. While seven members of the Labor Party joined the national unity government of Sharon, and Rabbi Michael Melchior of Meimad became Deputy Minister for Diaspora Affairs, no member of Gesher had any part in it. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Gesher “Bridge” Party; Israel Labor Party; Knesset; Levy, David; Likud; Meimad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon.

338

Gulf War (1991).

OPERATION DESERT STORM SEE

Gulf War (1991).

OPERATION PEACE FOR GALILEE SEE

Arab Israel War (1982).

ORGANIZATION FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION (DAO, Da’am in Arabic): Heir to the Trotskyite ideas of Matzpen, this Israeli political entity was founded in April 1996 by Assaf Adiv, in anticipation of the Knesset elections of the following May. Its aim is to organize the working class, especially Arab workers, whom it considers victims of discrimination by the Israeli government. Opposed to the existence of the State of Israel as such, the DAO rejected the IsraeliPalestinian accords of 1993. This movement has not been represented in the Knesset, and in the 2003 elections it received only 1,950 votes. SEE ALSO Matzpen. ORGANIZATION

OF ARAB PALESTINE: Palestinian movement founded in 1968 following a split in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command (itself the result of an earlier split with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) under the impetus of Ahmad ZaErur. ZaErur was a Nasserist and his organization was supported, at least until Gamal Abdal Nasser’s death, by Egypt. In 1971 the organization was incorporated into the Palestine Liberation Organization. SEE ALSO Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Palestine Liberation Organization; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.

ORGANIZATION OF ARAB PETROLEUM EXPORTING COUNTRIES (OAPEC): International organization created in 1968 under the aegis of the Arab League to strengthen cooperation among member states. Members were Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait,

ONE NATION SEE

Desert Fox.

Am Ehad Party. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC CONFERENCE

Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Tunisia left the organization in 1986. Seven of these states also belong to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). On 17 October 1973, when the 1973 War had just begun, OAPEC became involved in the conflict by reducing its exports by 25 percent and cutting off the United States and the Netherlands entirely. Exempt from the embargo were Britain (partially), France, Spain, and the Muslim countries. OAPEC announced that the measure would be in effect “until the territories occupied by Israel are liberated and the Palestinian people regain their rights.” The embargo was lifted in March 1974, by which time the world price of oil had quadrupled. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); League of Arab States; Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

ORGANIZATION OF COMMUNIST ACTION OF LEBANON

(OCAL; Munazzamat al-EAmal al-ShuyuDi fi Lubnan, or Organisation de 1’Action Communiste du Liban): Organization created in 1970 from the merger of two small movements of the extreme left: the Lebanese Socialist Movement and the Organization of Socialist Lebanon. The former had been the left wing of the Lebanese Arab Nationalist Movement and the latter rallied intellectuals from the Lebanese Communist Party and the BaEth. After April 1971 the OCAL supported the Palestinian resistance in its confrontation with Lebanese authorities. The OCAL advocated a popular war of liberation, rejecting UN Resolution 242 because it made no mention of the Palestinian people. Between 1971 and 1977 the OCAL, which was allied with the Lebanese National Movement, actively supported the Palestinian resistance, within which it had especially close ties with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Pro-Chinese when it was founded, the OCAL has drawn progressively closer to the Lebanese Communist Party. It publishes the newspaper al-Hurriyah. SEE ALSO Arab Nationalist Movement; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Lebanese Communist Party; Lebanese National Movement; Resolution 242.

ORGANIZATION

OF

PETROLEUM EXPORTING COUN-

(OPEC): Cartel of oil-producing states created in September 1960 in response to several rounds of unilateral price cuts by the big multinational oil companies. The founding conference in Baghdad was attended by delegates from five countries: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela. Subse-

TRIES

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

quently eight additional countries joined. Formed to halt the fall in crude oil prices, OPEC eventually took over the international pricing system from the oil companies after the Arab oil embargo that followed the 1973 Arab Israel War. For years, although often affected by political events such as the Iranian revolution of 1979, its members were able to exercise control over crude oil prices by controlling production. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, however, caused a serious division in the organization and limited its control of the market. In the late 1980s an extended period of lowered oil prices caused economic problems in oil-producing countries, which responded by increasing production above OPEC quotas, resulting in even lower prices. This overproduction was a contributing factor in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent Gulf War of 1991: Iraq owed huge amounts of money (to Kuwait, among other states) because of its war with Iran and needed higher oil prices to pay its debts. Between 1997 and 1998, torn by internal competition, OPEC went through a crisis, provoked by Saudi Arabia, which was facing serious economic difficulties and obtained an increase in the Gulf states’ production quotas, leading to lower prices. New problems for OPEC include potential new sources of production in Central Asia and increasing competition for existing resources from the West and from expanding East Asian economies, particularly China. Arab-Israel War (1973); Gulf War (1991); Iran-Iraq War; Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries.

SEE ALSO

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC CONFERENCE (OIC): Cooperative organization of Islamic countries created on 25 September 1969 at the special Islamic summit in Rabat following the fire at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Sponsored by King Faysal of Saudi Arabia and including twenty-three Muslim heads of state, the Rabat summit founded the OIC to safeguard the holy sites of Jerusalem. Among the goals of the organization were “the safeguarding and protection of the holy sites of Islam, of which Jerusalem is one of the essential elements; support for the just cause of the Palestinian people, deprived of its legitimate rights; support for peoples and populations that are victims of oppression and racial discrimination.” The OIC has headquarters in Jeddah and includes three decision-making organs: the summit of heads of state, the conference of ministers, and the office of the secretary general; it controls fourteen institutions, including the al-Quds Committee, presided over by the King of Morocco; the Committee of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

339

ORIENT, L’– LE JOUR

Six on Palestine; the Islamic Development Bank; and the Islamic Solidarity Fund. In 1972 the OIC adopted a charter fixing the promotion of Islamic solidarity as a principal objective of the organization. As a religious entity, the OIC has been amenable to contacts with the Catholic Church. On 7 April 1981 its secretary general, Habib al-Shatty, was received by Pope John Paul II. On 28 June 2001, as a gesture of support for the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories, the OIC ended its annual summit, which was being held in Bamako, Mali, with an appeal to Muslim countries to break off relations with Israel. Since 2001 the secretary general of the OIC has been a Moroccan, Abdelouahed Belkeziz. In 2004 the OIC included fifty-seven member states. SEE ALSO Aqsa, al-; Aqsa Intifada, al-. ORIENT, L’– LE JOUR: Lebanese francophone daily, born of the merger of two French-language newspapers, L’Orient and Le Jour.

ORIENT HOUSE: Constructed in 1897 in East Jerusa-

lem by IsmaEil Musa Husayni, Orient House (Bayt alSharq) became a center of Palestinian activities following the Madrid Conference in November 1991. After the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, the building was transformed into a symbol of Palestinian nationhood, designated by the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the future seat of government to signal its legitimate presence in Jerusalem. In May 1994 Faysal al-Husayni, owner of the Orient House and the head of the Arab Studies Society, which was also housed there, was made a minister of the PA and assigned the Jerusalem dossier by Yasir Arafat; he became the Palestinian Authority representative in Jerusalem. Israel, which had annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, considered it Israeli territory and disputed the PA’s right to be there at all. On 31 May 2001 Husayni died in Kuwait of a heart attack. In August Israeli authorities seized Orient House, closed the Arab Studies Society and the PA offices, and seized all archives, documents, books, and property. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Husayni, Faysal al-; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Authority.

ORR COMMISSION REPORT (2003): Israeli report on the violence of October 2000, following the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, in which thirteen Israeli Arab citizens were killed while protesting. The commission was appointed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak under public pressure, primarily from Palestinians. The report was written by Theodor Orr, a Supreme

340

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Court judge; Shimon Shamir, former Israeli ambassador to Egypt and Jordan; and Hashim Khatib, a district judge from Nazareth, representing the Arab minority. It was the result of three years spent compiling evidence, including interviews with over three hundred witnesses, and it deplored the failure of all Israeli governments to deal with the social and economic inequalities facing Palestinian citizens of Israel, cited the inadequacy of police response in the past and the overreaction of police forces in October 2000, and condemned several Palestinian politicians for inciting violence. It also criticized the prime minister’s office for not anticipating the possibility of the violent outbreak. It recommended the removal of Shlomo Ben Ami, minister of internal security, and criticized the National Police for the use of rubbercoated bullets and live ammunition to quell riots. The two highest ranking police officers, Rav Nitzav and Yehudah Wilk, were barred from holding high office in the National Police, and the Department of Police Investigations in the Ministry of Justice was instructed to review cases of possible unlawful manslaughter. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Barak, Ehud.

ORTHODOX JUDAISM: The form of Judaism practiced by Jews who accept as divinely inspired the totality of Jewish law as recorded in the Torah (both the Written and Oral Laws), as codified in the Shulhan Arukh, and as observed in practice according to the unchanging principles of the Halakhah. Orthodox Judaism looks upon attempts of other branches of Judaism to adjust to the contemporary “spirit of the time” as incompatible with a strict adherence to normative Judaism which considers the revealed will of God as a permanent and immutable authority and standard. Orthodox Jews may be Ashkenazi or Sephardi, depending on their geographic and cultural origins. Orthodox Jews are a small minority both in Israel and in the United States (estimates vary between 10 percent and 30 percent), but in Israel they enjoy disproportionate power in government and social institutions, placing legal restrictions deriving from Halakhah (for example, regulations governing marriage, divorce, and conversion) not only on Israel’s large secular Jewish population but also on members of the growing Reform and Conservative (Masorti) movements. Orthodox Jews believe that traditional religious commandments should play an important part in shaping government policy, leading to frequent conflicts with secular Israeli Jews who believe in religious pluralism or who wish to limit the role T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

OSLO ACCORDS II

of religion in the state. Many Orthodox Jews believe that Biblical promises entitle Jews to full control over Greater Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), and are unwilling to consider territorial concessions to the Palestinians. SEE ALSO Ashkenazi; Eretz Yisrael; Haredi; Hasidism; Masorti; Rabbi; Reform Judaism; Sephardi.

OSLO ACCORDS: Agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiated secretly in Oslo, Norway, and signed at the White House on 13 September 1993. These negotiations were begun in February 1993; on 20 August, they resulted in an accord on the provisional autonomy for the Gaza Strip and Jericho (“Gaza-Jericho First” option). The agreement was followed by the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements for the Palestinian Territories. This document was signed in Washington under the sponsorship of the United States and Russia (the former USSR). The signing was the occasion of a historic handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the leader of the PLO, Yasir Arafat. The text of the accord established a schedule of negotiations over a five-year period leading to the establishment of a permanent status for the Palestinian territories. Until then provisional autonomy would exist in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The specified phases were: a) 13 October 1993, transfer of administrative powers from the Israelis to the Palestinians; b) 13 December 1993, beginning of Israeli military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, and formation of a Palestinian police force; c) final withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and Jericho; d) 13 July 1994, elections in the territories of a Palestinian council with jurisdiction over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the exception of East Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements; e) 13 December, 1998 to 13 April 1999, establishment of a definitive and permanent status for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But in the months that followed, many incidents took place that prevented the application of the measures. Leaders of the Likud party in Israel, such as Ariel Sharon, stated that if they came to power they would not honor the agreement, while violence erupted between Jewish settlers of the Gaza Strip and Palestinian radicals. On 29 April 1994 in Paris, Israelis and Palestinians signed a protocol on Israeli-Palestinian economic relations. On 4 May in Cairo Prime Minister Rabin and Arafat signed a provisional agreement on the application of autonomy in the Palestinian territories, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

countersigned by Egyptian president Husni Mubarak, the Russian foreign minister, and the American secretary of state. Six days later the first Palestinian police arrived in the Gaza Strip. On 12 May, after the representatives of the right wing walked out of the Chamber, the Israeli Knesset approved the Cairo Accord by a vote of 55–0. On 13 May the Israeli Army gave the keys of the city of Jericho to the Palestinians, and on 12 July, Arafat arrived in Gaza to set up his headquarters. On 29 August the accord was signed on the transfer by Israel of civil powers to the Palestinians. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Gaza Strip; Intifada (1987–1993); Knesset; Mubarak, Husni; Sharon, Ariel; West Bank.

OSLO ACCORDS II: On September 28 1995, after much negotiating, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, signed an agreement in Washington, called Oslo II, dealing with the extension of Palestinian autonomy over the West Bank. The agreement provided for Israeli evacuation of six cities in the West Bank, a partial withdrawal from the city of Hebron, the deployment of Palestinian police, and the organization of elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank were to be divided into four zones. Zone A, which comprises 3 percent of the West Bank, would include the Gaza Strip and eight cities of the West Bank (Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jericho, Ramallah, and Hebron—the latter becoming the focus of special negotiations). In this zone the Palestinian Authority (PA) would be responsible for civil matters and security. Zone B, which comprises 24 percent of the West Bank and is essentially rural in character, includes West Bank villages where the PA would be responsible for civil affairs and for public order, with Israel reserving control of security. Zone C, which comprises 73 percent of the West Bank and where the majority of the Jewish colonies are located, would be entirely under the control of the Israel. Zone D is made up of frontiers, road interchanges, and military outposts responsible for the security of the Jewish colonies. On 6 October the Knesset approved the agreement by a vote of 61 to 59. The Oslo peace process generated a number of subsequent Israeli-Palestinian agreements. On 23 October 1998, at the Wye Plantation in Maryland, after months of stalled negotiations, Arafat and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an agreement on continued Israeli withdrawal from the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

341

OSLO ACCORDS II

Podolia Vienna

Hungary



Transylvania

 


Balearic Islands

Istanbul (Constantinople) Izmit Bursa

Trabzon

Aleppo

Morea Malta






Crete

 


Rhodes Cyprus

  

Syria

C*aldiran


  



Anatolia



Edirne


  

 


 






 



 




Baghdad

Damascus




Jerusalem

Cairo

 

 

Egypt

 







Medina

0

200 200

400 mi.




0

400 km




Ottoman Dynasty Ottoman Empire, early 14th C. Furthest extent of Ottoman Empire Battle City

N

Yemen Aden

West Bank under the sponsorship of U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright. Israel would transfer approximately 13 percent of the territory of the West Bank to the Palestinians: 1 percent of Zone A, and 12 percent of Zone B. The PA would gain control over 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and approximately 10 percent of the West Bank. On 18 November, the Knesset ratified the Wye River Accords, owing to the votes of the Left, by 75 to 19 with 9 abstentions and 17 absent. After Israel withdrew from almost 2 percent of the territory, under criticism by a portion of his majority, Netanyahu refused to continue applying the accord as long as the Palestinians declined to submit to five demands: 1) a commitment from the PA to respect its promises; 2) renunciation of any unilateral proclamation of an independent state with Jerusalem as capital; 3) cessation of all incitements to violence; 4) recognition that the Wye River Accords did not oblige Israel to release Palestinian “murderers”; 5) PA confiscation of illegally obtained arms in territories under its control, imprisonment

342

Mecca

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

of “murderers” and pursuit of security cooperation with Israel. On 21 December 1998, by a vote of 81 to 30 with 4 abstentions and 5 absent, the Knesset rejected these propositions. The vote prompted the dissolution of the Knesset and the preparation of early general elections. Israeli-Palestinian accords were once more stalled. In August 1999 negotiations on the application of the Wye Plantation Accords, undertaken between Albright, new Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian negotiators once more snagged over the question of Palestinian prisoners. In the night of 4–5 September, Arafat and Barak signed the Sharm al-Shaykh Memorandum in Egypt, which it was thought would open the way to negotiations on an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. The Wye Plantation treaty was endorsed by the Knesset on 8 September by a vote of 54 to 23 with 2 abstentions. The 17 SHAS representatives did not participate in the vote. On 19 September Israel transferred T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

OTTOMANS

an additional 7 percent of the West Bank to the Palestine Authority. SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Gaza Strip; Hebron; Knesset; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharm al-Shaykh Memorandum; SHAS; West Bank.

OTTOMAN EMPIRE SEE

Ottomans.

OTTOMANS: Turkish dynasty created by Osman (Othman) the First. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the Ottomans created a vast empire in western Asia, eastern Europe, and north Africa. In 1453 their troops took Constantinople, ending the reign of the Byzantine Christian empire. They controlled Palestine for four hundred years beginning in 1516. Under Ottoman rule Palestine was divided into three mutasarrifiyahs: Nablus and Acre, linked with Beirut, and Jerusalem, which dealt directly with the

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Ottoman government in Istanbul. Within the Ottoman Empire non-Muslim religious communities were organized into units called millets, each of which collected its own taxes, established its own educational institutions, and administered its own laws relating to personal affairs; thus Jews and Christian sects had full religious freedom during this period. In 1831 the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha and his son Ibrahim invaded Palestine, establishing a harsh regime while opening the area to Christian and other Western influences. In 1840, however, the British, Austrians, and Russians forced the Egyptians out and Palestine was restored to the Ottoman Empire, which adopted widespread reforms and encouraged foreign colonies. Among these were a few Zionist agricultural settlements, the earliest of which was established by Russian Jews in 1882. Ottoman control over Palestine ended in 1917– 1918, with the arrival of British troops during World War I, and officially ceased in 1922, when the Ottoman Empire, which had been allied with Germany, was formally dismantled. At that time the modern nation of Turkey was created and Palestine came under British Mandate.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

343

P PA SEE

Palestinian Authority.

PADICO Palestine Development and Investment Company.

SEE

PAEAC Parliamentary Association for EuropeanArab Cooperation.

SEE

PAI SEE

PoEalei Agudat Israel.

PALESTINE: Arabic Filastin, from the Greek; Hebrew Peleshet; “historical” Palestine today is the Palestine of the British Mandate after the separation of Transjordan, the area east of the Jordan River. It encompassed the state of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Politically, Palestine today consists of the projected Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip whose true status is reflected in the name by which it is more usually known, the Occupied Territories. Palestine derives its name from the Philistines who arrived in what was then Canaan in the fourteenth century B.C.E. and eventually occupied the Mediterranean coastal plain from Jaffa to the Sinai.

In 135 C.E. the Romans changed the name of their province Syria Judaea, the southern part of the province of Syria, to Syria Palaestina. The name was also used by seventh-century Arab armies, who conquered what they called Filastin from the Byzantine Empire. Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans from 1517 until World War I as part of the region known as Syria, or Greater Syria, covering the area between Turkey and Egypt, from the Mediterranean to the Syrian Desert. It was contained in several provinces and administrative districts, none named Palestine or coterminous with the territory known by that name; it had never been a discrete political entity or claimed precisely defined borders. British forces occupied Palestine in 1917–1918. In 1920, the postwar San Remo Conference ratified the agreement between the French and British to divide the Ottomans’ Arab territories between them. The French received a Mandate for Syria, including Lebanon; Britain was given Palestine/Transjordan and Iraq. The borders of these territories were all created by the British and French, with these borders and Mandates approved by the League of Nations in 1922. Britain set up a civil government in Palestine in 1920 and separated Transjordan in 1921–1922, closing Transjordan to Jewish immigration. Zionists had been establishing colonies in Palestine since 1878, and during World War I the World Zionist Organization (WZO), established in 1897,

345

PALESTINE

was particularly successful in lobbying the British government for support of its project to establish a Jewish state. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration the British made a commitment to the WZO to create a “national home for the Jewish people,” and the British Mandate for Palestine was written to permit the Zionists to take over the whole territory. The Mandate referred to the indigenous population of Palestinian Arabs as “non-Jewish communities,” but in 1918 the population of native Palestinian Jews and European Zionist immigrants numbered roughly 66,000 people, or only about 10 percent of the populace. Opposition to European Jewish immigration and suspicion of Zionist intentions had grown before the war, but with the advent of the Mandate and the massive postwar immigration and economic changes it brought, Jewish occupation grew to become the major theme of Palestinian politics. Zionists were buying land which, once purchased, was under restriction for use and resale only to Jews. Organizations such as the Muslim-Christian Association, founded in 1918, and the Arab Executive, founded in 1920, tried—largely through attempts at personal persuasion by the leadership—to convince the British to curtail both land purchases and immigration, and to encourage policies leading to Palestinian independence. Palestinian leaders consistently rejected British proposals for political representation in a legislative assembly, since all the proposals fell short of true self-government and required Palestinians to accept the legitimacy of the Mandate with its built-in promotion of the Zionist project. For their part, the Zionist leaders either rejected or reluctantly agreed to these same solutions because they wanted to put off resolution until they had achieved a majority. Displeasure with the situation led to rioting in 1920, with 47 Jews and 48 Palestinians killed in Jaffa, and again in 1929, with the Western Wall Disturbances claiming 133 Jewish and 116 Palestinian lives in Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere. Commissions of inquiry, including a League of Nations commission, the British Shaw Commission, and the HopeSimpson Commission, studied aspects of the Zionist-Palestinian problem in 1929–1930. Because of these studies, the British government issued the Passfield White Paper recommending changes to the Mandate favorable to the Palestinians. By 1929 the Jewish population in Palestine was over 156,000— about 16 percent of the population—and under pressure from the Zionists and their allies, the proposed changes were rejected by the government in the MacDonald Letter of 1931.

346

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

From the beginning the Zionists, with much help from abroad, had successfully engendered strong, flexible, well-organized civic and political institutions. Palestinian organizations, in contrast, operated according to the customs of late Ottoman politics: the notables—prominent, influential members of the social and economic elite, often from wealthy landowning or merchant families—attempted to discuss matters in private with the authorities and reach a private agreement. The Western Wall episode and its aftermath proved to be a catalyst for more modern political organizing, as well as for more radical and sometimes violent opposition. Several political parties were founded in the years after 1929. The Istqlal (Independence) Party, formed in 1932 by Awni Abd al-Hadi and others, was the first, calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses; and in 1933 a general strike called by the Arab Executive led to violence in which 24 people died. In 1935, Shaykh Izz al-Din alQassam, who had fought the French in Syria and had a following among the poor and recently landless Palestinians in Haifa, took an armed group of eight hundred dispossessed peasants to the mountains near Jenin to begin a revolt. He became a martyr when he was killed by British forces. A series of violent incidents followed, and in early 1936 a shipment of arms to a Zionist group was discovered. In April 1936 Palestinians in Nablus formed a “national committee” and called for a general strike, demanding the suspension of Jewish immigration and the establishment of a democratic national government; similar Palestinian committees were soon formed all over the country. At this point, the Jewish population was about 370,000—28 percent. Prominent leaders of the political elite formed the Arab Higher Committee, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, head of the Supreme Muslim Council, to coordinate and control the strike. At first it was nonviolent, but when the British announced that they were raising the Jewish immigration quota, the strike escalated into a general insurrection known as the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, in which over 5,000 people were killed, over 14,000 wounded, 5,600 put in detention and thousands forced into exile. Some Zionists formed guerrilla groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang, to attack and terrorize Palestinians. The strike was called off after six months, and the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate the causes of the uprising. In July 1937 the commission recommended the partition of Palestine. Under the Peel plan, the Zionists would be awarded one-third of the country, including the most fertile and prosperous part, Galilee, where there T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINE

were few Jews. The Zionist areas would become a self-governing state, while Palestinian areas would be annexed to Transjordan, with Palestinians subject to “compulsory” resettlement if necessary. The Palestinians found this unacceptable, and there was universal anger over this proposal. The violence, which had died down when the general strike ended, resumed. In September the British district commissioner for Galilee was assassinated, leading the British to impose severe repressive measures against the Palestinians, including collective punishments such as house demolitions and mass detentions in camps. Most of the Arab Higher Committee either was arrested and deported or fled into exile. In 1938 the Woodhead Commission, created to study the partition issue, reported that the Peel Commission’s plan was impractical, and the British government announced that it would reexamine the entire question. In March and April 1939 a conference was held in London attended by Zionist, Palestinian, and Arab leaders; it was not a success, but in May the government issued the MacDonald White Paper, which rejected partition and the idea of a Jewish state (although not the “national home” idea), proposed a limit to Jewish immigration and land purchase, and favored the creation of a single independent Palestinian state after a ten-year transition period. The Zionists rejected this plan since it was still their intention to create a Jewish state out of Palestine; the Palestinians rejected it because there were no guarantees regarding statehood; and Hajj Amin, Great Mufti of Jerusalem and the most prominent Palestinian leader, then in exile, did not trust the British to keep their word. A substantial segment of the Palestinian public, however, believed that the White Paper should have been accepted, because the terms represented a serious change of heart by the British. By 1939 the Jewish population in Palestine was 445,456, almost 30 percent of the populace. During World War II the British banned political activity. The Palestinians were politically disorganized in any case, and Hajj Amin had fled from Lebanon to Iraq to Germany—apparently hoping to find support from the enemies of the British, he collaborated with the Germans in attempting to raise a Muslim army in the Balkans. When the Arab League was being formed in 1946, it appointed Musa al-Alami as Palestinian representative and took control of Palestinian nationalist affairs, including refounding the Arab Higher Committee. Although Hajj Amin was named to head it, the British would not permit him D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

to return to Palestine. By 1946 the Jewish population of Palestine in was roughly 608,000, or 33 percent. At the Biltmore Conference in New York in 1942, the WZO had for the first time publicly committed itself to establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine, although it later was willing to consider partition. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1945–1946 recommended establishing a single unpartitioned state, an end to restrictions on land purchases by Jews, and the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe. The British felt that they had lost control of the situation after the war and announced their intention to give up the Mandate, turning the problem over to the United Nations. In 1947 the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended partition based on “a realistic appraisal of the actual Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine.” The population at that time was approximately 1,131,000 Palestinians and 508,000 Jews, with Jews owning seven percent of the land; the UNSCOP plan called for a Zionist state on 55 percent of the territory—with a substantial Palestinian minority population—a Palestinian state on 40 percent—with a few thousand Jews—and five percent— the city of Jerusalem and suburbs—as an international zone under UN trusteeship. The Zionists accepted the plan; the Palestinians and other Arabs opposed it, but were without power, organization, unity of purpose, or an effective strategy to prevent its adoption. The proposal was passed by the UN Security Council as Resolution 181 in November 1947. The UN vote caused public outrage in Palestine and was followed by another outbreak of communal violence and guerrilla warfare. In December Palestinian leaders made an effort to revive the “national committees” that had run the 1936 general strike, but it was too late; the Zionists had a modern, well-equipped army, paramilitary organizations, and an entire well-organized, well-run and well-funded state structure that had been building for several decades. After several months of fighting, Israel declared its statehood on 14 May 1948. The next day the Arab states declared war, but the Palestinian guerrillas, allied with the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, were no match for the Israelis. Moreover, the Arabs were not truly united; Abdullah I, although ostensibly part of the Arab coalition, had previously come to a secret agreement with the Zionists to refrain from fighting with them in territory allotted to them by the UN with the understanding that he would annex to Jordan the territory allotted to the Palestinians. The 1948–1949 War ended with Israel occupying 78 per-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

347

PALESTINE ARAB REVOLT

cent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, all but the West Bank and Gaza Strip; nearly 750,000 Palestinians expelled from Israeli territory became homeless refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; the obliteration of more than 350 Palestinian villages; Jordan’s annexation (formalized in 1950) of the West Bank; the destruction of the Palestinian political community; and the permanent presence in Palestine of a European settler state regarded by most Arabs as a tool of Western imperial power. The 1948–1949 War, known to Palestinians as al-Nakba, the Catastrophe, was the end of Palestine; since then Palestinians have resisted and struggled to reconstitute their community and to recreate a true Palestinian state. SEE ALSO Abd al-Hadi, Awni; Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Alami, Musa al-; Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry; Arab Executive; Arab Higher Committee; League of Arab States; Balfour Declaration; British Mandate; Gaza Strip; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Irgun; Jordan River; Lohamei Herut Yisrael; Occupied Territories; Palestinian Statehood; Qassam, Izz al-Din al-; Resolution 181; West Bank; Western Wall Disturbances; World Zionist Organization.

PALESTINE ARAB REVOLT (1936–1939): Palestinian armed insurrection against the British Mandatory government and its support for the Zionist project. It grew from a number of roots: continuing rule by a foreign power; that power’s support for foreign colonization (the “Jewish National Home”) and its continuing disregard for Palestinian national and civil rights; the failure of any Palestinian group, particularly the Arab Executive, with its cautious methods and its ties to the conservative (and mutually hostile and factionalized) interests of the landowning notable families, to influence the British to change their policies; the rapid increases in Jewish immigration and land purchases and the growth of Zionist civil institutions since the late 1920s; the demonstration of Zionist power to block the reforms called for after the Western Wall Disturbances. Palestinian politics took a more radical and activist tone in the early 1930s; popular opinion began to force change from below, new political parties and other groups were formed, and demonstrations and boycotts were undertaken. In October 1935 Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had fought the French in Syria and who preached to the poor and recently landless in Haifa against the British and the Zionists, took an armed group of eight hundred dispossessed

348

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Palestinian peasants to the mountains near Jenin to begin a revolt. He became a martyr when he was killed by British forces in November. On 15 April 1936 some of Qassam’s followers killed two Jews traveling on the Tulkarm-Nablus Road. The next day a retaliatory killing of two Palestinians took place near Petah Tikvah. On 17 April the funeral of the two dead Jews in Tel Aviv turned into a Zionist riot, with inflammatory speeches, stoning of police, and beating of Palestinians in the streets. On 19 April a Palestinian mob attacked Jews in the first of four days of rioting in which sixteen Jews and five Palestinians were killed. On 20 April Palestinians in Nablus formed a “national committee” and called for a general strike, demanding the suspension of Jewish immigration and the establishment of a democratic national government. Similar committees were soon formed all over the country. The most prominent leaders of the political elite formed the Arab Higher Committee, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, head of the Supreme Muslim Council, to coordinate the strike and try to keep it under the control. Many groups, including labor organizations, women’s committees, and boy scouts, took part. A national conference on 7 May called for nonpayment of taxes and other forms of civil disobedience. Virtually all Palestinian businesses were closed; Palestinian civil servants in the British administration signed a petition endorsing the aims of the strike. The British response was to raise the Jewish immigration quota and announce the creation of an all-Jewish port in Tel Aviv, which would put the old port in Jaffa out of business. Most strikers followed the National Committees’ nonviolent strategy, but the strike grew into a popular insurrection and there was violence, including arson, sabotage, burning of crops, mining of roads, derailing of trains, and attacks against suspected strikebreakers. Guerrilla groups formed in the countryside and occasionally fought with British troops, with a very high rate of casualties. The British responded with collective punishment, including house demolitions (one such action in the center of Jaffa made 6,000 people homeless) and mass arrests. The British offered to form another royal commission to investigate, but after the British government’s failure to respond to the findings and recommendations of the Shaw Commission, the Hope-Simpson Commission, or the Passfield White Paper with any serious change, the Palestinians were not mollified. The strike was ended after six months, when the leaders realized that their activities were benefiting Zionist economic interests, when the govT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINE ARMED STRUGGLE COMMAND

ernment sent a new army division, when the orange crop had to be harvested to avoid the loss of the country’s biggest export earner, and when the Arab states made a face-saving appeal. A royal commission, the Peel Commission, did conduct an inquiry and concluded in July 1937 that the mandate was ultimately impracticable and unjust to the Palestinians but made a recommendation that proved unacceptable to them: that the country be partitioned. Under the Peel plan the Zionists would be awarded one-third of Palestine, including the most fertile and prosperous part of the country, the Galilee, where few Jews lived. The Zionist areas would become a self-governing state. Palestinian areas would be annexed to Transjordan, and Palestinians would be subject to compulsory resettlement if necessary. Palestinians greeted this proposal with universal anger, and the violence that had died down when the general strike ended began again. In September the British district commissioner for Galilee was assassinated. The British arrested hundreds of nationalist leaders, banned the Arab Higher Committee and the National Committees, and removed Hajj Amin from the leadership of the Supreme Muslim Council. Members of the Arab Higher Committee were either deported to the Seychelles Islands or, for those who had managed to escape arrest by fleeing the country, forbidden to return. These actions stimulated resistance. Small guerrilla groups united into larger regional ones and the Arab Higher Committee, whose available members, including Hajj Amin, had collected themselves in Damascus, made efforts to supply them with arms. Coordinated attacks took place all over Palestine on 14 October. Violence spread through the country, and rebel guerrillas controlled large parts of it, including most of the countryside and many of the towns. Roads were mined and other acts of ambush and sabotage took place, as did both skirmishes and pitched battles between the guerrillas and both the British and Zionist forces whose creation the British had allowed. Both sides were responsible for massacres. The British conducted house demolitions and summary executions and created detention camps that held hundreds without trial. This continued into the autumn of 1938. Violence began to wane as the British, now with more than 20,000 troops and an air force, gained the upper hand militarily and guerrilla leaders were either killed or fled the country. In November 1938 yet another royal commission, the Woodhead Commission, created to study the partition issue, reported that the Peel Commission’s plan was impractical and D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

the British government announced that it would reexamine the entire question. In March and April 1939 it held a conference in London, attended by Zionist, Palestinian, and other Arab leaders, including representatives from Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia. Hajj Amin was not allowed to attend. The conference was not a success, but in May the government issued the MacDonald White Paper, in which it rejected partition, rejected the idea of a Jewish state (though not the “National Home”), proposed to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases, and favored the creation of an independent Palestinian state after a ten-year transition period, “conditions permitting.” The White Paper was rejected by the Zionists, since it was their intention to create a Jewish state and they did not want the Palestinians to be in a position to thwart them; it was rejected by Hajj Amin because it contained no guarantees of a Palestinian state and because he did not trust the British to keep their word in any case. Other Palestinians, including a substantial part of the public, felt that the White Paper should have been accepted since the terms represented a serious change of heart by the British. The results of the 1936–1939 Revolt were some 5,000 Palestinians killed, over 14,000 wounded, 5,600 in detention, and thousands in exile. The Palestinians were weaker economically and politically, their leadership was divided, and they had no military force. The Zionists became stronger in every area: 463 Jews were killed, as were 101 British. Arab Executive; Arab Higher Committee; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Qassam, Izz al-Din al-; Western Wall Disturbances; White Papers on Palestine.

SEE ALSO

PALESTINE ARMED STRUGGLE COMMAND: Structure (qiyadat al-kifah al-musallah) created in Jordan on 18 February 1969, by Yasir Arafat and the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to coordinate the military activities of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) with those of other Palestinian armed groups within the PLO. Political differences between the various movements rapidly led to the paralysis of the Palestine Armed Struggle Command (PASC). In Lebanon in the 1970s under the Cairo agreement signed by the PLO and the Lebanese government, PASC evolved into a military police organization, keeping order in the Palestinian refugee camps, attempting to prevent provocative acts against the Lebanese and intervening between opposing Palestinian groups.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

349

PALESTINE COMMUNIST PARTY

SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Palestine Liberation Army; Palestine Liberation Organization.

PALESTINE DEVELOPMENT

PALESTINE COMMUNIST PARTY: Created in January 1922 in Palestine by Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union who had become disaffected with Zionism. The Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was recognized by and accepted into the Comintern, the international organization of communist parties directed from Moscow, in 1924, and thereafter found itself divided between the directives of the Comintern leadership and the nationalist demands of both the Arab and Jewish communities. In the late 1920s Arabs began to join, and in the 1930s the party, at the direction of the Comintern, began to “Arabize” the party and bring Arabs into the leadership. There were ideological purges in 1932 and 1936, and the party also fractured along ethnic lines during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, after which it favored Arab nationalism and denounced Zionist imperialism. In 1943, tensions between Jews and Arabs prompted a breakup, and in 1944 most of the Palestinian membership joined the newly created National Liberation League (NLL) (Usbat al-Taharrur alWatani). Four years later, Soviet support for the partition of Palestine caused a break between Jewish communists and Palestinian Arab communists. After the Arab-Israel War (1948) the by then mostly Jewish PCP became the Israel Communist Party, and many Palestinians inside Israel, including members of the NLL, joined it. In the Gaza Strip, NLL and former Palestinian PCP members created the Communist Party of Gaza. The NLL continued in the West Bank until 1951, when many of its members joined with Jordanian communists to form the Jordan Communist Party (JCP). The JCP after 1967 became active in resistance to Israeli occupation, and in 1975, its West Bank branch became the Palestine Communist Organization (PCO). In 1982, after internal fighting, the JCP split, and the Palestinians in it, and in the PCO, formed a new Palestine Communist Party, which gave its support to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In April 1987 the Palestine National Council (PNC) elected a PCP representative to the PLO’s executive committee. In 1991, as a consequence of the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, the PCP changed its name to the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP). SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Gaza Strip; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian People’s Party; West Bank.

350

D I C T I O N A R Y

AND

INVESTMENT COM-

PANY:

O F

Palestinian holding company, registered as a limited liability corporation in Liberia, founded in October 1993 following the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords. Founded by Palestinian businessmen such as Hassib al-Sabbagh, Abdul-Mohsin Qattan, and Munib al-Masri, the Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO) raised initial capital of $172 million, to be invested in the Palestinian autonomous territories “to provide competitive financial returns to investors while directing new capital towards projects that would create new job opportunities to improve the standard of living of Palestinian people.” It has a number of subsidiaries and affiliates in the tourism, poultry, electronics, real estate, telecommunications, and financial industries (one subsidiary operates the Palestinian stock exchange). Its various businesses have invested over $500 million since 1993. Its outlook, however, was dependent on both Israeli goodwill and the expectation of a “deepening of the peace process,” based on which it expected “a substantial peace dividend, with the whole region likely to witness a macroeconomic resurgence” (all quotes from www.padico.com). Instead its businesses have stagnated as the economy of the territories has declined since the beginning of the al’Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. SEE ALSO

Aqsa Intifada, al-; Oslo Accords.

PALESTINE LIBERATION ARMY: At the time of its first meeting in 1964, the Palestine National Council (PNC) decided that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) must equip itself with a regular military force, called the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). This resolution was modified at the fourth session of the PNC (held in Cairo in July 1968), where the influence of al-Fatah came to the fore. Thereafter the PLA came under the authority of the executive committee of the PLO, led by Yasir Arafat, whose duty it would be to “encourage the enrolment of Palestinians in Arab military academies and institutions, so as to acquire military training; to mobilize all the Palestinian forces and energies in preparation for the fight for liberty.” Officially the PLA was comprised of four contingents or brigades based in different Arab countries: “Ain Jalut” in Egypt, “Qadisiya” in Iraq, “al-Badr” in Jordan, and “Hattin” in Syria. On 19 February 1969, the executive committee of the PLO created the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command (PASC) for the purpose of coordinating the actions of the PLA with those of other Palestinian armed forces. During the Arab-Israel War (1973), some of its units participated in combat against the T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT (1977)

Israel Defense Force. In 1983, during the sixteenth meeting of the PNC in Algiers, the organization’s name was changed to the Palestinian National Liberation Army (PNLA). This change reflected the desire of Arafat to tighten the ranks among combatants in each of the different movements, after some Palestinian forces based in Lebanon, commanded by Tariq al-Khudra, had rallied to Syria. The elements that had remained loyal to Arafat were integrated into the PNLA, under the command of General Ahmed Afanah. In 1994, following the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, some of the PNLA members joined the ranks of the new Palestinian Police, while others decided to remain in the army of their host country. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Armed Struggle Command; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian National Council.

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT (1961): Group of intellectuals founded by the Palestinian writer Shafiq al-Hut in 1961, based in Lebanon (not to be confused with the guerilla groups of the same name founded in 1965 and 1977). The Palestine Liberation Front (PLF)—which was later called the PLF–Path of Return or PLF–PR—recruited for the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). SEE ALSO Hut, Shafiq al-; Palestine Liberation Army. PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT (1965): Palestinian

freedom fighter (fida Diyyun) group founded by Ahmad Jibril in 1965, based in Syria. The Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) was merged into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1967. Not to be confused with the groups of the same name founded in 1961 or 1977. SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT (1977): Palestinian movement (Jabhat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniya) founded in April 1977. The Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) came out of a split in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC), caused by the opposition of some of its members to Syrian influence in the organization. Iraqi in allegiance, the PLF was headed by its political leader, Muhammad Zaydan and a secretary general, TalEat YaEqub, flanked by Said Yusuf and Ali Zaydan. On D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

14 May 1977 the leadership of the Rejection Front, which had united opponents to the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, decided to exclude Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP–GC from its organization, replacing it with the PLF. Having been established in Lebanon since the end of the 1970s, both movements’ partisans entered a period of bloody confrontations. In the night of 12–13 August 1978, an attack generally believed to have come from the PFLP–GC on the headquarters of the PLF in Beirut caused nearly two hundred deaths. In 1981, having succeeded in solidifying its base among Palestinians, the PLF was admitted to the Palestine National Council (PNC). Between 1982 and 1983, when Palestinian forces were evacuating Lebanon, two currents surfaced in the movement. The first, headed by Muhammad Zaydan, was comprised of partisans of Yasir Arafat; the second, under the leadership of TalEat YaEqub, was made up of members who favored Syria. YaEqub, after having created his own group (the PLF–TalEat YaEqub Faction), allied it with the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF), which gathered together the Palestinian opposition. From November 1984, Zaydan, elected to the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), ardently supported the policies of Arafat. A new tendency, represented by Abd al-Fattah Ghanim, until then a supporter of TalEat YaEqub, surfaced in the PLF. In September 1985, in spite of internal divergences in the movement, Zaydan was elected secretary general of the PLF. On the following 8 October, in reprisal for an Israeli air raid on the headquarters of the PLO, near Tunis, a PLF group carried out the hijacking of an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, during which a Jewish-American citizen was killed. The United States put out an international arrest warrant against Zaydan and the members of the commando. On 22 April 1987, the presence of the head of the PLF in Algiers at a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC) led the United States to protest to the Algerian authorities. Between 1986 and 1988, the leaders of different currents existing in the PLF tried in vain to unite their groups under a common banner. In November 1988, after the death of YaEqub, two new tendencies emerged in his movement: the first under the leadership of Abd al-Fattah Ghanim, pro-Libyan, the second, under Yusif al-Maqdah, pro-Syrian. On 15 November 1989, prodded by Arafat, the leaders of the different currents of the Front accepted the authority of Zaydan. On 30 May 1990, a PLF commando attempted a naval assault on Tel

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

351

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT–PATH OF RETURN

Aviv, which failed. Arafat’s refusal to condemn this action publicly caused the United States to reverse its decision to start talks with the leadership of the PLO. That August, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the PLF came out in support of Baghdad. Hostile to the Israeli-Arab peace process, which had started in November 1991 with the Madrid Conference, the PLF leader, in spite of his supporting Arafat, declared his opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, signed on 13 September 1993, in Washington, D.C. Several members of the PLF joined the Palestinian opposition in the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF), while Zaydan decided, finally, to continue backing Arafat. In 2004 the principal leaders of the PLF are: Muhammad Zaydan (Abu al-Abbas, secretary general), EAli Ishaq (Abu Dunia, assistant secretary general), Ali Zaydan, Zuhdi Sammur, Bilal Qassem Dalkamoni, Muhammad Mahmud Qassem, Imad Yassin, and Marwan Bakr. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Arafat, Yasir; Jibril, Ahmad; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command; Rejection Front; Zaydan, Muhammad EAbbas.

YASIR ARAFAT. THE HEAD OF THE PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION (PLO) VISITS A REFUGEE CAMP IN WEST BEIRUT, LEBANON, IN 1982. THE MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE, THE PLO WAS FORCED OUT OF ITS BASE IN LEBANON BY ISRAEL’S INVASION. THE FORTUNES OF THE PLO AND ARAFAT IN THEIR STRUGGLES—BOTH ARMED AND DIPLOMATIC—FOR A PALESTINIAN STATE HAVE WAXED AND WANED EVER SINCE. (AP/Wide World Photos)

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT–PATH OF RETURN SEE

Palestine Liberation Front (1961).

PALESTINE LIBERATION FRONT–TALEAT YAEQUB FACTION SEE

Palestine Liberation Front (1977).

PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION (PLO): Palestinian political institution (Munadhdhamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniya). Meeting in Jerusalem at its first congress on 28 May 1964, the Palestine National Council (PNC) created the PLO by adopting the Palestine National Charter and the PLO Fundamental Law, and becoming itself a member. As an umbrella organization for the Palestinian national struggle, the PLO replaced the moribund Arab Higher Committee, which had been presided over by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and eventually became the most important of the Palestinian political organizations. Ahmad Shuqayri, a Palestinian lawyer and former assistant to the secretary general of the Arab League, was named chairman of the PLO executive committee. The PLO platform was based on four principles: 1) rejection of the partition decreed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947; 2) armed struggle

352

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

for the liberation of Palestine; 3) the fight against Zionism; and 4) ultimate establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The organization comprises three principal components: the Palestine National Council (PNC, al-Majlis al-Watani al-Filastini), with 300–600 members—roughly 30 percent from the resistance and guerrilla organizations that are members of the PLO, 20 percent from affiliated mass organizations and trade unions, 20 percent from the diaspora, and 30 percent independent members; the executive committee (EC, al-Lajna a—Tanfidhiya), with 15 members elected by the PNC, similar to a cabinet-style government, who direct the bureaucracy and apply policies adopted by the PNC; and the Central Council (CC, al-Majlis al-Markazi alFilastini), with 50–70 members who act as a constitutional council to oversee the functions of the executive committee. Although the Central Council serves a consultative role, acting as an intermediary legislative entity between the PNC and the EC, it can use its veto to sanction the action of the executive committee. The executive committee supervises the PLO’s departments or ministries. It meets at the request of its members; and in the past has met often in Tunis, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION

sometimes in Baghdad. During the deliberations of the EC, a quorum of two-thirds of its members is required, although decisions can be made by a simple majority of those present. Because of regional disturbances, the headquarters of the PLO has been moved successively from Jerusalem to Amman (1967), Beirut (1970-71), Tunis (1982), and Ramallah (1995). The PNC was originally headquartered in Cairo, then moved to Damascus (1979), Amman (1984), and Gaza (1996). At first considered merely a tool of the Arab League, the PLO became truly independent in 1969. Defeat of the Arab forces in the 1967 War discredited the leadership of both the Arab states and the PLO; Shuqayri resigned in 1967 and was replaced by another lawyer, Yahya Hammuda. When the fida Dyyun groups, primarily al-Fatah, increased guerrilla attacks against Israel, they earned the respect of the Arab public, receiving many new recruits and greater financial assistance from the Gulf states. On 4 February 1969 Yasir Arafat, head of al-Fatah, was elected chairman of the PLO executive committee, and since then, al-Fatah has been the dominant element within the PLO. Arafat has followed a pragmatic course designed to balance internal differences and further move the PLO toward its single overriding goal. At times other leaders and organizations have disagreed with Arafat’s strategies, leaving the organization and later rejoining it; but the PLO’s core membership has remained stable. It includes all the major Palestinian liberation movements, encompassing a diversity of orientations. The largest groups are the centrist al-Fatah, the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the PFLP– General Command (PFLP–GC), and the MarxistLeninist inspired Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). In July 1969, the PLO was invited for the first time to attend a meeting of nonaligned countries that took place in Belgrade. Confronted by internal rivalry and affected by regional political changes, there was much dissidence within the PLO, reflecting ideological cleavages among the Palestinian movements. These disagreements came to a head in 1970 when the PFLP launched a violent campaign to sabotage and overthrow the monarchy in Jordan, the base of PLO activity, provoking the government to strike back brutally during what became known as “Black September” 1970. The result of this conflict was the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan and transfer to Lebanon, where it had already compelled the government there to grant it a degree of autonomy in governing and providing for the large population of Palestinian D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

refugees in Lebanon, and in defending them from many Lebanese enemies. On 26 October 1974, a year after the 1973 War, the PLO was recognized at the Arab League summit in Rabat as the “only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” On the following 13 November Arafat made a historic speech before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, after which the PLO obtained observer status at the UN. With the exceptions of Israel and the United States, the international community thereafter recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Lebanese Civil War began in 1975, threatening Lebanese sovereignty and contributing to the destabilization of Lebanese politics. PLO operations in that country were partly to blame for the war because they were so extensive that the organization was often referred to as a “state within a state,” and parts of southern Lebanon were known as “Fatahland.” These operations included not only military organizations and activities, but civilian institutions that provided security and social services to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had no other resources within a Lebanese population that was largely hostile to them. Both for these reasons, and for the need to defend its people and maintain its operations, the PLO became a major participant in the war. In September 1976, Palestine, represented by the PLO, was given full membership in the Arab League. The following year saw the famous journey of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat to Jerusalem, followed by the Camp David Accords in 1978, and the IsraeliEgyptian peace treaty in 1979. This treaty led to a schism in the Arab world that affected the PLO because, besides returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, it provided for negotiations toward a future settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli issue “on the basis of” UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, and contained a vague Israeli plan for Palestinian “autonomy” within restricted zones in the West Bank and Gaza without committing Israel’s removal of settlements. The other signatories, Egypt and the United States, agreed with Israel’s view of Resolution 242— that despite calling for complete Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, it did not apply to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jordan, which was part of the Camp David negotiations, and the PLO, which was not (although there were Palestinian representatives on the Jordanian delegation), along with the entire Arab world, rejected the treaty. In effect, Israel had removed Egypt, which was strong enough to

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

353

PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION

threaten it, from the Arab-Israel dispute while conceding nothing to the Palestinians. With the Egyptian threat neutralized by the treaty, Israel began aiding and subsidizing Lebanese who were hostile to the Palestinians; and in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to attack the PLO directly in an attempt to destroy it. A cease-fire mediated by the United States in August obliged Arafat and his followers to leave Lebanon, which they agreed to do after receiving an American promise to protect Palestinian refugees. Under the protection of a multinational force, the leadership of the much weakened PLO and about 14,000 fighters went to Tunis where the remnants of the organization found itself cut off from both the Palestinian territories and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Within days of the PLO’s withdrawal, the Israelis abetted the Phalange by invading two adjacent refugee camps in Beirut, perpetrating the Sabra and Shatila Massacre and leaving the entire community vulnerable. Later in 1982 the United States proposed a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, the Reagan Plan, based on the same Israeli autonomy plan as was in the Camp David Accord, again refusing to allow the PLO a part in the negotiations. In late 1983 Arafat sought to restore the PLO in Lebanon; Syria, which under President Hafiz al-Asad had entered the Lebanese war in 1976 and wanted to control the PLO, thwarted him by helping FatahIntifada, a breakaway group founded by SaEid Musa Muragha (Abu Musa), to defeat him. Asad, wanting Syria to replace Egypt as the primary deterrent to Israeli power—and as the leading state of the Arab world—aided opponents of Arafat’s policies, led by former PNC president Khalid al-Fahum, to organize the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF) in March 1985. Gathering together the Fatah-Intifada, the PFLP–GC, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), al-SaEiqa, the Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party (PRCP), and some members of the PFLP, the PNSF strove to constitute an alternative to the PLO. The DFLP and the balance of PFLP members, opposed to foreign interference in Palestinian affairs, refused to join because of Syrian backing. Riven by personality conflicts and ideological divergences, the PNSF was a failure and had faded away by 1989. Meanwhile, the policies of the PLO in Tunis began to evolve away from armed struggle toward political action. Despite this change, the Israelis bombed PLO headquarters in an attempt to kill Arafat on 1 October 1985. At the 17th congress of the PNC in Algiers in April 1987 there was a reconciliation among the principal Palestinian movements, including al-Fatah, the DFLP, the PFLP, and the PCP.

354

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Then in December of the same year the first Intifada broke out; and a new, younger leadership began to form within the Occupied Territories, forcing the leadership of the PLO to adapt and revise its strategy again. Many members of PLO organizations in the territories joined the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), the network of leadership committees that rose spontaneously early in the Intifada. Using the argument of “popular legitimacy,” the Intifada proclaimed the state of Palestine, with Jerusalem as the capitol, at the 18th PNC congress in Algiers on 15 November 1988. From that time the leadership of the PLO launched a diplomatic offensive, particularly in Western countries, and especially the United States. In December 1988 Arafat renounced terrorism and declared before the UN General Assembly the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. The United States rewarded him by opening a diplomatic dialogue. Israel, however, neither acknowledged nor responded to this declaration. Consequently, in the crisis beginning in July 1990 that led to the Gulf War of 1991, and in spite of the reservations of a majority of the PLO cadres, Arafat decided to throw his support behind Iraq. He may have felt that Saddam Hussein would be able to change the balance of power in the region, but the decision was a disaster for the PLO and the Palestinians. The immediate results were the persecution, expulsion, and impoverishment of the large Palestinian community in Kuwait, reducing a population of about 350,000 before the war to about 30,000 after it. The earnings of this community had supported many family members in the territories and camps, and the PLO had collected taxes from it for the Palestinian National Fund. Arafat’s support of Iraq also cost the PLO and Palestinians the financial aid they had been receiving from the Arab states (mainly Saudi Arabia) and Arab diplomatic support for the PLO in international affairs. The PLO, therefore, responded positively in September 1991 to the American-Soviet proposal for a Middle East peace conference, which opened in Madrid on 30 October 1991. The PLO, which Israel considered a terrorist organization, was not permitted a delegation, but Palestinian representatives, advised by a committee that consulted with the PLO, were included in the Jordanian delegation. The negotiations were unproductive, however, blocked by a combination of intransigence on the part of the Israeli Likud government and Palestinian resentment of the format for the negotiations and distrust of the American negotiators, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINE NATIONAL CHARTER

some of whom were associated with the Israeli lobby in Washington. When a new Labor government in Israel repealed the prohibition against dealing with the PLO, Arafat was able to seek talks outside of the Madrid conference. This led to the Oslo Accords and Declaration of Principles of 1993, embodying Israeli recognition of the PLO and containing a plan for partial autonomy of the Palestinian territories in anticipation of a treaty on their definitive status. In May 1994, under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the PLO created the Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim government responsible for putting the autonomy into effect, presided over by Arafat. Most PLO departments were moved to the PA, except for the political department which remained in Tunis headed by Faruq Qaddumi. On 7 July 1998 the UN upgraded the status of the PLO, according it the right to participate in political debates in the General Assembly. That same year the PNC altered the Palestine National Charter to conform to the provisions of the Oslo Accords. In the early twenty-first century, many of the PLO’s functions have been absorbed into the PA. The primary independent purpose of the PLO is to conduct negotiations with Israel, although there has been little talk between them since the start of the alAqsa Intifada in 2000. The PLO also oversees affiliated mass organizations such as the General Unions, civic organizations such as the Red Crescent Society, and various social service organizations that serve the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon, Jordan, and camps in the Occupied Territories. In October 2004, the removal of the seriously ill 75-year-old Arafat to France for medical treatment, and the uncertainty of his recovery, set off a wave of uncertainty and political maneuvering within the leadership of the PLO. Arafat’s demise will leave a vacuum at the center of Palestinian political institutions. Initial speculation over the succession centered on PLO general secretary and former PNA prime minister Mahmud Abbas, PNA prime minister Ahmad Qurai, and security chiefs Jibril Rajub and Muhammad Dahlan. Abbas is the most senior of Arafat’s collaborators, and the chief of the commission established to run the PLO’s affairs in his absence (other members are Qurai and PNC chairman Salim Zanoun). Qurai has little independent support, and Rajub and Dahlan have made many enemies. They face potential competition from a younger generation of leadership that has been alienated from the PLO establishment by its ineffectiveness and corruption, as well as from outside organizations like HAMAS that have opposed PLO policies toward IsD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

rael but have refrained from attacking or disrupting the PLO as long as Arafat, a living national symbol, remained in control. When Arafat is gone, there will likely be a struggle for power among the various factions: The established PLO leadership, the younger generation of secular leadership, and the Islamic organizations that have been keeping alive the al-Aqsa Intifada in the face of PLO opposition. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Higher Committee; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Arafat, Yasir; Asad, Hafiz al-; Black September 1970; Camp David Accords; Dahlan, Muhammad; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Fahum, Khalid al-; Fatah, al-; FatahIntifada; Gaza (City); Gulf War (1991); HAMAS; Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Hussein, Saddam; Intifada (1987–1993); Israel Labor Party; Israeli Settlements; League of Arab States; Likud; Musa Muragha, SaEid; Oslo Accords; Palestine; Palestine National Charter; Palestine National Council; Palestine Red Crescent Society; Palestinian National Fund; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party; Phalange; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Qaddumi, Faruq; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman; Rajub, Jibril; Reagan Plan; Resolution 242; Sabra and Shatila; Sadat, Anwar al-; West Bank.

PALESTINE NATIONAL CHARTER: Also known as the Palestinian National Covenant; in Arabic, al-Mithaq al-Watani (or al-Qawmi) al-Filastini. A document written to accompany the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), that enumerates its purposes and intentions. It was written by Ahmad alShukayri and adopted at the first meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC) in May and June 1964, and revised by the PNC in July 1968. The differences between the 1964 and 1968 versions of the Charter reflect the differences between the politics of two eras—before and after the Arab-Israel War (1967)—among Palestinians and in the Arab world. Both versions claim Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people, who have exclusive rights over it; both reject the legitimacy of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, and the Mandate and call for Palestinian self-determination; both call for the complete liberation of Palestine (and therefore, by implication, the elimination of the Israeli state); both define Palestinian identity (and include Jews “of Palestinian [i.e. pre-Zionist] origin,” as the 1964 version puts it);

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

355

PALESTINE NATIONAL COUNCIL

both proclaim a belief in Arab unity. Neither version calls for a Palestinian state, but the 1964 version projects Palestinian self-determination somewhat ambiguously within the framework of a prospective sovereign Arab nation, to which the structural relationship of a Palestinian entity is not made clear; in the 1968 version, the commitment to Arab nationalism is perfunctory and the liberation of Palestine for Palestinians is the overriding goal. In the 1964 version, the PLO specifically disavows sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, then under the control of Jordan and Egypt, respectively; the 1968 version declares a “Palestinian . . . national revolution” and rejects “intervention, trusteeship and subordination.” In the 1964 version there is no mention of armed struggle or any specific means of liberation; in 1968, armed struggle is “the only way to liberate Palestine” and is insisted upon throughout. On 24 April 1996, in the context of the Oslo peace process, the PNC voted to amend the Charter, canceling all the clauses that contradicted both the spirit of the peace process and the content of the letters of mutual recognition that had passed between Israel and the PLO in September 1993, particularly Article 22 regarding the character of Zionism. In December 1998, while United States president Bill Clinton was visiting Gaza, the PNC and the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), by a show of hands, ratified the annulment of the anti-Israeli clauses of the Palestine National Charter. The full official English text of the 1964 Charter may be found at www.mfa.gov.il/MFA; the 1968 text may be found at www.miftah.org and many other sites. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Gaza Strip; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Legislative Council; West Bank.

of the PNC, whose number has grown over the years from 430 to 669 as of 2004, are elected directly for a period of three years. The council meets once a year or by special convocation of the executive committee of the PLO and one-fourth of the council members. The PNC is headed by a president, assisted by two vice presidents and a secretary. The PNC held its meetings in Cairo until 1977, when it broke with Egypt over President Anwar al-Sadat’s diplomatic overtures to Israel. Delegates have since met in Algiers. On 15 November 1988, at the nineteenth session of the PNC, Yasir Arafat, basing himself on UN Resolution 181, issued a Proclamation of the State of Palestine (known as the Algiers Declaration), with Jerusalem as its capital. On 24 April 1996, in the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process launched in Madrid in 1991, the PNC met in special session in Gaza, and decided to amend the Charter by removing all statements denying Israel’s right to exist. Six articles were dropped, among which Article 9, calling for “armed struggle” to liberate Palestine; Article 21, which rejected all negotiated compromise; and Article 22, which compared Zionism to Nazism and described the State of Israel as an arm of “international imperialism.” Demanded by the Israelis, this historic modification was adopted by a vote of 504 in favor, 54 against, 14 abstentions, and 27 absent. Among the latter were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) representatives, both movements opposed to the Oslo Accords. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Charter; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; Proclamation of the State of Palestine; Sadat, Anwar al-.

PALESTINE NATIONAL COUNCIL: The legislative, poli-

PALESTINE NATIONAL COVENANT

cymaking body (al-Majlis al-Watani al-Filastini) of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the equivalent of a national parliament before the creation of the Palestinian Authority and its Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Its existence was formulated and authorized at an Arab League summit in January 1964 and it held its inaugural meeting in East Jerusalem in May and June 1964. The PNC represents all Palestinian people, those living in occupied Palestine as well as outside of Palestine, as well as the various constituent organizations of the PLO. At its 1964 meeting it adopted the Palestine National Charter and the PLO Fundamental Law that constituted the PLO, of which it became a part. Members

356

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE

Palestine National Charter.

PALESTINE RED CRESCENT SOCIETY: Medical and social services agency of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) created in Amman in December 1968, to meet the medical care and sanitation needs of the Palestinian people. Established in the Palestinian territories, where it works with the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian Authority and other nongovernmental organizations and in countries where Palestinians have taken refuge, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has adopted a program whose goal it is to affirm the national identity of its T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

PALESTINE NATIONAL COUNCIL. MEMBERS OF THE POLICYMAKING BODY OF THE PALESTINE LIBERATION ORGANIZATION VOTE TO REAFFIRM PALESTINE NATIONAL CHARTER CALLING FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL. U.S. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON WAS PRESENT FOR THE HISTORIC VOTE ON 14 DECEMBER 1998. THE EARLIER VOTE WAS ON 24 APRIL 1996. (AP/Wide World AN EARLIER DECISION TO RESCIND PORTIONS OF THE

Photos)

people by giving it the means necessary to take charge of its sanitation, social, and humanitarian needs. The PRCS operates 15 hospitals, 130 ambulances, 69 public health clinics, and numerous other social service locations. It provides Palestinians with primary health care, emergency care, disaster assistance, clinical and rehabilitative medicine, and social services in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and (until 2003) in Iraq. It also maintains offices in France, Italy, and Canada. Funding comes primarily through contributions from foundations, United Nations and foreign government aid organizations, humanitarian agencies, and similar sources. The PRCS is the largest Red Crescent organization in the Arab world, and is affiliated with the International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (IFRC). It is headquartered in al-Bireh, near Ramallah. In 2004, the honorary head of the PRCS is Yasir Arafat’s brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat. The president and acting director general is Yunis alKhatib.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority.

PALESTINE RED CROSS SEE

Palestine Red Crescent Society.

PALESTINIAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: An independent Palestinian academic institute that conducts and publishes research, seminars, conferences, and workshops on Palestinian issues in national, Arab, and international contexts, with affiliated and outside scholars. The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) was founded in March 1997 by Mahdi Abdul Hadi and a group of intellectuals and academics in East Jerusalem. It is not affiliated with any government or political party. Its financial support comes from donations, sales of publications, foundation grants, and targeted grants from specialized agencies of some foreign governments, including those of the United States

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

357

PALESTINIAN AGENCY

(USAID), Canada, and Britain. It posts a great deal of useful information on its web site, www.passia.org.

PALESTINIAN

AGENCY: Palestinian institution, founded in November 1996 in Geneva, for the purpose of supporting economic and cultural development of the Palestinian autonomous territories. The most important founders of this organization were wealthy businessmen of Palestinian origin, such as Abdul Mohsen Qattan, Jawid al-Ghossein, Abdul Majid Shoman, Hassib al-Sabbagh, and Munib alMasri.

PALESTINIAN ASSEMBLY: Palestinian movement created in January 1995 at the initiative of the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Under the control of Bassam al-ShaqDa, the Palestinian Assembly wanted to draw Palestinian opponents of the Oslo Accords to its cause. On 25 May 1995 a communiqué of the ten groups belonging to the Palestinian opposition front Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF) launched an appeal to strengthen this new movement, so as to function as a framework for an opposition front in the Occupied Territories. After a few promising statements, this organization was not heard from again. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Oslo Accords; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY: Interim Palestinian government, established under the terms of the Oslo Accords. It was created by a decree of 12 October 1993 of the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and established in May 1994, in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority (PA)’s mandate was to administer the partial autonomy in the Occupied Territories for the five-year period specified in the Oslo Accords, at which time agreed-upon governmental powers and territory were to have been transferred and a final settlement negotiated. It was understood, though not stated, that the final settlement would result in the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Under the Oslo Accords and subsequent agreements, the PA officially has control over both security and civil matters in certain designated (“A”) areas and over civil matters only in other (“B”) areas; Israel retains full control over the remaining (“C”) areas. In practice the degree of Palestinian control of a given place has depended on whether the Israelis are in occupation at a given time. The PA maintains a number of armed Palestinian se-

358

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

curity forces (including a paramilitary police force), which report to Yasir Arafat directly, rather than through a PA chain of command. Some of these are responsible, essentially, for meeting Israel’s “security needs” by controlling anti-Israel activity. They are the objects of frequent attack by Israel. Others are used to keep political opposition to the PLO leadership under control and are frequently deployed against Palestinian political organizations. At the time of its establishment the PA administration was comprised of the following members: Yasir Arafat (president and minister of the interior; al-Fatah), Muhammad Zuhdi Nashashibi (Finance and Agriculture; Independent), Yasir Amr (Education and Teaching; Independent), Yasir Abd Rabbo (Culture; Fida), Ahmad Sulayman Qurai (Economy and Commerce; Fatah), Abdul Hafi al-Ashab (Communications; pro–Palestinian People’s Party), Samir Ghosheh (Labor; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Intisar al-Wazir (Social Affairs; Fatah), Nabil ShaEth (Planning and Cooperation; Fatah), Zakariya al-Agha (Housing; Fatah), Elias Freij (Tourism; Independent), Riyad al-ZaEnun (Health; Independent), Freih Abu Middein (Justice; Fatah), Saib Erekat (Local Communities; Fatah), Abdelaziz al-Haj Ahmad (Transportation), Azmi Shuaibi (Sports and Youth; Fida), Jamil Tarifi (Civil Service; Fatah), Sheikh Hasan Tahbub (Religious Affairs). Faysal alHusayni was named minister without portfolio, in charge of the Jerusalem issue. In January 1996 elections were held for the presidency—Arafat won in a landslide—and for the newly created legislature, the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC); in May, a cabinet reshuffle brought about the departure of some ministers who had just won seats and the arrival of others who until then had refused to be part of the PA, such as Hanan Ashrawi, named minister of higher education. In 1996 a Likud government was elected in Israel, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, which did not believe in the Oslo peace process, and in fact the process has never recovered, changing the role of the PA. On 23 May 1997, an internal audit pegged the cost of management “errors” by the PA at $326 million, and a number of ministers were accused of embezzlement. On 5 August, the PA was reorganized again on the recommendation of the Legislative Council. The International Monetary Fund and especially the European Union (EU), the largest outside financial contributor to the PA, have also been concerned over corruption and diversion of funds in the PA and have conducted investigations and demanded reforms, some of which have been made. It is known T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN AUTONOMOUS TERRITORIES

LEBANON

Mediterranean
Sea

Golan Heights Acre

Sea of
Galilee

Haifa Nazareth

SYRIA

n R i ver

Jenin

Tel Aviv-Jaffa

Jorda

Nablus

West Bank Ramallah Jericho

In the spring of 2002 the Israelis invaded Ramallah, where the PA is headquartered, placed Arafat under house arrest, and destroyed buildings all around him, holding him hostage for months. In 2004, he is unable to travel, for fear the Israelis will prevent his return. In April 2003 Arafat bowed to American and Israeli pressure and appointed a (figurehead) prime minister, Mahmud Abbas, who was replaced by Ahmad Qurai in September. In the summer of 2004 there were a number of kidnappings of and threats to PA officials by a variety of groups. The most serious incident came in July when a revolt was threatened in Gaza if Arafat did not withdraw the appointment of his brother as security chief there. After several days, he did.

Jerusalem

ISRA E L

Bethlehem

Gaza

Hebron

that millions of dollars of PA funds have gone either into the pockets of corrupt officials, their friends, and families, or to Palestinian groups outside the PA structure that have engaged in anti-Israel activities, including terrorism. Since these facts were uncovered, the EU has chosen to donate only in the form of specific grants for particular purposes. Corruption and ineffective and undemocratic government have also grown as issues among the Palestinian population, particularly since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. Thanks to the increased violence and economic disruptions, the Israeli reoccupation and its continuing land confiscation, road and settlement building and the building of the “Apartheid wall,” the people living in the occupied territories are increasingly angry, and younger people in particular have been alienated from the PA, seen as unrepresentative and ineffective, at best, against the Israelis.

Dead
Sea

Gaza Strip Khan Yunis Beersheba

Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Agha, Zakariya al-; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Ashrawi, Hanan; Fatah, al-; Erekat, Saib Muhammad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Legislative Council; Palestine Liberation Organization; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman; ShaEth, Nabil Ali Mohamed; Wazir, Intisar al-. SEE ALSO

JO R D AN

E G YPT N

Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip, 2000

0 0

International border Areas in which the Palestinian Authority exercises various levels of control Areas under full Israeli control City

15 15

30 mi. 30 km

PALESTINIAN AUTONOMOUS TERRITORIES: Those parts of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) that, under the terms of the Oslo Accords and subsequent agreements, actually came under the control of the Palestinian Authority between 1994 and the Israeli reoccupation in 2002. SEE ALSO

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

Gaza Strip; Oslo Accords; West Bank.

C O N F L I C T

359

PALESTINIAN AUTONOMY

PALESTINIAN AUTONOMY: The concept from the time of the Camp David negotiations that Palestinians will be allowed to govern themselves, in areas determined by negotiated agreement(s), under the effective supervision of the Israelis, for a specified period, after which there will be a “final status” settlement in which they may be allowed to declare (limited) legal sovereignty under the terms of further negotiated agreement(s). It is the compromise at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process. The idea of autonomy came up seriously for the first time in 1978 during the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt, which, in their second phase, specified that “full autonomy will be accorded for five years to the populations of the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military government and its civil administration will cease to exert their functions as soon as autonomous authorities shall have been freely elected by the inhabitants of these regions.” Furthermore, it was anticipated that in the three years following the transitional period negotiations would start on the future of the West Bank and Gaza. No text took up the question of the future of Jerusalem. On 25 May 1979, as required by the IsraeliEgyptian Peace Treaty, Cairo and Tel Aviv began negotiations on West Bank and Gaza Strip autonomy. There was no Palestinian participation in these negotiations. The opposition to the Camp David Accords of the only acknowledged representative Palestinian body, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the intensification of Israeli colonization of the Occupied Territories, rendered the dialogue futile. In April 1980 Egypt proposed, in vain, that a regime of autonomy first be established in the Gaza Strip. Thirteen years later, on 13 September 1993, in Washington, D.C., Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles on transitional and partial autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, excluding Jerusalem. It was specified that the objective of IsraeliPalestinian negotiations would consist, notably, in “establishing an interim Palestinian self-government authority . . . for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” This agreement, known as the Oslo Accords, was followed by an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the institution of Palestinian autonomy, signed on 4 May 1994, in Cairo. Gaza Strip; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; West Bank. SEE ALSO

360

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

PALESTINIAN AUTONOMY COUNCIL SEE

Palestinian Legislative Council.

PALESTINIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION: The broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It operates both radio (Voice of Palestine) and television stations from its offices and studios in Ramallah. (It is not a monopoly; there are commercial broadcasters in the Palestinian territories, as well as ground and satellite stations available from other countries.) It began operations in 1994 and is under the direct control of Yasir Arafat rather than the PA Ministry of Information. It has been criticized for adhering to the official view, and has been accused by Israel of inciting violence and antisemitism. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Palestinian Authority.

PALESTINIAN CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (PCHR): Independent Palestinian nongovernmental human rights organization founded in 1995 by Raji Sourani, a prominent human rights lawyer and activist. Its goals include “protection and respect of human rights and support of the rule of law according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the other human rights agreements; assisting in the development of democratic institutions and civil society according to international standards; supporting the rights of Palestinian people as recognized by international law.” In addition to providing legal aid to victims, PCHR documents human rights violations (by Israeli or Palestinian authorities) and releases its findings in published reports and studies. The organization also works with other rights organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), organizes conferences, and conducts training workshops. PCHR is based in Gaza City and most of its activity is conducted in the Gaza Strip. It holds special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council and is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, the Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme (FIDH), and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. PCHR maintains a web site at www.pchrgaza.org. SEE ALSO Gaza (City); Sourani, Raji. PALESTINIAN COMMON BATTLE FRONT SEE

Palestinian Popular Struggle Front.

PALESTINIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE SEE

T H E

Proclamation of the State of Palestine.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION FOR CITIZENS’ RIGHTS

PALESTINIAN DEMOCRATIC ASSEMBLY: Palestinian movement created in January 1992, following dissension in the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), under the impetus of George Hazbun, vice president of the confederation of unions of the West Bank. This group has not been very widely known. SEE ALSO Palestinian People’s Party.

PALESTINIAN DEMOCRATIC UNION: This Palestinian political party (Al-Ittihad al-Dimuqrati al-Filastini; its acronym backward, “fida,” means “sacrifice”) was born of a split in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) in 1990–1991. It was founded in September 1991 and led by Yasir Abd Rabbo, former assistant secretary general of the DFLP and later minister of culture in the Palestinian Authority, and joined by others from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) (soon to be the Palestinian People’s Party [PPP]). At first representing itself as “the” DFLP, the group took the name Palestinian Democratic Union (PDU) in 1993. The PDU is a constituent member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and is represented on the PLO executive committee and in the Palestine National Council (PNC). It represents a reformist tendency within the PLO and has campaigned for the democratization of Palestinian political life. The PDU directs its activity toward the “independence of the Palestinian people and its right to return to its native land, while backing the democratic aspirations of the Palestinians.” Fervent but critical in its advocacy of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that began with the Madrid Conference of 1991, the PDU has supported the policies of Yasir Arafat, although it has criticized the internal functioning of the PLO. The headquarters of the PDU is in Ramallah. In 2004, its principal figures are Rabbo and Saleh RafDat (secretary general). SEE ALSO Abd Rabbo, Yasir; Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Palestinian Authority; Palestine Liberation Organization. PALESTINIAN ECONOMIC AND RECONSTRUCTION:

COUNCIL FOR DEVELOPMENT

Palestinian administrative structure established on 4 November 1993 by decree of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for the purpose of managing economic aid meant for the economic development of the Palestinian autonomous territories in the context of the Oslo Accords. While the advisory council was under the authority of Yasir Arafat’s presidency, the executive committee of the organiza-

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tion was chaired by Ahmad Sulayman Qurai, assisted by Hassan Abu Libdeh. On 25 January 1994 the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR) published a proposed Palestinian Development Plan for a seven-year period. PECDAR was supplanted by a new organization, the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC). After MOPIC established itself as the administration responsible for donor coordination efforts and planning, PECDAR became an implementing agency for small- and medium-scale infrastructure projects (many, if not most, in association with the World Bank). SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Autonomous Territories; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman.

PALESTINIAN GENERAL UNIONS: “Popular organizations” affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). These represent important sectors of Palestinian society, based on shared profession, skills, or interest, and in some cases act as umbrella organizations for smaller groups. Most have branches outside the Palestinian territories; in fact most were originally organized outside Palestine, to serve Palestinians in the diaspora and to incorporate them into the PLO’s activities. Some are older than the PLO itself. They are formally constituted as democratic organizations, with constitutions, bylaws, and elected leaders, but in practice their policies conform to the direction of the PLO leadership. (None, however, has a monopoly in its area of Palestinian society.) All are represented in the Palestine National Council (PNC). Some operate important social programs and have had a significant role in the national struggle, which is their primary purpose. As of 2004, most are headquartered in Ramallah. The most significant have been the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT), the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), the General Union of Palestinian Workers (GUPW), the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists (GUPWJ), and the Higher Council of Palestinian Youth and Sports; other important general unions are those of Palestinian artists, artistic performers, doctors, economists, engineers, farmers and jurists. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council. PALESTINIAN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION FOR CITIZENS’ RIGHTS: Autonomous human rights agency within the Palestinian Authority (PA) created in Sep-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

361

PALESTINIAN INTERIM SELF-GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY

tember 1993 at the urging of Hanan Ashrawi, who was its first commissioner general. To insure its independence, the commission is funded by contributions from outside the PA (mainly from European governments and foundations), and is controlled by a board of commissioners made up of Palestinians from both the territories and the diaspora, with public commitments to human rights and democracy. The commissioner general and executive director are appointed by the board, and staff members are not considered part of the PA civil service. The commission attempts to act as an ombudsman within Palestinian society, investigating and attempting to resolve complaints of abuses from Palestinian citizens against the PA. It monitors the activities of public institutions and tries to insure accountability; tries to safeguard freedom of expression and democratic participation in political decision making; reviews draft legislation and makes recommendations to insure conformity to international human rights standards; and familiarizes citizens with their rights and the means of defending them. The commission operates with sufficient independence that members of its staff and leadership have been arrested and jailed on several occasions. The commission also monitors and issues public statements and reports regarding the actions of the Israeli occupation authorities. In 2004, officers included Mamduh alAker, commissioner general, and Said Zeedani, director general. The board of commissioners included Ashrawi, Eyad Sarraj, Haydar Abd al-Shafi (all former commissioners general), Mahmud Darwish, and Nasir Aruri, among others. SEE ALSO Abd al-Shafi, Haydar; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Darwish, Mahmud.

PALESTINIAN INTERIM SELF-GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY SEE

Palestinian Authority.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC COMBAT MOVEMENT: Palestinian Islamic splinter organization (Harakat alMujahada al-Islamiya al-Filastiniya in Arabic) created in Lebanon at the end of 1989 by Shaykh Ibrahim Ghonim, born of personal conflicts between Ghonim and Fathi Shiqaqi, who decided to organize the Palestinian Hizbullah. Backed by Iran in its struggle with Israel, the Palestinian Islamic Combat Movement (PICM) sometimes participated in operations mounted by the Lebanese Hizbullah. At the end of 1993, the PICM found itself much weakened by the departure of many of its members, who decided to

362

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

rejoin the ranks of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad of Shiqaqi. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; Hizbullah–Palestine; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Shiqaqi, Fathi.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD: Militant Palestinian fundamentalist Islamic group (al-Jihad al-Islami alFilastini, in Arabic) that grew from an Islamic political current in the occupied Palestinian territories at the end of the 1970s, developed by a radical splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was born of the convergence of three events: the dissolution of the Islamic Liberation Party (ILP), the success of the Iranian revolution, and a split in the Islamic Collective (al-Majma E alIslami) of Ahmad IsmaEil Yasin. The PIJ is both a (Sunni) Islamist and a Palestinian nationalist group, and is therefore a descendant of the Islamic Liberation Party of Shaykh Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani. From its beginnings the PIJ has advocated a jihad (“struggle; holy war” in Arabic) of liberation to create a state in the whole of Palestine, whose capital would be Jerusalem. Several of the early leaders of the PIJ, such as Fathi Shiqaqi, Ramadan Shallah, Abdelaziz Udeh, Muhammad al-Hindi, and Abdallah al-Shami, received a religious education in Egypt. In Jordan, Shaykh Asad Bayud Tamimi, former imam of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and former member of the ILP, made efforts to promulgate the ideas of this movement. The tendency backed by Shaykh Tamimi and his family became known as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Jerusalem faction. Between 1981 and 1983, Shiqaqi, Udeh, and Munir Shafiq joined the movement, to which they brought a radical nationalist coloring, particularly after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Thereafter, an armed branch was formed that conducted operations sometimes claimed in the name of the Islamic Jihad Brigades (Sarayat al-Jihad al-Islami), such as the incident in 1986 when jihadis threw hand grenades at an Israeli military ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, through the mediation of the leadership of the western sector of al-Fatah headed by Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), tried vainly to draw this movement into the ranks of al-Fatah and to convince its directors to join the PLO. At the end of 1987 and beginning of 1988, when the first Intifada was spreading and deepening in intensity, the PIJ and al-Fatah both attempted to take control of the revolt, as did HAMAS, which was formed by a group that broke away from the PIJ. (HAMAS immediately became the larger and more important T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD

organization, and remains so into the twenty-first century.) In February, a closer collaboration between their operations was discussed. About this time, an Israeli commando in Cyprus assassinated three of the principal leaders of the Islamic Jihad Brigades, Bassam Sultan, Hassan Bheiss, and Marwan Kayyali, and then in Tunis, in April, alWazir, operations chief of the PLO. Four months later, Shaqaqi and Udeh were expelled by Israeli authorities to Lebanon. The development of the Intifada in the Occupied Territories, which PIJ claimed credit for, plus the expulsion of several dozen Islamic leaders to Lebanon, added to the popularity of the movement in the Palestinian population, and allowed the PIJ to obtain financial aid from Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Lebanon, the leaders of the PIJ developed contacts with fundamentalist pro-Iranian groups such as Hizbullah, as well as with radical Palestinian movements based in that country, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command (PFLP–GC). In concert with Iranian leaders, the PIJ decided to create an organization meant to unite the diverse Palestinian Islamist groups. During August 1989 divergences between these different currents gave rise to two new movements: the Islamic Combatant Orientation (ICO; al-Ittihad al-Islami al-Mujahid), headed by Munir Shafiq, and the Palestinian Hizbullah, led by Sayed Baraka and Ahmed Mehanna, backed by Iran. Fathi Shiqaqi, editor of the weekly al-Mujahid and one of the founders of the PIJ, belonged to the latter movement. Rapidly, new divergences surfaced in the Palestinian Hizbullah, from then on in abeyance. Faced with this situation, Shaykh Tamimi, in Jordan, lay claim to the leadership of all the Palestinian movements connected to the Jihad, attracting to him a few of its members who were living in Lebanon. During November 1991, Abdelaziz Udeh and Fathi Shiqaqi decided to create the Palestinian Islamic Jihad– Shiqaqi-Udeh Faction in Lebanon, which was better known under the name Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement and which became the main organization in the Palestinian Jihad movement. Udeh became the spiritual guide of the movement, while Shaqaqi was its secretary general. At the same time, Munir Shafiq decided to leave Lebanon to go to Jordan, where he joined the ranks of al-Fatah. In December 1992, after the killing of an Israeli frontier guard, the Tel Aviv authorities expelled 415 men suspected of belonging to HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, to Lebanon, which only strengthened the determination of the members of the Jihad to fight against Israel. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In November 1993, opposed to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Shiqaqi-Udeh Faction joined the Palestinian opposition in the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). In 1994 and 1995, Shiqaqi’s group organized a number of murderous anti-Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, where the new Palestinian Authority was responsible, in part, for security. On 2 November 1994, one of the most prominent military leaders of Jihad, Hani Abed, was assassinated by the Israelis at Khan Yunis, which led to bloody reprisals on the part of the movement. On 22 January, in the middle of Tel Aviv, a Jihad suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded more than 60. Within the movement there surfaced tensions caused by an unprecedented problem: the intervention of Palestinian authorities in security matters in the autonomous territories. The latter were accused by some PIJ members of doing the Israelis’ work, thereby betraying the Palestinian cause. In March, Shiqaqi was dismissed from his functions as secretary general of the movement. In May, the statements of Shaykh Abdallah al-Shami, in favor of a modification of the means used in the fight against Israel, caused him to be replaced as spokesperson of the movement in Gaza, by Shaykh Nafiz Azzam. Fearing an infiltration by Palestinian and Israeli security services, the leaders of the movement undertook a significant reorganization. The Jihad office in Iran came under the authority of the Muhammad Saftawi, from a distinguished Palestinian family, and the leadership of the movement in Lebanon was strengthened by Sayed Baraka. The authoritarian methods of Shiqaqi caused a serious dispute between himself and Abdelaziz Udeh, which led to the expulsion of the latter from the PIJ. In September 1995, the dissidents of the PIJ decided to found their own movement, the Palestinian Islamic Front Party, thereby weakening the position of Shiqaqi. On 26 October, passing through Malta, Shiqaqi was assassinated by the Mossad. Three days later, he was replaced by Ramadan Abdallah Shallah. In midNovember 1999, two leaders of the movement, received by the Lebanese prime minister Selim Hoss, declared that the PIJ would no longer launch attacks against Israel from Lebanese soil. This declaration came in the middle of a series of attacks against Israel, attributed to the PIJ, and at a moment when the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had announced several times that he wanted the IDF to withdraw from South Lebanon by 7 July of the next year. In the autumn of 2000, the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Occupied Territories prompted the PIJ to pursue and intensify the armed struggle against Israel. Members of the movement, having joined a com-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

363

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD–BAYT AL-MAQDIS

mand group, coordinating the Intifada, carried out a number of bombings, leading to severe reprisals by the IDF, often in the form of “targeted killings.” SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Fatah, al-; HAMAS; Hizbullah; Intifada (1987–1993); Intifada, al-Aqsa; Mossad; Muslim Brotherhood; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command; Shiqaqi, Fathi; Wazir, Khalil al-; Yasin, Ahmad IsmaEil.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD–BAYT AL-MAQDIS: Subgroup (al-Jihad al-Islami al-Filastini–Bayt al-Maqdis; Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Jerusalem) of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad whose name surfaced for the first time in February 1990, when it claimed responsibility for an attack on a bus filled with Israeli tourists in Isma’ilia, Egypt (the place where the Muslim Brotherhood was founded), that caused eleven deaths. Its principal leader was Shaykh Asad Bayud Tamimi, one of the founders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who, taking advantage of disarray in the Jihad in Lebanon, tried to capture its leadership. The movement went on to claim credit for a number of attacks it had not really carried out. Opposing any negotiated resolution with Israel and advocating the liberation of the whole of Palestine, it received material support from Iran and Sudan. In October 1990 a disagreement between Tamimi and Ibrahim Serbal prompted the latter to form his own group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad–KataDib al-Aqsa. After the Gulf War, two factions appeared within Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Bayt al-Maqdis: one pro-Iraqi, the other pro-Iranian. These two new currents rose from a divergence between Shaykh Tamimi and TalaDat alTamimi. Within the larger Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, the Bayt al-Maqdis faction is considered to be closest to al-Fatah. Some think that members of Force 17 joined its ranks in January 1993 in order to constitute a military branch called the Falcons of Islam. In Jordan, where the movement is based, the constant surveillance of the Jordanian services has kept its activities within the limits of strict legality. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Palestinian Islamic Jihad–KataDib al-Aqsa.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD–KATADIB AL-AQSA: Splinter group (al-Jihad al-Islami al-Filastini–alKata Dib al-Aqsa; Palestinian Islamic Jihad–al-Aqsa Phalanx) of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Bayt alMaqdis (itself a faction of Palestinian Islamic Jihad), led by Ibrahim Serbal. It originated in the discord be-

364

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

tween Serbal and Asad Tamimi, leader of the Bayt alMaqdis faction. Its name surfaced for the first time on 21 October 1990 when it took responsibility for the killing of three Israelis in Jerusalem. In 1993 dissension between the principal leaders prompted the formation of two currents, one led by Serbal, the other by Fayiz al-Aswad. In October 1994 a new split, caused by Shaykh Husayn Anbar, led Aswad to quit the movement to live in Gaza with a few supporters. Weakened by internal bickering, this faction has lost its influence in the Palestinian community. Its headquarters is in Amman. SEE ALSO Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Bayt alMaqdis.

PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD—SHIQAQI-UDEH FACTION: A faction within Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), formed in November 1991 by Abdelaziz Udeh and Fathi Shiqaqi. Opposed to the Oslo Accords, this group joined the Palestinian opposition bloc Alliance of Palestinian Forces in November 1993. Eventually it became the main current of the PIJ. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Shiqaqi, Fathi.

PALESTINIAN ISRAELIS: Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel; those Palestinians (and their descendants) who stayed in their homes during the Arab-Israel War (1948) or who returned and were allowed to stay. About 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948; while about 150,000 stayed within the Israeli borders. Some fled and managed to return afterward, although all but 20,000–30,000 were expelled again. In late 1948 the Palestinians in Israel were 156,000, about 18 percent of the Israeli population; in 2004 they number more than 1.3 million (including the annexed areas of East Jerusalem and its suburbs), or about 20 percent of the population of Israel. Most are Sunni Muslim; almost 18 percent are Christians, and approximately 10 percent are Druze (and some unclassified). Until 1966 they were forbidden to travel without a special permit. Except for the Druze, Palestinian Israelis are exempt from military service. Otherwise they enjoy, theoretically, the same rights as other Israelis. Nevertheless, for many years, Palestinian Israelis have been treated as second-class citizens, discriminated against in education (Arabs are schooled in a separate, and less well-funded, system), housing (the government has granted only 1,000 permits to build new housing for Arabs since 1948), employment (unemployment among Palestinian Israeli T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN ISRAELIS

men is estimated to be over 14 percent), and social provisions. Between 1960 and 1980, the Palestinian Israeli population—whose land had been taken from them and thus had become mostly urban residents— reinforced a Palestinian nationalist feeling by voting for leftist Israeli parties (the largest, MAPAM and Labor, ran candidates on separate “Arab lists” into the 1970s). By the middle of the 1980s, after having long been rejected by both Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the Palestinian Israelis had started to feel more comfortable with their double nationality. They founded their own parties and started participating more actively in Israeli political life; this time also saw the rise of the Israeli Islamic Movement (IIM). At the time of the 1992 elections, Palestinian Israelis were the focus of much political maneuvering that aimed at persuading them to rally to the ranks of the two main Israeli political parties, Likud and Labor. After the ballot of 30 May 1996 that won them eleven seats in the Knesset for different Arab and mixed Arab and Jewish parties, the Palestinian Israelis became much more assertive about their rights. The Arab Democratic Party, specifically Palestinian, won four seats, while the other representatives belonged to the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, the Labor Party, and Meretz. In March 1999, anticipating the general elections of the following May, Azmi Bishara, Democratic Front for Peace and Equality representative and founder of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), announced his candidacy for the post of prime minister, becoming the first Arab to run for this office. Just before the vote he withdrew his candidacy and threw his support to the Labor candidate, Ehud Barak. On 18 May 1999, after the election, Palestinian Israelis had won a total of thirteen seats, divided between the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, the NDA, the Unified Arab List, Meretz, and Israel United. Among these new representatives was Hussniya Jabara, the first Palestinian woman ever elected to the Knesset. Between 1998 and 1999 two events evidenced the integration of the Arab community into Israel: the appointment of an Arab judge, Abdel Rahman Zoabi, to the High Court of Justice, and Rana Raslan’s winning the title of Miss Israel. In 2000 Palestinian Israelis were represented in the Knesset by 13 seats that represented several parties: 5 for the Unified Arab Party, 2 for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, 1 for the National Democratic Assembly, 1 for the Arab Movement for Change, 2 for the Labor Party, 1 for Meretz, and 1 for Likud. Among them, Nawaf Masalha was deputy minister of foreign D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

affairs and Salih Tarif, a Druze, chairman of the Rules Committee of the Knesset. In January 2001, the Arab community of Israel decided to boycott the elections of the following 6 February in protest against the policies of the Labor government of Ehud Barak. Labor went on to lose power, partly perhaps because of the drop in Arab support. During the summer of 2001, when the Likud was back in power in a national unity government (in which Tarif was a minister without portfolio) and the al-Aqsa Intifada was intensifying in the Palestinian territories, two Palestinian Israeli deputies were the focus of an Knesset investigation. In November 2000, Azmi Bishara had gone to Damascus, where he met President Bashar al-Asad. One result of this visit was the organization of a trip that allowed Palestinian Israeli families to see their relatives who were refugees in Syria. In June 2001, the Knesset opened an inquiry about him, following remarks he had made that were thought to be anti-Israeli on the occasion of Hafiz al-Asad’s death. Two months later the same charges were leveled against another Palestinian Israeli representative in the Knesset, Taleb al-Sanaa. On 7 November 2001 the Knesset lifted Bishara’s parliamentary immunity, accusing him of incitement to terrorism and of organizing travel to a country at war with Israel. In 2002 Bishara and Ahmad Tibi were barred from running in the next election on the grounds that they had supported “terrorists” by denouncing the Israeli assault on Jenin that spring, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban shortly before the election in January 2003. Both Tibi and Bishara were returned to the Knesset. Palestinian Israelis generally supported the Oslo Accords of 1993, and they have generally favored the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But their belief in the good faith of Israeli governments has been decreasing. In October 2000, after the incident at the Haram al-Sharif that set off the al-Aqsa Intifada, Palestinian Israelis demonstrated in solidarity with the Palestinians of the territories. Police opened fire on the demonstrators and killed thirteen. A commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodor Orr, which issued a report in September 2003. The report deplored official neglect of underlying social issues and police overreaction, but also found that police “underreaction” to previous incidents, and “incitement” by Palestinian Israeli politicians such as Bishara, had also been at fault. Its major recommendations, however, were that to “remove the stain of discrimination,” Israel must provide a more equitable system, specifically in the areas of land and hous-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

365

PALESTINIAN LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL

ing allocation, education, state ministry budgeting, and employment. The government agreed to the recommendations (although it has yet to publish the report in Arabic). SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Arab-Israel War (1948); Barak, Ehud; Bishara, Azmi; Gaza Strip; Intifada, al-Aqsa; Israeli Islamic Movement; Knesset; National Democratic Alliance; West Bank.

PALESTINIAN LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL: Palestinian na-

tional parliament (al-Majlis al-Tashri Ei al-Filastini) created under the Oslo Accords II as part of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) first convened on 21 March 1996, after the first and, as of 2004, only elections in the territories, held on a universal-suffrage basis on 20 January. Presided over by Ahmad Sulayman Qurai, the PLC was comprised of 88 deputies, 34 of whom were chosen from the Gaza Strip and 54 from the West Bank. Its first session took place in Gaza, and the first debates concerned the platform and investiture, on 27 June, of the PA. The majority of the members of the PLC, whether independent or belonging to al-Fatah, supported the policies of the PA, headed by Yasir Arafat. On 16 October, at the invitation of the Israel Communist Party, the Knesset received a delegation of nine members of the PLC. Among the ten committees in the PLC, the political committee was presided over by Hanan Ashrawi, and that of interior and security by Fakhri Shakoura. The principal task of the PLC was the elaboration of organizational laws for civil administration, in preparation for Palestinian statehood. It therefore devoted a major portion of its activity to developing a “Basic Law,” amenable to giving the Palestinian state a true constitution. Meant to last for the period of transitional autonomy, the mandate of the PLC has been extended due to the stalling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Ashrawi, Hanan Daouda; Gaza Strip; Oslo Accords II; Qurai, Ahmad Sulayman; West Bank.

PALESTINIAN MARTYRS WORKS SOCIETY SEE

SAMED.

PALESTINIAN NATIONAL AUTHORITY SEE

Palestinian Authority.

PALESTINIAN NATIONAL FRONT: Palestinian movement created in August 1973 in the West Bank, fol-

366

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

lowing the 11th congress of the Palestine National Council (PNC). Gathering together primarily leftist militants, the Palestinian National Front (PNF) wanted to mitigate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s lack of representation in the Palestinian territories by attempting to establish a political dialogue with Israeli authorities that might look with favor on such an opening. The PNF disappeared in 1982, as suddenly as it had appeared on the Palestinian internal scene, following a hardening of Israeli policies toward the Occupied Territories. This movement has sometimes been confused with the Popular Resistance Front, a radical militant branch of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP). SEE ALSO Palestine Communist Party; Palestine National Council; West Bank.

PALESTINIAN NATIONAL FUND: Palestinian organization established in 1964, conforming to Article 24 of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fundamental law, to finance the activities of the PLO in the political as well as military, social, and cultural areas. From 1984 to 1996, the Palestinian National Fund (PNF) was headed by Jawad Ghusayn. The PNF is responsible for managing financial aid coming from a variety of sources: funds from Arab states, contributions from wealthy Palestinians, and a “liberation tax” levied on Palestinians working in Arab countries. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization.

PALESTINIAN NATIONAL SALVATION FRONT: Palestinian organization (Jabhat al-Inqadh al-Watani alFilastini, in Arabic) created in March 1985 by Khalid al-Fahum, who, being opposed to the policies of Yasir Arafat, had resigned as president of the Palestine National Council (PNC). Backed by Syria and gathering together the Fatah-Intifada, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC), the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), al-SaEiqa, the Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party (PRCP), and a part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF) strove to constitute a true oppositional front to Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), opposed to all foreign interference in Palestinian affairs, refused to join because of the Syrian backing. Torn by personality conflicts and ideological divergences, the PNSF did not succeed in forming a viable opposition to the PLO, or proposing a real alternaT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PALESTINIAN REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY

tive to the policies of Arafat. From 1989 its activities were reduced to the publication of simple press communiqués. In 1993, after the signature of the IsraeliPalestinian Oslo Accords in September, Palestinian opposition forces formed a new front, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF), which replaced the PNSF. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Arafat, Yasir; Fahum, Khalid al-.

PALESTINIAN PEOPLE’S PARTY (al-Hizb al-Sha Eabi alFilastini, sometimes translated as Palestinian Popular Party): Name since October 1991 of the former Palestine Communist Party (PCP). The Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) advocated a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. A member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since 1987, this group supported the policies of Yasir Arafat. In January 1992 the party split; Georges Hazbun, vice president of the confederation of West Bank unions, resigned to found the Palestinian Democratic Assembly (PDA). In 1994, opposed to certain clauses of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1994, several figures in the PPP distanced themselves from the policies of Arafat. Its principal leaders have included: Bashir Barghuti (secretary general until 1998), Mustafa Barghuti (secretary general 1998– 2003), Bassam al-Salhi (secretary general), Suleiman Najjab, FuDad Riziq, Abdul Majid Hamdan, Walid EAwad, and Ghassan Khatib, Palestinian Authority minister of labor. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Democratic Assembly. PALESTINIAN POPULAR PARTY SEE

Palestinian People’s Party.

PALESTINIAN POPULAR STRUGGLE FRONT (Jabhat al-Nidal al-Sha Dabi al-Filastini, in Arabic): MarxistLeninist in inspiration and upholding Arab nationalism, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) was created on 15 July 1967 in the West Bank, after the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War, which caused numerous splinters in al-Fatah. Its founder, Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a former member of the BaEth Party in Ramallah, advocated continuing the struggle against Israel to recover the territories occupied by the Israeli army. In 1968 the PPSF emerged from clandestinity by opening an office in Jordan. In 1971 it joined with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Abu Gharbiya was elected to its ExecuD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tive Committee. Between 1971 and 1973 there were vain negotiations to merge the leading members of the PPSF in the ranks of al-Fatah. In November 1973, following the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War, the movement decided to leave the PLO and establish its headquarters in Syria, and its operational section in Lebanon. The following year, Ghosheh became secretary general of the PPSF. Seven years later, in 1981, the movement was admitted to the Palestine National Council (PNC). In 1983 the PPSF joined the Palestinian opposition alliance, the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF). From 1988, a new rapprochement with the PLO provoked much dissension in the PPSF, and certain members remained loyal to Syria. In April 1992, a dissident current supported by Damascus decreed that Ghosheh was no longer secretary general of the PPSF, and was replaced by Khalid Abdul Majid (Abu al-Abed), seconded by Muhammad Khalil al-Fitani (Abu Nayif). In October 1993, Ghosheh was alone in declaring himself in favor of the Israeli-Palestinian accord of the preceding 13 September, while the rest of the movement supported the faction led by Abdul Majid, an opponent of the peace process. (As for Abu Gharbiyya, he joined the Rejection Front in 1974 and stood as its candidate for speaker of the PNC in 1977, but lost to Khalid al-Fahum. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Fatah, al-; Palestine National Council; Palestinian National Salvation Front.

PALESTINIAN POPULAR STRUGGLE FRONT–ABDUL MAJID FACTION: Palestinian faction created in October 1993, following a split in the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) caused by the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords that September. Syrian in allegiance, this faction joined the Palestinian opposition front, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF), based in Damascus. Principal leaders include: Khalid Abdul Majid (Abu al-Abed) and Muhammad Khalil al-Fitani (Abu Nayif). SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces.

PALESTINIAN REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY: Palestinian political party (al-Hizb al-Shuyu Ei alThawri al-Filastini) founded in 1982 by Arabi EAwad. EAwad, a teacher from Nablus, had been the secretary of the Jordan Communist Party (JCP) in the West Bank, the Palestinian successor to the pre-1948 Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which had included both Jews and Arabs. After a long period of imprisonment in Jordan, EAwad was deported to Lebanon in 1973. In 1980 he founded the (Palestinian) Com-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

367

PALESTINIAN SECURITY SERVICES

munist Organization of Lebanon as a branch of the JCP but it collapsed following a PalestinianJordanian split in that party. The Palestinian branch of the JCP (known as the Palestinian Communist Organization) renamed itself the Palestine Communist Party, and its central committee, changing its political orientation, now favored negotiating with Israel. The Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party (PRCP), led by EAwad, advocated continued armed struggle. In 1985, opposed to the policies of Yasir Arafat, the PRCP joined the Palestinian National Salvation Front, based in Damascus. At the beginning of the 1990s, weakened by the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, the PRCP tried to draw closer to Iran. Opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, this group joined the Palestinian opposition front, united in the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Arafat, Yasir; Palestinian National Salvation Front.

PALESTINIAN SECURITY SERVICES: Creation of Palestinian security agencies was provided for in the Oslo Accords II. In addition to those authorized by the Accords, the Palestinian leadership has created a number of others (precisely how many is not known), some of which have been incorporated into a formal government structure and others that seem to be independent. Most originated in entities overseen by the council of security of al-Fatah (Jihaz alAmn al-Qawmi al-Filastini), directed by Salah Khalaf (Abu Ayad) and by the unified command of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) security (al-Amn al-Muwahhad). The ten main security and police forces are grouped in the General Security Services (GSS), an umbrella organization headed by a director general who reports to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s president. They include Aerial Police (al-Shurta al-Jawiya), a very small unit with five helicopters. Civil Defense (al-Difa Da al-Madani), which provides fire and rescue services. Civil Police (al-Shurta al-Madaniya), which is a conventional police force of roughly 10,000 members; the main civil law enforcement agency. The Coast Guard (al-Shurta al-Bahariya) is an anti-smuggling unit with about 1,000 members on the Gaza coast. County Guard (Amn al-Mahafza) provides security for the district governors and their offices. General Intelligence (Amn al-Mukhabarat alAmm) is the main state intelligence agency, with approximately 3,000 members. Headed by General Amin al-Hindi. Military Intelligence (al-Istkhabarat al-Askariya) provides preventive intelligence, de-

368

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

ployed against opponents of the PA and PLO. It is headed by Musa Arafat, Yasir Arafat’s brother. The Military Police provides security for military installations and prisons; it is subordinate to Military Intelligence. National Security (Quwat al-Amn al-Watani) is the largest security force, with a membership of more than 14,000. Preventive Security (al-Amn al-Wiqa Di) is probably the most powerful security force, with a membership of approximately 5,000. Formally headed by Musbah Saqr but actually directed by Muhammad Dahlan in the Gaza Strip and Jibril Rajub in the West Bank. Two additional security forces are not part of the GSS and are directly under the command of Arafat. Presidential Security (Amn al-Ri Dasa) provides security for Yasir Arafat, PA officials, and diplomats. Headed by Faisal Abu Sharah. Most of its estimated 3,000 members formerly belonged to Force 17. The second is Special Security (al-Amn al-Khass), which is headed by Abu Yusuf al-Wahidi. Its function is believed to be to gather information on other security services. On 20 July 2004 Arafat yielded to both internal and international pressure to reorganize and reduce the number of security agencies. He issued a decree that converts the twelve forces enumerated above into three national, general, and domestic security and intelligence forces. As of 2004, it is not yet clear what the practical results of this decree will be. SEE ALSO Dahlan, Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Hindi, Amin al-; Khalaf, Salah; Rajub, Jibril.

PALESTINIANS “FROM INSIDE”/ “FROM OUTSIDE”: Expressions used to distinguish Palestinian political activists living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from those living in exile. The terms became current during the first Intifada (1987–1993) to distinguish the mostly young leaders who arose in the early years of the uprising and improvised leadership structures to direct resistance activities, from the older leaders of established organizations, particularly al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who had lived in exile for years and were caught by surprise by the Intifada, and struggled to take control of it. The term became particularly widespread post–Oslo Accords and signified the differences that arose between the Palestinian leadership inside the Occupied Territories that developed during the Intifada and the PLO leadership that relocated from Tunis and elsewhere in the Arab world and became part of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PAN-ARABISM

SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Intifada (1987–1993); Palestine Liberation Organization; West Bank.

PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD: The idea of statehood as the ultimate goal of the Palestinian national struggle emerged after the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian national movement had never been especially specific about the nature of the entity it was seeking to create, apart from its embodiment of the principle of Palestinian self-government. A future state was implicit in the various proposals put forth during the Mandate period (those plans that did not involve partition called for some form of power sharing between the Palestinian Arabs and what were thought of, hopefully, as Palestinian Jews). Statehood would have been the result of the partition plan voted by the United Nations in 1947, had it been accepted by both parties. The Palestine National Charter of 1964, which asserted the goals of the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), called for the liberation of Palestine from the Zionists and selfdetermination for the Palestinian people, but was ambiguous about the nature of the eventual Palestinian entity, leaving open the possibility of membership in a larger pan-Arab state. The 1968 revision of the Charter, written in changed political circumstances after the Arab-Israel War (1967), does not abandon the belief in “Arab unity,” nor describe the Palestinian entity in detail, but makes clear that its goal is an independent, sovereign Palestine. In 1974 the Palestine National Council (PNC) voted to establish a Palestinian “authority” on any liberated part of Palestine. In November 1988, the PNC voted to accept the “two-state solution”—it formally accepted the existence of Israel, and favored the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A Proclamation of the State of Palestine (the Algiers Declaration) was then issued. The Oslo Accords, which included the PLO’s formal recognition of Israel (and the corresponding renunciation of its claim to 78 percent of Palestine), provided for the establishment of an “interim” Palestinian autonomous self-governing authority for a period of five years, at which time a “final settlement” would be negotiated. It was widely assumed that the final settlement would involve the creation of a universally recognized sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied territories, although the Accords do not say so. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was formally instituted in 1994. Since then, however, numerous issues, including inability to resolve the status of Jerusalem, continued confiscation of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements and “security needs,” and the ongoing D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

cantonizing of the West Bank, have brought serious negotiations to a standstill. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Charter; Palestinian Authority; Proclamation of the State of Palestine; West Bank.

PALET-NEWCOMBE ACCORDS SEE

Golan Heights.

PALMAH (acronym for Plugot Mahatz; Hebrew for “striking forces”): Special elite “combat units” of the Haganah. Founded in May 1941, this militia, composed of volunteers working in the kibbutzim, was headed by Yitzhak Sadeh and Yigal Allon. Most of its members were from “special night squads” or “midnight commandos” created by a British officer, Orde Wingate, and dissolved in 1938. After participating with the Haganah in combat against the Arab forces, the Palmah units were dissolved in May 1948, following the creation of the State of Israel. SEE ALSO Haganah. PAN-ARABISM: Nationalist movement, primarily in the Arab East or Mashriq, advocating the political union of all Arab peoples on the basis of their shared history, language, and culture. It arose from the Arab struggle against the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I, and from the struggle against French and British imperialism after the war. During the war promises of a sovereign Arab state were made by the British to Emir Husayn ibn Ali alHashem, the ruler of the Hijaz and an opponent of Ottoman rule, in return for his help against the Ottomans; instead, once the war was won, the British and French divided Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine between them in accord with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Further resentment was provoked by British encouragement of the Zionist movement, which brought to Palestine under imperial protection thousands of European settlers ambitious to create their own state. Arab politics increasingly focused on freeing the Arab lands from outside rule, and the idea of Arab unity was an emotionally powerful motivator. In the 1940s the BaEth Party, which was active in several countries, promoted the idea of a unitary Arab state from Morocco to Iraq. In the 1950s the success of the Egyptian revolution under Gamal Abdel Nasser, particularly after it successfully nationalized the Suez Canal while defying Britain, France, and Israel in the Suez War of 1956, made

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

369

PARLIAMENTARY ASSOCIATION FOR EUROPEAN-ARAB COOPERATION

Nasser an international hero and powerfully stimulated the Nasserist version of pan-Arabism. The joining of Egypt and (BaEth-ruled) Syria in the United Arab Republic in 1958 marked a high point for panArabism, but changing politics and conflicting interests doomed the experiment, which ended in 1961. The failure of the Arabs against Israel in the ArabIsrael War (1967) also discredited the pan-Arab idea. The actions of Saddam Hussein—whose launching of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 and claiming defense of the Arab homeland as a justification, and even more his invading Kuwait in 1990—split the Arab League (founded in 1945 as a pan-Arab institution), as well as the willingness of several Arab states to negotiate directly with Israel, have all but killed pan-Arabism as a serious political idea. A somewhat attenuated form of Arab “unity” remains a diplomatic ideal at the Arab League, but even that is diminished by the existence of smaller regional groups. SEE ALSO Iran-Iraq War; Mashriq; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Sykes-Picot Agreement.

PARLIAMENTARY ASSOCIATION FOR EUROPEAN-ARAB COOPERATION: European organization created in 1974 for the purpose of proposing solutions to Middle East conflicts. It is composed of 650 representatives of all political tendencies from 23 European countries.

PASSIA Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.

SEE

PATRIARCHS: From the Latin word pater, meaning “father.” In the Jewish tradition this word designates the three “fathers” of the nation of Israel: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Afterward, this title was given to the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople. Toward the end of the seventh century, the patriarch of Constantinople was recognized as the primate of the entire Orient. SEE ALSO Abraham; Isaac; Jacob. PBC SEE

Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.

PCP SEE

Palestine Communist Party.

PDA SEE

Palestinian Democratic Assembly.

PDU SEE

Palestinian Democratic Union.

PEACE IN GALILEE PARTITION PLAN FOR PALESTINE, 1947 SEE

SEE

Resolution 181.

PARTY OF GOD SEE

Hizbullah.

PASC SEE

Palestinian Armed Struggle Command.

PASDARAN: Iranian paramilitary organization (the name is Farsi for “Revolutionary Guards”) founded in 1979, following the victory of the Iranian Revolution, to help the new Tehran regime apply Islamic law. Supervised by a special ministry, the Pasdaran was responsible also for foreign revolutionary Islamic activities. In the early 1980s the Pasdaran gave its support to the Lebanese Hizbullah against other Lebanese Muslim factions and in the struggle against Israeli occupation. SEE ALSO Hizbullah.

370

Arab-Israel War (1982).

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

PEACE NOW (Shalom Achshav, in Hebrew): Israeli pacifist movement, the largest extra-parliamentary movement in Israel and the country’s oldest peace movement. It was founded in March 1978, during the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. When these negotiations faltered, a large group of reserve officers from the Israeli army published an open letter to the prime minister, calling on the government to make sure that the opportunity for peace was not lost. Tens of thousands of Israelis sent in support for the letter, leading to the establishment of an ongoing organization of citizens who view peace, compromise, and reconciliation with the Palestinian people and the Arab states as essential to the future of Israel. This movement achieved prominence in 1982, when it organized massive demonstrations against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the involvement of Israeli forces in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Its 1982 rally in Tel Aviv assembled over 250,000 demonstrators (by some estimates, 400,000). Peace Now T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PERES, SHIMON

also drew the attention and ire of right-wing extremists. In 1983, during a demonstration calling for the dismissal of then-minister of defense Ariel Sharon, a hand grenade was thrown at the demonstrators, killing activist Emil Grunzweig and wounding seven others. A majority of Peace Now’s membership is drawn from among Meretz Party voters, though it has declined suggestions to become an established political party itself, aiming instead for broad cross-party support. In August 1999, a former leader of the movement, YaEel Tamir, was named minister of immigrant absorption in the Labor government of Ehud Barak. After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the subsequent decline of the peace process, Peace Now focused on its Settlement Watch project, monitoring and protesting settlement activities in disputed areas. It considers the occupation of Palestinian territory extremely harmful to Israel, both economically and morally. Peace Now condemns the use of violence on either side of the conflict. Discouraged by the violence of the al-Aqsa Intifada of September 2000 and the Israeli government’s stiff military response, its members nonetheless have continued to campaign for peace, creating the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Coalition, and conducting joint activities with the Palestinian People’s Campaign. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Tamir, YaEel.

PEACE TECHNOLOGY FUND: A joint capital fund established in January 1998 as a partnership between the International Finance Corporation (an associated institution of the World Bank) and private Israeli, Palestinian, and international investors. The Peace Technology Fund (PTF) was initially capitalized at $65 million. Its purpose was to stimulate cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian investors, and to encourage through investment the creation of laborintensive industries in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thus helping to strengthen the Palestinian economy. The fund is frozen due to the al-Aqsa Intifada that began in September 2000. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Intifada, al-Aqsa; West Bank. PECDAR Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction.

SEE

PELED, MATTITYAHU (“MATTI”) (1923–1995): Israeli soldier,

politician,

D I C T I O N A R Y

peace O F

T H E

activist.

Mattityahu

(“Matti”) Peled was born in Haifa in 1923. He served as a platoon commander in the Palmach. After studying law in London, he returned in 1948 to serve in the Arab-Israel War. Peled served for twenty years as a career officer in the Israel Defense Forces, retiring in 1969. He then completed his doctoral degree and was appointed as lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Peled joined the Israeli Council for IsraeliPalestinian Peace in the mid-1970s, becoming deeply involved in the creation of a dialogue with Palestinian leaders, including Issam Sartawi, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative in Paris. In 1983 and 1984, in defiance of Israeli law, he met several times with Yasir Arafat in Tunis and Geneva. Peled was elected to the Knesset in 1986 on the Progressive List of Peace, an Arab-Jewish party, serving one term. He died of cancer in March 1995.

PEOPLE OF THE BOOK (Ahl al-kitab, in Arabic): Word used in the QurDan to designate communities whose religion is based on a revealed book, such as Jews, Christians, and Sabaeans.

PERES, SHIMON (born Perski, 1923–): Israeli political figure, prime minister of Israel (1984–1986 and 1995–1996). Born in 1923 in Poland, Shimon Peres emigrated to Palestine in 1934, where he joined the Zionist youth movement, Ha-NoEar Ha-Oved. Between 1941 and 1944, he was secretary general of this movement, participating in the creation of kibbutz Alumot. In 1947, he joined the Haganah, then led by David Ben-Gurion, who the next year, as prime minister of the new State of Israel, made him head of Israel’s navy. In 1953 Ben-Gurion appointed him Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, a position in which, among other achievements, he participated in secret arms negotiations with the French prior to the Sinai campaign of 1956 and was responsible for Israel’s nuclear program. In 1959 he was elected to a MAPAI seat in the Knesset, and was deputy minister of defense in the successive governments of David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol from 1959 to 1965. He then left the Defense Ministry to help Ben-Gurion founded a new party, RAFI, of which he became secretary general. In 1968, he participated in the creation of the Israel Labor Party, formed through the merger of MAPAI, RAFI, and Ahdut ha-Avodah. The following year he was named minister without portfolio in the government of Golda Meir, responsible for economic development in the occupied territories. From this time on, he advocated the idea of the creation of an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian regional economic entity.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

371

PERETZ, AMIR

Peres was deputy prime minister and foreign minister. In the 1992 elections the Labor party regained power, and Peres was named foreign minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. In that capacity he negotiated the later stages of the Oslo Accords and convinced Rabin to support them. For his role in achieving this agreement, he, along with Rabin and Yasir Arafat, received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. In November 1995, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres again became prime minister, serving until the following May, when Labor lost power to Likud. In June 1997, he was defeated by Ehud Barak in the election for chairmanship of the Labor party; but he continued as a member of the Knesset. On 6 July 1999 he was appointed minister of regional cooperation in the Barak government, serving until 2001. In July 2000 he was defeated in the election for the presidency of the State of Israel by his Likud rival, Moshe Katsav. In March 2001, after the defeat of Ehud Barak in the elections for prime minister, Peres agreed to join a government of national unity, led by the head of Likud, Ariel Sharon, in the capacity of deputy prime minister and foreign minister. In October 2002, however, Peres and other Laborites resigned from the Sharon government. In June 2003, after Labor’s defeat under Amram Mitzna’s leadership in the May elections, the party once again selected Peres as its leader. SEE ALSO Ahdut Ha-Avodah; Ben-Gurion, David; Haganah; Israel Labor Party; MAPAI; Oslo Accords; Rabin, Yitzhak; RAFI Party. SHIMON PERES. THE ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER, A LIFELONG MODER(INCLUDING PRIME MINISTER FROM 1984 TO 1986), RECEIVES THE 1994 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE FOR HIS KEY EFFORTS TO BRING ABOUT THE OSLO ACCORDS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS. PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN AND PALESTINIAN LEADER YASIR ARAFAT WERE ALSO HONORED. (© Photograph by Ya’acov Sa’ar. Government Press Office [GPO] of Israel)

ATE WHO SERVED IN MANY GOVERNMENT POSTS

Between 1970 and 1974, Perez was minister of transport and communication, then of information. In 1974, he became defense minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin; and in 1977, after Rabin’s resignation as prime minister, he was elected to lead the Labor Party. It lost the next two elections; then in 1984, no party having a majority in the Knesset, a national unity government was formed, with Shimon Peres as prime minister and Yitzhak Shamir as foreign minister. Under a rotation agreement, in 1986 the two men switched roles. From 1988 to 1990,

372

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

PERETZ, AMIR (1954– ): Israeli politician. Born in Morocco, Peretz immigrated to Israel at the age of four. In the 1980s Peretz became the head of Sderot Council. He was elected to the Knesset in 1988 as a member of the Labor Party. After serving as head of the Histradut’s professional union, he was elected chairman of the Histradut in 1995. In January 1999 Peretz resigned from the Labor Party to found the Am Ehad (One Nation) Party, which that year won two seats in the Knesset. He is a member of the Peace Now movement.

PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

SEE

PFLP–GC Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command.

SEE

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PHALANGE

PFLP–SC Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Command.

SEE

PFLP–SO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations.

SEE

PHALANGE: Lebanese Maronite Christian Party (alKata Dib al-Lubnaniya or Phalange libanaise; kata Dib is Arabic for “phalanx,” or phalange in French; the party is sometimes referred to in English as the KataDib); founded in November 1936, by Pierre Jumayyil with Charles Hilu, George Naqqash, Shafiq Nasif, and Emile Yared. The Phalange was founded as a paramilitary youth organization modeled on the fascist political organizations Jumayyil had seen and admired at the Berlin Olympics of that year, particularly the Hitler Youth, one of whose rallies he had attended. From its founding (with about 300 members), the Phalange has aligned itself with France and the West. At first it supported the Mandate government, but in 1942 it advocated independence and was suspended by the authorities. It reactivated itself in 1943 when Lebanon became effectively independent. Also that year Lebanon’s leading Maronite and Sunni Muslim politicians established the unwritten National Pact, which institutionalized religious communalism as the basis of Lebanese politics and set the relative political power within the state of the different religious communities. The National Pact fixed a ratio for allotting parliamentary seats (six Christian to five Muslim), and assigned the three highest state offices to representatives of three communities: the presidency to a Maronite, the prime ministry to a Sunni, and the speakership of the Chamber of Deputies to a ShiEa. (This distribution was based on a questionable census of 1932. No one from the ShiEa, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Melkite, or other community was consulted.) The preservation of Maronite hegemony via the National Pact became the Phalange’s primary cause, and it has remained opposed to any change that would result in a dilution of Maronite power. It also has opposed any political tendency, such as pan-Arabism, pan-Syrianism, communism, and pan-Islamism, that would compromise Lebanese sovereignty or the uniquely “Phoenician,” non-Arab culture it believes distinguishes Lebanon. It has been right wing, authoritarian, anti-Palestinian, antiIslamic, and thoroughly sectarian, although it has at times formed tactical alliances with Muslim organizations holding compatible positions. Between 1943 D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

PIERRE JUMAYYIL. A FOUNDER OF THE CHRISTIAN PHALANGE PARTY LEBANON IN 1936, HE LED THE PARTY (UNDER VARIOUS NAMES) IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LEBANESE INDEPENDENCE WHILE RESISTING BOTH SYRIAN AND COMMUNIST INFLUENCE. IN 1975, ITS OPPOSITION TO THE PALESTINIAN PRESENCE IN SOUTH LEBANON TOUCHED OFF THE LONG LEBANESE CIVIL WAR. JUMAYYIL DIED IN 1984, TWO YEARS AFTER HIS SON BASHIR, THE PRESIDENT-ELECT, WAS ASSASSINATED. IN

(AP/Wide World Photos)

and 1949, while it was primarily focusing on union activities, its first candidacies in legislative elections were failures. Dissolved on 20 July 1949, it was reborn on the following 3 August as the Lebanese Union, transformed in May 1951 into the Social Democratic Party, then into the Phalange Party the following year. At this time it had three deputies in parliament. In the 1958 crisis, the party backed the power in place, represented by the president, Camille Chamoun. Chamoun wanted the army to intervene against Muslim demonstrators, but the army commander, FuDad Chehab, refused to engage his forces in intercommunal fighting; Pierre Jumayyil stepped in to do so with the Phalange’s considerable militia. As a result, in October 1958, Jumayyil became a minister in a multiparty government of national salvation, in which he held the public works, communi-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

373

PHALANGE

cations, health, national education and agriculture portfolios, under the new president, Chehab, who had been chosen largely because he had not taken sides in the civil war. The party withdrew its support from Chehab (and his successor, the former Phalangist Charles Hilu), as his policies of administrative and (limited) economic reform, known as Chehabism, threatened the financial interests of Maronite oligarchs. In 1967, the Phalange sealed an alliance with two other Christian groups, Chamoun’s National Liberal Party (NLP), and the National Bloc of Raymond Eddé, to form the Triple Alliance (al-Hilf al-Thulathi) in opposition to Chehabism. After the 1968 parliamentary elections, the Hilf coalition controlled the largest block of seats (the Phalange held nine). Lebanon then was being deeply affected by the Palestinian issue, which was beginning to destabilize its politics. Muslim and leftist Lebanese had always sympathized with the dispossessed Palestinians; Maronite Christians and conservatives, in general, had not. The outcome of the Arab-Israel War (1967), in which Lebanon had not participated, had made it clear that the Palestinian refugees in the country would not be returning to their homes, and armed Palestinian groups were organizing and carrying out anti-Israeli operations. Their activities tended to expose the government’s weakness—it could prevent neither the guerrilla activities nor the Israeli reprisals they provoked—undermining its authority and polarizing the Lebanese. In January 1969 a new coalition cabinet that excluded right-wing Maronite parties, which opposed all reform, proclaimed its support for the Palestinian resistance, while allowing the army and police to attempt to repress political activity in the refugee camps. This resulted in fighting between government forces and Palestinian paramilitaries. Eventually, under outside pressure, a formal agreement was made between the government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) giving Palestinians legal status and, in effect, ceding the PLO an autonomous state within the state. In 1970, after Jumayyil withdrew his candidacy, Sulayman Franjiyya, a nationalist and enemy of the PLO, was elected president. Further polarizing the situation was the arrival later that year and into 1971 of large numbers of Palestinians, including many PLO fighters, who had been expelled from Jordan in the wake of Black September 1970. Franjiyya’s government, like Hilu’s, did almost nothing to provide security against Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory in the south, which were indiscriminately hitting Lebanese—predominantly poor Shiites—as well as Pales-

374

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

tinian targets. Tens of thousands of South Lebanese Shiites migrated to Beirut to escape Israeli shelling, and little provision was made for them. Lebanon remained neutral in the Arab-Israel War (1973). Franjiyya, unable to use the army effectively against the Palestinians, encouraged the army to arm and train the Maronite militias. On 13 April 1975, unknown persons attempted to assassinate Pierre Jumayyil; in retaliation, Phalangists attacked a bus carrying Palestinian civilians through a Christian area of East Beirut, killing twenty-six. Fighting then broke out between armed factional groups and violence spread around the country: this was the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990. The main antagonists at first were the Phalange and its militia, and the Lebanese National Movement (LMN), which loosely united fifteen organizations of the left around the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt and advocated reform of the Lebanese system. The PLO was aligned with the LNM and established a joint command with its militia. The Phalange was joined by other right-wing Maronite groups (soon to form an alliance, the Lebanese Front, and later a joint militia command, the Lebanese Forces [LF]), commanded by Bashir Jumayyil, son of Pierre. In January 1976 the LF destroyed a Palestinian refugee camp and a Muslim neighborhood in East Beirut. In March Muslim troops of the Lebanese army mutinied and formed the Lebanese Arab Army, which joined with the LNM. It attacked Christian areas of Beirut and forced President Franjiyya to flee. In May Ilyas Sarkis, with Syrian support, was elected to become president in September at the end of Franjiyya’s term. At the end of May, the LF was about to be defeated, and Syria, after having for months attempted to mediate a settlement, intervened militarily against the LNM and the Palestinians. This move was supported by Jordan, Israel, France, and the United States. By mid-August the Syrian forces had gained control and agreed to a cease-fire. A truce was agreed to and the Arab League sanctioned an Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) (consisting almost entirely of Syrian troops already in place) to be deployed to keep the peace. The ADF and Lebanese government authority did not extend to South Lebanon, largely controlled by the PLO, where Israel and Christian militias backed by Israel continued to attack. The diplomatic peace offensive by Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat toward Israel in 1977 drove the Syrians closer to the PLO and away from the Sarkis government. By 1978 the Lebanese Forces (under control of the Phalange, the Lebanese Front alliance having deteriorated) were firmly allied with T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PHALANGE

Israel and operating independently of the government, and Syria switched its support to their opponents, the LMN. After a PLO attack within Israel, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) invaded South Lebanon in March 1978, intending to destroy PLO bases and drive PLO fighters away from the border by creating a “security zone” on the Lebanese side. The Israelis organized, trained and armed a Christian militia called the South Lebanon Army (SLA) as their proxy to patrol the border area after they withdrew in October. In June 1978, Tony Franjiyya, son of Sulayman Franjiyya and a potential rival to Bashir Jumayyil for the presidency, was assassinated by an LF commando under directed by Samir Geagea. In November 1979, the principal figures in the political section of the Phalange were Pierre Jumayyil, Antoine Ayyub, Georges EOmayra, Pierre Sayigh, Elie Karame, Munir al-Hajj, Karim Pakraduni, Ibrahim Najjar, Joseph Saadeh, Georges EAql, Edmond Rizq and Laura Jumayyil. On 31 January, the alliance with the NLP of Camille Chamoun was broken, following confrontations between the LF and the LDP’s militia, the Tigers. Between 7 and 9 July, combat between members of the two parties caused more than 500 deaths, and the Tigers were decimated. In 1980 and 1981 there was also frequent fighting between the LF and the ADF, in which Israel at least once intervened significantly in support of the LF. In June 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon again, this time going as far north as Beirut and besieging the city for weeks, side by side with the LF, using artillery shelling and aerial saturation bombing, including phosphorus bombs, turning much of the city to rubble. A cease-fire was arranged by the United States, and a withdrawal of the PLO leadership along with about 13,000 PLO and Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) fighters to Tunis was arranged under the supervision of a Multinational Force (MF). Israel also meant to ensure that Bashir Jumayyil became president, and he was duly elected on 23 August. The MF left Beirut on 10 September. On 14 September Jumayyil was assassinated (by pan-Syrian nationalists). Israeli forces then moved in to help the LF secure the city. Two days later the IDF helped the LF enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and looked on passively as over three days they slaughtered approximately 1,500 to 3,000 civilians, ostensibly in reprisal for Jumayyil’s assassination. On 20 September the MF was redeployed to Beirut. On 21 September Amin Jumayyil, Bashir’s brother, was elected president, and at the end of September the Israelis left the city. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In May 1983, under pressure from the United States, Amin Jumayyil agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which was actually ratified by parliament. Opposition to this treaty among Lebanese—and by the Syrians—was so great, however, that Jumayyil felt obliged to refuse to sign it. The Israelis, who had been protecting Jumayyil’s government from its factional enemies, then withdrew their forces from the Shuf district southeast of Beirut, a largely Druze area held by the Phalange. Fighting broke out between the Phalange and the Druze militia directed by Walid Jumblatt, which had Palestinian and Syrian support. These were some of the biggest battles of the war. After several months the Phalange were expelled from the area. Jumayyil, with support from Syria, repudiated the agreement with Israel in March 1984. In August 1984 Pierre Jumayyil died; he was succeeded by Elie Karame, but his death set off power struggles within the Phalange and the LF. In March 1985, a split opened between the Lebanese Forces on one side and President Jumayyil and the Phalange on the other. An agreement had been reached for the LF to turn back to the government the public property, offices and functions it had taken over in its Beirut enclave during the war. Samir Geagea, a senior LF commander, had himself named chief of staff and proclaimed the LF independent of the Phalange. On 9 May, Geagea was ousted and Elie Hobeika was appointed to replace him. Hobeika tried to end the hostilities between his movement and Syria. In December Hobeika signed an agreement for peace and political reform with the leaders of the Shiite Amal and the Druze militia, but it never took effect because he lost control of the LF. Geagea revolted, and, after fighting between followers of the two men, Geagea took over command of the Lebanese Forces, evicting Hobeika and reestablishing the LF’s ties with Israel. Hobeika, who had worked closely with the Israelis and had been one of the LF commanders in charge of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, organized a splinter LF under the protection of the Syrians. George Saade was elected head of the Phalange in 1987, succeeding Karame. With the end of his presidential term in 1988, with no successor selected, Amin Jumayyil appointed General Michel Aoun as “interim president” and, having received death threats from Geagea, left Lebanon. Geagea supported the TaDif Accords of 1989, causing a split in the LF; some members supported Aoun, who opposed the accords, and the two factions fought into October when the Syrians finally defeated Aoun’s forces and ended the civil war. The same month, the head of the NLP, Dany Chamoun, former head of the Tigers militia and son of Camille

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

375

PHILBY, HARRY ST. JOHN

Chamoun, was assassinated by an LF commando. Both Geagea and Saade were included in the national unity cabinet formed in December 1990, but in March 1991 Geagea resigned to reconstitute the LF as a political party. In June 1991, Amin Jumayyil met with Shimon Peres in Brussels, and discussed the situation in South Lebanon. In 1992, he returned home and persuaded the Phalange party to boycott the parliamentary elections, the first since before the civil war; he was obliged, under government pressure, to cut his stay short. The LF Party also was unsuccessful in these elections; in 1994 the party was banned after the bombing of a church in Junieh in which ten people were killed, and responsibility for it, and for the assassination of Dany Chamoun and a number of other people were traced to Geagea. Geagea received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment, for the Chamoun killing, and remained in prison in 2004. A rump LF organization remains, run by Geagea’s wife Strida. On 21 March 1998, Munir al-Hajj became head of the Phalange, following the death of George Saade. In July 2000 Amin Jumayyil returned to Lebanon again and campaigned to regain the leadership of the Phalange, but Karim Pakraduni was elected in 2002. Frustrated, Jumayyil formed a splinter group called the Phalange Base (al-KataDib alQaEida). In July 2002 he was expelled from the party, and sued for insulting the leadership. SEE ALSO Arab Deterrent Force; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Black September 1970; Chamoun, Camille; Franjiyya; Sulayman; Geagea, Samir; Hobeika, Elie; Israel Defense Force; Jumayyil, Bashir; Jumblatt, Kamal; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Lebanese Forces; Lebanese National Movement; Palestine Liberation Army; Palestine Liberation Organization; Pan-Arabism; TaDif Accord.

PHILBY, HARRY ST. JOHN: Leading British explorer of Saudi Arabia who on occasion was involved in Palestinian affairs. He was born in 1885 in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and after distinguished studies at Cambridge in joined the Indian Foreign Office. In 1915 he left India to go to Iraq and served there in the Intelligence Service of the British army. Ten years later he left government service to become a merchant and to devote his life to the exploration of Arabia for which he is known. In 1930 he converted to Islam. In 1929 Philby became involved, with Jewish dissenter Judah Magnes, in an ill-fated Arab-Zionist peace plan. Then in 1939 he developed a scheme under which his patron, Saudi ruler King Ibn SaEud,

376

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

might be persuaded to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in exchange for Jewish political influence in London and in Washington, D.C. and financial compensation. This scheme would have been contingent on complete independence of the remaining Arab territory along with financial assistance to the Arabs; so although he proposed it to Zionist officials in London, nothing ever came of it.

PHOENICIANS: Maritime population, which, in the third millennium B.C.E., settled along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, between Mount Carmel and the mouth of the Oronte, in the Land of Canaan. The Phoenicians founded many colonies and trading stations all around the Mediterranean. Excellent navigators, they disseminated the alphabet through the Mediterranean world, transmitting it to the Greeks. SEE ALSO Canaan.

PICCR Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights.

SEE

PICM SEE

Palestinian Islamic Combat Movement.

SEE

Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

PIJ

PIKUAH NEFESH: Hebrew word meaning “saving an endangered life.” Basic principle of Judaism, according to which saving a life takes precedence over any Torah commandment. In practice, the principle often used to override restrictions regarding Kashrut or Sabbath observance. SEE ALSO Torah. PINES OPERATION: Military project in preparation between 1980 and 1981 by the Israeli defense minister, Ariel Sharon, and the general staff of the Israel Defense Force, headed by Raphael Eitan. This plan provided for the invasion of Lebanon, so as to neutralize, definitively, the terrorist actions of Palestinian movements in this country. Thereby deprived of the support of armed resistance, the Palestinian population of the territories would no longer be able to oppose the establishment of a limited autonomy, one that perpetuated the Israeli occupation. Israeli military experts, however, considered that this would be an opportunity to resolve the Syrian issue also: Either Damascus would decide to intervene, resulting in a T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE

sure defeat for the Syrian army, or Syria would not intervene, becoming scorned by the Arab world. In either case, the Syrian influence in Lebanon would be greatly reduced. When it was first presented to the Israeli government on 20 December, 1981, the plan was rejected, at least for the time being.

POEALEI ZION (Workers of Zion): Labor Zionist po-

PISGA SEE

Palestinian Authority.

PLA SEE

Palestine Liberation Army.

PLC SEE

Palestinian Legislative Council.

PLF Palestine Liberation Front (1961); Palestine Liberation Front (1965); Palestine Liberation Front (1977).

SEE

PLF–PR SEE

Palestine Liberation Front (1961).

PLO SEE

Popular Movement of Arab Liberation.

PNA SEE

Palestinian Authority.

PNC SEE

Palestine National Council.

Palestinian National Front.

SEE

Aqsa Intifada, al-.

POPULAR FRONT

PNSF SEE

POGROM: Russian word meaning “attack” or “devastation.” Historically, it designates mob attacks accompanied by pillage and murder that were perpetrated against the Jews of Russia—for example, in 1881–1882 and in 1903 at Kishinev. An important component of a pogrom is the usually silent complicity of the police and other authorities. Many Arab attacks on Jews in pre-1948 Palestine, such as those in 1908, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1929, were labeled by some of the victims as “Arab pogroms.” POPULAR ARMY FRONT–RETURN BATTALIONS

PNF SEE

litical party founded in 1905 by Eastern European Jewish youth who went to Palestine. It tried to organize craftsmen into unions and initiated strikes to protest the conditions of employment in the Jewish farming colonies. Also, following the precedent set by Labor Zionist guard units formed in Eastern Europe to protect Jewish communities there during pogroms, this party established such units and their members were hired as guards on Jewish farms. Later, PoEalei Zion combined with Ahdut ha-Avoda after a split in MAPAI, and in 1948 the joint party united with MAPAM to run for the First and Second Knessets; PoEalei Zion’s leader Moshe Erem and other members became Members of Knesset for MAPAM. The name Po’alei Zion was also used by parties in the United States and other nations; Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin all belonged to such groups in their teens. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avoda; MAPAI; MAPAM.

Palestine Liberation Organization.

PMAL SEE

Israel (PAI) candidates ran on a joint electoral list with the Agudat. In 1960 PAI joined the coalition government, contrary to the advice of the Agudat Council of Sages. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel.

Palestinian National Salvation Front.

POEALEI AGUDAT ISRAEL: Ultra-Orthodox Israeli movement, created in Poland in 1922, and representing the workers of Agudat Israel. This group advocated the creation of a state of Israel based on the Torah. It was identified with Agudat Israel regarding religious matters, and in most elections, PoEalei Agudat D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

FOR THE

LIBERATION

OF

PALESTINE

(PFLP): Palestinian movement (al-Jabha al-Sha Ebiya li-Tahrir Filastin, in Arabic) created in December 1967, in the wake of the Arab defeat in the ArabIsrael War (1967), by Dr. George Habash (b. 1925), Nayif Hawatma, and Ahmad Jibril. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was formed from the merger of Habash’s Nasserist Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) and Jibril’s Palestine Liberation Front (PLF, 1965), and was more radical

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

377

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE

VICTIMS OF 1905 POGROM. IN LATE-NINETEENTH- AND EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIA, ANTI-SEMITIC MOBS REPEATEDLY ATTACKED JEWS, WITH THE ENCOURAGEMENT OR ACQUIESCENCE OF THE CZARIST GOVERNMENT. ONE RESULT WAS THAT MORE THAN FORTY THOUSAND JEWS FLED TO PALESTINE. THERE, WITH RISING ARAB NATIONALISM AND RESISTANCE TO ZIONISM, SIMILAR MOB ATTACKS TOOK PLACE REPEATEDLY IN THE DECADES BEFORE ISRAEL CAME INTO BEING. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

than either. It also attracted the dissidents of the groups Heroes of the Return of Fayiz Jabir and Revenge of Youth. Like the ANM advocating panArabism, the PFLP opposed any negotiated solution with Israel. It espoused a strategy of mobilizing workers and peasants in a revolutionary grass-roots war of liberation. The second largest Palestinian movement after Yasir Arafat’s al-Fatah, the PFLP established its headquarters in Damascus and affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In March 1968, Habash was jailed in Damascus, and returned to Jordan in early 1969. During his absence, Jibril quit the movement to create his own organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC). In February 1969, a second break, initiated by Nayif Hawatima, gave rise to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), which later became the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

378

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

(DFLP). The PFLP engaged in hundreds of armed actions, mainly in the Gaza Strip, and became widely known for airplane hijackings. On 30 August 1969, a Front commando led by Leila Khaled hijacked a TWA airliner en route from Rome to Tel Aviv via Athens. The commandos forced the plane to land near Damascus. In exchange for the passengers they obtained the release of thirteen Palestinians jailed in Israel; they also exploded a bomb in the cockpit of the aircraft. Khalid became a heroine of the Palestinian resistance. The PFLP moved from Syria to Jordan and played a critical role creating confrontations against the government of King Hussein. At the beginning of August 1970, coming out against the position of al-Fatah, Habash advocated the establishment of a “national democratic government” in Jordan. The PFLP multiplied provocations, meant to push the Jordanian forces toward confrontation. On 6–9 September 1970, PFLP T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE

commandos hijacked three Western airliners to a remote airstrip in the Jordanian desert, destroying them after the passengers were evacuated. On 16 September the king formed a military government and the next day launched an attack against Palestinian refugee camps, beginning a campaign of violent repression of Palestinian organizations. This was the beginning of Black September 1970. On 27 September, after ten days of fighting that caused nearly 4,000 Palestinian deaths, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, at the behest of the Arab League, arranged a cease-fire. When fighting broke out again the following summer, the PLO was expelled from the country, from which it moved to Lebanon. The following year the PFLP mounted joint operations with the Japanese Red Army (JRA). In 1972 the PFLP renounced operations outside Palestine. It also adopted a Marxist orientation and a more comprehensive social program. In 1974 when the PLO adopted the idea of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the PFLP quit the PLO’s executive committee and became the major force behind the creation of the Rejection Front. During the early period of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, the PFLP joined with al-Fatah against the Syrians, who at that point were supporting the Lebanese government. After Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat launched his peace offensive toward Israel, breaking the Arab consensus, Syria and the PLO were reconciled. The PFLP rejoined the PLO executive committee in 1981. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon in 1982, the PFLP moved to Damascus. In June 1983 the PFLP and the DFLP announced the creation of a common military and political command to coordinate the actions of the Palestinian resistance. In 1984, in order to counter the policies of Yasir Arafat, which were tending toward dialogue with Israel, the movement joined with the DFLP and the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF, 1977), in constituting the “Democratic Alliance,” which lasted only around fifteen months because of personality conflicts. In 1987, after the abrogation of the JordanianPalestinian Accord, the PFLP, along with the DFLP and the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), rejoined the Executive Committee of the PLO. In February 1993, there was radicalization of the movement at the PFLP congress; and following the signature of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords of 1993, the PFLP and the DFLP resigned once more from the Executive Committee of the PLO, joining with the Palestinian opposition front, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF). In August 1994, in an effort to consoliD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

date its common position against the Oslo Accords, the PFLP and the DFLP again announced the constitution of a common military command. In December 1994, the PFLP was the impetus behind the creation, at Amman, of a movement meant to unite opponents of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Assembly, under the leadership of Bassam al-ShaqDa. This entity, whose activities were very sparse, lasted only a few weeks. On 1 July 1996, the leadership of the PFLP announced it was withdrawing from the Central Council of the PLO. Between 1996 and 1998, the PFLP strove to unify a new movement of credible opposition, principally with its main ally, the DFLP. During this time, the armed branch of the PFLP carried out some antiIsrael attacks, of which several were coordinated with the PFLP–GC. At the beginning of 1999, two currents surfaced in the PFLP: one led by Mustafa Zibri (Abu Ali Mustafa) and Abdul Rahim Malluh, which favored a rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority; the other, opposed to this rapprochement, was led by George Habash. The following June, the political bureau of the PFLP threw its support behind the project of unifying the Palestinian forces of the left, for the purpose of defending Palestinian interests, in negotiations on a final status for the Palestinian territories. In August, leaders of the PFLP, the DFLP, and al-Fatah met in Cairo to discuss reconciliation between the partisans and opponents of the Oslo Accords. In mid-February 2000, the political bureau of the PFLP rejoined the Executive Committee of the PLO. In April, Habash resigned as head of the movement, replaced three months later by alZabri, who had been residing in the Palestinian territories since the previous September. In November, while the al-Aqsa Intifada was raging in the Palestinian territories, the PFLP decided to become more involved in armed action against the Israelis. On 27 August 2001, al-Zabri was killed in his office in Ramallah by Israeli missiles in a “targeted killing,” or assassination. On 3 October, Ahmad SaEadat was chosen to head the PFLP, seconded by Abdul Rahim Malluh. Fourteen days later, in order to avenge the death of al-Zabri, a PFLP member assassinated Rehavam ZeDevi, Israeli minister of tourism. In 2004, Habash, who is in poor health, lives in Damascus. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab Nationalist Movement; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Habash, George; Hawatma, Nayif; Japanese Red Army; Jibril, Ahmad; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Front (1965); Palestine Liberation Front (1977); Palestine Liberation

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

379

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE–GENERAL COMMAND

Organization; Palestinian Authority; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command; Rejection Front; West Bank.

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE– GENERAL COMMAND (PFLP–GC): Palestinian move-

ment (Al-Jabha al-Sha Ebiya li-Tahrir Filastni–AlQiyada al- EAmma) created by Ahmad Jibril and Ahmad ZaErur in November 1968, after breaking with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), claiming they wanted to concentrate on the struggle rather than politics. A radical, secular, socialist movement, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC) advocated armed struggle and rejected any negotiated solution with Israel. It was backed by Syria, Libya, and Iran, who supplied them well with arms. Its headquarters was located in the suburbs of Damascus, while a section of its operational department was based in Lebanon. The PFLP–GC made itself known on 2 February 1970 when it destroyed a Swissair plane, killing 47 people, by placing a bomb aboard, which exploded in flight en route to Tel Aviv. From this date, the movement specialized in boobytrapped letters and suicide attacks. In April 1974 the PFLP–GC attacked a kibbutz at Kiryat Shimona, took hostages and attempted to trade them for 100 Palestinian prisoners. The operation failed and the guerrillas and 18 hostages were killed. In 1974, the PFLP-GC joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In 1977, the pro-Syrian policies favored by Jibril prompted Muhammad Zaydan to quit the PFLP– GC, to create the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Between 1978 and 1981, the PFLP–GC launched a campaign of armed actions against Israeli interests as well as Lebanese militia and other Palestinian splinter groups. During the 1980s, it participated in a number of attacks in liaison with the Irish Republican Army, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), and Action Directe (a French terrorist organization). In 1982, when the PLO was expelled from Lebanon after the Israeli invasion, the PFLP–GC moved its headquarters to Damascus. In 1983, the PFLP–GC participated in a revolt against Yasir Arafat promoted by the Syrian regime; the resulting dissidence in the movement gave rise to the PFLP–GC–Temporary Command. In the following year, the PFLP–GC joined the Palestinian oppositional front, the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF). A split in that movement, caused by Muhammad Shatta (Abu Jabir) and backed by al-Fatah, gave rise to the PFLP–GC–

380

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Special Command. This new organization had its headquarters in Cyprus. In 1984 Jibril and the PFLP– GC was expelled from the PLO for its definitively pro-Syrian attitude. In April 1985, through the intermediary of the International Red Cross and the former chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, the PFLP–GC negotiated an exchange of three Israeli soldiers, whom they had captured in Lebanon in September 1982, for 1,187 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. In 1987 the movement effected a rapprochement with Iran, after which it retreated somewhat from its strictly secular orientation. In November of that year it staged a raid from South Lebanon into Israel by hang glider and killed six Israeli soldiers; this incident gave heart to many Palestinians and is said to have helped spark the first Intifada. In 1988 it established a radio station in Syria, Radio Jerusalem (Idha Dt al-Quds), to broadcast into the occupied territories and encourage the resistance during the Intifada. Opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords of 1993, the PFLP–GC joined the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF), and Ahmad Jibril made a death threat against Yasir Arafat, whom he accused of betraying the Palestinian cause. In 1994, an Islamic current, under the impetus of Mustafa Khamis, appeared in the movement, giving rise to a PFLP– Islamic GC. There was supposition that this new branch was created with Jibril’s agreement to facilitate contacts of the PFLP–GC with Hizbullah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Thereafter, in the context of their opposition to the Oslo peace process, joint operations were mounted by the three movements. In December 1996, Khamis announced the creation of a new dissident party from the PFLP–GC, the Arab Union Party, which favored the policies of Arafat and was based in Jordan. Two trends exist within the movement: a radical wing, led by Jibril and, until his assassination by car bomb in 2002, his son Jihad, and a moderate wing, headed by the assistant secretary general of the movement, Talal Naji (Abu Jihad Talal). Weakened by financial crisis due to a reduction in external subsidies, as well as by personality conflicts and political dissension, the PFLP–GC has lost support in the occupied territories and has been largely inactive since the early 1990s. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; Arab Union Party; Fatah, al-; Intifada (1987–1993); Jibril, Ahmad; Palestine Liberation Front (1977); Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian National Salvation Front; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Zaydan, Muhammad.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PRCS

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE– SPECIAL COMMAND: Palestinian armed group created in 1979, after the dissolution of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations (PFLP–SO), caused by the death of Wadi Haddad. Backed by Syria and Iraq, this splinter group was led by Salim Abdul Salem (Abu Muhammad), seconded by Zaki Khalil Muhammad. Marxist-Leninist in ideology, this movement advocated the struggle against imperialism and Zionism as well as armed combat for the recovery of Palestinian land. The headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Command (PFLP–SC) moved from Sidon, in South Lebanon, to Damascus, then to Baghdad, before finally winding up in South Yemen from the end of 1983. The PFLP–SC organized a number of attacks in the Middle East and in Europe, sometimes in liaison with European terrorist groups, such as the Basque group Homeland and Liberty (Euskadi ta Askatasuna [ETA]) and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA).The PFLP–SC ceased to exist at the end of 1989, most of its members rejoining the ranks of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine– General Command (PFLP–GC). SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations.

POPULAR FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE– SPECIAL OPERATIONS: Radical faction created in 1972 by Wadi Haddad, who split from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) over the policies of George Habash, which he found too moderate. An organization with allegiance to MarxistLeninism, backed by Iraq, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Operations (PFLP– SO) cultivated ties with groups and movements that were ideologically close to it, such as the Japanese Red Army, and the German Baader-Meinhof group. The PFLP–SO became known for its participation in the hijacking of an Air France plane en route to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. In 1978, after the death of Haddad, the group was dissolved and its members scattered in three different movements: the 15 May Arab Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Command (PFLP–SC), and the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Fraction (LARF). SEE ALSO Habash, George; Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–Special Command. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

POPULAR MOVEMENT OF ARAB LIBERATION: Palestinian movement founded at the end of 1973, following a split in al-Fatah caused by defeats in the Arab-Israel Wars of 1967 and 1973. Formed under the initiative of Naji EAllush, the Popular Movement of Arab Liberation (PMA), Marxist-Leninist in leaning, promoted the “unity of the Arab struggle for the defense of the Arab peoples, confronted by Zionism and capitalism.” Opposing the policies of Yasir Arafat, the PMAL, at first allied with the Fatah Revolutionary Council of Abu Nidal, became completely autonomous in 1979, benefiting from the support of Syria, Libya, and Iraq. This movement, which has ceased all activity since 1991, was also known as the Arab Popular Liberation Front (APLF). SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Nidal, Abu.

PORAT, HANAN (1943– ): Israeli rabbi and politician. Hanan Porat was born in K’far Pines in Mandatory Palestine in 1943. Elected to the Knesset in 1981, he served until 1999 as a member of the National Religious Party and ha-Tehiyah. A proponent of the Greater Land of Israel, he became prominent in the settlement movement. Porat founded a yeshiva on the site of Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, which became the locus of clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli Defense Forces during the al-Aqsa Intifada beginning in October 2000. SEE ALSO Ha-Tehiyah; National Religious Party.

PORAZ, AVRAHAM (1945– ): Israeli politician. Born in Romania in 1945, Avraham Poraz immigrated to Israel in 1950. He holds a law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A member of the Knesset since 1988, Poraz has served on various committees, including Law and Justice, Ethics, and Finance. He is a member of the Shinui Party. In February 2003 Poraz was appointed minister of the interior. PPP SEE

Palestinian People’s Party.

PPSF SEE

Palestinian Popular Struggle Front.

PRCP Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party.

SEE

PRCS SEE

Palestine Red Crescent Society.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

381

PROCLAMATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL: Made on Friday, 14 May 1948, at 4 P.M., eight hours before the expiration of the British Mandate on Palestine, this proclamation marked the birth of the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, president of the Jewish Agency, read it before the members of the Jewish National Council, representing Palestinian Jewry (the “Yishuv”) and world Zionism, meeting at the Tel Aviv Museum.

SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David; British Mandate; Israel, State of.

PROCLAMATION

In part, the Proclamation declared: “. . . [W]e, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over EretzIsrael and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. We declare that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called ‘Israel.’ The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. . . . We appeal—in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months—to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions. We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. . . .”

382

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

PROCLAMATION OF THE STATE OF PALESTINE: Document, also known as the Algiers Declaration, proclaiming the existence of a sovereign state of Palestine “on our Palestinian territory,” with Jerusalem as its capital. It was adopted on 15 November 1988 by the Palestine National Council (PNC), meeting in Algiers. The PNC also elected Yasir Arafat president of the embryonic state. These moves, made at Arafat’s urging, were part of an ongoing strategy of Arafat’s to gain enough international political leverage— specifically, American support—to bring about direct negotiations with Israel. The proclamation was an attempt to gain control of the first Intifada (1987– 1993) in the occupied territories, then at its height. The PNC also voted to alter the Palestine National Charter, renouncing the use of terror and recognizing Resolutions 242 and 338 as a basis for an international peace conference. On 13 December 1988, Arafat gave a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, meeting in Geneva especially to hear him, in which he confirmed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist and declared its renunciation of terrorism. These moves put the PLO in compliance with American conditions for discussions, and the United States was prompted to call for a “substantive dialogue” with the PLO. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Intifada (1987–1993); Palestine National Charter; Palestine National Council. PROGRESSIVE LIST FOR PEACE (ha-Reshimah haMitkademet le-Shalom, in Hebrew): Israeli political bloc of the center-left, created in 1984 by some Jewish and Arab figures favorable to the creation of a Palestinian state. It advocated the right of selfdetermination for the two peoples. This party obtained a seat in the Knesset elections of 1988. Its influence waned with the departure of some of its members, principally Jews. In October 1993, while preparing for municipal elections, it formed a common list with HADASH and MAPAM. In the Knesset elections of May 1996, its principal leader, Mohammed Zaydan, was obliged to present his own list, which obtained no seats. The most prominent party members were Mohammed Zaydan, Said Azbarga, Ahmed Abu Freih, and Mohammed Miari. SEE ALSO Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Knesset; MAPAM. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

PUNDAK, RON

PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL MOVEMENT SEE

Progressive List for Peace.

PROTESTANTS: Christians belonging to denominations that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation, or have been founded since that time, which deny the authority of the pope and view the Bible as the only source of revealed truth. Loosely, the term refers to any Christian not a member of the Roman Catholic or an Eastern church. Along with Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox churches, Protestantism is one of the major branches of Christianity. There is, however, a wide range of beliefs and practices within Protestantism. Protestant missionaries, based mainly in the United States and Britain, have been active in the Middle East since the nineteenth century, with the original goal of preaching the Gospel (the New Testament of the Bible) to Muslims. When Muslims proved unreceptive, these missionaries focused instead on indigenous Christian communities, which they considered unschooled in the Bible and in need of reform; as a result, Protestant congregations broke away from the Eastern Orthodox churches. Missionaries worked through benevolent service; they offered schools and medical care that were otherwise unavailable and had a major impact on increasing literacy. Among major Protestant establishments in Palestine were the American Colony and Schneller’s Orphanage (both in Jerusalem) and the German Colony in Haifa and Jerusalem. After World War I missions in the Middle East declined, in part because newly-independent states placed limits on them; and the percentage of Christians in the region, especially in Palestine, also declined during the last decades of the twentieth century. However, there has been a resurgence of enthusiasm for missionary work in recent years. The traditional Protestant denominations, employing new technologies such as the Internet and satellite television, have concentrated on alleviating human suffering and promoting social justice without proselytizing on behalf of a particular religious doctrine. U.S. conservative evangelic denominations, on the other hand, believe that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone and feel a religious obligation to convert Muslims to that belief along with the provision of material aid. As a result, there have been Muslim attacks on missionaries, leading to objections from mainstream clergy who believe the evangelicals’ actions not only are counterproductive, but endanger all Christians. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Another important aspect of the evangelicals’ influence is their interpretation of the Bible, which they consider to be the literal Word of God, as sanctifying the expansion of Jewish settlement all over Palestine and beyond. This view is not shared by mainline Protestant denominations, which seek a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict satisfactory to all peoples of the region. The disagreement among Christians on this issue not only affects the relations between them in the Middle East, but has a significant impact on U.S. politics. SEE ALSO Bible; Christianity; Eastern Orthodox Church; Roman Catholic Church.

PTF SEE

Peace Technology Fund.

PULSA DENURA: In Aramaic, “fire baton.” Ceremony practiced by certain extremist rabbis, chanted in Aramaic and meant to fatally hex a person. It was originally performed by initiated kabbalists and thought to be effective only when at least ten pious Jews participated in it after a fast of three days. This ceremony was carried out on 2 October 1995, conducted by Rabbi Yossef Dayan, with twenty or so members of the Kach extremist party near the domicile of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose death they desired. On 4 November, the latter was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extremist Jew close to Kach who may have been aware of the ceremony, or at least of reports of it that appeared prior to the assassination. On 14 September 2004, Rabbi Dayan declared on Israeli television that he would be prepared to carry out the ceremony again, to put a curse on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, if the Gaza disengagement plan was not called off. Officials initiated an investigation of him on suspicion of incitement to murder. SEE ALSO Amir, Yigal; Devekut; Eyal; Kach Party; Rabin, Yitzhak.

PUNDAK, RON (1955–): Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1955, Ron Pundak holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern political history from the University of London. Dr. Pundak played a major role in creating the secret track of unofficial Israeli-Arab negotiations in Oslo in 1993, alongside Dr. Yair Hirschfeld and their Palestinian counterparts. He served as a member of the official Israeli negotiating team—guided by Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, and later by Yitzhak Rabinuntil the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. From 1995 to 2001 he served as executive di-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

383

PUNDAK, RON

rector of the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in Tel Aviv dedicated to building, maintaining, and supporting Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab cooperation in the political, economic, and civil-society arenas. Since July 2001 he has served as the director general of the Peres Center for Peace.

384

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

Q QADDUMI, FARUQ (Abu Lutf): Palestinian political figure, born in August 1931 at Kufr Qaddum, near Nablus; grew up in Haifa but returned to Nablus as a refugee in 1948. Faruq Qaddumi joined the BaEth Party in 1949. He worked for the American oil company Aramco in Saudi Arabia, from 1952 to 1954, when he left to attend the American University of Cairo, from which he graduated in 1958 with degrees in economics and political science. In Cairo he belonged to the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS). In 1959, with Yasir Arafat and Salah Khalaf, Qaddumi helped found the Palestinian Fatah movement. Between 1960 and 1966, while working at the Kuwaiti ministry of health, he was very active in furthering the Palestinian cause. Expelled from Kuwait, he went to Damascus, then to Cairo, finally settling in Amman. During this period, Qaddumi and Salah Khalaf became friends of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In April, 1966, Qaddumi became Secretary General of Fatah. In 1969, Qaddumi was elected to the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in charge of popular organizations. In May 1973, he was named head of the political department of the PLO, replacing Muhammad al-Najjar, who was assassinated in Lebanon by an Israeli commando. Combining the offices of head of Palestinian diplomacy and Secretary General of Fatah, he succeeded in obtaining the recognition of the PLO by the United Nations. Because of his connections with

socialist countries, he was able to have PLO offices opened in numerous countries of Eastern Europe and Africa. The Lebanese crisis became an occasion for him to demonstrate his talents at negotiation and diplomacy. While continuing to be vital in the political department of the PLO, Qaddumi maintained a great deal of influence in Fatah, of which he was one of the main leaders. In August 1989, at the fifth congress of Fatah, he consolidated his position near the top of the movement. He advocated maintaining the Fatah’s role in revolutionary movement, while affirming the need for the PLO to have a central political role. On 1 June 1992, Yasir Arafat, hospitalized in Amman following a plane crash in Libya, designated Qaddumi as a member of the triumvirate, along with Mahmud Rida Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Khalid al-Hasan, in charge of the PLO in the interim. On 20 August 1993, when the coming accord with Israel was announced, he publicly expressed his reservations about its wisdom. As a result, on 13 September 1993, Qaddumi did not participate in the Washington ceremony, although it would have been expected that, as “foreign minister” of the PLO, he would have been the one to initial the accord, not Mahmud Abbas. In spite of his reservations about the Oslo accord, Faruq Qaddumi continued to participate in international negotiations, but when the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was being set up in the Occupied Territories, he refused to go

385

QADI

there, staying on as PLO foreign minister in Tunis. He was appointed director of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR) but did not actively participate. Qaddumi remains head of the PLO political department and remains headquartered in Tunis. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Arafat, Yasir; BaEth; General Union of Palestine Students; Hasan, Khalid al-; Khalaf, Salah; Nablus; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Occupied Territories; Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction.

by British forces, Qassam was killed in battle in YaEbad, becoming the first martyr of the Palestinian resistance. Almost sixty years later, both HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad named the armed branches of their movements, responsible for many attacks against Israel, after him. SEE ALSO Azhar, al-; HAMAS; Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

QASSAM IZZEDINE ALSEE

QIRYAT ARBA SEE

QADI: (“judge,” in Arabic.) In Islam, an educated shaykh responsible for deciding issues of Islamic law. In a civil context, a judge.

QAEIDA, SEE

AL-

Qassam, Izz al-Din al-.

Kiryat Arba.

QUDS, AL-: Arabic name (meaning “the holiness”) of Jerusalem. QUDS, AL- (Jerusalem): An independent daily, considered the most important of all local Palestinian newspapers, founded in 1951.

International Islamic Front.

QANA 1996 SEE

QUDS AL-SHARIF, AL-: Arab term designating the city of Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Jerusalem.

Grapes of Wrath Operation.

QASM SEE

Qassam.

QASSAM: Acronym for the Arab words Quwat alislamiya al-mujahida (Islamic combatant force), designating the armed branch of an Islamic movement. Qassam is also the name given to a small, crude missile or artillery rocket with a range of about eight kilometers (five miles) developed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip.

QASSAM, IZZ AL-DIN AL-: Syrian-Palestinian resistance fighter (1881–1935). Born in Jabla, Syria, and given a religious education in Latakia and at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Izz al-Din al-Qassam became a preacher in Syria. After 1920, he spoke out against French rule under the post-World War I Mandate, and was active in anti-French political resistance. Sentenced to death in the mid-1920s, he fled to Haifa, where he preached against the British and the Zionists. He founded, at the end of the 1920s, an activist group called the Black Hand, for the purpose of undertaking armed actions against Zionist colonists. In October 1935, he took to the countryside in the mountains near Jenin, at the head of a group of several hundred partisans. On 19 November, tracked

386

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

QUDS BRIGADE, AL-: An Iranian Islamic commando operating mainly in Lebanon. Affiliated with the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and supervised by the Iranian Special Services, it operates exclusively outside of Iranian territory. QUDS COMMITTEE, SEE

AL-

Organization of the Islamic Conference.

QUDS FUND, AL-: Specialized institution of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, responsible for participating in the financing and upkeep of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. The Fund, created by the Jerusalem Committee, during the committee’s fifteenth session held in January 1995 in Ifrane (central Morocco), seeks to raise funds to save the sites in the occupied side of Jerusalem, defend the Palestinians’ rights over the city, support their resistance, and safeguard the city’s history as well as its religious, cultural, and architectural heritage. SEE ALSO Organization of the Islamic Conference. QUDS UNIVERSITY, AL-: Palestinian university with four campuses in East Jerusalem and nearby areas, T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

QURAI, AHMAD SULAYMAN

created in 1984 from the confederation of four smaller institutions that had been founded in the 1970s. The university was fully unified into a single institutional structure in 1994. It now has ten faculties, including arts, science, medicine, health sciences, and law, with over 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students and a faculty and staff of more than 700. One campus, containing the main administrative offices, is in East Jerusalem, just outside the Old City; the largest campus is in Abu Dis, just beyond the city boundary. Other locations are in Ramallah and alBireh. The university’s board of trustees includes internationally known academics, and its president since 1995 has been Sari Nusabaya, a well-known peace activist. It conducts numerous joint research projects with Israeli institutions, including the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, as well as with foreign universities. Classes and attendance at al-Quds have been seriously affected by the difficulties placed in the way of Palestinian movement around the West Bank and into East Jerusalem: internal borders, checkpoints, closures, and curfews. Unlike Bir Zeit University, alQuds has not been known for political activism, but it has been the target of Israeli harassment, particularly since Nusabaya became associated with it. In July 2002 Israeli police raided its administrative offices in East Jerusalem and carried away all files and computers, sealing the premises for several weeks. Earlier they had entered a university facility in Ramallah, smashed $200,000 worth of donated video equipment and vandalized the building. In September 2003 Israel announced that it was seizing a third of the Abu Dis campus to build a portion of its separation wall, which will cut off the town of Abu Dis from Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Abu Dis; Bir Zeit University; Nusabaya, Sari; West Bank.

QUMRAN SEE

Dead Sea Scrolls.

QURAI, AHMAD SULAYMAN (Abu Ala): Palestinian political figure, born in 1937 at Abu Dis, in the suburbs of Jerusalem. An economist by education, at the time of the 1967 War, Ahmad Qurai was working for the Arab Bank in Saudi Arabia. The following year he joined Yasir Arafat’s al-Fatah. In 1970 he was chosen to organize the Palestinian Martyrs’ Works Society (SAMED), a set of business enterprises run from Beirut by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for the economic support of the Palestinian community in exile. It operated in most Palestinian commuD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

nities in the Middle East outside the occupied territories and has been dormant since the founding of the Palestinian Authority (Qurai is still its head). In August, 1987, Qurai was elected to the Central Committee of Fatah, and the following year he was chosen to be general director of the economics department of the PLO. In the framework of the Madrid peace process, launched in 1991, he participated in multilateral negotiations. With Mahmud Rida Abbas (Abu Mazen), he participated in secret negotiations with the Israelis, which resulted in the Oslo Accords of 1993. In February 1996, he was elected president of the new Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), of the Palestinian Authority parliament. While carrying on his duties as the president of the Legislative Council, Ahmad Qurai also participated in the principal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. On 5 September 2000, along with his counterpart in Israel, Knesset president Avraham Burg, he was invited to speak before the European Parliament on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Between September and December 2001, while the al-Aqsa Intifada was continuing in the Palestinian territories, Qurai met several times with the Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres and European envoys Miguel Moratinos and Javier Solana, in an attempt to restart negotiations. On 23 January 2002, when the Intifada and Israeli reprisals were intensifying, Qurai went to Paris to participate in a colloquium organized by the French National Assembly, in which Burg and Moratinos also participated. During this meeting Qurai invited Burg to speak before the PLC, and Burg agreed. In a speech commenting on the seriousness of the situation in the Palestinian territories, Qurai appealed to the international community—and to the European Union in particular—to become more involved in the process. On the fringes of this meeting, Qurai met also with Peres, with whom he discussed various ways of restarting IsraeliPalestinian negotiations. In September 2003, Qurai was appointed prime minister in Arafat’s Palestinian Authority government, replacing Mahmud Abbas. In mid-July 2004, as frustration grew not only with the Israeli occupation, but with the corruption and inaction of the Palestinian Authority and the PLO’s oldguard leadership, and conditions in the Gaza Strip verged on chaos, Qurai offered his resignation, which Arafat refused. Qurai withdrew his resignation about a week later. Qurai, as prime minister of the PNA, is a possible successor to Arafat, but has been considered to be ineffective and corrupt, and does not command the level of support that would see

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

387

QUR D AN

QURDAN. THESE PAGES ARE FROM THE HOLY BOOK OF THE MUSLIMS, WHICH THEY BELIEVE TO BE THE WORD OF GOD, GIVEN TO THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD IN REVELATIONS THAT WERE COLLECTED IN THE MID-SEVENTH CENTURY, NOT LONG AFTER HIS DEATH. THE QURDAN COMPRISES NEARLY 6,250 VERSES IN 114 CHAPTERS. (© The Art Archive/Private Collection/Eileen Tweedy)

him through the expected political struggle that would likely follow Arafat’s demise. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Burg, Avraham; Fatah, al-; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; Peres, Shimon.

QURDAN: Sacred book of the Muslims (from the Arabic word meaning “recitation”), containing the revelations the Prophet Muhammad received from God over the period from 610 to 632 C.E., largely via the angel JibraDil (or Jibril; Gabriel, in Arabic), first at Mecca, then at Medina. Muslims consider the QurDan the word of God, from the heavenly Book, which was also the source of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The written verses of revelation did not

388

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

become one book until the reign of the Caliph Uthman (r. 644–652), some fifteen years after the death of Muhammad. At that time the writings of the prophet, which had been collected by his secretary, Zayd ibn Thâbit, started attracting a lot of attention. The QurDan is comprised of 114 chapters (suras) in 30 equal sections (juz D), totaling nearly 6,250 verses (ayat). The QurDan and Hadith (collection of authoritative traditions, based on what Muhammad did and said as a ruler) together form the ShariDa, the Islamic law and basis of all Muslim teaching. According to canonical norms, the QurDan cannot be translated; to be understood, it must be read in Arabic. There are four Arabic designations for the QurDan: al-qur Dan (recited proclamation), al-furqân (discernment of true and false), al-kitab (the written book), and al-dhikr (recollection). The QurDan presents T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

QUR D AN

many points of convergence, from both doctrinal and literary perspectives, with the Bible. SEE ALSO Mecca; Muhammad.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

389

R RABBI: Title derived from Aramaic rabban (Hebrew rav,) which means “master,” given by Jews to scholars familiar with sacred Jewish texts. In modern times there are two general categories of rabbis: those who are primarily teachers and scholars or serve on religious courts, and those who minister in synagogues and in the community, officiating at religious rituals, weddings, and funerals. Traditionally the title has been given only to men, but in recent times nonOrthodox Jews have begun to ordain women. Different Jewish denominations have different criteria for determining who is entitled to be called a rabbi; in the United States at present, there are four types: Reform; Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox. Only Orthodox rabbis are officially recognized in Israel, although those of other denominations exist there. In modern Israel, despite an ostensible commitment to religious freedom, halakhah (Jewish religious law) governs in all matters related to the personal status of citizens, and Orthodox rabbinical interpretation of that law is dominant. Only Orthodox rabbis have the legal authority to perform marriages, divorces, and conversions and thus to determine who is entitled to immigrate (although marriages and conversions performed by other rabbis outside Israel are recognized by the state). Many Israeli rabbis are officials of the state ministry of religion and the office of the chief rabbinate, which is divided into Ashkenazic and Sephardic wings.

Though there are other rabbis in Israel, particularly within Hasidic and yeshiva circles, their authority is not official. During the last few decades, the official rabbis have steadily lost moral authority; secular Jews consider them irrelevant, while a small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews, as well as a growing number of Reform (progressive) and Conservative (Masorti) Jews, look to their own rabbis for guidance. SEE ALSO Ashkenazi; Bible; Halakhah; Haredi; Hasidism; Masorti; Orthodox Judaism; Reform Jew; Sephardim; Yeshiva.

RABBO SEE

Abd Rabbo, Yasir.

RABIN, YITZHAK (1922–1995): Israeli military and political figure, prime minister of Israel 1974–1977 and 1992–1995. Born in 1922 in Jerusalem, he studied at an agricultural school and became active in the Ahdut ha-Avodah movement in Galilee. In 1940 he joined the Haganah’s commando unit, the Palmah, and became its chief operations officer in 1947. During the Israeli war of independence (1948), he directed the defense of Jerusalem and fought the Egyptians in the Negev. After the war he studied at the British army staff college, graduating in 1953, and became chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in 1964. Under his command the IDF won an over-

391

RABIN-PELOSOFF, DALIA

YITZHAK RABIN. THE FORMER MILITARY LEADER WAS PRIME MINISTER 1974 AND THEN IN 1989. RABIN TOOK NOTABLE STRIDES TOWARD PEACE WITH OTHER MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRIES AND WITH PALESTINIANS. HE WAS AWARDED THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE IN 1994 BUT ASSASSINATED A YEAR LATER BY YIGAL AMIR, A YOUNG ISRAELI EXTREMIST OPPOSED TO THE PEACE PROCESS. (© Photograph by Ya’acov Sa’ar. Government Press Office [GPO] of IsraOF ISRAEL FOR TWO TERMS, STARTING IN

el)

whelming victory during the Six Day War of 1967, and he became a national hero. In 1968 Rabin retired from the IDF and was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United States, a position he held until March 1973. This diplomatic experience led him to pursue a second career in politics; later in 1973 he was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party. He was minister of labor in the cabinet of Golda Meir, and after her resignation as prime minister, Rabin was chosen to succeed her. In June 1994 he became the first sabra (nativeborn) prime minister of Israel. Early in his term, Rabin worked closely with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who helped Israel to reach disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria. In July 1976 he ordered a bold raid to rescue hostages held by a Palestinian terrorist group on a hi-

392

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

jacked plane at Entebbe. However, the popularity of the Labor Party declined, in part because Rabin refused to meet National Religious Party (NRP) demands for greater control over the government by Orthodox Judaism. He was eventually forced to call for elections; but before they occurred, on 8 April 1977, he resigned as prime minister when the press revealed that his wife, Leah, had an illegal bank account in the United States. He thereupon lost the leadership of the Labor Party to Shimon Peres; however, he continued to hold a seat in the Knesset. From 1984 to 1990 Rabin served as minister of defense in the two Likud-Labor coalition governments of that period, responding forcefully to the first intifada while proclaiming that there was no “military solution” to the Palestinian uprising. In 1985 he initiated the withdrawal of the IDF from most of Lebanon. In March 1990, the Labor Party having decided to quit the coalition, he resigned his position as defense minister. In 1992 he again became head of the Labor Party, which won the June Knesset elections, and on 13 July, for the second time, he became prime minister. Three days later, Rabin announced the end of public subsidies for Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Persuaded by his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, he gave the go-ahead to secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway, with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); and in September 1993, in Washington, he signed the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords), which called for mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians and self-rule in Gaza and Jericho. In October 1994 he signed a full peace treaty with Jordan. For his role in the Oslo Accords, Rabin, together with Shimon Peres and Yasir Arafat, was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace. But Yitzhak Rabin’s commitment to peace with the Palestinians, and the return of settled territories to them as its consequence, had earned him the hatred of Israeli extremists. On 4 November 1995, at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv, he was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing activist. SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avodah; Entebbe; Haganah; Israel Labor Party; Intifada; Oslo Accords; Palmah.

RABIN-PELOSOFF, DALIA (1950–): Daughter of the former prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, born in 1950. A lawyer by training, Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff performed her military service in an elite unit of the IDF. In March, 1999, she joined the ranks of the Center Party, created by Yitzhak Mordechai, former T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RAJUB, JIBRIL

defense minister, who had resigned from the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, then head of Likud. As a result of the Knesset elections of the following May, which saw the victory of the Laborite, Ehud Barak, she was elected M.K.. A few weeks later, she became deputy speaker of the Knesset. At the beginning of 2001, Rabin-Pelosoff resigned from the Center Party, to create her own group, the New Way. On the following 7 March, she became deputy defense minister in the government of the leader of Likud, Ariel Sharon. This was the first time a woman had occupied this post. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Center Party; Knesset; Likud; Mordechai, Yitzhak; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel.

RAF: RED ARMY FACTION. SEE

Japanese Red Army.

RAFI PARTY (Reshimat Po Ealei Yisrael): Israeli socialist party, created in 1965 by David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres, following a split in MAPAI. One of the sources of the rift was the Lavon Affair, a dispute over a 1954 espionage operation. The defectors also accused MAPAI of inflexibility and a failure to provide opportunities for younger leaders. In 1968, this group merged with MAPAI and the Ahdut ha-Avodah to create the Israel Labor Party (ILP). SEE ALSO Ahdut ha-Avodah; Ben-Gurion, David; Dayan, Moshe; Israel Labor Party; Lavon Affair; MAPAI; Peres, Shimon. RAJUB, JIBRIL (Abu Rami): Palestinian political figure, born in 1953 in Dura in the West Bank. In 1968, Jibril Rajub was arrested by the Israeli police and sentenced to life in prison for throwing a hand grenade at an Israeli army vehicle. In prison he learned Hebrew and English. In May 1985 he was released as part of a prisoner exchange and worked as a journalist for the magazine Abir. In January 1988, during the first Intifada, he was expelled to Lebanon, and from there he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis. Rajub became part of the Palestinian Security Services, functioning as an advisor to Khalil al-Wazir and liaison with some Intifada leaders in the Palestinian territories; after Wazir’s assassination in April 1988, he became close to Yasir Arafat. At the end of December 1993, as part of the application of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, he and Muhammad Dahlan went to Rome to meet with the Israeli general D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Amnon Shahak to coordinate Israeli and Palestinian security activities. In May 1994, as part of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, he was named director of the Palestinian Preventive Security Force for the West Bank, which was set up by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Rajub’s position made him one of Israel’s and the United States’ main Palestinian interlocutors in the 1990s. He developed an independent power base in the West Bank in alliance with younger leaders of al-Fatah, including Marwan Barghuthi and Saib Erekat. In 1997 rumors circulated about his taking control of the West Bank if Arafat’s health failed, about his possible succession as head of the PLO, and even about a coup against Arafat. In late 1997 Rajub was suspended from the al-Fatah central committee for several months. He worked extensively with the Shin Bet and the CIA to prevent Palestinian attacks on Israel. In May 2001, eight months after the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada, he was wounded in an Israeli military attack on his home. In early 2002, Rajub fell out of favor with Arafat, who reportedly accused him of being an Israeli and American spy. In April 2002 the Israelis attacked his headquarters. Rajub escaped after turning over fifty Palestinian Islamists to the Israelis in a deal mediated by the CIA, for which he was widely condemned. In May when the Americans told Arafat he should reform his various security services with Rajub in charge, Arafat dismissed him, naming him governor of Jenin. In August 2003 Arafat named him head of his newly created National Security Council, supervising the chiefs of all Palestinian Security Services. In this post he was an effective opponent of the new prime minister, Mahmud Rida Abbas, who was appointed under American and Israeli pressure. Rajub remains committed to a twostate solution and was a member of the delegation that negotiated the Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003. Rajub is considered a possible successor to Arafat, though he would be opposed by Abbas and his ally, former interior minister Dahlan, among others. He is believed to have betrayed Barghuthi to the Israeli authorities and would not be acceptable to HAMAS, which, although opposed to the PLO, has refrained from attacking it as long as Arafat remained. SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Barghuthi, Marwan; Dahlan, Muhammad; Fatah, al-; Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003; Intifada; Palestinian Security Services; Shin Bet; Wazir, Khalil al-; West Bank.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

393

RAKAH

RAMADAN EVENING MEAL. A PALESTINIAN WOMAN AND HER CHILDREN IN THE OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM PREPARE THE EVENING MEAL DURING THE HOLY MONTH OF FASTING. ONE OF THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM, FASTING IS BELIEVED TO FOSTER PIETY, AND ADULT MUSLIMS MUST ABSTAIN FROM FOOD OR DRINK BETWEEN SUNRISE AND SUNSET DURING RAMADAN. (© Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis)

RAKAH (New Communist List): (Reshimah Kommunistit Hadashah in Hebrew): Israeli Arab communist party, formed in 1964 as an alternative to the overwhelmingly Jewish MAKI, which split over the issue of Arab nationalism. In the 1973 election the two communist parties, RAKAH and MAKI, ran together as Moked; but since then only RAKAH has borne the name “communist.” SEE ALSO Israel Communist Party; Moked. RAK KACH (“only thus!”): Slogan/motto of the Irgun. SEE ALSO

Irgun.

food or drink; telling lies, gossiping and engaging in other unethical behavior; and engaging in sex. At sunset everyone breaks the fast, usually in a large meal with family and friends (iftar). The end of the month of Ramadan is celebrated with a feast, the EId al-Fitr. Between the 27 and 28 Ramadan falls the Night of Destiny (lailat al-qadr), when according to a widespread belief everyone’s fate is decided. For some this date marks the first revelation of the QurDan to Muhammad. SEE ALSO Hijra; EId al-Fitr; Islamic Calendar; Muhammad; QurDan.

RAMATKAL: Hebrew word meaning the chief of staff of the Israeli army.

RAMADAN (ramadhan): Ninth month of the Islamic calendar, lasting twenty-nine or thirty days. Ramadan is a month of fasting, which is one of the five obligations of Islam, and so between sunrise and sunset the believer abstains from smoking; partaking of

394

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

RAMÍREZ, ILYICH SÁNCHEZ (Carlos the Jackal; 1949– ): Terrorist, born in Caracas, Venezuala, to a Communist lawyer who named his three sons Vladimir, Ilyich, and Lenin. After failing to obtain enT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RANTISI, ABD AL-AZIZ

trance to the Sorbonne, he was sent to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in 1967, where he became friendly with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the spring of 1970 he left Moscow for Lebanon and then for a PFLP camp in Jordan. Between 1973 and 1984 he participated in many attacks in Europe, with a high cost in human lives (over 1,500 according to his own claims). On 30 December 1973 he committed his first assassination attempt, a failed one, against the owner of the British Marks and Spencer retail chain. On 15 September 1974 he threw a grenade into a Paris drugstore, causing two deaths and leaving thirty-four wounded. In early 1975 he participated in two attacks on Israeli airliners at Orly Airport. On 27 June 1975 he killed two French internal security officers (they were about to arrest him) as well as Michel Mukharbal, his Lebanese PFLP contact in France, who had betrayed him under interrogation. On 21 December 1976 he participated in the kidnapping of eleven Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil ministers (and fifty other people) to Algiers from their meeting in Vienna. The hostages were eventually released and Carlos had to answer to the PFLP for not killing the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers as he had been assigned to do. He was also suspected of having embezzled some of the ransom money and was expelled from the PFLP. After being arrested in Yugoslavia and expelled to Baghdad, he went to live in Aden, where he founded his own terrorist group, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle, with some Arab and German terrorists. He established contacts with the East German and Romanian secret police and was hired by the Romanians to assassinate Romanian dissidents in France. In early 1982 the group attempted an attack on a French nuclear power plant. After his then-wife, Magdalena Kopp, was arrested by the French police in February 1982, he mounted several attacks in France and Germany that were meant to persuade the French authorities to free her, including bombing a train on 29 March 1982 (5 dead, 27 wounded), an attack in Paris on 22 April (1 dead, 63 wounded), and twin attacks against the Paris-Marseille train and the Marseille railroad station on 31 December 1983 (5 dead, 50 wounded). Kopp was released in 1985 and joined Carlos in Damascus, and from there they went to Budapest. Expelled from Hungary later that year, they were denied refuge in Iraq, Libya, and Cuba but were allowed to stay in Damascus. During this period Carlos’s notoriety was such that terrorist incidents were frequently blamed on D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

him if they could not otherwise be attributed (he was said to be a master of disguise); this was partly the result of his own boasting, which included taking credit for terrorist acts that he had had nothing to do with. The Syrians curtailed his activities until 1991, and he lived disguised as a Mexican businessman. He and Kopp had a daughter, and he was reportedly drunk most of the time. In 1991 the Syrians, newly allied with the United States over the Gulf War of 1991, expelled him; he was again denied refuge in several countries, finally entering Jordan with Syrian help; eventually he settled in Sudan during the summer of 1993. On 14 August 1994, under pressure from the United States and France, the Sudanese police arrested him in Khartoum and handed him over to French authorities. In December 1997 he was convicted of the 1975 murder of the two French security officers and the Lebanese informer and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2001 he married one of his French lawyers, and in 2003, a Muslim convert, he published a book in defense of terrorism, Revolutionary Islam. In 2004 his French wife published an unapologetic memoir about their relationship. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991); Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

RAMON, HAIM (1950– ): Israeli politician, born in Jaffa. Haim Ramon was active in the Labor Party’s Young Guard. A lawyer, he was elected to the Knesset in 1983, where he served on various committees, including law and justice, finance, and the house committee. He was chairman of the Labor faction of the Knesset from 1988 to 1992. Ramon was appointed minister of health in 1992 and served in that post until 1994. In July 1995 he was elected chairman of the Histradut; he left that position in November 1995, when he was appointed minister of the interior, a post he held until June 1996. From 1996 to 1999 he served as a member of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee. In July 1999 he was appointed minister without portfolio, with responsibility for Jerusalem, government reform, and liaison between the prime minister’s office and the Knesset. He served as minister of the interior from August 2000 to March 2001. SEE ALSO Israel Labor Party; Knesset. RANTISI, ABD AL-AZIZ (1948–2004): Palestinian Islamist, born near Jaffa, in Palestine. In 1948, at the time of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, Abdul Aziz Rantisi and his family became refugees in the Khan

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

395

RASHIDUN, AL-

Yunis camp, in the Gaza Strip. After studying in Alexandria, Egypt, where he frequented the Muslim Brotherhood, he became a pediatrician and also started to teach religion at the Islamic University of Gaza. In 1973, with Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, Mahmud al-Azhar, and Ibrahim al-Yazuri, he participated in the creation of the Islamic Collective (al-MajmaE alIslami), a charity helping the disadvantaged, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood. In October 1987 the Israeli authorities banned him from working in hospitals because he refused to pay taxes to the “Israeli occupier.” On 14 December, with Shaykh Yasin, Abdallah Darwish, Salah Shahada, and Ahmad Shamah, he participated in founding HAMAS. Between 1988 and 1990 he was imprisoned a number of times by the Israeli authorities, and in 1992 he was among the 417 Islamists banished to South Lebanon by Israel. During his expulsion, he was the spokesperson for those among the banished who belonged to HAMAS. On 15 December 1993, along with some hundred others, he was allowed to return to Israel, where as soon as he arrived he was again arrested. Freed on 21 April 1997, he returned to the political arena. On 9 April 1998 he was arrested by the Palestinian police for having accused the Palestinian Authority (PA) of being responsible for the death of Muhyaddin al-Sharif, a member of the armed branch of HAMAS. He was held until February 2000 without trial for the same killing. He was again arrested by the PA in July 2000 and held until December after having accused the leadership of treason for participating in that year’s Camp David talks. Over the next year he was arrested and released several times as the Palestinian authorities responded to Israeli demands that measures be taken against the Islamist movement. After December 2001, while the al-Aqsa Intifada was raging, he was frequently under house arrest. In 2003 he survived an Israeli attempt to assassinate him using helicopter-fired missiles. On 22 March 2004, following the Israeli assassination (by missile) of Shaykh Yasin, he became the head of HAMAS. On 17 April, in Gaza, Rantisi was assassinated the same way. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Camp David Accords; Camp David II Summit; Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestinian Authority; Yasin, Ahmad IsmaEil.

RASHIDUN, AL- (“the rightly guided,” in Arabic): In Sunni Islam, the phrase “rightly guided caliphs” (alkhulafa D al-rashidun) designates the four successors

396

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

of the prophet Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar (Omar), Uthman (Othman), and Ali. SEE ALSO Muhammad.

RASUL: Arabic word meaning “messenger” in the sense of one receiving a divine message. For Muslims, the prophet Muhammad was such a rasul. SEE ALSO Muhammad.

RATZ SEE

Movement for Civil Rights and Peace.

AL-RADUF AL- (1939–): Jordanian political figure, born in Irbid. He received a bachelor of science in pharmacology from the American University of Beirut in 1962 and studied law at the University of Jordan from 1982 to 1983. Rawabdeh joined the Jordanian health ministry in 1962, becoming director of its pharmaceutical and supply department in 1968. In 1976, after having briefly served as administrative director of Yarmuk University, he was named communications minister, and two years later health minister, a post he filled for one year. From 1983 to 1989 he was the appointed mayor of the Jordanian capital, Amman. Between 1982 and 1985 he was on the governing board of the Jordanian Phosphate Mines Company. In 1989 he was appointed a parliamentary deputy and became minister of public works and habitat in the government of Tahir al-Masri. In February 1993 he created the Awakening (al-Yaqatha) Party, a center-right party, of which he was the secretary general. The following year he was elected deputy. In June 1994 he was named education minister in the government of Abd al-Salam Majali. He supported the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Between 1995 and 1996 he was vice prime minister and minister of education. The following year he entered his party into a multiparty coalition, the National Constitutional Party, becoming deputy secretary general and head of its political section. On 1 March 1999, following the accession of King Abdullah II to the Jordanian throne, he became prime minister and defense minister, replacing Fayiz al-Tarawneh. On 15 January 2000 he initiated a cabinet reshuffle, making the journalist Salih Qallab information minister. On the following 28 March he announced the creation of a royal commission for human rights, decided on by Abdullah II. Because the cabinet moved slowly in implementing the economic reforms requested by the king, on 18 June Rawabdeh resigned and was replaced by Ali Abu alRaghib. In 2001 Rawabdeh was reelected to parlia-

RAWABDEH, ABD

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

REJECTION FRONT

ment. Having pulled his party out of the National Constitutional bloc, he once again represented the Yaqatha. SEE ALSO Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Abu alRaghib, Ali; Majali, Abd al-Salam; Tarawneh, Fayiz al-.

REAGAN PLAN: Peace plan presented on 1 September 1982 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) following U.S. mediation. This plan provided for the creation of an autonomous Palestinian authority in the occupied territories, to be associated with Jordan. The basic elements of the Reagan Plan included free elections of an autonomous Palestinian authority in the occupied territories; peaceful and orderly transfer of power from the Israeli government to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza over a period of five years, the final status of these territories to be a fully autonomous association with Jordan; an immediate freeze on the creation of new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza; negotiations on Jerusalem, which must remain undivided; and recognition by the Palestinians of the “right of Israel to a secure future,” and by the Arab states of the reality of Israel. Also, President Reagan gave notice that the United States would support neither the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, nor the permanent annexation of these territories by Israel. Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin rejected the plan and reiterated Israel’s claim to the West Bank, while the Arab leaders showed little enthusiasm for it. Events in Lebanon soon drew U.S. attention from it, and it was never pursued. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1982); Begin, Menachem. RED EAGLES: Armed militia of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Inactive since 1994. SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

REFORM JUDAISM: Form of Judaism originally developed in Germany in the nineteenth century and now dominant in the United States. (In other nations it is sometimes known as Progressive or Liberal Judaism.) This movement has modified traditional religious orthodoxy in the interests of greater adaptability to the moral, intellectual, and practical demands of modern life. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Because in Israel Orthodox Judaism dominates the government, society, and institutions such as marriage through its legal monopoly on religious affairs, the human rights of Israeli Reform Jews are limited. However, Knesset members have become more sensitive to the intensity of feeling that exists in the Diaspora regarding issues of religious freedom, in large part because of political campaigning by the Reform movement; as a result, steps have been taken toward reducing this discrimination. SEE ALSO Masorti; Orthodox Judaism; Rabbi.

REJECTION FRONT [1]: Coalition of groups within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in November 1973 following the Arab defeat in the 1973 War to oppose any leadership strategy to seek negotiations with Israel. Formed through the impetus of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) with the support of the Iraqi BaEth Party, the front united the most radical of the Palestinian movements, including the PFLP, the Arab Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, and the Palestine Liberation Front (1977). Between 1974 and 1978 the Rejection Front contested all attempts, whether American, Arab, Palestinian, or Israeli, to start Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Political changes after the Camp David Accords of 1978 drew the front’s constituents back into the PLO and the front ceased to exist by 1980. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Camp David Accords; Palestine Liberation Front (1977); Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Popular Struggle Front; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command. REJECTION FRONT [2]: In October 1977 Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat traveled to Jerusalem to negotiate peace with Israel. Between 2 and 5 December 1977 representatives of a number of Arab countries met in Tripoli, Libya, to oppose the move. Libya, Algeria, South Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were represented, having reconciled their differences. They constituted a second Rejection Front of Arab states (as distinct from the internal PLO Rejection Front [1], active since 1973). A final communiqué of this conference called for action to neutralize the effects of Sadat’s move: a freeze in political and diplomatic relations with Egypt; nonparticipation in Arab League meetings held in Cairo; reconsideration of Egypt’s membership in the Arab League; and opposi-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

397

RESOLUTION 32/40

tion to any attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO reaffirmed its rejection of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. In September 1981, meeting in Benghazi, Libya, the leaders of the front decided on a rapprochement with the Soviet Union and invited Arab countries to “reconsider their relations with the United States” and oppose, with all the means at their disposal, the accord of strategic cooperation that had been concluded between Washington and Tel Aviv. On 18 November 1981 the final communiqué from a meeting of the front at Aden stressed that “Arab solidarity should be based on a confrontation with Zionism and its ally, the United States.” In June 1982 the Israeli invasion of Lebanon caused a schism in the front, resulting in its dissolution. Throughout the history of the Palestinian movement, the Arab response has been characterized by a lack of cohesiveness, due principally to a struggle for leadership and to political and ideological divergences. SEE ALSO League of Arab States; Palestine Liberation Organization; Rejection Front [1]; Resolution 242; Resolution 338; Sadat, Anwar al-.

RESOLUTION 32/40: Resolution passed on 2 December 1977 by the United Nations General Assembly, which, among other stipulations, fixed the date of 29 November as an “international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

RESOLUTION 51/26: Passed by the UN General Assembly on 4 December 1996, this resolution, “Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine,” expresses support for the Madrid/Oslo peace process, reaffirms the “right to self-determination” of the Palestinian people, the necessity for an “Israeli withdrawal” from the territories occupied since 1967, and the need to resolve “the problem of Palestinian refugees, with reference to UN Security Council Resolutions 194, 242, and 338.” There were 152 votes for it, two against (United States and Israel), and four abstentions. Its preamble asserts the “illegal character” of the Israeli settlements and initiatives aimed at changing the status of Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords II; Resolution 194; Resolution 242; Resolution 338. RESOLUTION 52/250: Adopted on 7 July 1998 by the UN General Assembly, this resolution raised the status of the Palestinian observer mission, allowing it to

398

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

participate in the general debates of the Assembly and to coauthor projects aimed at resolving questions connected with Palestine and the Middle East. This new arrangement did not allow the Palestinian mission the right to vote, or to present a candidate.

RESOLUTION 181: Passed on 29 November 1947 by the UN General Assembly, this resolution provides for the partition of Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and the other Jewish, with an economic union between them and Jerusalem enjoying a special status. The General Assembly indicated that the British Mandate over Palestine should end as soon as possible. (Britain had already notified the United Nations that it would resign its mandate by 1 August 1948.) The resolution passed by thirtythree to thirteen, with ten abstentions. Voting in favor were Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxemburg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Soviet Union, Sweden, Ukraine, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Voting against were Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. Abstaining were Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. SEE ALSO British Mandate; Jerusalem.

RESOLUTION 185: Passed on 26 April 1948 by the UN General Assembly, when tensions were on the rise between Jews and Arabs, this resolution asked the Security Council to study measures that would guarantee the protection of Jerusalem and its inhabitants. RESOLUTION 194: Passed by the UN General Assembly on 11 December 1948 after the 1948 War, this resolution resulted from the report of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, who had been assassinated in September by terrorists from the Irgun, a Zionist militia. It establishes the UN Conciliation Commission (members: France, Turkey, and the United States), which is charged with carrying out instructions of the Security Council and conducting negotiations for a settlement; affirms that Jerusalem should have a special status under an “international regime” apart from the rest of Palestine, and that “all inhabitants of Palestine” should have the “freest possible access” to it; affirms that other holy places should be protected by the United Nations; and, affirming the PalesT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RESOLUTION 273

tinians’ right of return, resolves “that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible; Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation . . . ” The Conciliation Commission did eventually achieve an armistice, but none of the other provisions were ever put into effect. Clause 11, quoted above, provides the legal basis for the Palestinians’ claim of a right of return. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Bernadotte, Folke; Irgun.

RESOLUTION 237: Passed by the UN Security Council on 14 June 1967, immediately following the 1967 War, this resolution “Calls upon the Government of Israel to ensure the safety, welfare, and security of the inhabitants of the areas where military operations have taken place. . . . [and] Recommends to the Governments concerned the scrupulous respect of the humanitarian principles governing the treatment of prisoners of war and the protection of civilian persons in time of war contained in the Geneva Conventions of 12 August, 1949. . . .” SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967). RESOLUTION 242: Passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on 22 November 1967, following the 1967 War, this resolution was drafted by the British ambassador, Lord Caradon, after exhaustive negotiation and discussion and was accepted by all belligerent states. It reads: “The Security Council, Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East, Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security, Emphasizing further that all Member States in their acceptance of the Charter of the United Nations have undertaken a commitment to act in accordance with Article 2 of the Charter, 1. Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: (i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (ii) Termination of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force; 2. Affirms further the necessity (a) For guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area; (b) For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem; (c) For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones; 3. Requests the Secretary General to designate a Special Representative to proceed to the Middle East to establish and maintain contacts with the States concerned in order to promote agreement and assist efforts to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement in accordance with the provisions and principles in this resolution; 4. Requests the Secretary General to report to the Security Council on the progress of the efforts of the Special Representative as soon as possible.” Resolution 242 states the basic premise, land for peace, of all subsequent diplomatic proposals for settlement of the Arab-Israeli issue. In order to gain unanimous approval, however, it was artfully ambiguous regarding the extent of the land in question, leading to greatly differing interpretations later. It did not refer to the issue of Palestinian rights, mentioning the Palestinians only in the context of the “refugee problem.” Although it was accepted by the belligerent states, it was rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had not been a party to the discussion and which continued to reject it until 1988. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Palestine Liberation Organization.

RESOLUTION 253: Passed on 4 July 1967 by the UN General Assembly, following the 1967 War, this resolution declared invalid the measures taken by Israel to modify the status of Jerusalem and demanded that Israel rescind all measures already taken and abstain from further action that would change the status of the city. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Jerusalem. RESOLUTION 273: Passed on 11 May 1949 by the United Nations General Assembly, this resolution allowed Israel to become a member of the UN. There were 37 votes for, 12 against, and 9 abstentions, as follows: In favor: Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Byelorussian SSR, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Dominican

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

399

RESOLUTION 302

Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Ukrainian SSR, Union of South Africa, USSR, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yugoslavia. Against: Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen. Abstaining: Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, El Salvador, Greece, Sweden, Thailand (Siam), Turkey, United Kingdom.

recognized boundaries; 2. Calls upon Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory; 3. Decides . . . to establish immediately under its authority a United Nations interim force for southern Lebanon for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area. . .”

RESOLUTION 302: Adopted on 8 December 1949 by

RESOLUTION 426: Passed on 19 March 1978 by the

the UN General Assembly, this resolution creates the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. SEE ALSO United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

UN Security Council, this resolution approved the report of the secretary general on the application of Resolution 425 and decided that the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon would be created in accord with the mentioned report for an initial period of six months and renewed subsequently, if need be, by decision of the Security Council. SEE ALSO Resolution 425; United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon.

RESOLUTION 338: Adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on 22 October 1973, during the 1973 War, in an urgent session requested jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union, this resolution reads: “The Security Council 1. Calls upon all parties to the present fighting to cease all firing and terminate all military activity immediately, no later than 12 hours after the moment of the adoption of this decision, in the positions they now occupy; 2. Calls upon the parties concerned to start immediately after the cease-fire the implementation of Security Council resolution 242 (1967) in all of its parts; 3. Decides that, immediately and concurrently with the cease-fire, negotiations shall start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” Resolution 338 calls for the parties to implement Resolution 242 of 1967 immediately upon a ceasefire and begin negotiations for a permanent peace. (A ceasefire did begin almost immediately, but it was broken within hours.) Like Resolution 242, it does not deal with the Palestinian issue. These two resolutions have remained the legal foundation on which all subsequent proposals for an Arab–Israeli settlement have been based. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Resolution 242.

RESOLUTION 425: Adopted 19 March 1978 by the UN Security Council on the initiative of the United States, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on 14 March, this resolution “1. Calls for strict respect for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally

400

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

RESOLUTION 476 AND 478: Passed by the UN Security Council on 30 June and 20 August 1980, respectively, these resolutions deal with Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. Resolution 476, citing five previous resolutions and the fourth Geneva Convention, and declaring again that “acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible,” deplores Israel’s “changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and the status” of Jerusalem, and declares itself “gravely concerned” over forthcoming Israeli legislation regarding the city. The resolution “Reaffirms the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem” and “Strongly deplores the continued refusal of Israel, the occupying Power, to comply with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly.” Resolution 478 was adopted after the passage in the Knesset on 30 July of the anticipated “basic law” formally extending Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem and surrounding territory and declaring Jerusalem the “capital of Israel.” Referring to Resolution 476 and the fourth Geneva Convention, this resolution censures Israel for making that change as well as for its refusal to comply with previous UN resolutions, declares the law null and void, and asserts that Israel must rescind it. It also states that Israel’s “action constitutes a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East” and calls upon all states with diplomatic missions in Jerusalem to withdraw them. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RESOLUTION 997 AND 998

SEE ALSO

Jerusalem; Knesset.

SEE ALSO

RESOLUTION 497 (UN Security Council): Passed on 17 December 1981 by the UN Security Council, this resolution declares “null and void and without international legal effect” the decision of Israel to “impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights,” and demands that Israel rescind its decision. The resolution was adopted unanimously. SEE ALSO Golan Heights.

RESOLUTION 509: Passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on 6 June 1982, the day Israel invaded Lebanon, this resolution demands the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from Lebanon. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1982). RESOLUTION 520: Passed unanimously on 17 September 1982 by the UN Security Council, this resolution condemns Israeli violations of a ceasefire agreement. It notes and condemns the assassination on 14 September of Bashir Jumayyil, who had been about to take office as president. Then, “Taking note of Lebanon’s determination to ensure the withdrawal of all non-Lebanese forces” and reaffirming several recent resolutions on the Lebanese situation, it “Condemns the recent Israeli incursions into Beirut in violation of the cease-fire agreements and of Security council resolutions,” “Demands an immediate return to the positions occupied by Israel before 15 September 1982 . . .” and “Calls again for the strict respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity and political independence under the sole and exclusive authority of the Lebanese Government through the Lebanese Army throughout Lebanon.” SEE ALSO Jumayyil, Bashir. RESOLUTION 799: Passed on 18 December 1992 by the UN Security Council, this resolution, citing the fourth Geneva Convention and a number of previous UN resolutions, demands the immediate return of the more than 400 Palestinians who had just been banished to Lebanon by Israeli authorities. On 17 December 1992, during the first Intifada, Israel expelled these alleged HAMAS sympathizers from the Occupied Territories into the no-man’s-land beyond the Lebanese border. The Israelis assumed they would proceed into Lebanon and exile, but instead they set up a camp in full view of the world’s media and stayed there for months. They named their camp Return (al-Awdah). D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

HAMAS; Intifada.

RESOLUTION 904: Passed unanimously on 18 March 1994 by the UN Security Council, three weeks after the massacre of twenty-nine Palestinians by an Israeli settler in Hebron, this resolution refers to the fourth Geneva Convention and to the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles of 1993 and vehemently condemns the Hebron massacre; demands that Israel adopt and apply measures, including confiscation of arms, to prevent illegal violent acts by Israeli settlers; demands that measures be adopted to guarantee the security and protection of Palestinian civilians in the entire occupied territory, including, among other recourses, a temporary international or foreign presence; entreats the cosponsors of the peace process, the United States and Russia, to pursue efforts to invigorate this process; and reaffirms its support for the peace process and demands that the Declaration of Principles be applied without delay. The resolution was voted on paragraph by paragraph, allowing the United State to abstain on two of them, one placing Jerusalem among the Occupied Territories, the other referring to “occupied territory” rather than “occupied territories.” SEE ALSO Oslo Accords.

RESOLUTION 997 AND 998: Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 2 and 4 November 1956, respectively, these resolutions dealt with the Suez War of 1956. They were brought before the General Assembly under the provisions of General Assembly Resolution 377 (“Uniting for Peace”) of 1950, which allow urgent matters to be brought there for action in certain circumstances in case of “failure of the Security Council to discharge its responsibilities” (in this case, after a veto by Britain and France; in practice this tactic can work only when it has the support of the United States). Resolution 997 urged all belligerents to observe a ceasefire, urged the parties to the 1949 General Armistice Agreements (Egypt and Israel) to retreat to the armistice lines, and urged the reopening of the Suez Canal. Resolution 998 provided for the creation of an “emergency international United Nations Force to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities in accordance with all the terms of [Resolution 997].” A United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF)—the UN’s first peacekeeping force—was set up within days and began operation in Egypt on 12 November. At first it had about 6,000 troops (the number was later reduced) from Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, India, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

401

RESOLUTION 1052

and Yugoslavia, commanded by a Canadian general. After the withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli troops, completed in March 1957, UNEF was deployed along the Egypt-Israel border until May 1967, when, during the tension that led to the 1967 War, it was withdrawn at the request of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Suez Crisis; United Nations Emergency Force.

RESOLUTION 1052: Passed by the UN Security Council on 18 April 1996, a week after Israel launched Operation Grapes of Wrath against the Lebanese Hizbullah, this resolution demanded the immediate cessation of hostilities by all concerned parties. The Security Council reaffirmed its commitment to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon, as well as to the security of all states in the region. Finally, the council asked all states in the region to oversee the security and freedom of movement of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to allow it to fulfill its mandate without obstacle or interference (“deploring” the incident on the same day, 18 April, in which over a hundred civilians were killed when Israel shelled a UNIFIL compound). Operation Grapes of Wrath ended on 28 April. SEE ALSO Hizbullah; United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, this resolution declares, among other provisions, that all states shall: “(a)Prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts; (b) Criminalize the willful provision or collection, by any means, directly or indirectly, of funds by their nationals or in their territories with the intention that the funds should be used, or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in order to carry out terrorist acts; (c) Freeze without delay funds and other financial assets or economic resources of persons who commit, or attempt to commit, terrorist acts or participate in or facilitate the commission of terrorist acts; of entities owned or controlled directly or indirectly by such persons; and of persons and entities acting on behalf of, or at the direction of such persons and entities, including funds derived or generated from property owned or controlled directly or indirectly by such persons and associated persons and entities; (d) Prohibit their nationals or any persons and entities within their territories from making any funds, financial assets or economic resources or financial or other related services available, directly or indirectly, for the benefit of persons who commit or attempt to commit or facilitate or participate in the commission of terrorist acts, of entities owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by such persons and of persons and entities acting on behalf of or at the direction of such persons[.]”

RESOLUTION 2253: Passed on 4 July 1967 by the UN RESOLUTION 1154: Passed on 2 March 1998 by the UN Security Council at the apogee of an Iraqi-U.S. crisis, this resolution refers to Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991, which imposed economic sanctions and an arms inspection regime on Iraq at the end of the Gulf War of 1991 and endorses a recent “memorandum of understanding” between Iraq and the United Nations, which provided for International Atomic Energy Agency staff to inspect “presidential sites” in Iraq. The resolution urges that Iraq respect its “obligation” to accord immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access to UN inspectors, and declares that “any violation would have the severest consequences for Iraq.” The Council “notes that by its failure so far to comply with its relevant obligations Iraq has delayed the moment when the Council can” make a decision “to lift sanctions, which it reaffirms its intention to do.” SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991).

General Assembly, this resolution declares “invalid” the “measures taken by Israel to change the status of the City” of Jerusalem and “Calls upon Israel to rescind all measures already taken and to desist forthwith from taking any action which would alter the status of Jerusalem.” The vote was ninety-nine to zero, with twenty abstentions. The occasion was the passage of a law by the Knesset, after the conquest of East Jerusalem in the 1967 War, to apply Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration to East Jerusalem. Although this act was referred to in public discussion as “annexation”—as, in practical terms, it was—annexation did not formally occur until 1980, when Israel unilaterally extended its sovereignty over East Jerusalem and surrounding territory; at that time the Security Council passed Resolutions 476 and 478. SEE ALSO Arab Israel War (1967); Jersusalem; Knesset; Resolutions 476 and 478.

RESOLUTION 1373: Adopted by the UN Security

RESOLUTION 2443: Resoution passed by the United

Council on 28 September 2001, less than three weeks

Nations General Assembly on 19 December 1968,

402

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RESOLUTION 3236

which created a “Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population in the Occupied Territories.” The resolution expressed its concern at the violation of human rights in Arab territories occupied by Israel; drew the attention of the Government of Israel to the “grave consequences resulting from the disregard of fundamental freedoms and human rights in occupied territories;” called upon the Government of Israel to “desist forthwith from acts of destroying homes of the Arab civilian population”; and affirmed “the inalienable rights of all inhabitants who have left their homes as a result of the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East to return home, resume their normal life, recover their property and homes, and rejoin their families.” Since its establishment the Special Committee has consistently been denied cooperation by the Government of Israel or access to the occupied territories. It has, however, received information from the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, much of it from witnesses having first-hand and recent experience of the human rights situation in the occupied territories. The Special Committee makes regular reports to the General Assembly on its evaluation of the situation and its recommendations. Its mandate has been regularly renewed from year to year.

RESOLUTION 2628: Passed by the UN General Assembly on 4 November 1970, following the bloody events of Black September 1970 in Jordan. Making reference to Security Council Resolution 242 and noting that it has not been implemented, this resolution deplores “the continued occupation of the Arab territories since 5 June 1967,” “Reaffirms that the acquisition of territories by force is inadmissible and that, consequently, territories thus occupied must be restored,” calls for “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” and “Recognizes that respect for the rights of the Palestinians is an indispensable element in the establishing of a just and lasting peace.” The vote was fifty-seven to sixteen, with thirty-nine abstentions. SEE ALSO

Black September 1970; Resolution 242.

RESOLUTION 2649: Passed on 30 November 1970 by the UN General Assembly, this resolution condemned “governments which refused the right of self-determination to peoples who were recognized to have the right to it, notably the peoples of South Africa and Palestine.” D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

RESOLUTION 3089: Passed on 7 December 1973 by the UN General Assembly, not long after the 1973 War; the primary subject is the financing and operation of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. However, referencing the fourth Geneva Convention, Security Council Resolution 194, and a number of subsequent resolutions, it establishes an explicit connection between the Palestinians’ right of return and their right to self-determination. The right of return is mentioned in several places but the clearest statement is in clause 3: “[The General Assembly] Declares that full respect for and realization of the inalienable rights of the people of Palestine, particularly its right to selfdetermination, are indispensable for the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, and that the enjoyment by the Palestine Arab refugees of their right to return to their homes and property, recognized by the General Assembly in resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, which has been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Assembly since that date, is indispensable for the achievement of a just settlement of the refugee problem and for the exercise by the people of Palestine of its right to selfdetermination.” Arab-Israel War (1967); Resolution 194; Right of Return; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

SEE ALSO

RESOLUTION 3236: Passed by the United Nations General Assembly on 22 November 1974, nine days after the Yasir Arafat addressed the General Assembly. In October, the Arab League had recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as “the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and the UN was about to give the PLO observer status to allow it to take part in discussions on the Palestine issue for the first time. Arafat took the occasion to hint that the PLO might be willing to work for a political settlement, addressing this remark to the Israeli delegation: “I come carrying an olive branch and the rifle of a fighter for liberty; do not let the branch fall from my hand!” The resolution recognizes the Palestinians’ right to a sovereign national state: “The General Assembly, Having considered the question of Palestine, Having heard the statement of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the representative of the Palestinian people, Having also heard other statements made during the debate, Deeply concerned that no just solution to the problem of Palestine has yet been achieved and recognizing that the problem of Palestine continues to endanger interna-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

403

RESOLUTION 3376

tional peace and security, Recognizing that the Palestinian people is entitled to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, Expressing its grave concern that the Palestinian people has been prevented from enjoying its inalienable rights, in particular its right to self-determination, Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter, Recalling its relevant resolutions which affirm the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, 1. Reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including: (a) The right to selfdetermination without external interference; (b) The right to national independence and sovereignty; 2. Reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return; 3. Emphasizes that full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine; 4. Recognizes that the Palestinian people is a principal party in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East; 5. Further recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations; 6. Appeals to all States and international organizations to extend their support to the Palestinian people in its struggle to restore its rights, in accordance with the Charter; 7. Requests the SecretaryGeneral to establish contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization on all matters concerning the question of Palestine; 8. Requests the SecretaryGeneral to report to the General Assembly at its thirtieth session on the implementation of the present resolution; 9. Decides to include the item entitled ‘Question of Palestine’ in the provisional agenda of its thirtieth session.” Arafat, Yasir; League of Arab States; Palestine Liberation Organization.

SEE ALSO

RESOLUTION 3376: Adopted 10 November 1975 as part of the General Assembly’s annual debate on the “Question of Palestine.” The resolution reaffirms the provisions of General Assembly Resolution 3236 of 1974, including the right of return. It establishes a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, composed of twenty member states. The committee is mandated to recommend a program for the implementation of the rights of the Palestinian people. SEE ALSO

404

Resolution 3236; Right of Return. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

RESOLUTION 3379: Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 November 1975 during the General Assembly’s annual discussion of the “Question of Palestine.” This resolution identified Zionism with racism. In part it was the result of a campaign by the Soviet Union to counter the American campaign condemning the Soviet Union for its treatment of its Jewish population (and the vote divided, in part, along Cold War lines). It gained wide support not only among Arab nations but among other Third World countries as well, most of which had long suffered from either exploitation or outright colonial occupation by Western powers, and from the racial ideologies that were associated with them. Moreover, Israeli cooperation with the apartheid regime in South Africa had long been a sore point—as was, two years after the 1973 War, Israel’s increasingly close strategic alliance with the United States. Israel also maintained a firm refusal to recognize any legitimate representative of the Palestinians or consider any discussion with such a representative. (Israel’s official position toward the Palestinians then was that there was no such people, as distinct from other Arabs; as Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”) The vote was seventy-two to thirty-five, with thirty-two abstentions. When the resolution passed, the Israeli ambassador, Chaim Herzog, tore up his copy of the draft at the podium. The resolution reads: “The General Assembly, Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that ‘any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous’ and its expression of alarm at ‘the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures,’ Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1953, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism, Taking note of the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace 1975, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that ‘international cooperation and peace require the achievement of naT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

RIGHT OF RETURN

tional liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination,’ Taking note also of resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, held at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered ‘that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being,’ Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned Zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology, Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The resolution caused an uproar in the West, particularly in the United States. It was condemned by Israel as an international act of anti-Semitism “devoid of any moral or legal value,” and increased distrust of the United Nations in Israel and the United States. It contributed to the feeling of the Israeli right that Israel was besieged and stiffened Israeli resistance to discussion or negotiation. It was annulled by General Assembly Resolution 4686 in 1991. Arab-Israel War (1973); Herzog, Chaim; Meir, Golda; Resolution 4686.

SEE ALSO

RESOLUTION 4686: Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 16 December 1991, this resolution nullified Resolution 3379 of 1975, the “Zionism is racism” resolution. By late 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and so had the South African apartheid regime. Earlier in the year the Gulf War of 1991 had been fought (under a UN resolution), causing division in the Arab world. In addition, Israel made its attendance at the Madrid Conference conditional on a repeal of Resolution 3379. Under considerable pressure from the United States, the members of the General Assembly voted 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions, to pass this resolution, given here in full: “The general assembly decides to revoke the determinaD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

tion contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975.” SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991); Madrid Conference; Resolution 3379.

REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS SEE

Pasdaran.

REVOLUTIONARY PALESTINIAN COMMUNIST PARTY Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party.

SEE

RHODES TALKS: Talks held on the island of Rhodes, Greece, formally ending the 1948 Arab-Israel War, and resulting in the signing of two general armistice agreements. On 24 February 1949 an armistice was signed between Israel and Egypt through Ralph Bunche’s efforts as UN mediator. Although of a military nature, this first agreement conveys an implicit recognition of the Israeli state by an Arab government. Although it provided for demilitarized zones in the Nitzana-Abu Ageila sector, it did not specify Israeli shipping rights through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran (a blockade was to last for thirty years). On 3 April, a second Rhodes armistice was signed between Israel and the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. The agreement left a number of issues unresolved, including Jewish access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and Jordanian access to the south through the Bethlehem road, but it served as the framework of relations between the two states for nearly twenty years, until the Arab-Israel War of 1967. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967).

RIGHT OF RETURN: Established by the State of Israel soon after its creation in 1948, the right of return enacted by the Knesset allows any Jew who so desires to live in Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship. This right was also requested by Palestinian political leaders, who demanded that Palestinians who had been forced to leave their land as a consequence of the various Israeli-Palestine wars be allowed to return home. This right of return, which now concerns 3.7 million Palestinians, principally refugees in neighboring Arab countries, is a source of anxiety for the Israeli authorities, who are afraid that allowing it would upset the country’s demographic equilibrium between Palestinians and Israelis. Along with East Jerusalem, this problem is one of the main stumbling blocks in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations,

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

405

ROAD MAP (2002)

in particular as it concerns the refugees from 1948, whose right to return was affirmed by United Nations Resolution 194. Among Palestinians, renouncing the right of return has been considered tantamount to treason. SEE ALSO

Arab-Israel War (1948); Resolution

194.

ROAD MAP (2002): American-sponsored proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement put forth by the so-called Quartet (the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia) in April 2003; it was formally accepted by both sides, but never implemented. A revised version of a proposal floated, at the urging of British prime minister Tony Blair, in September 2002. The Road Map was issued as the United States and Britain took up the occupation of Iraq following the initial phase of the Iraq War of 2003, which had been justified, in part, as a step toward a general peace in the Middle East. The Road Map provided for the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. It called for the Palestinians, again, to recognize Israel’s right to exist; to renounce violence; and to reform the Palestinian Authority (PA), specifically to create the position of prime minister (to allow Israel to negotiate with someone other than Yasir Arafat). It called for Israel to remove curfews and roadblocks in the occupied territories; freeze settlement activity; dismantle “illegal” settlements (not defined; under international law all the settlements are illegal); and withdraw from territory seized from Palestinian autonomous areas since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. The Road Map was accepted by the PA, and a prime minister, Mahmud Rida Abbas (Abu Mazen), was appointed. The Israeli government of prime minister Ariel Sharon, fundamentally opposed to giving up any occupied territory or settlements, as well as to allowing a sovereign Palestinian state, publicly accepted the Road Map with reservations, but did nothing to implement it. Since then both sides have continued activities in violation of the Road Map and little progress has been achieved. In February 2004 Sharon announced his own plan of “unilateral disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, which involved dismantling Israeli settlements there and moving the approximately 7,500 to 8,000 settlers to the West Bank, while also removing four settlements in the West Bank. In September Sharon announced that he would not follow the Road Map, and added that once the disengagement from Gaza is complete, “it is very possible . . . there will be a long period when nothing else happens.”

406

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE ALSO Abbas, Mahmud Rida; Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Gaza Strip; Iraq War; Palestinian Authority; Sharon, Ariel.

ROGERS PLAN: Proposal for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement put forward by American secretary of state William P. Rogers in December 1969. The plan was proposed in response to the outbreak of fighting between Israel and Egypt known as the War of Attrition (1969–70). It was also in response to Palestinian guerilla attacks across the Jordan, and to the ongoing futility of the Jarring Mission, a UN diplomatic effort begun shortly after the Arab-Israel War (1967) in an effort to realize the provisions of Security Council Resolution 242. At the same time the Nixon administration was making efforts to create a state of “détente” with the Soviet Union, which had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel over the war, and was supplying Egypt with fighter jets, missiles and other military material. The plan called for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for recognition from Egypt and Jordan; like Resolution 242, it did not make specific reference to Palestinian rights but only called generally for a just solution to “the refugee problem.” Earlier in 1969 Rogers had made similar proposals in private discussions with Israel’s ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin and prime minister, Golda Meir, without success, and the proposals had also been submitted for discussion with the Soviet Union, which had not responded by December. The plan was not met with favor by Egypt, Jordan or the other Arab states, none of whom wished to deal directly with Israel, but wanted to see a UN-imposed solution forcing Israel to evacuate the occupied territories in accordance with Resolution 242. Late in December the Rogers Plan was rejected by Israel, on the grounds that it would “prejudice the chances of establishing peace” by harming “Israel’s sovereign rights and security in the drafting of the resolutions concerning refugees and the status of Jerusalem, and contain no actual obligation of the Arab States to put a stop to the hostile activities of the sabotage and terror organizations.” Israel, which had already incorporated East Jerusalem and was establishing settlements in the Jordan Valley and elsewhere in the West Bank under the Allon Plan, was essentially rejecting the provisions of Resolution 242. At the same time, the United States continued to press Israel and Egypt to commit to a ceasefire, and one was agreed to in August 1970. The Palestinian guerrilla activities in Jordan, and the efforts by that country’s government to control them, eventually led to the events of Black September 1970. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ROSS, DENNIS B.

CHURCH OF THE DORMITION. THIS ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS DEDICATED TO THE TRADITIONAL SITE WHERE THE VIRGIN MARY DIED. IT STANDS ON MOUNT ZION, THE TRADITIONAL LOCATION OF THE LAST SUPPER OF CHRIST. (© Paul A. Souders/Corbis)

SEE ALSO Allon Plan; Arab-Israel War (1967); Black September 1970; Jarring Mission; Meir, Golda; Rabin, Yitzhak; Resolution 242.

ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: The church of Christians of the Latin rite, who accept the authority of the bishop of Rome (the pope). It is one of the three major branches of Christianity, the other two being the Eastern Orthodox churches and Protestantism. Although Roman Catholics are often referred to simply as Catholics, this is ambiguous, as in Arabic “Catholic” refers to the Melkites and some Anglican churches consider themselves Anglo-Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church came into existence as a result of the schism between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity that occurred in 1054. Under Pope Urban II it launched the First Crusade to take Jerusalem from the Muslims, who in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1009 had destroyed the Holy Sepulcher there; it succeeded in doing so in 1099 and a hierarchy under a Latin partriarchate was established in Jerusalem. More Crusades against the Muslims followed, with varying degrees of success, until 1291 when the Crusaders were driven out by the Mamluks. After that, only the Franciscan Brothers remained as custodians of Christian shrines. The Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem was reestablished in 1847, and during that era missionaries engaged in education and nursing were sent to Ottoman Palestine. In 2004, a Roman Catholic community of over 60,000, with its own patriarch and diocesan clergy, exists in the West Bank and Jordan, although most other Roman Catholics in Palestine are scattered in small groups. There are many Catholic schools, most of them established in the nineteenth century, as well as a Catholic University in Bethlehem. As Palestine is the Christian Holy Land, it is a center for several Roman Catholic religious orders. The Holy See (the papal headquarters, or Vatican) is an independent state that maintains diplomatic relations with sovereign nations. In June 1994 it established full formal relations with the State of Israel. Among the reasons for the long negotiations that preceded this event were the desire of the Roman Catholic Church to maintain control over, and access to, the Holy Places in Israel; its desire to protect the interests of Catholic communities there; concern over the legal status of the church under Israeli law; and fear that recognition of Israel would provoke retaliation against Catholics in the Arab world. On 10 November 1997 a formal agreement addressing some of these issues was signed in Jerusalem. SEE ALSO Christianity; Eastern Orthodox Church; Melkites; Protestants.

ROSS, DENNIS B. (1948– ): U.S. diplomatic envoy, born in San Francisco. A graduate of University of California-Los Angeles, Dennis Ross participated in the electoral campaigns of the Democrats Robert Kennedy and George McGovern. He began working at the Pentagon in 1972. Between 1985 and 1987, along with Martin Indyk, he was a member of the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy and a consultant to the National Security Council. He was a foreign affairs advisor in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. In 1988, after Bush was elected, he became one of the main assistants to Secretary of State James Baker, who was in charge of policy planning. A member of the presidential study group of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

407

ROTHSCHILD, EDMOND DE

the Washington Institute, he played an important role during the crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He and Indyk became artisans of the Israeli-Arab peace process. It has been conjectured that without Ross, who was thought to be the éminence grise behind James Baker, the Madrid peace conference of November 1991 would never have taken place. When Bill Clinton was elected, Ross remained at the State Department, which was headed by Warren Christopher. On 18 June 1993 he was named special coordinator of the peace process in the Middle East. He undertook numerous trips to try to advance Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, participating in working out the final details of various accords. In September he attended the sessions which resulted in the Israeli-Palestinian accord on principles signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat in Washington. On 18 September 1994 he was in Damascus, then went on to Tel Aviv to prepare for Warren Christopher’s upcoming trip. On 12 July 1995, during a round of visits in the Middle East, he was received by Arafat in the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. In October 1996 he was in Israel to participate in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the city of Hebron. In September 1998 he was in Israel again, trying restart the negotiations with the Palestinians, which had been blocked since Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister. On 5 December 1999 he accompanied the new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, on a visit to the Middle East at a time when Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were again stalled. Upon his arrival in Israel, together with Martin Indyk, undersecretary of state for the Middle East, he met with Arafat and then with Ehud Barak. On 15 December he participated in Washington meetings between the Israeli foreign minister and the Syrian foreign minister Faruk al-Shara, which were meant to jumpstart the peace negotiations that had been interrupted since the spring of 1996. Between 13 February and 15 March 2000 he was in Israel several times to try to unblock the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations because the 13 February deadline for a general accord on the conflict had not been met. On 26 February he met with King Abdullah II of Jordan. On the following 2 May he participated in IsraeliPalestinian parleys in Elat, Israel, to speed up movement toward a general accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians. On 19 August, following the July failure of the Israeli-Palestinian summit at Camp David, he was in Alexandria to meet with the Egyptian foreign minister, Amr Mousa.

408

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

On 26 September he moderated a three-day secret Washington encounter between Palestinian and Israeli envoys in a vain attempt to restart the IsraeliPalestinian peace process. During November, when confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis were intensifying in the Palestinian territories, he was in Israel to meet with leaders of the two camps. At the beginning of 2001, after ten years devoted largely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he resigned as U.S. special envoy to the Middle East to rejoin the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. SEE ALSO Albright, Madeleine; Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Camp David II Summit; Christopher, Warren; Indyk, Martin; Madrid Conference; Mousa, Amr Muhammad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Palestinian Authority; Rabin, Yitzhak; Shara, Faruk al-.

ROTHSCHILD, EDMOND DE (1845–1935): Banker, born in Paris. In 1882 Baron Edmond de Rothschild began to support Jewish emigration to Palestine, donating money to the Lovers of Zion pioneers, which allowed them to create several colonies. In 1891 he was joined by the financier Maurice de Hirsch in creating the Jewish Colonization Association. In 1900 Rothschild helped finance the Jewish National Fund and supported Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in his efforts to modernize Hebrew. A regent of the Bank of France, he participated in financing World War I. SEE ALSO Lovers of Zion. RUBINSTEIN, AMNON (1931– ): Israeli law professor and politician. Amnon Rubinstein was born in Tel Aviv and studied at the Hebrew University and the London School of Economics. In 1974 he founded the Shinui Party, a liberal, secular Zionist party that advocated electoral reform and the formulation of a written constitution. In 1992 Shinui joined MAPAM and the Citizens’ Rights Party to form the Meretz Party, which won twelve seats in the Knesset. Rubinstein was a member of the Knesset from 1977 to 2002, serving on key committees, including foreign affairs and defense, economy, and ethics. In the National Unity government (1984–1988) he was minister of communications. From 1992 to 1996 he served as minister of education and culture and was responsible for the introduction of major legislation leading to educational reform. He retired from politics in 2002 to become dean of the law school of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre. SEE ALSO Knesset; MAPAM; Meretz Party; Shinui Party. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

S SABRA: From the Hebrew word tsabar, which means, in reference to cactus or the fruit of the Barbary fig tree, “sweet inside, under a prickly skin.” By extension, this word is used to designate a Jew born in Israel, as opposed to immigrants.

SABRA AND SHATILA: Adjacent Palestinian refugee camps—actually a single area—in southern West Beirut, the site of a mass murder of Palestinian civilians during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. From June through August, the Israelis bombed and shelled Beirut, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and most of its fighters were trapped (destroying much of the city). A cease-fire was negotiated by the United States under which the Israelis withdrew from the city. After assurances were given that Palestinian civilians living in refugee camps would be protected, the PLO agreed to accept a safe passage, under protection of a multinational force, out of Lebanon; they were gone by 1 September. The Israelis’ second goal in invading, after destroying the PLO, was to ensure the election of their ally and client, Bashir Jumayyil of the Phalange, as president of Lebanon. Jumayyil was elected by the Lebanese parliament on 23 August. The multinational force withdrew on 10 September; on 11 September Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon declared that “2,000 terrorists” remained in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut

(“We even have their names,” he claimed). On 12 September Sharon met with Jumayyil to arrange for the Phalange and its associated militia, the Lebanese Forces (LF) to “mop up” the camps. On 14 September a pan-Syrian nationalist assassinated Jumayyil. On 15 September, in violation of the cease-fire, Israeli troops once again entered Beirut, to help the Phalange and the LF take control of the city (the cease-fire agreement had assumed that the Lebanese army would take over West Beirut). As part of this operation the Israelis shelled the camps, and fired into them with small arms. On the following day, the Israel Defense Force (IDF), providing protection and logistical support, brought an LF force of 150 men under the command of Elie Hobeika into the camps, where from 6:00 P.M. on 16 September through 8:00 A.M. on 18 September, with Israeli forces surrounding them, the forces systematically killed approximately 1,500 to 3,000 civilians, and raped and injured an unknown number of others. Numerous people were “rounded up” and disappeared. The massacre aroused strong reactions in Israel and the entire world. In Tel Aviv, 400,000 Israelis demonstrated in the streets to show their indignation, and the United States decided to interrupt its assistance to Israel for the construction of the Lavi bomber. The government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin (who himself had participated in the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948) was forced to appoint an investigative commission headed by the chief of

409

SABRA AND SHATILA MARTYRS GROUP

the Israeli Supreme Court, Yitzhak Kahan. The Kahan Commission, reporting in February 1983, assigned “direct” responsibility for the massacre to the Phalangists, and “personal” but “indirect” responsibility to Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, as well as lesser degrees of “indirect” responsibility to IDF chief of staff General Rafael Eitan, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and other officials, for “having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps” when allowing them into the camps, knowing their express hostility to Palestinians, and for allowing them to stay after being informed of the killings. It did not accept eyewitness accounts of Israeli direction of the action and did not question Sharon’s assertion that there were “2000 terrorists” in the camps. An investigation by an unofficial International Commission of Enquiry headed by former United Nations assistant secretary general and Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride, held Israel responsible under the Geneva Conventions as an “occupying power,” concluding that Israel both intended and enabled the massacre, and recommended a Nuremburg-style war crimes tribunal. (There was also an official investigation by a Lebanese military prosecutor, who absolved the Phalange of any responsibility and never issued a report, and several independent Palestinian investigations.) After the Kahan report, Sharon was made to resign as defense minister, but remained in the government as minister without portfolio. Both Shamir and he went on to become prime minister. No one has ever been prosecuted, although there has been an effort to have Sharon tried for war crimes in Belgium, under that country’s Universal Jurisdiction Law. The case was first brought in 2001 and has been the subject of several contradictory rulings by Belgian courts. As of 2004, the United States and Israel are bringing pressure on the Belgian government to amend the law. SEE ALSO Begin, Menachem; Hobeika, Elie; Jumayyil, Bashir; Sharon, Ariel.

SABRA AND SHATILA MARTYRS GROUP: One of a number of small Palestinian resistance groups that sprung up in the Occupied Territories during the al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in late September 2000. These groups, collectively known as al-Tanzim (“organization”), are under the leadership of a younger generation of Palestinians who mainly grew up under the occupation. This group was named in honor of the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massa-

410

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

cre at the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Tanzim, al-.

SADAT, ANWAR AL- (1918–1981): Egyptian military and political figure. Anwar al-Sadat was born in Mit Abu al-Kum, in Lower Egypt, the son of a government clerk. He graduated from the national military academy in 1938 as a communications officer and became friendly with Gamal Abdel Nasser, with whom he began to cultivate a network of officers opposed to the monarchy and British control of the country. Sadat also made contact with a number of clandestine groups working against the monarchy, including the Muslim Brotherhood. During World War II, Sadat was part of a cell within the army that collaborated with the Germans, in whom they saw an ally against the British. In October 1942 he was arrested by the British authorities for espionage on behalf of the Axis. Escaping from prison in 1944, he went underground with the Muslim Brotherhood until he was again arrested, accused of participating in the assassination of the finance minister, Amin Osman, in January 1946. After more than two years of imprisonment, he was released for lack of proof and expelled from the army. In 1948 he launched on a career as a publisher with the review al-Mussawar, which failed; late the following year he was readmitted into the army with his old rank of captain. Reunited with his friend Nasser at his new posting in the Sinai, he joined the movement Nasser had founded, now called the Free Officers, which aimed to abolish the monarchy. On 23 July 1952 Sadat participated in the coup d’état that overthrew King Faruq and Nasser assigned him to supervise Faruq’s abdication. After the Free Officers took power, he became editor of the government’s newspaper al-Gumhuriya (The republic) and a member of the Revolutionary Command Council. On 1 September 1954 he was on the tribunal charged with trying the Muslim Brothers who had attempted to assassinate Nasser, who by then had become president of the republic. In 1959 he became president (speaker) of the National Assembly, keeping that position until 1969. From 1964 to 1966 he was one of Nasser’s four vice presidents, and in 1969 he was appointed sole vice president. He presided over the 1969 Islamic summit meeting in Rabat that created the Organization of the Islamic Conference. When Nasser died of a heart attack in September 1970, Sadat was appointed interim president by the cabinet; his presidency was confirmed in a referendum in October (no other T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SADAT, ANWAR AL-

which originated during the Nasser regime, but feeling that the Soviet Union gave him inadequate support in Egypt’s continuing confrontation with Israel, he expelled thousands of Soviet technicians and advisers from the country in 1972. (He reconciled with the Soviet Union early in 1973, after which military aid resumed.) Frustrated by the Israeli refusal to negotiate the return of captured Egyptian territory, he also reconciled with Saudi Arabia and Syria and planned for a campaign to recapture it. Egypt and Syria launched the October 1973 War; the Egyptians achieved a tactical surprise in its attack on the Israeliheld Sinai Peninsula, and although Israel successfully counterattacked Sadat came out of the war with greatly enhanced prestige as the first Arab leader to retake some territory from Israel. Sadat successfully achieved two objectives with this war: showing that Egyptian armed forces were capable of fighting well against the Israelis and provoking the Americans to step in to mediate a peace settlement. Sadat agreed to an Israeli proposal to seek a treaty under U.S. rather than UN auspices and concluded agreements in 1974 and 1975 dealing with disengagement in the Sinai.

ANWAR

AL-SADAT.

GAMAL ABDEL NASSER’S SUCCESSOR AS PRESI1970, SADAT LED EGYPT INTO THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR OF 1973. HE ALSO CUT TIES WITH THE SOVIET UNION AND RENEWED RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES. THEN, IN 1977, HE INITIATED CONTACT WITH ISRAEL; THE RESULTS INCLUDED THE HISTORIC CAMP DAVID ACCORDS, PEACE WITH ISRAEL (INCLUDING AN AGREEMENT TO RETURN THE SINAI PENINSULA TO EGYPT)—AND HIS ASSASSINATION BY EGYPTIAN EXTREMISTS IN 1981. (AP/Wide World Photos)

DENT IN

candidates were offered). He resolved the internal power struggle that followed in May 1971 by having his chief rival, the leftist Ali Sabri, whom he had appointed as one of two vice presidents, arrested on charges of plotting a coup. At the same time he moved to cultivate conservative religious elements by emphasizing his own religious beliefs and allowing the creation of Islamist political groups. To improve the depressed Egyptian economy, he instituted a liberal economic policy meant to attract foreign investment capital, backtracking on Nasser’s policy of nationalization and directed development. It was in part to counter the unpopularity of his domestic policies that Sadat made his most dramatic efforts in foreign affairs. Not long after taking office he signed the Egyptian-Soviet Friendship Treaty, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

In October 1975, having opened the Suez Canal to international traffic after it had been closed for eight years, he became the first Egyptian president to visit the United States. He sought American aid and investment and abrogated the friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1976 when the Soviets refused to delay repayment of Egyptian debts. In late 1977 Sadat made his dramatic trip to Jerusalem to deliver a speech to the Knesset, in which he offered Israel peace, recognition, and security guarantees while warning that no “durable and just peace” could be achieved “in the absence of a just solution to the Palestinian problem,” and insisting on a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, “including Arab Jerusalem,” because “any move to ensure our coexistence in peace and security . . . would become meaningless while you occupy Arab territories by force of arms.” He did not claim to be speaking on behalf of all Arabs, but he declared that he was not seeking a separate peace. Five days after returning from Jerusalem, Sadat convened a meeting in Cairo to attempt to obtain the support of the Arab countries for an international peace conference. These steps, which made the Egyptian president an honored figure internationally, led not to an international conference but to Camp David—the separate peace that Sadat claimed not to want, with no Israeli concessions regarding the Palestinians or the occupied territories. Sadat signed the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

411

SADR, MUSA AL-

Camp David Accords in September 1978 and the subsequent peace treaty in March 1979. In October 1978 he and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The separate peace with Israel was unloved by Arabs and constituted a break with the entire Arab world. Members of the Arab League severed diplomatic relations; Egypt was suspended from the league and from the Organization of the Islamic Conference. It became highly dependent on American aid, which in turn affected Sadat’s domestic policies. In Egypt there was immense popular opposition to the treaty, with its perceived capitulation over the Palestinian issue, as well as to Sadat’s economic liberalization. In the fall of 1974, about a year after the war, Sadat had introduced an intensified economic liberalization policy he called infitah (“opening up”). More foreign exchange was necessary to finance imports, and Sadat also wished to refinance Egypt’s foreign debt. Largely at the behest of the World Bank, he reduced taxes and import duties, opened land and banking to foreign ownership, reduced protection for labor, reduced exchange controls, reduced food subsidies and price controls, and froze salaries. This policy brought inflation, increased the gap between rich and poor, created a whole new corrupt profiteer class (called munfatihin, “door openers”) and brought tremendous hardship to the lower and middle classes. There were food riots in January 1977, which were suppressed violently by the army; 171 people died. Sadat referred to the rioters as “thieves.” In July of that year, a military expedition into Libya, organized to distract attention from internal problems, was opposed by most Egyptians. To retain control, Sadat governed in an increasingly autocratic and repressive manner, largely by decree and through rigged elections. He introduced legal limits on political activity. In June 1978 he had the leadership of the Wafd, an increasingly popular opposition party, arrested. He outlawed strikes, imposed censorship, repressed Palestinian political and economic activity in Egypt, and attempted to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization. In January 1979, on an official visit to Sudan, he denounced Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and proposed that his country help the United States counter the “Soviet danger.” In June 1979 he dissolved parliament and held a rigged election in which his own newly formed National Democratic Party gained the parliamentary majority. In May 1980, confronting a difficult economic situation and growing religious agitation, he appointed himself prime minister for the second time (the first had been in 1973–1974).

412

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

On 22 May 1981, a rigged referendum approved a constitutional amendment repealing the one-term limit for the presidency. In September 1981 he had nearly all activist dissidents and opposition political leaders imprisoned—some 1,500 to 2,000 people, among them the head of the Muslim Brotherhood— and dismissed Pope Shenouda III, head of the Coptic Church, who went into internal exile. When Sadat was assassinated by a group of young officers belonging to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, he was barely mourned; indeed his death was celebrated throughout the Arab world. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Begin, Menachem; Camp David Accords; Eyptian Islamic Jihad; League of Arab States; Muslim Brotherhood; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Organization of the Islamic Conference; Palestine Liberation Organization; Wafd. AL-: Lebanese ShiEite leader, born in March 1928 in Qom, Iran. Musa al-Sadr belonged to a family divided among three countries: Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. After having followed religious studies in Iraq, then legal studies in Iran, Sadr returned to Qom, where he became an ulema. In this capacity, he gave conferences in theology and edited the review Maktabi Islam. In 1960 he was sent to Lebanon to replace Shaykh Abdul Hussein Sharafeddin, head of the ShiEite community of Tyre. He soon became involved in social and political work aimed at reducing the social inequities that put the largely poor and disenfranchised Lebanese ShiEite community at a considerable disadvantage. After participating in an Islamic-Christian dialogue in 1962, he made efforts to form a permanent committee of Muslim and Christian religious leaders of South Lebanon. After becoming a Lebanese citizen, he formed and headed the Supreme Islamic ShiEa Council (or Communal Council) in 1968–1969. Having launched an appeal for a general strike on 26 May 1970, he was successful in establishing, at least temporarily, a dialogue with the Lebanese government over economic development of South Lebanon and the Baqaa Valley. Frustrated by a lack of results, however, Sadr in 1973 founded the Movement of the Disinherited, a branch of the Foundation of the Disinherited (Mustadafin), created in Iran in 1971. On 18 March 1974, he assembled at Baalbek some 100,000 people, ready to support him in his fight against poverty. In July 1975, confronted by the continued unresponsiveness of the government, the outbreak of communal fighting in the spring—the beginning of the civil war of 1975–1990—and the

SADR, MUSA

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SAID, EDWARD

degradation of the situation in South Lebanon, Sadr and his fellow leaders decided to create an armed branch of the Movement, calling it AMAL (“Hope”), an acronym for Lebanese Resistance Brigade. Inspired by the al-DaEwa movement, Sadr advocated jihad to establish an independent democratic republic in Lebanon that would protect the interests of the ShiEites and support the struggle against Zionism. Despite this, he made efforts to maintain a moderate stance. AMAL did not engage in fighting in the early period of the civil war, and as a result lost considerable support to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and groups associated with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM). AMAL also endorsed Syrian intervention in 1976, which cost it more support. However, the mysterious disappearance of Sadr, along with two companions while on an official visit to Libya on 31 August 1978, transformed him into a popular hero and ShiEa symbol (on the analogy of the Hidden Imam). It has always been assumed that Sadr was assassinated by the regime of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, but Libyan authorities have denied any responsibility in his disappearance, which prompted a period of tension between Libya and Iran. SEE ALSO AMAL; Movement of the Disinherited; ShiEite; Zionism.

SAFED (in Arabic, Safad; in Hebrew, Tzefat): City of Galilee; birthplace of Simon ben Yohai, presumed author of the Zohar. Safed is mentioned by the Roman historian Flavius; it was later an administrative center of the Mamluks. A city of mixed Arab and Jewish population, in the late eighteenth century Safed saw the influx of two large Jewish groups, the Hasidim and the followers of Rabbi Elijah Goan of Vilnius. In 1929 Arabs attacked and destroyed the Jewish quarter, which was rebuilt in the 1930s. In 1948 the Jewish population of the city was only 2,000, of a total population of 12,000. After the British evacuated in April 1948, Arab forces attacked Safed. When Palmakh forces launched a counterattack in May, most of the Arab population fled the city. Modern-day Safed (population 27,000) is considered a center of the arts and of Jewish mysticism. SAID, EDWARD (1935–2003): Palestinian-American scholar, critic, and writer, born in 1935 in Jerusalem. At the end of 1947, Edward Wadie Said, with his family, left Palestine for Egypt, where his father ran a branch of the family business, and they were unable to return after the Arab-Israel War (1948). Said, raised as an Anglican, attended a British school in D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Cairo and a prep school in the United States, where, in 1953, he obtained American nationality (his father had become a citizen through his service in the U.S. Army in World War I). After a brilliant student career at Princeton and Harvard, he became an academic literary critic. From 1963 until his death he was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. By his own account, he was not politically engaged until the 1967 Arab-Israel War, a shock that caused him to reflect on the situation of the Palestinians. He soon became the best-known American advocate for the Palestinian cause, although he was never a spokesman for any Palestinian faction, from all of which he kept his distance. From 1977 to 1991 he was an unaffiliated member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), and helped to write the proposed Palestinian constitution in 1988. In September 1993 just before the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, he expressed openly his opposition to the Oslo Accords. He went on to publish many articles critical of the accords and the “peace process,” which he felt were a disastrous capitulation—he called it “a Palestinian Versailles”—leaving the Palestinians defenseless against Israeli power, and obligating the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to suppress the Palestinians on Israel’s behalf. Before the Oslo Accords he had generally favored a two-state solution as an acceptable compromise, but the historical developments of the 1990s convinced him that the only fair solution was the creation of a binational state for both Jews and Palestinians. But he insisted that no solution would work, given the unequal power of the parties, unless Israelis faced up to and took responsibility for the injustice and cruelty of what they had done to the Palestinians, of dispossessing an entire people to establish another in their place, and then demonizing them as monstrous and inhuman for failing to accept their treatment quietly. He was a severe and articulate critic of the Israel and Zionist project, of America’s imperial relation to the world, of craven and undemocratic Arab political leadership, and particularly of the policies and character of Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian leadership, whom he felt were corrupt and incompetent. (Arafat responded by banning Said’s works in the territory ruled by the Palestinian Authority [PA].) Said’s work advocated, and embodied, what he called “worldliness,” an understanding of the effects of theories and texts in the world, rather than as abstract intellectual exercises. He was also a highly accomplished musician; he published two books on

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

413

SA E IQA, AL-

music, and with his friend Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor and pianist, founded the East-West Divan, a Palestinian-Israeli orchestra. He was the author of more than two dozen books and hundreds of articles, and from the mid-1990s until 2003 he wrote a monthly column for al-Ahram, the Egyptian newspaper. His 1978 book Orientalism reevaluated an entire historical tradition of European-American thought, examining the relation of political power to the representation of the world, and generated an entire field of cultural and postcolonial studies as well as informing the thinking of scholars in every area of cultural, social and historical work. Other significant books include The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Peace and Its Discontents (1995), The End of the Peace Process (2000), Reflections on Exile (2000) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). He published a memoir of his early years, Out of Place, in 1999. Edward Said was by general consent one of the most influential intellectuals of the late twentieth century. He died in New York on 25 September 2003. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Palestine National Council.

SAEIQA, AL-: Palestinian movement (“Thunderbolt”)

created in 1967 by the Syrian BaEth Party, after the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War that year. Under the leadership of Zuhayr Muhsin, al-SaEiqa received the support of Syrian authorities anxious to counterbalance Iraqi influence on the Palestinian situation. Upholding pan-Arabism in general, al-SaEiqa supported the creation of a secular Palestinian state under a socialist regime. Its first leader, Muhsin, one of the main rivals of Yasir Arafat for the leadership of the Palestinian resistance, was assassinated on 25 July 1979 in Cannes, France. Considered an elite paramilitary unit, al-SaEiqa is also known as the “Vanguard of the People’s War of Liberation,” or as “Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution.” In September 1973 al-SaEiqa carried out an attack in Austria on a train conveying Russian Jews for transfer to Israel. They held three hostages until the Austrian government agreed to close its transfer facility at Schönau. The perpetrators were released. Among other such incidents in which al-SaEiqa participated in the 1970s were the March 1979 bombing of a kosher restaurant in Paris, which wounded twenty; the April 1979 bombings of the Israeli embassies in Nicosia and Ankara and a synagogue in Vi-

414

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

enna (no one was injured); and the July 1979 occupation of the Egyptian Embassy at Ankara. During the Lebanese Civil War (1973–1990), the movement sided totally with Syria against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Lebanese allies. In October 1983 the spokesperson of the movement, Farhan Abu al-Haija, exhorted Palestinian fighters to reject the authority of Arafat and to join the ranks of the Fatah-Intifada. In 1985 al-SaEiqa quit the Executive Committee of the PLO and joined the Palestinian National Salvation Front (PNSF), becoming part of the Palestinian opposition. From 1990 on, most of its members were integrated into the Syrian army, reducing the activity of the movement to zero. In spite of having no presence in the Palestinian community, al-SaEiqa joined the Palestinian opposition coalition, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF), in 1993. The principal leaders of the movement included Isam al-Qadi (secretary general), Muhammad Khalifa (adjunct), Saleh Maani, Farhan al-Haija, Marwan Akari, Hassan Shahrur, and Majid Muhsin. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces; ArabIsrael War (1967); Arafat, Yasir; BaEth Party; Fatah-Intifada.

SALAAM: In Arabic, “peace, health” Shalom is its Hebrew equivalent. SEE ALSO Shalom.

SALADIN (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayub; 1138–1193): Born in Tikrit, in Iraq, in 1138, died in Damascus in 1193. Kurdish in origin, Saladin was a lieutenant of the governor of Aleppo, Nur al-Din, who inspired him by his faith in holy war. Determined to realize the reunification of the Muslim empire, he conquered Egypt, where he founded the Ayyubid dynasty, by abolishing the Fatimid caliphate. The Ayyubids ruled in Syria, the Hijaz, as well as Mesopotamia (1171–1250), where they created many Sunnite schools. During his reign, Saladin, having defeated the crusaders at Hattin, in Palestine, just west of Lake Tiberius, on 4 July 1187, took Jerusalem, which led to the third Christian crusade (1188–1192). Saladin is an emblematic figure in the Arab world, standing for unity and independence. SALAFIYYA: From the Arabic salafi, ancients. Name of the members of the salafiya, pan-Islamist, traditionalist and reformist movement, whose central personage at the end of the nineteenth century was Rashid Rida, a figure who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood. The salafiya ideology called for the renewal of Islam by a return to sources, which, according to this docT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SARID, YOSSI

trine, would allow society to recover from the ills that beset it. Supplanted by the Muslim Brotherhood, this movement did not really succeed in emerging in Egypt until the beginning of the 1980s, owing to the constitution of a political program created by a dissident splinter group, al-Takfir wa alHijra. It has benefited from considerable support from Saudi Arabia. SEE ALSO Muslim Brotherhood; Takfir wa alHijra, al-.

SALAMA, ALI HASSAN ALSEE

Black September 1970.

SAMARIA: Region in the center of the West Bank, between Galilee to the north and Judea to the south. This is also the name of an ancient city of Palestine, whose destruction in 721 B.C.E., by Sargon II of Assyria, marked the fall of the Kingdom of Israel.

SAMARITAN: Around 932 B.C.E., after the death of King Solomon, there was a schism caused by the Samaritans that led to the constitution of two kingdoms: Israel to the north, and Judah to the south. After the city of Samaria fell in 721, which marked the end of the Kingdom of Israel, a part of the population was deported and replaced by Assyrian colonists, who gradually assimilated with the native peoples. Returning from exile, the Jews banished them from their community and from the Temple, since they considered them to be “half-Jews.” Another schism occurred, resulting in the building of a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, north of Nabulus. Samaritans recognize only the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua as sacred, while practicing their own special kind of Judaism. Currently, the Samaritan community counts some six to seven hundred people, who live on the slopes of Mount Gerizim, in the village of Kiryat Luza, or in Holon, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

tle factories and agriculture—that operated in most Palestinian communities in the Middle East outside the occupied territories. It has been dormant since the founding of the Palestinian Authority, but Qurai is still its head. SAMED publishes a scholarly economics journal called Samed al-Iqtisadi (SAMED Economist). SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority.

SANHEDRIN: From the Aramaic sanhedrin, itself from the Greek sunedrion, meaning “assembly.” Name of the supreme political, religious and judiciary tribunal of Judaism in Palestine, during the Roman Occupation. SANJAK: A Turkish (presumably) word used by the Ottomans to designate an administrative subdivision of a province. SANT’ EGIDIO: Catholic community, founded in Rome, in 1968, by Andrea Riccardi, professor of religious history, for the purpose of educating young people about the situation of disinherited populations. Financed by subscription, and voluntary contributions, and with the support of the Vatican, this community developed a program of charitable activity in the world’s most impoverished countries. In the Middle East Sant’ Egidio was particularly concerned by the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and by the victims of repressive operations of the Israeli army. Becoming significant figures in humanitarian action, its leaders also launched into what they call “free lance diplomacy,” participating in the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Therefore, in 1992, the Mozambique peace accords were concluded at the headquarters of the association, where, in January, 1995, the first encounter between all the parties in the Algerian dispute took place. On 3 September, 2001, the movement organized an encounter at Barcelona to discuss world peace, in which religious dignitaries of all confessions participated.

SAMED: Palestine Martyrs’ Works Society (originally Production Society for the Children of Palestinian Martyrs; Jami Eiyat Eamal abna D shuhada D falastin), an organization set up and headed by Ahmad Qurai for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan in 1970 to provide vocational training and economic support for, at first, the children of those killed in the resistance, and after 1975, to all members of the Palestinian community in exile. It was moved to Beirut and reorganized in 1971. SAMED consisted of a set of business enterprises—crafts, litD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SARAYAT AL-JIHAD AL-ISLAMI SEE

Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

SARID, YOSSI (1940– ): Israeli politician. Born in Rehovot, in Mandatory Palestine, Yossi Sarid had a brief career as a journalist before becoming active in the Israel Labor Party. He was elected to the Knesset in 1974. In 1984, after the formation of the PeresShamir unity government, Sarid resigned from the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

415

SARRAJ, EYAD EL-

Labor Party and joined the Movement for Civil Rights and Peace. In 1988 he was one of the founders of Meretz, a leftist party that advocated an active peacemaking process with the Palestinians, and he became party chair in 1996. Sarid was appointed minister of education in 1999, when Meretz was part of the Barak coalition government, and he served briefly until Meretz left the coalition in 2000. In the 2002 elections, the Meretz Party lost four of its ten Knesset seats, and Sarid resigned as party chair. He remained active in the Knesset.

SARRAJ, EYAD

EL- (1944–): Palestinian psychiatrist and human rights activist, born in Beersheba in 1944; fled with his family to the Gaza Strip in 1948. Sarraj attended schools in Gaza, earned a medical degree at Alexandria University, a degree in psychology from the University of London and a doctorate at Harvard. Sarraj worked as a pediatrician and as a psychiatrist in Gaza and Bethlehem, and headed Mental Health Services in Gaza in 1981–1988. In 1989–1991, during the first Intifada (1987–1993), he took up a fellowship in the Refugee Studies Program at Oxford. Sarraj is the chairman of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), which he founded in 1991. (The GCMHP provides services for those traumatized by the military occupation; its eight clinics are said to have treated ten percent of the population of the Gaza Strip.) As a prominent Palestinian human rights activist, he has criticized the policies and practices of both the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority (PA). As a public critic of Yasir Arafat, Sarraj has been jailed by the PA several times, tortured and threatened; in 1996 an international campaign was mounted to force the PA to release him. He is the author of numerous articles in newspapers and on the Internet, and travels frequently to lecture and promote the cause of human rights in Palestine and in the Arab world. Sarraj is on the board of commissioners of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights (PICCR), and was its general commissioner (chairman) from 1995 to 2002. He is a member of the International Federation of Physicians for Human Rights, the International Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims, and the Campaign against Torture. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP); Gaza Strip; Intifada (1987–1993); Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights.

Issam Sartawi and his family left Palestine in 1948, at the time of the first Arab-Israel War, to seek refuge in Iraq. He undertook a course of studies in medicine in the United States, choosing cardiology as a specialty. Following the Arab defeat of June 1967, he decided to join the Palestinian resistance, within which he became head of the Active Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (AOLP). Banished from Jordan after the events of Black September 1970, he sought refuge in Beirut, where he became acquainted with a small group of Palestinians that favored making contact with Israelis to resolve the Palestinian question. Among the group were Mahmud Abbas and Said Hamami. In July 1971 Sartawi decided to join al-Fatah. During the summer of 1976, in France, he participated in a number of secret meetings with Israelis who were in favor of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. On 4 January 1978, the assassination of Hamami by an Israeli commando in London strengthened him in his resolve to start negotiations with Israel. The following May, through the mediation of the Swedish deputy to the Socialist International, he was able to meet with the Austrian chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. From then on, Sartawi traveled frequently to Vienna, where he encountered various Western political figures, arguing the Palestinian cause before them. In July 1979, in the company of Yasir Arafat, he was received by the president of the Socialist International, former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, and by Chancellor Kreisky. On 19 October 1979, at Vienna, he and the Israeli Aryeh Eliav were awarded the Peace Prize of the Kreisky Foundation, in honor of the risks they took to “further reconciliation between their two peoples.” Between 1978 and 1982, Sartawi increased his efforts to try to get official Israeli-Palestinian negotiations started, prompting the anger of diverse radical currents, both Israeli and Palestinian. On 15 January 1983, in Tunis, he organized a meeting between Arafat and three Israelis: “Matti” Peled, Uri Avnery, and Yaacov Arnon. This meeting caused a wave of protests in Israel as well as among the Palestinians. On 10 April 1983, he was killed by a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council of Abu Nidal during a preliminary meeting for the congress of the Socialist International, which was to take place in Portugal. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Fatah Revolutionary Council.

SATMAR: An ultra-Orthodox Hasidic sect, founded in SARTAWI, ISSAM (1934–1983): Palestinian political leader, born in January 1934 in Acre; died in 1983.

416

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

New York in 1947 by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, passionately anti-Zionist and hostile to the existence of T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SCHACH, ELIEZER

the State of Israel. Connected to the Neturei Karta movement, the Satmar, named after the Hungarian city of Szatmar, is a rival of the Lubavitch. While for the latter the creation of Israel was an act of God, for the Satmar the Jewish state cannot exist before the coming of the Messiah. By the 1960s the Satmar community in the Williamsburg section of New York City was the largest Hasidic community in the United States, and today it is the largest in the world. Most members outside the United States live in London; there are only about four hundred in Israel, migration to which is actively discouraged by the sect. Rabbi Teitelbaum attracted worldwide Jewish attention on several occasions when he was the only prominent Jewish figure to categorically renounce the newly founded Jewish state and to lament Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. Considering it sinful for Jews to establish their own state prior to the arrival of the Moshiach (or Messiah), he publicly expressed this through sobbing and shouting; but his followers loved and admired him enough to tolerate the negative publicity they received. He died in 1977 and was succeeded by his nephew, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, who holds Israel responsible for its wars with the Arabs. SEE ALSO Hasidism; Lubavitcher Hasidim; Neturei Karta; Messiah; Moshiach.

SAUDI PEACE PLAN (2002): Plan for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia during the height of the al-Aqsa Intifada. It called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 boundaries and accept the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In return the Arab states would recognize Israel and establish “normal relations” and security arrangements. The plan did not deal with the question of Palestinians’ right to return; it called only for a “just solution” to the refugee problem. First floated publicly in February 2000, the plan was presented to the League of Arab States summit meeting in Beirut in March. It was endorsed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in a statement read on the Arab satellite news channel al-Jazeera by Yasir Arafat (who was prevented by Israel from traveling out of the West Bank, and by Lebanese authorities from addressing the summit directly) and entered into the summit’s minutes the next day by the Palestinian delegation. It was unanimously adopted by the member states in a closed session. In a declaration issued on 28 March, the last day of the summit, the League formally announced that in return for complete withdrawal from all occupied territories, including the Golan Heights; a “just solution to the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Palestinian refugee problem” under the terms of General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 (which called for the right to return or compensation for the refugees); and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, the Arab states would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement, and achieve peace for all states in the region.” This was the first peace proposal put forth by the entire League of Arab States, and the first to offer immediate recognition and a peace treaty with every Arab state. The Israeli government of prime minister Ariel Sharon was opposed to returning any territory or withdrawing any of the almost 200 West Bank settlements, outposts, and colonies that had been established since 1967, with a population of 400,000. It did not reject the proposal out of hand, calling it a “very interesting development,” but let it die. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arafat, Yasir; Gaza Strip; Golan Heights; League of Arab States; Palestinian Authority; Resolution 194; Settlements; Sharon, Ariel; West Bank.

SAYERET: Hebrew word used to designate “special reconnaissance units” of the Israeli army. In the Israel Defense Force there are three principal sayeret— north, central, and south—all directly linked to the general staff. The first, called “Sayeret-Shaked,” was formed in the 1950s by Commander Amos Yarkoni, his real name being Abdul Majid, so as to track the fidaDiyyun infiltrating through the Negev, coming from Jordan and Egypt. The “Sayeret-Matkal” was formed in 1964, placed under the command of Avraham Arnan. Through the years, and by reason its success, this unit became a veritable “action” service of the Israeli general staff, carrying out a number of assassinations against Palestinian leaders. Between 1970 and 1973, the “Sayeret-Matkal” was headed by Ehud Barak, future prime minister. Finally the “Sayeret-Egoz,” formed in 1970, was responsible for special operations in the northern sector of Israel, particularly on the border with Lebanon. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud. SAYF AL-ISLAM: “Sword of Islam,” an armed branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad created in 1991, whose principal leader was Khalid al-Ayyub. SEE ALSO Palestinian Islamic Jihad. SCHACH, ELIEZER (1898–2001): Israeli religious and political leader. Born on 22 January 1989 in the village of Wabolnick in Lithuania, Eliezer Schach was

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

417

SECOND GULF WAR

described as a “genius” at a young age. He migrated to Mandatory Palestine with his family in 1938. After studying at various yeshivas, he settled at Ponevezh Yeshiva. Rabbi Schach eventually became the standard-bearer for orthodoxy in Israel. Though he was an Ashkenazi, he was instrumental in forming the Sephardi Torah Guardians Party (SHAS) in the early 1970s. He was apparently in competition with Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef for influence over SHAS, and in 1988 founded a new party, Degel ha-Torah (Torah Flag), for the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox. Though his rift with Yosef (and a highly publicized remark that Sephardi were not yet ready for leadership) eventually diminished his political influence, he remained the spiritual spokesman of the Ashkenazi and a prominent rabbinical authority until his death in 2001 at the age of 103. SEE ALSO Ashkenazi; Degel ha-Torah; SHAS; Yosef, Ovadiah.

SECOND GULF WAR SEE

Gulf War (1991).

SEDER: Jewish Easter meal, celebrating the flight from Egypt of the Hebrew people. During the meal, participants recite the Haggadah, the book containing the story of the Exodus and the ritual of the Seder. SELJUKS: Turkish dynasty that reigned over a part of central Asia from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Between 1073 and 1092, the Seljuks conquered parts of Asia Minor, Kerman, Transoxiana, Damascus and Jerusalem. Their defeat of the Byzantine Empire opened Asia Minor to settlement by Turks. Seljuk power was based on a strong army and a wellorganized administration. The Turkish practice of dividing the kingdom among heirs, family quarrels, the great number of vassals, and the Crusades led to the weakening of Seljuk power and the decline of the empire.

SEMED PROJECT: (Acronym, Southeast Mediterranean Development): A project for the coordinated development of the Southeast Mediterranean, initiated by Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, with the assistance of the European Union. Its purpose is to foster regional economic cooperation in the SEMED area, a coastal strip running from East of Lake Bardawil, through the Gaza Strip, up to and including Ashdod. A workshop was held in Cairo in 1995 to create a common vision for development of the area. Plans have focused on specific short- and

418

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

medium-term projects that will attract private investors and create jobs, and have placed emphasis on development of the Gaza Strip to bring its facilities and standards in line with those of the other partners.

SEMITE: From “Shemi,” Hebrew word from the name of Shem, son of Noah, who, according to Biblical tradition, was the eponymous ancestor of the Semites. Semites are people of the Middle East and Africa who speak one of the Semitic languages, which are branches of the Afro-Asiatic family. Examples of such languages are Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

SEPHARDI: Descendants of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, not including others of the lands in which they settled (although the term is used loosely to mean all Jews who are not part of the Ashkenazi culture). According to the dictionary the name derived from the Hebrew word “Sepharadh,” which means “Spain;” the word “Sepharad” also appears in the Bible, but there is no scholarly consensus about the location to which it refers. By the Middle Ages, it was the term used by Jews to mean Spain, where during the tenth and eleventh centuries Spanish Judaism flourished under the Muslims. Even during the early centuries of Christian control there, Jews were involved in intellectual, cultural, and economic affairs. In the fifteenth century, however, they faced increasing persecution and violence; many were forced to flee or convert to Christianity, and in 1492 all Jews were expelled from Spain. Thereafter, communities of exiled Sephardi were established in many nations. The Sephardi community has been one of the most disadvantaged in Israeli society. One of the main cleavages among Israelis opposes Sephardi to Ashkenazi, the former reproaching the latter with dominating the country. In September 1998, a historical study established that at the beginning of the existence of the State of Israel, the leaders, mostly Ashkenazi, decided to be selective about the eastern Jews (Sephardi) they were going to admit, receiving only those who would not represent a burden for the country. Disappointed by the promises of the Labor Party and by the attitudes of the Ashkenazim, a majority of the Sephardi rallied to Likud in 1977, thereby allowing the right-wing party to come to power after thirty years of Labor control. In May 1999, however, the Sephardi vote in the general elections caused the fall of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, enabling the Labor Party to return to power. Tensions remain between Ashkenazi and SeT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SETTLEMENTS

phardi, but although the latter have not attained full equality in Israel, they have been politically active, especially through SHAS, and have increasingly occupied positions of influence. SEE ALSO Ashkenazi; SHAS.

SEPHARDI TORAH GUARDIANS SEE

SHAS.

SEPTUAGINT SEE

Bible.

SETTLEMENT PARTY (Mifleget ha-Hityashvut, in Hebrew): Israeli political entity, formed in April, 1996, in anticipation of the coming Knesset elections. This movement was created uniquely to draw the attention of the Israeli government to the plight of Jewish settlers, who would lose everything, were there to be an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. The Settlement Party obtained no seat in the Knesset.

SETTLEMENTS: Israeli colonies established in the Palestinian territories occupied by the Israeli Army in the Arab-Israel War (1967). The settlements were established by government policy and with substantial, and ongoing, state aid, infrastructure creation and military protection. The policy has been more or less aggressive, depending on the party in power. There are now more than 400,000 settlers in approximately 200 settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights (before 1979 there were also settlements in the Sinai) including about 200,000 in the area immediately surrounding East Jerusalem. Israeli colonization of these territories began immediately after the war. Before 1977 settlements were placed, in accordance with the Allon Plan, in and above the Jordan Valley, where the Palestinian population was small, and in a ring around East Jerusalem, which was incorporated into Israel just after the war. The Allon Plan anticipated an eventual treaty providing for a substantial portion of the West Bank to be annexed to Israel. This annexation included the Jordan Valley and the area between the river and Jerusalem, as well as the establishment of two autonomous Palestinian areas in the remainder—roughly eleven percent of Mandate Palestine, completely surrounded by Israel—which would have been administered by Jordan. The settlements were part of a strategy that was primarily defensive, though also acquisitive; it would have increased the amount of land controlled by Israel, but not the areas with the heaviest Palestinian population, and, it was believed, would have created a more easily defensible border. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

HARADAR. THIS PHOTOGRAPH, C. 1994, SHOWS HARADAR, ONE OF THE LARGE NUMBER OF ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS ESTABLISHED IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE OCCUPIED

WEST BANK SINCE 1967. DISPUTES OVER

THE SIZE, LOCATION, AND VERY EXISTENCE OF THESE SETTLEMENTS ARE AMONG THE MOST DIFFICULT ISSUES DIVIDING ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS WHO SEEK PEACE. (© Morton Beebe, S.F./Corbis)

After the Arab-Israel War (1973), ultraorthodox religious nationalist Jews were convinced that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) victories were messianic signs of the realization of a “Greater Israel” promised them by God. They founded the Gush Emunim movement, which regarded the Allon Plan as “minimalist.” The Gush dedicated itself to establishing settlements throughout the occupied territories, and making it impossible to remove them in any future peace agreement. This movement was opposed by the Labor governments in power until 1977, but with the formation of a government that year led by the Likud—a party whose fundamental principle was the annexation of the occupied territories—their program became official state policy. A 1977 plan devised by housing minister Ariel Sharon—the Sharon Plan—proposed a line of settlements running north-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

419

SFEIR, NASRALLAH

south inside the Green Line in the western part of the West Bank. The Sharon Plan was enhanced by a another plan proposed by the World Zionist Organization in 1978, which called for settlements to be built around and in between towns in the most heavily populated Palestinian areas, dividing them from each other and thwarting “political and territorial continuity.” These plans have been the basis of Israeli policy ever since. After 1967, approximately half the land in the West Bank was appropriated for settlements and military purposes, and by 1977 there were roughly 4,200 settlers in 36 settlements. Settlement building accelerated in the early 1980s, along with the confiscation of land, the building of roads, and all the legal and material measures necessary to create “facts on the ground,” including financial incentives to potential settlers. By the time of the Oslo Accords of 1993, there were almost 200,000 settlers; after the Accords, new settlement activity, particularly expansion to accommodate “natural growth,” was increased dramatically, and from 1994 to 2000 the number of settlers doubled. The 1990s also saw the building of roughly 250 miles of bypass roads, meant for Israeli use only, accompanied by further expropriation, crop destruction and house demolitions (construction is forbidden within fifty-five yards of such a road). The religious settlers and their supporters believe that Jews must inhabit and control every part of Mandate Palestine (and, some of them, beyond), and a good many of them believe that Palestinians should be removed from it. The idea of “land for peace” is profoundly offensive to them and they have opposed any and all efforts to make a negotiated peace, even when the compromise keeps Palestinians virtually caged within noncontiguous “autonomous” zones under Israeli control. Ultraorthodox rabbis have ruled that settling Eretz Yisroel is a mitzvah, a religious imperative, and that dismantling settlements is contrary to religious law and must be resisted. This element in Israeli society is increasingly powerful, and has demonstrated that it can thwart or cripple government action. In mid-2004 it was mobilizing against Prime Minister Sharon’s so-called Gaza “disengagement” plan. Under international law, settlements are forbidden. The fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own citizens into occupied territory. Other humanitarian law forbids an occupying power to make changes in an occupied area unless for the benefit of the occupied population. Land expropriations have been carried out under Israeli laws and regulations, although Jor-

420

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

danian law remains the internationally recognized legal regime in the West Bank, as Egyptian law does in the Gaza Strip. Continued Israeli control of Palestinian land is not recognized as valid by the international community. The occupation, as well as changes in the status of the territories, is in violation of several UN resolutions, notably Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, passed just after the 1967 War. The Resolution asserts “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied.” Israel rejects all such arguments, and by signing the Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has effectively politically undermined them; under the Accords all matters affecting the status of the occupied territories have become subject to negotiation, including settlements, borders, security, water rights, the right of return for refugees, and the status of Jerusalem. Israel’s overwhelming power, and the Palestinians’ weakness, has made it impossible for the Palestinians to negotiate on an equal basis, or even to compel Israel to negotiate at all. SEE ALSO Allon Plan; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Gaza Strip; Golan Heights; Green Line; Gush Emunim; Israel Defense Force; Likud; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Resolution 242; Sharon, Ariel; West Bank; World Zionist Organization.

SFEIR, NASRALLAH (1920–): Lebanese Maronite religious leader, born in May 1920, at Reyfun; Patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church since April 1986. Considered to be a man of compromise and dialogue, his election seemed to exemplify the desire of the Maronite Church to mark its independence from certain Maronite leaders who, in the late 1980s, prosecuted an internal civil war within the Maronite community (within the Lebanese civil war of 1975– 90). In September 1986, as president of the Council of Bishops and Patriarchs, Sfeir made an appeal for an end to the Lebanese war and for reestablishing the unity and sovereignty of an independent state. He appealed many times for dialogue between Christians and Muslims; in April 1987, on an official visit to Algiers, he received the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat. In 1988–1989 Sfeir made efforts as a mediator for a presidential election to take place, with a candidate able to win a national consensus. He opposed General Aoun for provoking the bloody confrontations between Christian militias meant to prevent T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHAHID, LEILA MOUNIB

implementation of the TaDif Accords. On 6 November 1989, partisans of Aoun forced him to flee to the north of Lebanon, which was under Syrian control. (Aoun was defeated by the Syrians in late 1991 and fled the country.) In 1994 with the arrest of Samir Geagea, the last of the Phalange warlords, Sfeir became the most prominent leader of the Maronite community. On 1 April 1994, in his Easter sermon, Sfeir accused the Lebanese state of not treating the Lebanese Christians equitably, thereby violating the TaDif Accords. In November, he was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II. In May 1997, following the success of the latter’s visit to Lebanon, Sfeir consolidated his position as the head of the Christian camp, confirming also his role of mediator with other Lebanese communities. On 22 August 2000, in the course of an interview with the al-Nahar newspaper during the Lebanese legislative elections, he reaffirmed his desire to see Lebanon free itself from Syrian influence, while maintaining special relations with Syria. (He had little to say about the Israeli occupation in South Lebanon.) On 4 August 2001, Sfeir visited the head of the Druze community, Walid Jumblatt, to show his support for the reconciliation between the Druze and Christian communities. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Arafat, Yasir; Druze; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; Maronite; Phalange; South Lebanon; TaDif Accords.

SHAEAB, AL- (The People, in Arabic): Palestinian daily paper based in Jerusalem Started in 1972, the paper has ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization.

SHAB: Arabic word meaning “adolescent” or “youth”; plural shabab (m.) or shabiba (f.). The term is used in the media to designate young Palestinians participating in the first Intifada or the al-Aqsa Intifada. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Intifada (1987– 1993).

SHABAK SEE

Shin Bet.

SHABBAT (sabbat, sabbath): Holy day of rest for Jews, referring to the seventh day, in the course of which God rested after creating the world. Starting on Friday, just before sunset, shabbat ends with the appearance of the first stars on Saturday night.

SHABIBAT AL-FATAH: al-Fatah youth movement. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO

Fatah, al-.

SHAFI ABD-AL, HAYDAR SEE

Abd al-Shafi, Haydar.

SHAHADA: Arab word used to designate the profession of faith of each Muslim, marked by the saying of the phrase: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His prophet.” One of the five pillars of Islam. SEE ALSO Muhammad. SHAHID: Arab word meaning “martyr.” SHAHID, LEILA MOUNIB (1949– ): Palestinian editor and diplomat, born in July 1949, in Beirut, to a family in exile from Acre (her father, Abbas Effendi [Abdul Baha], was one of the principal leaders of the BahaDi movement in Palestine). Shahid first got involved with the Palestinian issue in 1967, providing assistance to refugees in Lebanese camps. In 1970 she met the French writer Jean Genet and helped him during his journeys among the exiled Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s about which he wrote in his book Un captif amoureux (1986; in English Prisoner of Love, 2003). Between 1974 and 1977, following a stint as a journalist for a Lebanese weekly, Shahib studied sociology in France, where she was very active in the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS). Between 1978 and 1988, she traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East, attending numerous conferences on the Israeli-Arab conflict, where she also happened to meet Israelis who were in favor of peace with the Palestinians. Between 1980 to 1984 she worked for the Society of United Moroccan Editors, and in 1986–1988 she worked for the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut and continues to be an editor of its journal La Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes, now published in Paris. A member of al-Fatah, she represented the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Ireland in 1989, and in September 1990 she was designated the PLO representative in the Netherlands. During her tenure there, she developed relations with the lay Jewish community center in Brussels, which was working for Israeli-Arab peace. In 1992, working with the Israeli Shulamit Aloni among others, she participated in the creation of the Jerusalem Link: a Joint Venture for Peace, a women’s association supporting the peace process in the Middle East. After representing the PLO in Denmark, Shahid was named in June 1993 to be the head of the general

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

421

SHAHIN, ABD AL-AZIZ

delegation of the PLO in Paris, a post she still holds. She is the PLO’s only woman ambassador. SEE ALSO BahaDi; Fatah, al-; General Union of Palestine Students; Palestine Liberation Organization.

SHAHIN, ABD

AL-AZIZ (Shaheen, Ali Abu; Shahine, Abdu Aziz; 1938– ): Palestinian political figure, born in Palestine. After secondary studies in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he worked in the ministry of health. In 1959 he joined Fatah, the new Palestinian movement created by Yasir Arafat, where he was active in the military section. In June 1967, in the course of an operation in which Arafat also participated, Shahin was captured by the Israelis, who kept him incarcerated until 1982. He is said to have led the Fatah organization inside the Israeli prisons. He lived at Dahaniya in the Gaza Strip until 1983, when he was rearrested for “illegal residence.” In March 1984 Israel deported him to Lebanon. Two years later he sought refuge in Iraq. In 1988 he coordinated actions with the Western Sector of Fatah that were linked to the Intifada developing in the Occupied Territories. In August 1989 he was elected to the revolutionary council of Fatah. In 1992 he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunis, where he became one of the leaders of the Western Sector, responsible for Palestinian actions in the Gaza Strip. In September 1993, in spite of his loyalty to Arafat, he opposed the Oslo Accords. Nevertheless he became the Palestinian Legislative Council deputy from Rafah in the Gaza Strip, and was minister of supply in the Palestinian Authority cabinet from 1996 to April 1993. While in that position he was accused, and is still widely suspected, of corruption—specifically, stealing food and medical supplies supplied by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and reselling it on the black market. He retains Arafat’s confidence and served as Fatah’s representative at the all-faction negotiations in Gaza in 2002, a position he quit, accusing HAMAS of blocking an agreement. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Intifada; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Legislative Council; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

SHAHRIT (from the Hebrew chahar, “dawn”): Morning prayer practiced by the Jews.

422

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SHALOM (“peace,” in Hebrew): The search for peace is a constant theme in the Bible, as well as in Hebrew liturgy and the Talmud. In the Kabbalistic tradition, Shalom is one of the names of “God, agent of universal harmony.” The expression shalom aleichem (peace be with you) is close to the Arab phrase alsalam alaykum and means the same thing. SEE ALSO Bible; Salaam; Talmud. SHALOM ACHSHAV SEE

Peace Now.

SHAM, AL- (“left” or “north,” in Arabic): Refers to the direction one takes to get to al-Sham from the Hijaz (western Arabian Peninsula), the original source of Arab culture. Bilad al-Sham is the early Arab name for Greater Syria, meaning the geographic area Syria, Lebanon, western Jordan, and Palestine. The name Syria (the Greek name for the city of Tyre; Sur, in Arabic), became current in the nineteenth century.

SHAMIR, YITZHAK (1915– ): Israeli political figure, born in Rozhno, Poland. In 1934 Yitzhak Shamir (born Yzernitsky) joined Betar, the youth wing of the militant right-wing Zionist revisionist movement headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. The following year he emigrated to Palestine, which was under the British Mandate. He enlisted in Irgun Zvai Le’umi (IZL, or ETZEL) in Tel Aviv, participating in terrorist attacks against the Arab population and British interests. In 1940 he joined the radical Abraham (“YaEir”) Stern splinter group known as IZL-Bet and became chief of military operations. In December 1943, with Nathan Yalin-Mor and Israel Eldad, he reconstituted the Stern Group, which had been dormant since the death of its leader, renaming it LEHI. In July 1946 he was arrested by British military police following an attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and was deported to Eritrea. He escaped a few months later, going to Djibouti. In September 1948 a LEHI squad assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine. Outlawed by Israeli authorities, LEHI was dissolved and succeeded by a political organization, the Fighters’ List, with Shamir at its head. Between 1955 and 1968 he was in the Mossad, the Israeli special intelligence service. In 1969, having quit Mossad, he entered politics, joining the rightist Herut Party led by his friend Menachem Begin. In July 1973 three small dissident groups in Herut joined with the Liberal Party and Herut to constitute a new right-wing parliamentary bloc, Likud. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHAMIR PLAN

YITZHAK SHAMIR. A FOLLOWER OF THE RADICAL NATIONALIST VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY AND A LEADER OF GROUPS ENGAGED IN VIOLENT AT-

BRITISH AND ARAB TARGETS IN PALESTINE, SHAMIR LATER MOSSAD BEFORE ENTERING ISRAELI POLITICS IN 1969 AS AN ASSOCIATE OF MENACHEM BEGIN. HE SUCCEEDED BEGIN AS PRIME MINISTER IN 1983 AND, WITH A LIKUD-LABOR COALITION IN POWER, RETURNED TO THE OFFICE IN 1986. SHAMIR SERVED UNTIL 1992, TWO YEARS AFTER HE DISSOLVED THE UNITY GOVERNMENT. (© TACKS ON

SERVED IN THE

Bettmann/Corbis)

In October of the following year, as a Herut Knesset member, Shamir was critical of the policies of Yitzhak Rabin, who he argued was putting the existence of the Jewish state at risk through lax policies. In May 1977, ending thirty years of Labor hegemony, Likud came to power. The following month Begin became prime minister and Shamir was elected speaker of the Knesset. In March 1980 he was named foreign minister in Begin’s government. In the June 1981 Knesset elections, Likud won forty-eight seats and Labor won forty-seven. On the following 15 July, Begin, the head of Herut, became prime minister for the second time. In September 1983, weakened by his wife’s recent death, his own illness, and criticism of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Begin resigned and Shamir replaced him as party leader and prime minister. Within Likud, two currents surfaced, one led by David Levy and Ariel Sharon, the other by Shamir D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

and Moshe Arens. In the Knesset elections of the following year, Likud won forty-one seats and the Labor Party won forty-four. The two parties constituted a National Unity government, agreeing that their leaders would alternate as prime minister. Shamir became deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the first cabinet headed by Shimon Peres. Two years later, in October 1986, he replaced Peres as prime minister. In the 1988 elections Likud won forty seats and the Labor Party thirty-nine. Another National Unity government was formed, headed by Shamir with Peres as finance minister. On 13 March 1990 Shamir revoked the Labor ministers, breaking the agreement between the two parties. Two days later the Knesset censured the government by a vote of sixty to fifty-five, causing its dissolution. This was the first time an Israeli government was overthrown by a parliamentary majority. On 11 July, the Labor Party leader having failed to form a new government, Shamir formed one based on a union between Likud, the religious parties, and the extreme right. A few months later he was confronted by the Gulf War, during which the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories supported Baghdad. In response to Washington’s demand, he agreed that Israel would not retaliate against a bombardment of Iraqi missiles. At the war’s end, he agreed to participate in a peace conference on the Middle East, to take place in Madrid. In October 1991, he headed Israel’s Madrid delegation, whose spokesperson was the rising star of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu. During the conference, Shamir would not yield to any of the significant Arab proposals. The extremist parties, however, opposing any negotiations with the Palestinians, withdrew their support from the Shamir government. On 23 June 1992, weakened by internal divisions, the right lost the elections and was replaced in power by the left, which won 61 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Shamir resigned from the government and backed Netanyahu as head of Likud. In December 1995, at the age of eighty, Shamir retired from Israeli politics. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1982); Begin, Menachem; Betar; Bernadotte, Folke; British Mandate; Eldad, Israel; Gulf War (1991); Herut Party; Irgun; Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev; Levy, David; Likud; Lohamei Herut Yisrael; Madrid Conference; Mossad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Peres, Shimon; Rabin, Yitzhak; Sharon, Ariel; Stern, Abraham.

SHAMIR PLAN: Name of an Israeli proposal made on 14 May 1989 by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

423

SHAMSEDDIN, MUHAMMAD MAHDI

four conditions Shamir fixed were: direct negotiations based on the principles of the Camp David Accords; no Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the region between Israel and Jordan; no negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization; and no change in the status of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, the Israeli proposal envisaged two phases: first a transitional period of five years; then in the third year of the transition at the latest, negotiations based on Resolutions 242 and 338 to result in a definitive solution. The Palestinians would be represented at the negotiating table by an elected delegation of Arab Palestinians residing in Judea and Samaria and in the Gaza Strip and satisfying the conditions fixed by the Israeli government; a peace treaty would be signed between Jordan and Israel. Camp David Accords; Gaza Strip; Judea and Samaria; Palestine Liberation Organization; Resolution 242; Resolution 338; Shamir, Yitzhak; West Bank.

SEE ALSO

SHAMSEDDIN, MUHAMMAD MAHDI (1933–2001): Lebanese ShiEite religious leader. After studying theology in Iraq, Muhammad Mahdi Shamseddin returned to Lebanon in 1969. In 1975, along with Musa al-Sadr, president of the Supreme Islamic ShiEa Council, he participated in the creation of AMAL. Within the Supreme Islamic ShiEa Council, he often advocated a moderate line and came up against the intransigence of both the vice president, Abdul Amir Qabalan, and of Nabi Berri (another cofounder of AMAL). In February 1981 Shamseddin escaped an assassination attempt. In April 1984 he spoke in favor of deploying the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon in all of South Lebanon and also in favor of keeping Syrian forces in the country as long as the Israel Defense Force remained on Lebanese soil. That June, commenting on the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Shamseddin demanded “the reapplication of the armistice agreement reached between Lebanon and Israel in March 1949, which, in itself, did not necessitate negotiations,” and renewed his support for a Syrian presence in Lebanon as long as Israeli forces remained on Lebanese territory. In February 1988 he presided over a commission responsible for ending combat between AMAL and Hizbullah. In December he visited Tehran and was received by the leaders of the country. In January 1990 Shamseddin received an Iranian delegation, led by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hassan Akhtari, which had come to discuss measures to end the fighting between AMAL and Hizbullah. In 18 March 1994 he

424

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

was elected president of the Supreme Islamic ShiEa Council. From then on he worked for a rapprochement between the Christian and Muslim communities in Lebanon. He died of cancer in Beirut. SEE ALSO AMAL; Berri, Nabi; Hizbullah; Sadr, Musa al-; South Lebanon; United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

SHARA, FARUK AL- (1938– ): Syrian political figure, born in Mharbé. Faruk al-Shara earned degrees in English literature and international law and became a BaEth Party member. In the early 1970s, he ran the Syrian Airlines Agency in Dubai and London. In 1975 he joined the foreign ministry, where he became assistant director of the Western European desk. Between 1976 and 1979 he was Syrian ambassador to Italy. In January 1980 he was appointed foreign minister in the Qassem government. In July 1983, after the death of Iskandar Ahmed, he became interim information minister. On 11 March 1984, when the third Qassem government was formed, he was reappointed foreign minister, a post he has kept through all the succeeding governments. On 8 January 1985, at the Eighth BaEth Regional Conference, he was elected a member of its central committee. In October 1991 he led the Syrian delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, where he advocated the Arab cause in the face of Israeli intransigence. His performance at the conference earned him the respect of Westerners and led him to play an important part in negotiations with Israel. Shara’s intelligence and his knowledge of the issues have made him a redoubtable negotiator. In the spring of 1994 he received American Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who was in charge of restarting the Israeli-Syrian talks. That December, alShara visited Washington, where he held an official meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in an attempt to renew the Syrian-Israeli peace dialogue, which had been interrupted since the spring of 1996. He stated on this occasion, “Peace will doubtless pose questions for all of us, especially for the Arab world, which, after it reviews the last fifty years, may well ask itself if the Israeli-Arab conflict has only challenged Arab unity, or prevented it.” AlShara kept his portfolio in the new government formed by Muhammad Mustafa Miro in March 2000. That June, following the death of President Hafiz al-Asad, al-Shara was elected to BaEth Command, the highest authority of the party. In August he was by the side of the new Syrian president, Bashar al-Asad, when the American emissary Edward Walker paid a visit to Syria with the mission to reT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHARETT, MOSHE

start Israeli-Syrian negotiations. That same month saw him in Egypt, where American emissary Dennis Ross was meeting with Amr Musa, the head of Egyptian diplomacy, to discuss the aftermath of the Israeli-Palestinian peace summit held in Camp David in July. On 13 December 2001, in a reshuffle of Muhammad Miro’s government, he was named deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. Asad, Bashar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Barak, Ehud; BaEth; Camp David II Summit; Christopher, Warren; Madrid Conference; Musa, Amr Muhammad.

SEE ALSO

SHARANSKY, NATAN (1948– ): Israeli political figure, born in the Ukraine, in the Soviet Union. Natan Scharansky graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and became an activist for human rights. He was imprisoned in 1973 for his opposition to the Soviet regime. In 1977, accused of “treason and espionage” on behalf of the American Central Intelligence Agency, he was sentenced to thirteen years of forced labor. His wife organized an international campaign that allowed him to be freed after nine years. In February 1986 he was exchanged for Eastern-bloc spies in Western custody. After a few weeks in Berlin, Sharansky emigrated to Israel, where he worked to integrate Soviet immigrants, who represented a considerable political bloc, into Israeli society. In 1988 he created the Zionist Forum of Soviet Union Jews, a center-right political grouping. He was courted by both Likud and the Labor Party. In June 1995, along with his friend Yuli Edelstein, he created the Israel be-Aliyah Party, which in the platform published on the following 1 November upheld “the inalienable rights of the Israeli people over the country of Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan” and rejected the creation of a Palestinian state, while recommending autonomy for the Occupied Territories. In the May 1996 parliamentary elections, Sharansky’s party won seven seats in the Knesset. A few weeks later, Sharansky was named minister of commerce and industry in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Three years later he became minister of the interior in the Labor government of Ehud Barak. On 9 July 2000, opposing the Israeli-Palestinian summit in Washington, D.C. that Barak was participating in, Sharansky resigned his post in the Labor government. On 7 March 2001, after the election for prime minister, he was appointed minister of housing and construction in the cabinet of Likud’s Ariel Sharon. In 2003 he became minister for diaspora, social, and Jerusalem affairs. In this capacity he has lecD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

MOSHE SHARETT. ISRAEL’S FIRST FOREIGN MINISTER, FROM 1948 TO 1956, WAS ALSO ITS SECOND PRIME MINISTER, FROM 1953 UNTIL 1955, WHEN DAVID BEN-GURION RETURNED TO OFFICE AFTER NEW ELECTIONS. SHARETT TOOK A HARD LINE ON PALESTINIAN REFUGEES BUT LOST HIS MINISTERIAL POST WHEN HE URGED CAUTION IN RESPONSE TO TENSIONS WITH

EGYPT IN 1956.

(© Bettmann/Corbis)

tured widely on the topic of anti-Semitism and its connection to anti-Israel sentiment. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Israel be-Aliyah; Israel Labor Party; Knesset; Likud; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sharon, Ariel.

SHARETT, MOSHE (1894–1965): Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister. Born Moshe Shertok, he migrated with his family from Russia to Palestine in 1906. After attending school in Herzliyya and Tel Aviv, he entered the University of Istanbul to study law, but was drafted into the Turkish army at the outbreak of World War I. He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1924, then returned to Palestine as a journalist. In 1931 he became political secretary of the Jewish Agency Executive, where he began his long working relationship with David Ben-Gurion. In 1935 Sharett became director of the Jewish Agency’s political department. In 1947 Sharett was a representative of the Jewish Agency to the United Nations (UN) Special

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

425

SHARI E A

Committee on Palestine, where he lobbied for UN support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In May 1948 he was named foreign minister in the Jewish provisional administration of the newly proclaimed State of Israel, and he held the post of foreign minister until 1956. In that capacity he introduced, in 1949, the principle of “nonidentification,” which proposed that Israel pursue a diplomatic course of nonalignment. By 1951, however, the support of the Soviet Union for the Arab bloc made it clear that Israel’s foreign policy would be aligned with the West. When Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion resigned in December 1953, Sharett became prime minister, holding the post until 1955, when his cabinet was overturned by the withdrawal of the General Zionist Party. Ben-Gurion returned as prime minister after the November 1955 elections, and Sharett continued to serve as foreign minister. In 1956 tensions arose between them over a course of action regarding the Suez Canal Crisis, and Ben-Gurion asked for Sharett’s resignation, replacing him with Golda Meir. SEE ALSO Ben-Gurion, David; Meir, Golda; Suez Crisis.

SHARIEA (“way,” in Arabic): Islamic religious law

from the QurDan and the Sunna. The ShariEa establishes laws concerning worship (d“n, madhab) as well as principles concerning human social and juridical behavior (dunyâ, milla). The ShariEa is interpreted and practiced differently by different schools of law and even by each Muslim. SEE ALSO QurDan; Sunna.

SHARIF (pl. sharifs, shurafa; “noble,” in Arabic): Designates generally the descendents of Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad and her husband EAli, the cousin of Muhammad. Every Sharif (for example, the members of the Jordanian Hashimite dynasty) traces his or her ancestry back to one of their sons, Husayn (Hussein) or Hasan. SEE ALSO Fatima; Muhammad.

SHARM AL-SHAYKH SEE

Sharm al-Shaykh Summits.

peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Ratified by King Abdullah II of Jordan, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak, and American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the signing of this accord came after long negotiations undertaken within the framework of the application of the Wye Plantation Agreements. The major points in the agreement concerned: The speedy liberation of 200 Palestinian prisoners, followed on October 8 by 150 other prisoners, then by a number to be determined by a commission; negotiations on the final status of Palestinian territories, which were to be reinstated rapidly and to conclude with an agreement within a year’s time; Israeli military withdrawal (a week after the agreement, 7 percent of the West Bank would change from Zone C to a Zone B; on November 15 another 3 percent would change from Zone C to Zone B and of 2 percent from Zone B to Zone A; on January 20 5.1 percent would change from Zone B and 1 percent from Zone C to Zone A); a “secure” passage to allow Palestinians to move between Gaza and the West Bank; a new port, which would be constructed at Gaza; Shuhada Street, along a Jewish enclave in Hebron, which would be opened to Palestinian circulation; cooperation on matters of security; and a renunciation of unilateral measures to change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from what was defined in the accord. On 9 September the Knesset approved the accord by a vote of fifty-four to twenty-three, with two abstentions. Ten Arab members of parliament voted in favor. On 6 January 2000 Israel transferred control of ten villages near Ramallah (West Bank) to the PA as part of the withdrawal from 5 percent of the West Bank that it had begun the evening before. On 7 February the Israeli withdrawal was contested, causing the transfer of authority to stop and negotiations to stall. On 21 March the Israel Defense Force retreated from 6.1 percent of the West Bank, allowing the PA to exercise control over 40 percent of the West Bank. On 16 October, after three weeks of violent Palestinian-Israeli confrontations in the Palestinian territories that caused more than a hundred deaths, an international summit was organized at Sharm alShaykh to try to arrange an accord to restore calm and to restart the Israeli–Palestinian dialogue.

SHARM AL-SHAYKH MEMORANDUM: On the night of 4–5 September 1999, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak signed an accord at Sharm al-Shaykh, in Egypt, whose purpose was to open the way to final

426

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Abdullah II ibn Hussein; Albright, Madeleine; Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Gaza Strip; Israel Defense Force; Knesset; Mubarak, Husni; Oslo Accords II; Palestinian Authority; Sharm al-Shaykh Summits; West Bank.

SEE ALSO

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHARON, ARIEL

SHARM

AL-SHAYKH SUMMITS: Situated south of the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt, Sharm al-Shaykh has hosted several international meetings in the framework of the Israeli-Arab peace process. From 13 to 16 March 1996, under the sponsorship of U.S. president Bill Clinton, an international meeting on terrorism took place there, presented as the “summit of the peacemakers.” Concerned by the terrorism unleashed against Israeli urban populations in early 1996—which, together with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, had dangerously shaken the peace process—the twenty-nine leaders attending this summit, of which some twenty were heads of governments, were determined to formulate a common strategy in the struggle against terrorism. Following this meeting President Clinton went to Israel, where he finalized the U.S. Israeli accord on Islamic terrorism, providing for aid to Israel in the amount of 100 million dollars. To implement the resolutions made at this summit, a conference was organized at Washington for the following 30 March. From 16 to 18 October 2000, a new summit was held at Sharm al-Sheikh eighteen days after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories. In addition to Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak, U.S. President Clinton, King Abdallah II of Jordan, European Union representative Javier Solana, UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak attended this meeting. No accord was signed between the parties. Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat committed themselves publicly to call for an end to the violence, to take concrete measures to end the current confrontations, and to prevent the recurrence of the recent events. The United States agreed, with the concurrence of the UN, to set up a fact-finding committee on the events of the preceding few weeks, a step that led to the Mitchell Report. On the following 27 December, a meeting between Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak, scheduled to take place the next day at Sharm al-Sheikh, had to be canceled because of opposition that was mounting in both camps against the Clinton Plan known as “parameters for peace.” SEE ALSO Aqsa, Intifada, al-; Clinton, William Jefferson; Clinton Plan; Mitchell Report; Sharm al-Shaykh Memorandum.

SHARON, ARIEL: (born Scheinerman; called Arik): Israeli military and political figure, As of 2004, prime minister of Israel. Born in February 1928 at Kefar Malal, in Palestine. In 1942, barely fourteen years old, he joined the ranks of the Haganah. Six years later he started on a military career in the new Israeli D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

ARIEL SHARON. AS A MILITARY OFFICER AND THEN ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER, SHARON OFTEN ENGAGED IN EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL ACTIONS IN WARTIME AND AGAINST PALESTINIAN VILLAGES AND REFUGEE CAMPS. AN ARDENT SUPPORTER OF ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS IN OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, HE TOOK A HARD LINE ON NEGOTIATIONS WITH PALESTINIANS BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER HIS ELECTION AS PRIME MINISTER IN EARLY 2001—A FEW MONTHS AFTER HIS VISIT TO THE TEMPLE MOUNT IN JERUSALEM WAS BLAMED FOR PROVOKING A NEW PALESTINIAN INTIFADA. (AP/Wide World Photos)

army, the Israel Defense Force (IDF). In 1949 he commanded an intelligence unit of the Golani brigade, and in 1953 he headed a special anti-terror unit responsible for halting Palestinian incursions into Israeli territory. During the night of 14–15 October 1953, in reprisal for the murder of a woman and her daughters, the unit penetrated the village of Qibya, in West Jordan, where he ordered the dynamiting of forty-five houses, causing the death of sixty-nine persons. This action provoked widespread outrage, and Israel was condemned by the UN Security Council. After his unit was disbanded, Ariel Sharon was transferred to a paratroop brigade, where between 1954 and 1955 he headed a battalion. In 1956, during the Suez-Sinai War, he ignored orders from army headquarters and occupied the Mitla Pass, which commanded the access to the Suez Canal. In the

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

427

SHARON, ARIEL

course of a confrontation with Egyptian troops, thirty-six of his men were killed. At the end of the conflict, accused of insubordination, he was tried and judged responsible for the death of these men; but he continued to advance in the IDF, for he had earned a reputation as a brilliant military strategist. Promoted to general in February of 1967, he commanded an armored division during the Six-Day War. Between 1969 and 1973, as chief of the southern command, he applied radical methods, demolishing thousands of homes in Gaza refugee camps to create roads for antiterror patrols. In July of 1972, having vainly sought the position of Army chief of staff, he decided to quit the military for politics, registering as a member of the Liberal Party. With Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, he participated in the creation of the right-wing parliamentary group Likud. Mobilized in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, he commanded an armored division on the southern front. Once again ignoring orders, he crossed the Suez Canal, cutting the Egyptian Third Army off from its rear. This maneuver enabled the IDF to force the Egyptian army to surrender, and in the eyes of Israeli soldiers he became “Arik, King of Israel.” Elected a Likud representative in 1973, in 1975 Sharon became the security adviser for the Labor Party prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. After arguing with the latter he decided to found his own party, Shlomzion, which in the May elections of 1977 won two seats in the Knesset. Shortly thereafter he rejoined Likud and was appointed minister of agriculture in the government of Menachem Begin. While in this office, his support for the development of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories impeded the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations. In June of 1981 he became defense minister, and a year later was the principal architect of the invasion of Lebanon (Operation “Peace in Galilee”), during which several hundred Palestinians were murdered by the Lebanese Christian militia at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila while the IDF observed, voicing no objection. On 11 February 1983, Sharon was judged culpable by a commission of inquiry headed by Israeli Supreme Court chief justice Yitzhak Kahan for not preventing the slaughter. He was forced to resign his post of defense minister, but remained minister without portfolio. During the next decade Sharon served in several cabinet posts. Then in 1996 he was appointed national infrastructure minister by Benjamin Netanyahu; two years later he became foreign minister. After the election of Labor’s Ehud Barak as prime

428

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

minister in May 1999, Sharon succeeded Netanyahu as Likud leader. His visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000 sparked Muslim riots and unleashed the anger of the Palestinians, prompting a revival of the Intifada known as al-Aqsa Intifada. On 6 February 2001 Sharon was elected prime minister, with 62.5 percent of the votes, against his adversary from the Labor Party, incumbent prime minister Ehud Barak, whose peace policy had failed. A month later Sharon presented his cabinet, composed of 26 ministers belonging to eight different political parties, which allowed him to have a majority of 73 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. In his inauguration speech Ariel Sharon indicated that his cabinet would conduct negotiations with the Palestinians “so as to obtain political agreements, but not under the pressure of terrorism and violence.” When the Intifada intensified in the Palestinian territories, he decided to reply to the violence with military operations of unprecedented brutality. This policy of “targeted responses,” in other words the assassination of Palestinian leaders and militants, was vigorously criticized not only by Palestinians but also by the Israeli opposition and a part of the international community. On 4 December 2001, when the terrorist actions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad were multiplying, Ariel Sharon decided to increase the operations of the IDF against the symbols of the Palestinian Authority of Yasir Arafat, whom he accused of supporting terrorism. Following a suicide bombing at a Netanya resort hotel in March 2002, Sharon ordered the invasion and reoccupation of West Bank cities under Operation “Defensive Shield.” Israeli forces destroyed buildings and captured hundreds of Palestinians. In the 2003 elections, in an apparent endorsement of his policies, voters gave Likud 29.4 percent of the vote (thirty-eight seats in the Knesset), confirming Sharon’s premiership. Sharon continued his aggressive policies, making Palestinian leader Arafat a virtual prisoner in the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters. Under intense pressure from the United States, Sharon’s cabinet voted in May 2003 to approve the internationally backed “Road Map” for peace. Sharon surprised many observers by apparently seeking a balance between the right-wing commitment to disputed territories and a more pragmatic approach to an eventual resolution of the conflict. In 2004 he presented a plan to disengage from settlements in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, in the face of strong opposition by a majority of his own Likud Party and the defection or firing of several members of his cabinet. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHA E TH, NABIL ALI MUHAMMAD

The Knesset voted to back Sharon’s plan in October 2004. Likud called for a referendum, which Sharon rejected, causing a split in the ruling Likud. SEE ALSO Aqsa Inlifada, al-; Haganah; Intifada (1987–1993); Likud; Road Map (2002); Shlomzion.

SHAS (Shomrei ha-Torah ha-Sepharadim in Hebrew, meaning “Sephardi Torah Guardians.”): UltraOrthodox Israeli religious party, created in 1983 following a split within Agudat Israel that exemplifies the opposition that existed between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. SHAS, whose Sephardi electorate was positioned on the right, supported a greater Judaization of Israeli society while declaring itself in favor of territorial compromise with the Palestinians. When it was created the two religious authorities of SHAS, rabbis Ovadiah Yosef and Eliezer Schach, asked Arye Deri to turn the party into a real political force. Thereupon, as a result of the elections of 1984, SHAS won four seats in the Knesset and Deri was named director general of the ministry of the interior, the minister being the president of SHAS, Yitzhak Peretz, in the cabinet of Shimon Peres. In only a few years, SHAS was able to greatly expand its educational and social network. In the elections of 1988, the party won six Knesset seats. Three of its members joined the government of Yitzhak Shamir: Arye Deri as minister of the interior, Yitzhak Peretz as minister of immigration, and Yosef Azran as deputy minister of finance. In 1990, tensions surfaced in the party between its principal leaders, resulting in the departure of Peretz, who created his own group, Moriah. In June of the same year, after a reshuffle in the Shamir cabinet, another SHAS member, Rafael Pinhasi, joined the government as communications minister. In September 1993, Arye Deri, while he was the subject of legal proceedings for corruption, resigned his post in the ministry of the interior. The other SHAS ministers quit the government, rejoining it in March of the following year. In February 1995, the four SHAS ministers belonging to the cabinet of Yitzhak Rabin once more resigned, and the leadership of the party reproached the government for its lack of resolve in the struggle against terrorism. In the elections of May 1996, SHAS obtained ten Knesset seats, confirming its place in Israeli politics. Because of the party’s strong support for the candidacy of Benjamin Netanyahu for the post of prime minister, two of its leaders joined his government: Eli Suissa as minister of the interior and Eli Ishai as minister of labor. In the municipal elections of 10 November D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1998, the party won fifteen seats of the thirty-one in the municipality of Jerusalem, allowing it to strengthen its control over the religious institutions of the Holy City. On 17 March 1999, after a difficult trial lasting several months, Arye Deri was judged guilty of corruption, abuse of confidence, and fraud during his term in the ministry of the interior and sentenced to four years in prison. After the May general elections, in spite of the trial of its leader, SHAS found itself in an even stronger position, with seventeen Knesset seats. On 15 June, with his condemnation obstructing negotiations on SHAS joining the Labor government of Ehud Barak, Deri resigned from his functions as head of the party. On 6 July six party members joined the government of Barak. On 21 June 2000, constant disagreement between the SHAS ministers and those of Meretz forced the latter to quit the government. On 9 July SHAS, with the National Religious Party (NRP) and Israel B’Aliyah, resigned from the Barak government, reproaching it for the concessions it was preparing to make to the Palestinians during the talks at Camp David. The departure of these three parties meant that the Barak cabinet commanded only a minority in the Knesset. On 9 January 2001, in the elections for the post of prime minister, SHAS supported Likud’s candidate, Ariel Sharon. On the following 7 March, after Sharon’s victory, SHAS entered the new national unity government, obtaining five ministries (interior, labor, social affairs, health, and religion). In the 2003 elections it won eleven seats in the Knesset. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel; Ashkenazi; Deri, Arye; Moriah; National Religious Party; Peres, Shimon; Peretz, Yitzhak; Rabin, Yitzhak; Shamir, Yitzhak; Schach, Eliezer; Sephardi; Suissa, Eli; Yosef, Ovadiah.

SHAETH, NABIL ALI MUHAMMAD (Abu Rashid; 1938–): Palestinian politician, born in August 1938 to a wealthy commercial family of Safad, in British Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, at the time of the first Arab-Israel war, his family fled to Egypt. ShaEth was educated in Alexandria and the United States, where he received a Ph.D. in public administration from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Egypt, becoming an Egyptian citizen, at the end of 1965 and headed the National Institute of Management Development in Cairo until 1969. In 1967, after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 War, he joined the ranks of al-Fatah. In 1969, he settled in Lebanon, where he taught business adminis-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

429

SHAYKH

tration at the American University in Beirut until 1976. In 1970 he became a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Committee and represented the PLO at the nonaligned nations summit at Lusaka, Zambia in September of that year. In August of 1973, ShaEth became director of the PLO’s planning office. In this capacity he took numerous trips to the Gulf States and the United States, where he met with many political and economic leaders. In 1974, he showed himself to be a formidable negotiator at the time of his discussions with UN delegates, which led to the invitation extended to Yasir Arafat to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. In 1975 ShaEth founded TEAM International, a large Beirut management consulting company. Three years later, he was elected to the Palestine National Council (PNC). Between 1982 and 1983 he was in the group of negotiators who were discussing a solution to the Palestinian situation in Lebanon with American authorities. In 1988 he emerged as one of the main Palestinian interlocutors in the initial proceedings that led to opening a dialogue between the United States and the PLO. In November, 1989, ShaEth became Yasir Arafat’s economic and political counselor. Between 1990 and 1993, he participated in the many negotiations that resulted in the Oslo Accords with Israel. At the beginning of May, 1994, ShaEth was named minister of planning and the economy of the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA). That June, after a forty-five year exile, he settled in the Gaza Strip. In 1996 he was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) from Khan Yunis. He has, along with other senior PLO leaders, been credibly accused of corruption; a PLC commission demanded in 1997 that he be removed from office and prosecuted. No such action was taken. After the destructive Israeli reoccupation of 2002, ShaEth was named to head the PA’s reconstruction effort. In April 2003 he was appointed the PA’s foreign minister. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Legislative Council; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority.

sible for initiating his disciples into the mystic way (tariqa).

SHEBAA FARMS: Territory of approximately 38.5 square miles situated on the Lebanese side of Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Shaykh) on the Lebanese-Syrian frontier; under Israeli occupation since 1967. At the beginning of May 2000, before the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, the Lebanese authorities demanded that Israel also pull out of this area, citing the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 425. Israel claimed that the territory belonged to Syria and that evacuating it would be part of the application of Resolution 242, and therefore that an Israeli withdrawal would be tied to Israeli-Syrian peace talks. It is unclear whom the territory belongs to, but both Lebanese and Syrian officials suggest that Syria had officially given the territory to Lebanon in 1951. On 30 May 2000 Syria broke the stalemate by accepting its restitution to Lebanon at a later date, in the framework of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. SEE ALSO Resolution 242; Resolution 425; South Lebanon.

SHECHEM SEE

Nablus.

SHEETRIT, MEIR (1948– ): Israeli politician. Born in Morocco in 1948, Meir Sheetrit migrated to Israel in 1957. He received a master’s degree in political science from Bar-Ilan University. He was mayor of Yavneh from 1974 to 1987 and treasurer of the Jewish Agency from 1988 to 1992. First elected to the Knesset in 1981, he served on various committees, including the Finance Committee and the Education and Culture Committee. He became deputy speaker of the Knesset in 1996, then served as minister of finance from February 1999 to July 1999. He was appointed minister of justice in March 2001, and in February 2003 was appointed minister without portfolio.

SHEIK SEE

Shaykh.

SHAYKH (“old person,” “religious scholar,” in Ara-

SHEKEL (also spelled “sheqel”): Anciently, a Hebrew

bic): A Muslim title implying respect for wisdom or leadership, or simply for age and experience, accorded to men who have achieved some standing in their community. Among Sufis, shaykh is the title of a group’s spiritual director (murshid), who is respon-

word designating the donation that was due to the Temple, and also a unit of weight corresponding to less than half an ounce. Currently it is the name of the national money of the State of Israel, the New Israel Shekel (NIS), which was introduced in 1985.

430

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SHI E A

SHRINE OF HAZRAT IMAM ALI. A VIEW FROM THE COURTYARD SHOWS ONE OF THE HOLIEST PLACES TO SHIDITE MUSLIMS, THE SITE OF THE TOMB OF THE FIRST IMAM, MUHAMMAD’S FIRST COUSIN AS WELL AS THE HUSBAND OF HIS FAVORITE DAUGHTER, FATIMA. LOCATED IN AN NAJAF, IRAQ, THIS MOSQUE WAS THE SCENE OF A LONG STANDOFF IN 2004 BETWEEN THE FORCES OF ANTI-AMERICAN CLERIC MOKTADA AL-SADR AND U.S. FORCES (AS WELL AS THOSE OF THE INTERIM IRAQI GOVERNMENT). (© Shepard Sherbell/Corbis Saba)

This replaced the “old” shekel, which in 1980 had replaced the Israeli pound, at a rate of one NIS per thousand. As of September 2004, the exchange rate was about 4.48 NIS per U.S. dollar and 5.51 NIS per Euro.

SHELI PARTY (Shelli): Israeli political party, founded in 1977 by retired general Matti Peled. Considered to be of the extreme left, the SHELI advocated a peace dialogue with the Palestinians. In the 1977 elections, the group won two seats in the Knesset. The party disbanded before the 1984 elections. SEE ALSO Peled, Mattityahu (“Matti”).

SHEMA (“hear. . .”): A shorthand name for the Shema-Israel (Hear O Israel) prayer.

SHIEA: ShiEa Muslims are the followers of Ali (Shi Eat Ali), the cousin and brother-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, to whose descendants they believe D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

leadership of the entire Muslim community rightfully belongs. Ali ibn Abi Talib succeeded the first three successors of Muhammad, but his rule was contested. The successor to Ali, MuEawiyya, was succeeded by his son Yazid. The second son of Ali, Husayn, revolted against him and was martyred in 632 C.E.. Although they share with Sunnis the basic tenets of Islam, ShiEas have different doctrines, rituals, theology, and organization. ShiEas comprise the smaller of the two major branches of Islam. They are predominant in Iran and a majority in Iraq, but elsewhere in the Muslim world are a minority, making up around 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population. They constitute a substantial minority in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. In many places ShiEas are subjected by Sunni majorities to discrimination and sometimes violence; in Iraq, where they are a majority, they have been suppressed for political reasons for decades.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

431

SHIHABI, HIKMAT AL-

SHIHABI, HIKMAT AL- (al-Shehabi; 1931– ): Syrian career officer, born in Bab el-Hawa. Hikmat alShihabi began his career in aviation, training in the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1970 he earned a Soviet degree in intelligence services. In April 1971 he was named head of intelligence services of the Syrian Army, assisted by Colonel Ali Douba. Appointed a general the following year, he also supervised the department of military security. After the 1973 War, he led the Syrian delegation to the United States in April of 1974, negotiating the conditions of the Syrian–Israeli disengagement. On 12 August 1974 he was appointed chief of staff of the Syrian Army, replacing Yusuf Shakkur, who was promoted to deputy defense minister. In December 1983, while President Hafiz al-Asad was ill, Shihabi was part, along with General Tlass, of the committee in charge of running the country. In August 1984 he escaped an assassination attempt. Between 1994 and 1995 he was part of a delegation that traveled to the United States to discuss peace negotiations with Israel. In July 1998, after twenty-four years as army chief of staff, he resigned his post. He is thought of as an influential figure in the Syrian regime and has been considered several times for prime minister. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973); Asad, Hafiz al-; Douba, Ali Issa Ibrahim. SHIEITE: A ShiEa Muslim may be referred to in English as a ShiEite (or ShiEite). SEE ALSO ShiEa. SHIKAKI, FATHI IBRAHIM SEE

SHINUI PARTY (“Movement for Change,” in Hebrew): Israeli center-left, ultra-secular political party, founded in 1974 by Amnon Rubinstein. Shinui stood for defending the interests of the Israeli middle class by supporting a liberal economy and advocated a peace process between Israel and the Arab countries. In the July 1981 elections the party won two seats in the Knesset. In 1988 the Shinui electoral program on the Palestinian question was based on three principles: “1) peace in exchange for the territories; 2) demilitarization of the territories and rectification of the1967 border; 3) creation of a Jordano-Palestinian confederation.” In 1992 the party merged with RATZ (Movement for Civil Rights and Peace) and MAPAM to form the Meretz bloc. In that year’s elections, Meretz obtained twelve seats in the Knesset, of which two went to Shinui. These seats were filled by Avraham Poraz and Amnon Rubinstein. On 18 May 1999, the day after the general elections in which the Labor Party leader Ehud Barak became prime minister, the Shinui list, headed by Yosef (“Tommy”) Lapid, won six of the ten seats taken by Meretz. In 2003 it won sixteen seats. SEE ALSO Lapid, Yosef (Tommy); MAPAM; Meretz Party; Movement for Civil Rights and Peace; Poraz, Avraham; Rubinstein, Amnon.

Shiqaqi, Fathi.

SHIN BET (Sherutei ha-Bitahon, in Hebrew): Israeli General Security Service. Succeeding Shai, the Haganah intelligence service, Shin Bet was created in June 1948 and is responsible for the internal security of the State of Israel. Also nicknamed Shabak, it has been shaken by scandals that have revealed the extreme methods its members use in dealing with Palestinians. In December 1980 its head quit after an investigation revealed that members of his organization had been implicated in anti-Arab attacks. In April 1984 two Shin Bet agents killed two Palestinians who had hijacked an Israeli bus, beating them with rocks. In 1995 an inquest into the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin uncovered many failings in the functioning of Shin Bet, leading to the resignation of a number of its leaders. The directors of Shin Bet have been: Isser Harel (1948–1953), Amos Manor

432

(1953–1963), Yosef Harmelin (1963–1974), Avraham Ahituv (1974–1981), Avraham Shalom (1981–1986), Yosef Harmelin (1986–1988), Jacob Peri (1988–1994), Karmi Gilon (1995–1996), Ami Ayalon (1996–2000), and Avraham Dichter (2000– ). SEE ALSO Haganah; Harel, Isser.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SHIQAQI, FATHI (1951–1995): Palestinian, born in the al-Shoura refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, where his family had sought shelter at the time of the 1948 War. Between 1974 and 1980, Fathi Shiqaqi was a student at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, and then in Egypt, where he earned degrees in medicine and mathematics. The Arab defeat in the 1967 War impelled him to join the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideas he disseminated, along with Abdulaziz Udeh, in the Palestinian community. In 1979, after the victory of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, he wrote a book in honor of the Ayatollah Khomeini (Khomeini: The Islamic Solution and Alternative), in which he advocated the application of Khomeini’s ideas to the Palestinian problem. He founded the alTaliEa al-Islamiyya association (Islamic Vanguard). In 1980 he was interrogated by the Egyptian authorities, who suspected him of planning an attack. The T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SNEH, EPHRAIM

following year, he left Egypt for the Gaza Strip, where he began practicing medicine. He quickly joined the ranks of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and became one of the principal leaders, along with Udeh. In 1983, with Munir Shafiq Asal, he created the Brigades of the Islamic Holy War. Imprisoned several times by Israeli authorities between 1984 and 1986, he was banished to Lebanon (together with Udeh) in August of 1988 and there established contacts with the pro-Iranian movements that were active in the country. He settled in Damascus, where he developed ties with leaders of the ShiEite movements. In 1990, after the founding of the Palestinian Hizbullah, he became editor of its press organ, AlMujahid. In November 1991, with Udeh, he formed a faction within the PIJ known as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad–Shiqaqi-Udeh Faction, which became the mainstream of that organization. In November 1993, opposing the Oslo Accords, his group became a member of the Alliance of Palestinian Forces, thereby joining the ranks of the Palestinian opposition. Between 1994 and 1995, his movement carried out a number of anti-Israeli attacks, but his authoritarianism provoked Udeh to resign. On 26 October 1995 he was assassinated by the Mossad in Malta as he was returning from a visit to Libya. SEE ALSO Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Bir Zeit University; Gaza Strip; Mossad; Muslim Brotherhood; Oslo Accords; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; West Bank. SHIRAA, AL-: An Arabic-language pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian weekly newspaper, started in Beirut in 1982. This newspaper was notable for revealing, in 1986, American arms deliveries to Iran (the IranContra scandal).

SHIRK: Arabic term indicating polytheism, the act of associating other divinities to God. This is considered the most serious sin in the Muslim religion.

SHOMAN, ABD

AL-HAMID (1888–1974): Palestinian banker, born in 1888 in Beit Hanina near Jerusalem. Shoman immigrated to the United States in 1911 and returned to Jerusalem in 1929. In 1930 he founded the Arab Bank, today one of the largest banks in the Arab world (with branches all over the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Europe). A conservative Palestinian nationalist, Shoman was an associate of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1930s, and was arrested twice by the British during the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. In 1948 Shoman moved to Amman, Jordan, where the bank is now headquartered. The Abd al-Hamid Shoman Foundation in Amman supports scientific research and some arts institutions in Jordan and the Arab world. Shoman’s son Abd al-Majid Shoman, who succeeded his father as chairman of the Arab Bank, was for at time the chairman of the Palestine National Fund of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). SEE ALSO Husayni, Hajj Amin al-; Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939); Palestine Liberation Organization.

SHULHAN ARUKH: Hebrew term designating the everyday precepts and practical commandments that every religious Jew must observe. SHURA (“council,” in Arabic): Arabic word designating the tradition of leaders consulting members of a community

SIAH (Israeli New Left; ha-Smol ha-Israeli he-Hadash in Hebrew): Israeli political movement, created at the beginning of 1969, uniting young leftists from different backgrounds. The Siah declared it was part of “the world movement of the new left, fighting against the political establishment, whether of the Capitalist West, or the Socialist East.” As of 2004, Siah has won no seats in the Knesset.

SINGLETON-HUTCHESON COMMISSION SHLOMZION: Israeli political bloc, created by Ariel Sharon in 1977 after he quit the Likud coalition. After winning two seats in the Knesset elections of May 1977, Shlomzion merged with Likud. SEE ALSO Likud; Sharon, Ariel.

SHOAH: Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe,” “destruction”; preferred by many Jews and Israelis over the more common Holocaust. Designates the genocide carried out on the Jewish diaspora population during World War II. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.

SIX-DAY WAR SEE

Arab-Israel War (1967).

SLA SEE

South Lebanon Army.

SNEH, EPHRAIM(1944– ): Israeli brigadier general and politician, born in Tel Aviv. Ephraim Sneh received

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

433

SOCIALIST ZIONIST PIONEER PARTY

his medical degree from Tel Aviv Medical School and served as a medical officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF). From 1978 to 1980 he commanded an elite IDF unit, and in 1981 commanded the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon. From 1985 to 1987 Sneh served as head of the civil administration in the West Bank. Elected to the Knesset in 1992 on the Labor Party list, he served as a member of the foreign affairs and defense committee. Sneh was minister of health from 1993 to 1996, and in 1999 was appointed deputy minister of defense. In March 2001 he was appointed minister of transportation, serving until 2002. In 2004 he was chair of the Knesset subcommittee on defense policy and planning SEE ALSO Israel Defense Force; Israel Labor Party; Knesset; West Bank.

SOCIALIST ZIONIST PIONEER PARTY SEE

Ahdut ha-Avodah.

SOURANI, RAJI (1953– ): Palestinian human rights lawyer and activist, born in Gaza in 1953. Attended schools in Gaza and Bethlehem; studied law at Beirut Arab University and Alexandria University, where he earned his law degree in 1977. As a lawyer in private practice until 1991, Sourani worked as a defender of Palestinians in Israeli military courts. During this time he was frequently harassed by the Israelis and was imprisoned by them several times between 1979 and 1982, suffering beatings and torture. He was director of the Gaza Center for Rights and Law from 1991 until 1995, when he called for an investigation of the security courts operated by the Palestinian Authority (PA), only to be was arrested by the PA and dismissed from his job. In 1995 he founded the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, of which he remains the director. One of the most prominent human rights advocates in the Middle East, Sourani works to promote democracy, the rule of law, and the principles of human rights both domestically and internationally. He continues to be a severe critic of Israeli policies and to document Israeli actions in the occupied territories, and has also been critical of the PA for its human rights abuses. Sourani has worked with the Palestine Human Rights Information Center and other human rights NGOs. He is a board member of the International Federation of Human Rights and a member of the International Commission of Jurists. He has received a number of awards for his work, including a Robert F. Kennedy prize in 1991 and a Bruno Kreisky prize in 2002. In 2003 Sourani was selected for a human rights fellowship by the

434

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Oak Institute at Colby College in Maine, but was denied a visa to enter the United States. SEE ALSO Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

SOUSS, IBRAHIM (1945– ): Palestinian writer and diplomat, born in August 1945 in Jerusalem. Souss studied in France and Britain and has degrees in political science and international relations. A former member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), he joined the ranks of al-Fatah in 1966. Six years later, while a student in Paris, he was president of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) in France. Between 1975 and 1980, he was a member of the Palestinian delegation to United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In August 1978, after the assassination of Izz al-Din Kalak, Souss became head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) offices in Paris. During the following year he participated in the creation of the France-Palestine Association. In June 1992, Leila Shahid replaced him at the head of the general delegation of Palestine in Paris. In 1998 he was appointed assistant director general of the United Nations agency the International Labor Organization (ILO), with responsibility for ILO activities in the Arab states. Souss married Diana Tawil, a sister of Suha Tawil, wife of Yasir Arafat and daughter of Raymonda Hawa Tawil. SEE ALSO General Union of Palestinian Students; Palestine Liberation Organization. SOUTH LEBANON: Area between the Litani River and the Israeli border, the site of political contention and violence since the 1948 War, when Palestinian refugee camps were established there. The Palestinian presence was politically destabilizing in Lebanon, whose politics is communally based. The refugees were largely sustained by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—little was done for them by the Lebanese government. Both Palestinians and Lebanese assumed that they would be returning home in the near future. Lebanon did not take part in the 1967 War, but the aftermath affected the country deeply. It became clear that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return home, and increasingly angry and politicized Palestinians turned to armed guerrilla activities carried on across the border by groups based in the camps. Their activities in turn tended to polarize the Lebanese, undermining government authority, particularly in the south. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SOUTH LEBANON

A December 1968 Israeli attack in Beirut in reprisal for an attack on an Israeli airliner in Athens by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was based in Lebanon, prompted a break between Lebanese supporters and opponents of the Palestinian resistance. In January 1969 a new coalition cabinet was formed that excluded right-wing Maronite parties. This government proclaimed its support for the Palestinian resistance while allowing the army and police organizations to take measures to repress political activity in the camps and reduce the activity of Palestinian guerrillas on Lebanese territory. Pressure brought by supporters of the Palestinians both inside Lebanon and in other Arab governments prompted negotiations, and in November accords were signed between the government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), establishing new legal relations between them. Palestinians now had the right to govern and police the camps themselves, to maintain military organizations in Lebanon, and to use them in the struggle against Israel. In effect, government ceded the Palestinians a kind of autonomous state within the state (often referred to as Fatahland.) Moreover, between the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, large numbers of Palestinians arrived in Lebanon, including many PLO fighters who had been expelled from Jordan in the wake of Black September 1970, further increasing polarization between Lebanese supporters and opponents of the Palestinians. The opponents, a coalition of Maronites, nationalists, and conservatives, objected to the violation of Lebanese sovereignty represented by the Cairo agreement and particularly feared the consequences of Palestinian guerrilla activity against Israel; they also opposed increased Muslim access to power. The government did almost nothing to provide security against Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory in the south, which were striking Lebanese— predominantly poor ShiEites in that area—as well as Palestinian targets indiscriminately. Tens of thousands of South Lebanese ShiEites migrated to Beirut to escape Israeli shelling, and little provision was made for them. Lebanon remained neutral in the October 1973 War; Maronite militias attacked the PLO and Palestinian civilians in South Lebanon. On 14 March 1978 the Israelis invaded and occupied Lebanon up to the Litani River in Operation Litani. On 19 March the UN Security Council passed Resolution 425, demanding an Israeli withdrawal “without delay” and providing for the creation of the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The Israeli army withdrew D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

gradually after creating the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a largely Maronite force, to act in its stead. On 18 April 1979 SLA commander Major Saad Haddad proclaimed the creation of the Free State of Lebanon, leading to confrontations between the SLA and the Phalange-dominated Lebanese Forces (LF) militia, as well as between these and armed Lebanese Muslim groups. Israel invaded Lebanon again on 6 June 1982 in Operation Peace for Galilee. After pushing through the UNIFIL lines, the Israeli army neutralized Syrian forces that were attempting to intervene. On 13 June, two days after the Israeli-Syrian ceasefire was concluded, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) joined with the Phalangist-dominated LF. The Israeli army undertook the siege of Beirut, where the Palestinians were dug in, backed by the Lebanese National Movement. Israeli presence on Lebanese soil prompted the emergence of a ShiEite resistance movement, the Hizbullah, which was based in the Bekáa Valley. A ceasefire was arranged by the United States, and a withdrawal of the PLO leadership and fighters to Tunis was arranged under the supervision of a Multinational Force; Israeli forces withdrew to the south. One of Israel’s goals was to ensure that Bashir Jumayyil, the Phalange leader and an asset of both the CIA and the Mossad, became president of Lebanon. Jumayyil was duly elected on 23 August. The Multinational Force left Beirut on 10 September. On 14 September Jumayyil was assassinated by pan-Syrian nationalists. Israel, in violation of the ceasefire, moved back to Beirut to secure the city for the Phalange. Two days later—on the grounds, according to Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, that there were “terrorists” inside—the IDF allowed the Phalangists to enter the adjacent Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps where from 16 to 18 September they slaughtered some 1,500 to 3,000 civilians. On 20 September the Multinational Force was redeployed to Beirut. On 21 September Amin Jumayyil, Bashir’s brother, was elected president, and at the end of September the Israelis left the city. In May 1983, under pressure from the United States, Jumayyil agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which was ratified by parliament. Opposition to this treaty among Lebanese and Syrians was so great, however, that Jumayyil felt obliged to refuse to sign it. The Syrians would not negotiate, and the Israelis, who had been protecting Jumayyil’s government from its factional enemies, withdrew their forces from the Shuf district southeast of Beirut, a largely Druze area held by the Phalange. Fighting broke out

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

435

SOUTH LEBANON

between the Phalange and the Druze militia directed by Walid Jumblatt, which had Palestinian and Syrian support, weakening the Phalange substantially in some of the biggest battles of the civil war. Israeli forces retired to South Lebanon, where, with the SLA, they remained in permanent occupation. On 15 January 1985 the government of Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres announced a phased withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon. Six months later the withdrawal began, except from a territory of 850 square kilometers that Israel called a “security zone” along the Israeli border. Subject to constant attacks from Hizbullah, this zone was patrolled by around 1,300 Israeli soldiers, backed up by 2,600 men of the SLA. The purpose of the occupation was to protect Israeli territory from Hizbullah attacks, but these were not deterred. The signing of the TaDif Accord in October 1989 and the developments of succeeding months ended the Lebanese Civil War but did not resolve the situation in South Lebanon. In April and May 1993, during the Middle East peace process begun at the Madrid Conference in 1991, the Israeli government proposed to Lebanese authorities that they define, in general terms, an acceptable peace accord, but there was no consensus in Lebanon in favor of a peace treaty with Israel as long as Israel occupied Lebanese territory and the Palestinian issue was unresolved. On 25 July 1993 Israel unleashed Operation Justice Is Done, targeting various Hizbullah positions. On 11 April 1996 Israel launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, a massive bombardment of South Lebanon, which led to the death of, among others, 103 Lebanese civilians killed when Israel shelled the camp of a UNIFIL unit where they had sought protection. After much negotiation and the intervention of several foreign leaders, a committee of surveillance of the ceasefire—made up of representatives of France, the United States, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel—was agreed upon. According to the terms of the arrangement, the belligerents promised to spare civilians on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli frontier and not to launch operations from inhabited areas. On 26 July the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, proposed to restart IsraeliSyrian negotiations on the basis of a “Lebanon first” option, which would involve an IDF withdrawal from South Lebanon. Netanyahu knew the Syrians would reject this, since they had already made it clear to his predecessor, Shimon Peres, that a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights was an absolute prerequisite for any agreement.

436

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

As expected, the Syrians demanded that negotiations be restarted from the point where they had been left the preceding February. For Syria, in control of the situation in Lebanon, the negotiations over South Lebanon were the only means at its disposal to pressure Israel for the restoration of the Golan Heights. On the other hand, the withdrawal of the Israeli army from South Lebanon was going to pose the question of the presence of 35,000 Syrian soldiers in Lebanon. (Syrian soldiers had entered Lebanon in May 1976 with the support of Jordan, Israel, France, and the United States, and were later authorized by the Arab League as the Arab Deterrent Force; their presence was no longer justifiable as an emergency measure.) In March 1998 the Israeli government renewed its proposal, based for the first time on the twenty-year-old UN Security Council Resolution 425 (which demanded Israeli withdrawal “without delay”), while adding one condition—that the Lebanese government oversee peace and security in this zone. The Lebanese authorities rejected the Israeli proposal, arguing that Resolution 425 was not negotiable. In May 1999 Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel on a promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, and in September he announced his commitment to do so before 7 July of the following year. On 17 April 2000 Israel informed the United Nations of its intention to withdraw and declared itself willing to cooperate with the United Nations in the matter. On 1 May the Israeli army started evacuating its main positions near Marjayun, which prompted many desertions from the SLA. Between 17 and 20 May, an intense artillery duel took place between Hizbullah and the IDF. The following day, a weakened SLA abandoned five villages on the edge of the security zone, which were immediately occupied by their former inhabitants and by Hizbullah. From 22 to 24 May 2000 Israel withdrew its troops from South Lebanon, leading to the disbanding of the SLA; 1,200 men affiliated with SLA sought refuge in Israel, along with their families. On 23 June, on the recommendation of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Security Council certified the withdrawal of Israeli forces behind the Blue Line. On 27 July 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1310, extending the mandate of UNIFIL, which was deployed along the Israeli frontier on 5 August. On 9 August, a Lebanese army force of 9,000 was stationed in South Lebanon for the first time in 22 years. The UNIFIL mandate has been extended every six months. Israel has not completely left Lebanese T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

STERN, ABRAHAM

territory; it still holds the Shebaa Farms area, which it claims is Syrian territory but which Lebanon and Syria agree is Lebanese. SEE ALSO Arab Deterrent Force; Arab-Israel War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Barak, Ehud; Black September 1970; Blue Line; Golan Heights; Hizbullah; Jumayyil, Amin; Jumayyil, Bashir; Jumblatt, Walid Kamal; League of Arab States; Lebanese Forces; Lebanese National Movement; Madrid Conference; Maronites; Mossad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Palestine Liberation Organization; Peres, Shimon; Phalange; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Resolution 425; Sabra and Shatila; Sharon, Ariel; Shebaa Farms; South Lebanon Army; United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

long as they had not received guarantees of their security. On 9 May, Lebanese prime minister Salim alHoss rejected Lahad’s request for amnesty for himself and his soldiers. By the time of the final Israeli withdrawal on 24 May, about half the SLA’s men and their families, including Lahad, chose to seek refuge in Israel. The remainder stayed in Lebanon, accepting thereby to be tried by Lebanese military justice (over 800 were sentenced to long terms in prison). On 5 August, the “blue helmets” of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon were deployed in the former South Lebanon security zone. SEE ALSO Barak, Ehud; Arab Deterrent Force; Hizbullah; Hoss, Salim, al-; United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon.

SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP SEE

Hawari Group.

SSNP SOUTH LEBANON ARMY: A Lebanese Maronite militia created, trained, and financed by Israel during its invasion of Lebanon in April 1978. It was commanded by Major Saad Haddad, a former Lebanese army officer. On behalf of Israel the South Lebanon Army (SLA) patrolled the border between Israel and Lebanon, keeping the Lebanese army and the Arab Deterrent Force out of the area. After Israel invaded Lebanon again on 6 June 1982 (“Operation Peace for Galilee”), the SLA operated as a part of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). An agreement was signed on 17 May 1983 between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, stipulating the creation of a “security zone” on the Lebanese side of the border, which remained under Israel’s control. The SLA remained deployed there at the insistence of Israel. In March 1984, after the death of Major Haddad, the Israelis recruited the retired Lebanese general Antoine Lahad to replace him. In this security zone, Israeli forces numbered around 1,400 soldiers and those of the SLA around 2,600 men, and an Israeli administration was set up. From 1985 on, South Lebanon became an area of frequent confrontation between the Lebanese Hizbullah on one side, and the IDF and SLA on the other, causing hundreds of deaths. In the mid-1990s the occupation of South Lebanon became a domestic political issue in Israel. Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in 1999 largely on a promise to withdraw Israeli forces. On 17 April 2000 the Israeli government informed the United Nations of its decision to withdraw its troops from South Lebanon before 7 July, causing unease in the SLA. Israeli leaders refused to disarm SLA soldiers as D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE

Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

STAMINA OPERATION: Code name for the retreat of the Israeli army from South Lebanon, realized between 22 and 25 May 2000. SEE ALSO South Lebanon.

STAR OF DAVID: Hexagram formed by two equilateral triangles opposed at their base and interlaced, figuring in blue on white background on the Israeli flag. This six-pointed star surfaced for the first time in a Kabbalistic text. In the sixteenth century, under the name “seal of Solomon,” it became the symbol of Judaism. It is called in Hebrew Magen David, or “David’s shield.” STERN, ABRAHAM (1907–1942): Jewish underground leader. Born in Poland, Abraham Stern migrated in 1924 to Mandatory Palestine, where he studied at the Hebrew University. He later began doctoral studies in Florence, Italy. Stern served in the Haganah beginning in 1929, then left in 1931 to form the Irgun ZvaDi LeDumi (IZL), through which he smuggled weapons into Palestine. He returned to Palestine in 1939, following publication of the British White Paper, to organize resistance to the British. In 1940 he left the Irgun in a dispute over ideology and tactics, forming a new group, Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or LEHI, which became known as the “Stern Gang.” LEHI carried out a campaign of anti-British propaganda and terror attacks. Abraham Stern was killed by members of the British Criminal Investigation Division (CID) on 12 February 1942.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

437

STERN GROUP

SEE ALSO Irgun; Lohamei Herut Yisrael; White Papers on Palestine.

STERN GROUP SEE

Lohamei Herut Yisrael.

SUBLIME PORTE: Name given traditionally to the headquarters of the Sultan’s government in Constantinople and designating, by extension, the Ottoman Empire.

SUEZ CANAL: Canal linking the Mediterranean Sea to

the Red Sea. It extends 101 miles from Port SaEid in the north to Suez in the south, and since 1870 has been one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes. Built between 1856 and 1869, it was the result of a plan initiated by former French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who convinced Egyptian viceroy Muhammad SaEid Pasha to grant the Suez Canal Company, incorporated as an Egyptian stock company with headquarters in Paris, the right to operate a maritime canal for ninety-nine years after completion of construction. Although shares were offered widely, 52 percent were bought by the French and nearly half the rest by SaEid Pasha. Some of the early construction work was done by Egyptian peasants forced to dig with picks and baskets; later it was taken over by European laborers with dredgers and steam shovels. The canal soon became a main route for steamships because it reduced travel and cargo transport time between Europe and East Africa, South Asia, China, Japan, and the East Indies, avoiding the long passage around the Cape of Good Hope. It was administered by the Suez Canal Company until nationalized by Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. The canal was closed from 1956 to 1957 and from 1967 to 1975 because of the Arab-Israel conflict, and until 1975, Egypt prevented its use by Israel or ships supplying Israel. At present it is especially important for transport of crude oil from the Persian Gulf, although some of the newest tankers are too large to use it except when empty. SEE ALSO Suez Crisis.

SUEZ CRISIS: One of the most serious international crises of the twentieth century, triggered by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. As the canal was under Egyptian sovereignty and compensation to its foreign shareholders was promised, this move was entirely legal. But Britain and France viewed it as a

438

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

blow to their prestige and political standing in the Middle East. A few days after Nasser’s announcement, they made plans for an invasion of Egypt to regain control of the canal, which were strongly opposed by the United States despite its agreement on the need to assure international access to it. On 2 August a Franco-Anglo-American statement reaffirmed the international character of the canal and invited its main users to a meeting. On 16 August, a conference opened in London, where American Secretary of State Foster Dulles proposed creating an international organization responsible for control and management of the Suez Canal. On 9 September President Nasser rejected the Dulles Plan, and his position was supported by the Soviet Union. Three days later, France and Great Britain, with the approval of the United States, created an association of users of the canal, which, on 15 September, Nasser declared he would not recognize. Four days later, a second conference opened in London. On 14 October 1956 the United Nations Security Council defined the right of passage through the Suez Canal. On 22 October, at Sèvres, France, there was a secret meeting of British, French and Israeli political and military leaders, which concluded with an agreement for a French-Israeli-British military alliance to retake control of the Suez Canal, after which France launched “Operation Musketeer.” The preceding April, France and Israel had signed an accord allowing Israel to obtain French arms. Although the British wanted to keep the Suez Crisis separate from the Arab-Israeli conflict, France wanted Israeli assistance and in fact wished to induce Israel to attack first; it therefore speeded up the delivery of these arms. On 29 October, the Israeli Army, under the leadership of General Moshe Dayan, started “Operation Kadesh” against Egypt. The 7th Armored Brigade routed the Egyptian forces, freeing access to the Suez Canal, and the Gaza Strip was rapidly brought under the control of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). By 1 November, the artillery support of the French-British forces had incapacitated the Egyptian Air Force. The next day, President Nasser decreed martial law and seized French and English assets on Egyptian soil. On 3 November the Egyptian Army sunk several ships, thereby blocking the Suez Canal. Syrian troops arrived in Jordan, while Israelis took over strategic Egyptian positions on the Gulf of Aqaba. On 5 November, Franco-British paratroopers descended on Port Said and Port Fuad and took control of the northern entry to the Suez Canal, allowing the expeditionary corps to begin establishing control over the whole length of the canal. At this point, SoT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SUNNA

viet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin gave an ultimatum to Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, demanding the immediate withdrawal of their troops from Egyptian soil. Under pressure from Washington and threats from Moscow, France, Great Britain and Israel accepted a cease-fire and agreed to withdraw. On 15 November, UN soldiers moved into the Sinai desert. On 22 December, the Franco-British forces completed their evacuation of Port Said. On 5 January 1957, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower presented his Middle East foreign policy, based essentially on economic aid and military assistance; but on 19 January, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, gathered in Cairo, rejected the Eisenhower Plan. On 21 January, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding the departure of Israeli troops from Egypt. Although Israel had hoped to hold on to the Gaza Strip and the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, heavy American pressure and the threat of UN sanctions moved Prime Minister David BenGurion to withdraw Israeli forces. On 6 March, the IDF evacuated the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh, making way for UN units. On 8 April 1957, the Suez Canal was reopened to maritime traffic. In July, the Soviet Union began delivering large quantities of arms to Egypt. On 21 August, 1958, the United Nations General Assembly, at the initiative of the member states of the Arab League, approved a resolution demanding that the Middle East be kept out of the quarrels between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Suez war is generally considered a major blunder on the part of Britain and France, for it led to the loss of their positions in the Middle East and marked the end of British and French colonialism, as well as increasing U.S. power in Middle Eastern affairs. Egyptian President Nasser, on the other hand, emerged as the uncontested leader of the Arab people. SEE ALSO Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Suez Canal.

Suez Crisis.

SUFISM SEE

Tasawwuf.

SUISSA, ELI (1956– ): Israeli politician. Born in Morocco in 1956, Eli Suissa migrated to Israel that same year. He received his rabbinical ordination from Yeshivat Kfar Hassidim and joined the SHAS Party shortly after it was founded. Suissa served as minister D I C T I O N A R Y

SULEIMAN, OMAR MAHMUD (1935– ): Egyptian military figure, born in 1935, in Cairo, Omar Suleiman began a career in the military in 1955. In 1978, he became head of the strategic planning section of the operational center of Egyptian armed forces. After earning a degree in political science, between 1986 and 1988 he was assistant director of the Egyptian Military Intelligence Department (MID). Appreciated by President Husni Mubarak, he was named director general of the MID in August 1989. General Ghayati replaced him in November of the following year. A few months later, Suleiman took over the leadership of the General Intelligence Service (GIS). In October 1993 there was talk he was being considered for the position of vice president of the Republic, or, if not, as special advisor to the presidency. Two years later, in November, he was named special advisor to President Mubarak, while continuing to head the GIS. From then on, Suleiman was in charge of sensitive dossiers, like that of the Israeli-Arab peace process, and that of the Palestinian question, while participating in the negotiations between Yemen and Eritrea in their dispute over the Hanish Islands. On 10 January 2001, in the context of the intensification of the al-Intifada in the Palestinian territories, he met with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet. In 2003 he met with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Premier Mahmud Abbas as part of a bid to broker a truce between radical militants and Israel. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Mubarak, Husni. SULTANATE: Mandate and jurisdiction of the sultan, a title born by sovereigns through a number of Muslim dynasties. From 1517, the Ottoman sultan of Istanbul also assumed the title and functions of the caliph, as spiritual and temporal head of Islam. SEE ALSO Caliph.

SUEZ WAR SEE

of the interior from 1996 until July 1999, served in rotation as minister of religious affairs, then as minister of national infrastructures from July 1999 until his resignation in July 2000. He was appointed minister without portfolio in March 2001, responsible for Jerusalem affairs.

O F

T H E

SUNNA: Arabic word meaning “the way” or “the path,” signifying Islamic tradition or custom. It refers to the ways and sayings of the prophet Muhammad, upon which laws, decisions, and judgments not deriving directly from the QurDan are based. These are collected and codified in the Hadith. SEE ALSO Hadith; QurDan.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

439

SUNNI ISLAM

SUNNI ISLAM: Follower of the majority branch of Islam, based on the sunna and the community consensus it aroused. Sunnis are those who recognize the legitimacy of the first four caliphs succeeding Muhammad, and adhere to one of the four juridical Sunni schools (madhhab): Hanafi, Malik, ShafiEi, and Hanbali. They make up about 85 percent of the world’s Muslims, and the ShiEa make up the remaining 15 percent. SEE ALSO Muhammad; Sunna.

SYKES-PICOT AGREEMENT: On 30 January 1916, an exchange of letters, started on 17 July 1915, between the British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, and the sheriff of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, came to light. From a perusal of this material it can be understood that Great Britain was committing itself to support the creation of an independent Arab state extending from Persia in the east to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the south, and to the Red Sea and Mediterranean in the west. On 29 November 1917, after the October Revolution took place in Russia, Leon Trotsky made public the contents of several diplomatic documents that had been secret until then, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Mark Sykes (for Great Britain) and Georges Picot (for France) had signed an agreement, ratified by Russia, in view of a partition of the Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany during World War I. According to this document France would be granted Cilicia and the region of Adana, the oil-rich region of Mosul (Iraq), a coastal strip of Lebanon-Syria, and the zone corresponding to present-day Syria. Great Britain would be granted Lower Mesopotamia and the territories east of the Jordan. Palestine would be internationalized, and the two ports of Saint-John of Acre and Haifa would revert to Great Britain. SEE ALSO Mecca.

SYNAGOGUE: From the Greek word sunagoge, meaning “meeting”; in Hebrew, Beth Knesset, meaning “assembly, house where people assemble.” With origins dating back to the sixth century B.C.E., this building served as a place for meeting, teaching, and prayer. It always points toward Jerusalem.

SYRIA: In the latter years of the Ottoman Empire, Syria was part of an administrative region that included Lebanon and Palestine (including western Jordan). In the last year of World War I, Greater

440

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Syria was occupied by forces commanded by Emir Faysal ibn Husayn al-Hashem, son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca and a leader of the British-sponsored Arab Revolt. Faysal was welcomed by the notables of Greater Syria, who were largely Arab nationalists, and was chosen by the National Assembly to be Syria’s king. France, which was awarded a League of Nations mandate over Syria (without Palestine) in the postwar peace settlement, occupied the country and expelled Faysal in July 1920 (he was later installed by the British as king of Iraq). The French detached an enlarged Lebanon from Greater Syria and created the current borders of Syria in 1924. After it adopted a constitution for a sovereign Syria in 1928, the French dissolved the National Assembly and imposed a constitution in 1930. After much public protest, an agreement was reached in 1936 to grant independence in 1939, but it was suspended and martial law imposed at the beginning of World War II. In June 1941, British and Free French forces captured Lebanon and Syria from the Vichy government, and the Free French, under political pressure, proclaimed the independence of both in November. After the war, however, France attempted to reimpose itself; but by then Syria had been allowed to join the United Nations, and France was persuaded to leave the country in 1946. Syria participated in the Arab-Israel War (1948) against Israel, sending one ill-prepared brigade into Galilee. Its failure contributed to the instability of the Syrian government. In March 1949 a coup d’état installed a military regime headed by Colonel Husni al-ZaEim, who was assassinated the next year in another coup. ZaEim was the first of five coup-installed leaders from 1949 to 1954, when a coalition of civilian parties and military officers took power and held a free parliamentary election with universal suffrage, the first in the Middle East. A centrist government was formed; under pressure from the public and from leftist groups such as the BaEth Party, the country’s largest, it legislated social reforms. Political tension led to the cancellation of elections in 1957. Syria was weak, unstable and vulnerable to outside threats, from the West and particularly from subversive actions of conservative and royalist Iraq, whose own stability was threatened by the existence of left-leaning Arab governments. The less radical faction of the BaEth was faced with the prospect of forming a government with either the conservatives or the communists. This faction promoted the idea of a federation between Syria and the larger, more populous and more powerful Egypt, then at the height of its Nasserist prestige in the Arab world. The T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SYRIA

National Assembly voted for union, and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was persuaded to accept, though on terms decidedly favorable to Egypt. The United Arab Republic (UAR) was created in February 1958, with Nasser as president and Cairo as its capital. Structured as a unitary state rather than a federation, it featured structural changes and policy measures that alienated politically important elements of Syrian society—landholders, the middle class, politicians, and the officer corps. Later changes to state structures such as abolition of local autonomy, and the planned unification of currencies, furthered centralized control, and government policies were based primarily on Egyptian conditions. Dissatisfaction grew, and there was growing talk of secession. In September 1961, Syrian army officers staged a coup d’état in Damascus and Nasser chose not to fight it. The UAR was dissolved in September 1961. There followed two years of extreme political tension among those advocating the maintenance of a nationalized economy, those favoring a mixed economy, and those advocating a return to the status quo ante. In March 1963 there was another BaEthist military coup by a group of officers led by Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Asad. Under this regime, the BaEthist government pursued socialist reforms at home and opposed conservative Arab governments abroad. Jadid became the regime’s leader in 1966, after three years of internal struggles. He confronted Israel over its Jordan River diversion project of the early 1960s, as well as Israel’s escalating attacks on Syria’s borders, which had been demilitarized under the armistice agreement of 1949. Jadid gave his support to the Palestinian guerrilla resistance groups that had begun to emerge, including al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA). These activities were critical in igniting the Arab-Israel War (1967). After the war, Jadid’s government established a BaEthist Palestinian group, al-SaEiqa, while continuing to assist the others. The failure of the Arab armies, and particularly the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, caused internal dissension within the regime between Jadid’s leftist faction and the nationalist faction led by Asad. When Jadid sent troops to assist the Palestinians in Jordan during Black September 1970, Asad, who was defense minister, refused to provide air cover. A power struggle followed, and in November 1970 Asad’s faction overthrew Jadid’s government and established the regime that remains in place today. It has followed a more conservative policy domestically, in pursuit of political stability, and has been more cautious and pragD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

matic abroad, while attempting to build Syria into a regional power. In 1972 Asad formed a BaEthist-led national coalition of nationalist parties. Syria participated in the Arab-Israel War (1973) against Israel, in collaboration with Anwar al-Sadat’s Egypt, in an attempt to recover occupied territory, some of which was regained in the disengagement agreement in 1974. In 1975 Syria and Jordan formed a joint command to coordinate their military and political activities against Israel. In late May 1976, after having attempted for months to mediate a settlement in the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), Asad sent Syrian troops to intervene, saving the Maronite-dominated government from defeat at the hands of a coalition of leftist Lebanese parties and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This move was opposed by Egypt and Iraq but supported by Jordan, Israel, France and the United States, and was later ratified by the League of Arab States. The Syrians then held the balance of power in Lebanon except for the south, largely controlled by the PLO (parts of it were known as “Fatahland”), where Israel and Israelibacked Christian militias continued to attack. The peace offensive by Sadat toward Israel in 1977 drove the Syrians closer to the PLO and away from the government side. Good relations with the PLO did not last after Israel, undeterred by Syria, invaded Lebanon in 1982 and forced the PLO’s expulsion. Syrian forces remained involved in the civil war to prevent Lebanon, or a potential breakaway Maronite state, from coming under the control of Israel, and to prevent leftist groups from gaining control and forming an alliance with Iraq. Syria still keeps approximately 25,000 troops in Lebanon. When Asad intervened in Lebanon on the Christian side, Islamic groups in Syria, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which were already hostile to the secular-oriented BaEth and the Alawis who dominated it, began a campaign of violent opposition, including acts of terrorism and assassinations. It lasted several years, surviving brutal repression, until in 1982 Asad sent in the special forces to put an end to a state of virtual rebellion in the cities of Aleppo and Hama. Ambushed in Hama, the army attacked the city with full force, including tanks and artillery. The regime regained control after the killing of an estimated 10– 20,000 people (and 1,000 soldiers) and the destruction of much of the city. After Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem in 1977, Syria became a member of the Rejection Front [2]. After the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty of 1979, Asad worked to make Syria militarily equal to Israel, supplied by

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

441

SYRIACS

the Soviet Union. In the Iran-Iraq War of 1980– 1988, Syria supported Iran, cutting the Iraqi oil pipeline running through Syria and receiving oil from Iran in return, as well as financial support from Saudi Arabia. In 1990, during the crisis that led to the Gulf War of 1991, Asad attempted to persuade Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait; he then joined the anti-Iraq coalition led by the United States, sending troops to Saudi Arabia. In October 1991 Syria agreed to participate in the Madrid Conference on the condition that Israel agree to discuss the Golan Heights in bilateral negotiations afterward. The Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1994–2000 achieved nothing. In June 2000 Asad died. He was succeeded by his son Bashshar al-Asad, who lifted the state of emergency that had been in effect since 1963 and otherwise liberalized Syrian public life, though he has governed cautiously since. He has been less inclined to interfere in Lebanon and has followed his father’s policies of not directly confronting Israel and not offending the United States. Syria maintains good relations with Iran and continues to support the Lebanese Hizbullah, a major Lebanese religious movement/militia/political party, regarded by Washington as a terrorist organization. Since the September 2001 attacks on the United States, Syria has cooperated with Washington on intelligence matters. Syria voted to approve the November 2002 UN Security Council resolution demanding that Iraq meet its obligation to allow continued weapons inspections, but opposed the American war in Iraq in 2003. Syrian relations with Israel have been frozen since the failure of the Oslo Accords II negotiations and the radicalization of Israeli and American policies toward the Palestinians. SEE ALSO Alawite; Arab-Israel War (1948); ArabIsrael War (1967); Arab-Israel War (1973); Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; Fatah, al-; Black September 1970; Golan Heights; Gulf War (1991); Hizbullah; Hussein, Saddam; Iran-Iraq War; Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (1994–2000); Madrid Conference; Maronite; Muslim Brotherhood; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Oslo Accords II; Palestine Liberation Army; Palestine Liberation Organization; Rejection Front [2]; Sadat, Anwar al-; SaEiqa, al-; United Arab Republic.

SYRIACS: Also known as Assyrians; there are communities of Syriacs in Palestine, in Syria, and in a worldwide diaspora. The Syriac Orthodox Church, whose patriarch resides in Jerusalem, is said to have been founded by Thomas the Apostle in 33 C.E. There is

442

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

also a Syriac Catholic Church affiliated, like the Maronite Catholic Church, with the Roman Catholic Church. The Syriac (or Assyrian-Aramaic) language is used in the liturgy of all three churches.

SYRIAN SOCIAL NATIONALIST PARTY (SSNP; in Ara-

bic, al-Hizb a—Suri al-Qawmi al-Ijtima Ei): Syrian socialist political party. Under the name Parti Populaire Syrien (Syrian Popular Party), a name that is still in use, the SSNP was created in November 1932 by Antun SaEada, a Maronite Christian, during the French Mandate in Beirut. The SSNP was a panSyrian party whose ideology and organization owed much to contemporary European fascism. It opposed both the independence of Lebanon from Syria and pan-Arab nationalism, advocating instead “the rise of the Syrian nation” within its “natural” borders. SaEada’s conception of “Syria” included the traditional area of Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham)— Syria, Lebanon, western Jordan, and Palestine—as well as eastern Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, part of Iran, part of Turkey, the Sinai Peninsula, and Cyprus. As a party of secular nationalism, it counted members of all ideologies. Between 1935 and 1937 many were arrested, prompting others to leave Lebanon. Legally authorized in April 1944, the SSNP was at that time led by Nehmé Tabet, aided by Fayez Sayegh; but after two years of exile in Brazil, SaEada returned to Lebanon in 1947 and retook the leadership of the party, moving it toward confrontation with the Lebanese government. After an attack on the party by the Phalange in 1949, SaEada attempted an armed rebellion that led to the arrest of hundreds of party members. SaEada fled to Syria, but was betrayed by Syrian president General Husni al-ZaEim who handed him over to Lebanese authorities; he was executed by them on 8 July 1949. ZaEim’s betrayal provoked a coup d’état in Syria on 14 August, removing the general from power. The SSNP, which had particpated in the overthrow, moved its headquarters to Damascus under the leadership of Georges Abdul Massih, and nine of its members were elected to the Syrian parliament. Between 1950 and 1958, the party increased its activities in Lebanon, opposing the Communists and Arab nationalists. On 22 April 1955 a SSNP member assassinated the Syrian assistant chief-of-staff, BaEthist Adnan Malki; this resulted in Syria banning the party and expelling its members from the country. In 1961, the SSNP participated in an attempted coup d’état in Lebanon and was declared illegal in T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

SYRIAN SOCIAL NATIONALIST PARTY

that country as well, but by 1970 the party had been reinstated in Lebanon, and Abdallah SaEada was elected to its head. During the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) the SSNP split into factions. One of these, headed by InEam Raad, tried to combine a form of Marxism with the semi-fascist SNP ideology; this group joined the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), an alliance of leftist secularist groups. Two more factions sufaced in 1984: one was pro-Syrian and led by Isam

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Mahayri, the second was pro-Libyan and headed by Daud Baz. The parliamentary block of the SSNP proposed the abolition of confessionalism in Lebanon in 1992, and supported Islamic resistance against the Israeli presence in South Lebanon. On 5 August 2001, for the first time in 47 years, the SSNP organized a public meeting in Damascus, presided over by its secretary general Jubran Arbadji. SEE ALSO

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

Phalange.

C O N F L I C T

443

T TAGAR (“challenge”, in Hebrew): International Zionist organization for students on university campuses, founded in 1983 as an expansion of the Betar Zionist Youth Movement. Its original aim was to counter anti-Israel propaganda during the Lebanon war. Today this, along with fostering a positive image of Israel and strengthening links among Israeli youth, are its main objectives. Among other activities it offers tours to Israel and opportunities for students to spend time volunteering there. SEE ALSO Betar.

TADIF ACCORD: Agreement among factions that led to the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). In May 1989 the Arab League sponsored a tripartite commission composed of the heads of state of Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Morocco to resolve the civil war in Lebanon, which had lasted almost fifteen years. In July the commission made several proposals that were rejected out of hand by Syria. In September the commission asked representatives of the various factions remaining in the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies (last elected in 1972) to meet in TaDif, Saudi Arabia, to discuss its proposals. After a month of negotiations, a compromise agreement, the National Unity Charter, known as the TaDif Accord, was signed on 22 October. The accord stipulated reducing the powers of the Lebanese president in favor of the prime minister,

who would become executive head of government, and the Council of Ministers (cabinet); and increasing the number of seats in Parliament (to 128 from 99) with equal proportions of Christians and Muslims. (Seats had previously been apportioned based on the fiction of a Christian majority. Lebanon is now approximately 70–75 percent Muslim.) The presidency would still be reserved for a Christian and the prime ministry for a Sunni Muslim. The sectarian basis of Lebanese politics was left unchanged. The accord also provided for disarming the sectarian militias as soon as a new president was elected and ratified the presence in Lebanon of the Syrian Army, whose 1976 mandate from the Arab League had expired in 1982, after several extensions. The text of the accord, in spite of the opposition of the so-called “interim president,” General Michel Aoun, was ratified by the Lebanese Parliament on 5 November 1989. On 4 November 1989 the parliament elected Rene Muawad president; he was assassinated on 22 November. On 24 November Ilyas al-Hrawi was elected, and a new national unity government was installed in December 1989. In August 1990 the parliament amended the constitution according to the provisions of the accord. The TaDif Accord allowed the Lebanese to have a duly elected president again, after a gap of more than a year, and to begin to isolate the factions that wished to prolong the war. Aoun’s forces continued to oppose the settlement until October, when, during the crisis lead-

445

TAKFIR WA AL-HIJRA, AL-

ing to the Gulf War of 1991, the Syrian army defeated them. More than 25,000 Syrian troops remain in Lebanon, and no Lebanese government initiative can take place without Syrian approval. SEE ALSO Aoun, Michel; Arab League; Gulf War (1991).

TAKFIR WA AL-HIJRA, AL-: Egyptian Islamicist movement (“Condemnation and Migration” in English), founded at the end of the 1960s by Ahmad Shukri Mustafa, then in prison. Mustafa was inspired by the writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a radical Islamicist and propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideas he shared. This organization became known in July 1977 when it kidnapped and murdered an Islamic moderate and former Egyptian minister of the Waqf, Muhammad al-Dhahabi. In March 1978, four hundred members of the group were arrested, and five leaders, including Mustafa, were hanged. SEE ALSO Muslim Brotherhood; Waqf. TALAEI AL-FATAH SEE

Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

TALAEI AL-ISLAMIYYA, SEE

AL-

Shiqaqi, Fathi.

TALAL, HUSSEIN IBN SEE

Hussein ibn Talal.

TALAL IBN ABDULLAH (1909–1972; King of Jordan, 1951–1952): Talal was the son of King Abdullah I ibn Hussein of Jordan, and acceded to power when Abdullah was assassinated in July 1951. During his brief reign he promulgated a constitution for Jordan that provided for a partly-elected legislature and restrictions on the power of the monarch. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, he was deposed in August 1952 (with his acquiescence) in favor of his 17-year-old son Hussein ibn Talal, who had been groomed for the throne by his grandfather. Talal lived out the remainder of his life in a sanatorium in Turkey. SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein; Hussein ibn Talal. TALMUD: Rabbinical work, constituted of the ensemble of Torah commentaries, written (Mishnah) and oral (Gemora). This is a veritable reading manual of Torah, in which sometimes diverging views may be expressed. There are two versions of the Talmud: the

446

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Palestinian, so-called of Jerusalem, and the more important one, from Babylonia. The author of the Mishnah, Juda Hanassi (second century C.E.), ignored the apocalyptic traditions of the Torah, keeping only the commandments. This written compilation attracted a number of commentaries, which were assembled to create the Gemora. The Talmud proclaims three interdictions that must never be infringed, even at the cost of one’s life: incest, idolatry, and murder. SEE ALSO Torah.

TAMI (Movement for the Traditions of Israel, in

Hebrew Tnu Dat Masoret Israel): Name of an Israeli political group, arisen from a splinter in 1981, in the National Religious Party. Founded by Aharon Abuhatzeira, TAMI attracted Sephardim, while benefiting from the financial support of the wealthy Swiss banker Nissim Gaon. As a result of the elections of June 1981, this party won three Knesset seats. The following year, TAMI was weakened by a corruption scandal involving its principal leader, Abuhatzeira, former minister of religious affairs. In 1983, TAMI Knesset Members backed, successfully, the candidacy of Laborite Chaim Herzog to the post of president of the State of Israel. In October 1983, TAMI joined the rightist government of Yitzhak Shamir, obtaining the portfolio of labor, taken by Aharon Uzan. In March 1984 the leadership of the party decided to withdraw its support from the Shamir government, anticipating the results of the next scheduled elections, in which the Labor Party won 44 seats against 41 for Likud. As a result of this ballot, nevertheless, TAMI obtained only one seat, filled by Abuhatzeira. Four years later, just before the elections of November 1988, the latter rejoined Likud, leading to the disappearance of TAMI from the Israeli political arena. SEE ALSO Abuhatzeira, Aharon; National Religious Party; Shamir, Yitzhak.

TAMIR, YAEEL (1954– ): Israeli scholar and politician.

YaEel (Yuli) Tamir was born in Israel in 1954 and received her doctoral degree from Oxford University. A professor of political philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Hartman Institute of Jewish Studies, she is the author of numerous books and articles on various subjects, including liberalism, feminism, and nationalism. Tamir was also one of the founders of the Peace Now movement. From 1980 to 1985 she was an active member of the RATZ Party and since 1995 a member of the Labor T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TAWHID AL-ISLAMI, HARAKAT AL-

Party. Tamir served as minister of immigrant absorption from August 1999 to March 2001. SEE ALSO

Peace Now.

SEE ALSO Abdallah II ibn Hussein; Hassan of Jordan; Kabariti, Abdul Karim; Majali, Abd alSalam; Rawabdeh, Abd al-Rawuf al-.

TASAWWUF: Literally, “becoming a sufi”; the way of TANZIM,

AL-:

“Organization” (plural: tanzimat). A loosely organized network of groups of Palestinian militants in the Occupied Territories who surfaced in the first Intifada (1987–1993) and continue to be active in the al-Aqsa Intifada. It is said to have been run by Mustafa Barghuthi until his arrest in 2003. Information about the tanzim is limited and contested, and it is said that there are tanzimat for each of the PLO factions. The best-known is probably the alAqsa Martyrs Brigade, associated with al-Fatah. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Barghuthi, Mustafa; Fatah, al-; Intifada (1987–1993).

TARAWNEH, FAYIZ AL- (1949–): Jordanian political figure born in 1949 in Amman. Al-Tarawneh was the son of Ahmad al-Tarawneh, who held a number of ministerial posts in Jordanian governments. Educated in the United States, with a degree in economics, al-Tarawneh became assistant to the chief of protocol at the Jordanian royal court in 1971. Between 1980 and 1984, he was secretary to the prime minister, then became advisor for economic affairs. In January 1988, he was named minister for presidential affairs of the Jordanian council. In December of that year he became supply minister, a post that he kept until the fall of the RifaEi government in April 1989. After concentrating on business affairs for a few years, al-Tarawneh was named Jordanian ambassador to the United States in December 1992. In this capacity, he participated in Israeli-Jordanian peace negotiations and in multilateral consultations on the Israeli-Arab peace process, becoming one of the main crafters of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994. On 19 March 1997, al-Tarawneh was named foreign minister in the government of Abd al-Salam Majali. On 17 February 1998, during a reshuffling of the cabinet, he was appointed chief of the royal court of King Hussein. On 19 August he was named prime minister, replacing Majali, three days after Hussein delegated the regency to Prince Hassan. On 1 March 1999, three days after the accession of King Abdallah II ibn Hussein, al-Tarawneh resigned, replaced by Abd al-Rawuf al-Rawabdeh. In January 2000, he was again appointed chief of the royal court, replacing Abdul Karim Kabariti. In 2004 he was relieved of this post and appointed by the king to the Jordanian Senate. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

being of the spiritual and ethical ideals implied in the body of ascetic and mystical rules of the sufi Muslim orders; often rendered in English as “sufism.” The word “sufi” comes from the Arabic suf, “wool,” from the traditional ascetic clothing worn by holy men in the Arab world. Tasawwuf developed in Islam in the seventh century, inspired by the nightly vigils in a cave of the Prophet Muhammad, and by the contemplative practice of Christian hermits. The sufis established themselves in Al-Kufa, then Basra, and finally Baghdad, which became the movement’s center in the second half of the ninth century. After the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, Cordoba became a center of mysticism, notably under Muhyi al-Din ibn Arabi. The sufis are organized in orders (tariqas), of which some, like the Qadiriyya or the Naqshbandiyya, have disciples on several continents. The great sufi orders have been and are still politically and religiously significant. They include: the Suhrawardiya; the Naqshbandiyya; the Kubrawiya; the Khalwatiya; the Tidjaniya; the Mawlawiya (whose members are known as the whirling dervishes); the Alawiya; the Bektashiya; the Jazuliya; the Muridiya;, the Qadiriya; the Rahmaniya; the Rifaiya; the Shadhiliya; the Shaykhiya; the Darqawiya; the Idrishiya; and the Sanusiya.

TAWHID AL-ISLAMI, HARAKAT AL-: Lebanese Sunni Islamicist group (“Islamic Unity Movement” in English), formed from the unification of three smaller groups in 1982 in Tripoli by Shaykh Said al-Shaaban (1928–1998). Shaaban had studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo where he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He taught in Algeria, Iraq and Morocco. During the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) this group supported the Lebanese National Movement (LNM)–Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) alliance and remains a supporter of the Palestinian cause. It controlled Tripoli in 1983–1985, imposing its version of sharia, or Islamic law, but was ousted after a violent fight with the Syrians and their Lebanese allies in November 1985. Many of its members were imprisoned in Syria and were released only gradually through 2000. In recent years al-Tawhid, now led by Shaaban’s son Bilal, has grown close to the Syrians. SEE ALSO Azhar, al-; Lebanese National Movement; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestine Liberation Organization; Sunni Islam.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

447

TAWIL, RAYMONDA HAWA

TAWIL, RAYMONDA HAWA (1939–): Palestinian journalist, born in 1939 into a Greek Orthodox family at Acre. Following the Arab defeat in the Arab-Israel War (1967), she decided to devote herself to the Pal-

448

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

estinian cause. In 1978, with journalist Ibrahim Karain, Tawil created the Palestine Press Service in Jerusalem, which, besides its newsgathering activities, provided Palestinian stringers for foreign news T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TEL AVIV

TEL AVIV. ISRAEL’S SECOND-LARGEST CITY, LOCATED ON THE MEDITERRANEAN COAST, BOASTS A POPULATION OF MORE THAN 400,000. FOUNDED IN 1909 BY EARLY ZIONIST SETTLERS IN PALESTINE, TEL AVIV WAS THE FIRST CAPITAL OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL, FROM 1948 TO 1950. IT MERGED WITH THE MUCH OLDER CITY OF JAFFA IN 1950, BECOMING TEL AVIV–JAFFA. (© Royalty-Free/Corbis)

organizations. In September 1979, she published a book, My Country, My Prison, which won the Mamud Hamshari prize the following year, awarded by the Franco-Arab Solidarity Association. In 1983, with Ibrahim Karain, she brought out a new magazine in Jerusalem, al-Awdah (The Return). For many years Raymonda Tawil was harassed by the Israeli administration, and was put under house arrest several times. In November 1991, her daughter Suha married Yasir Arafat. Tawil and Suha now live in Paris. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad.

TEKUMAH PARTY (Resurrection or renaissance, in Hebrew): Small religious-Zionist political party, a faction of the National Union party. It was formed from the parliamentary group Emunim that had been established toward the end of the Fourteenth Knesset by MKs Zvi Hendel and Hanan Porat, who had left the National Religious Party; Uri Ariel, the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

chairman of the movement; Yaakov Katz; Benny Katzover; and others. It joined forces with Herut and Moldet to form the National Union (Ihud haLe’umi) list for the 1999 Knesset elections, but continued to exist independently and ran in the 2003 Jerusalem municipal elections. The main difference between Herut and Tekumah is the religious orientation of the latter. Tekumah strongly supports Jewish settlement activity and, anticipating the possibility of future compromise with Palestinians, in September 2004 it took part in a campaign to make policemen and soldiers aware that they are permitted not to “take part in the uprooting of Jews from their homes.” SEE ALSO National Union.

TEL AVIV: A coastal city founded in Ottoman Palestine in 1909. As Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, they found it difficult to find affordable homes in the overcrowded residential areas of Jerusalem and Jaffa. Ahuzat Bayit, the build-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

449

TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY

ing society, purchased beachfront property and underwrote the construction of Tel Aviv’s first houses in 1909. Initially planned as a residential suburb of Jaffa, Tel Aviv expanded rapidly. By 1935 the population had grown from 2,000 (in 1909) to 120,000, and the city included businesses, factories, and the headquarters of Histradut, the umbrella trade union organization. In 1948 David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s statehood at a meeting held in the Tel Aviv Museum. In 1950 Jaffa was incorporated with Tel Aviv into the twin city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. The population of central Tel Aviv reached 350,000 by the early twenty-first century, but the population of greater Tel Aviv, with its sprawling suburbs and outskirts, was 2.5 million.

TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY: The largest university in Israel, Tel Aviv University was founded in 1956, when the Tel Aviv School of Law merged with the Institute of Natural Sciences and the Institute of Jewish Studies. The university offers programs in the arts and sciences within nine faculties: engineering, exact sciences, humanities, law, life sciences, management, medicine, social services, and visual and performing arts. It also houses ninety research institutes. The university includes in its mission a commitment to social concerns and to the peace process. In 2002 it enrolled approximately 26,000 students.

TELEM EMANA: Israeli religious political party, founded in April 1996, by Rabbi Yosef Azran, a dissident from the ultra-orthodox SHAS Party, former deputy minister of finance in 1988, and deputy speaker of the Knesset in 1992. Sephardi in observance, with ideas close to Likud, this group was formed in anticipation of the Knesset elections of May 1996, as a result of which it obtained no seats.

TEMPLE MOUNT SEE

Haram al-Sharif.

TEMPLE MOUNT FAITHFUL: Israeli extremist religious movement, founded in 1967 (and still headed) by Gershon Salomon. Its objectives are to liberate the Temple Mount in Jerusalem from Islamic occupation; to remove what it views as “pagan shrines,” which it suggests should be relocated to Mecca; to consecrate the Temple Mount so that it can become the moral and spiritual center of the Jewish people as the chosen people of God; to built the Third Temple (the Temple of Solomon) in accordance with the words of the Hebrew prophets; to make Jerusalem the undivided capital of the State of Israel; to “reject

450

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

false ‘peace talks’ which will result in the dividing of Israel and the breaking of God’s covenant”; and to support the settlements in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights, which it considers holy because “God commanded the people of Israel to settle the land completely.” According to this group, “Israel is not permitted to give any of this land to any group for any purpose since the land is a grant to Israel from God Himself. Any division of the Land and the giving of it to another people represents a breach of the Covenant with God.” In 1990, a violent confrontation between the group and Muslims at Temple Mount led to a confrontation with Israeli police, which left twenty-one Muslims dead. The group has at various times attempted to lay a cornerstone for the Third Temple, but has been prevented from doing so by Israeli police because of the likelihood that riots would be provoked. This issue was taken all the way to Israel’s Supreme Court, which in 2001 allowed the stone to be moved temporarily to the gates of the site but ruled that in the interests of religious peace, it could not be placed on the Temple Mount itself. The group, though small, conducts marches and demonstrations when permitted to do so and has received a good deal of publicity. SEE ALSO Haram al-Sharif.

TEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL PRESENCE

IN

HEBRON

(TIPH): A United Nations civilian observer mission stationed in the city of Hebron, in the West Bank, charged with “monitor[ing] and report[ing] on misconduct by either side in the conflict. TIPH is not allowed to intervene directly in incidents and has no military or police functions.” Personnel are supplied by Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. TIPH was first deployed in May 1994 after the murder of twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in the Ibrahim Mosque by an American-Israeli settler in February. It was withdrawn in August when the Israeli and Palestinian authorities could not agree on an extension of its mandate. A second, provisional, mission was established in May 1996 pending the IDF’s withdrawal, and a new accord of 15 January 1997 provided for a full-scale mission with 180 members. This mission was deployed that February and remains in place. Its mandate is renewed every six months. SEE ALSO Hebron; West Bank.

TENUAT HA-TEHIYAH SEE

T H E

Ha-Tehiyah.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

THIRD WAY

SUICIDE BOMBING. ISRAELI POLICE AND PARAMEDICS WORK AT THE SCENE OF AN EXPLOSION IN APRIL 2002, AT A BUS STOP NEXT TO A CROWDED DELIBERATE ACTS OF TERRORISM AGAINST CIVILIAN POPULATIONS HAVE INCREASED DRAMATICALLY DURING THE SECOND INTIFADA. (AP/Wide World Photos)

OUTDOOR MARKET IN JERUSALEM.

TERRORISM: Violence against civilians for the purpose of intimidation, revenge for perceived grievances, or the achievement of political goals. No definition of terrorism exists in international law. The application of the term to a violent and sometimes spectacular act is subject to debate because persons who perform such acts claim justification by invoking their right to defend themselves against an identifiable oppressor. There are often no objective criteria by which to determine whether a given act constitutes terrorism or legitimate resistance. For example, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has been perceived by Israelis and by most of the world as a terrorist group, whereas it sees itself as an idealistic national liberation movement and was so viewed by allies such as the Soviet Union. Attempts have been made to establish international conventions that criminalize intentional violence against civilians whether a government or a nonstate group is responsible; but major nations, including both Israel and the United States, insist that the defiD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

nition of terrorism must be limited to nonstate groups that target civilians. Whether or not a consensus is ever reached on what constitutes terrorism, violent acts perceived by their victims as terrorism are likely to continue.

THABITUN ALA AL-MABDA, AL-: “Those Constant for the Principle,” an Islamist faction that appeared within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC) in 1994. SEE ALSO Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. THIRD WAY (ha-Derekh ha-Shlishlit, in Hebrew): Israeli political party, created on 13 February 1996, anticipating the Knesset elections for the following May. In fact, this group had been in existence since 1994, as a radical current within the Labor Party, headed by Avigdor Kahalani, Yehuda Harel, and Emanuel Zissman. Presenting itself at this time as a forum for reflection, this movement expressed its

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

451

THUNDERBOLT

support for the peace process, under the condition that Israel maintained its control over the Occupied Territories. In January 1995, a “council” was formed within the movement, uniting many figures on the left and in the center, so as to promote the proposition of a referendum on the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. In the context of an eventual peace accord with Syria, Third Way favored keeping Israeli control over the Jewish villages that had been established in the Golan, as well as over water sources, and also a security line on the heights. As a result of the elections of 29 May 1996, Third Way won four seats, and its leader, Kahalani, was named internal security minister in the government led by the head of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu. For the scheduled general elections of May 1999, the party did not succeed in constituting an electoral list; and most of its members threw their support to the new Center Party, headed by Yitzhak Mordechai, which allowed this bloc to obtain six seats. Not presenting itself at the elections, the Third Way disappeared from the Israeli political scene. SEE ALSO Center Party; Golan Heights; Israel Labor Party; Kahalani, Avigdor; Netanyahu, Benjamin.

THUNDERBOLT SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

Peace and Equality and the Arab Democratic Party (ADP). After this project fell through, he changed the name of his movement to “Arab Alliance for Progress and Renewal,” hoping, in vain, to obtain the support of the ADP and the Islamists. On 21 May of the same year he decided to withdraw his candidacy from the elections, calling on his supporters to vote for the Israeli Labor Party. In February 1999, he resigned his functions as advisor to Yasir Arafat to present himself as a candidate at the scheduled Israeli elections in May, on the list constituted by Azmi Bishara, the Democratic National Alliance, known as “Balad.” In that election, in which Laborite Ehud Barak was voted in as prime minister, Balad obtained two seats, which were allotted to Bishara and Tibi. In 2002 Bishara and Tibi were barred from running in the next election on the grounds that they had “supported terrorists” by denouncing the Israeli assault on Jenin that spring. The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban shortly before the election in January 2003. Both Tibi and Bishara were reelected to the Knesset. SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Arab Movement for Change; Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Barak, Ehud; Bishara, Azmi; Democratic Front for Peace and Equality; Democratic National Alliance; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Israelis; Rabin, Yitzhak; Tawil, Raymonda Hawa; Weizman, Ezer.

TIBI, AHMAD (1958–): Palestinian Israeli political figure, born in 1958 at Taibeh, near Tel Aviv. A medical doctor, with a degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ahmad Tibi had very good relations with a number of Israeli personages, including former president Ezer Weizman. He developed into an important intermediary between the Israeli leaders and the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, whom he came to know in 1984, through Raymonda Hawa Tawil, a prominent Palestinian journalist (and Arafat’s future mother-inlaw). In September 1993, in the context of the Oslo Accords signed in Washington that month, he became a special advisor to Arafat. In June of 1994, on the advice of an advisor to the Israeli government, Michael Ben Yair, according to whom contacts with a representative of the PLO were prohibited, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, decided to stop using Tibi as a liaison. In March, 1996, anticipating Israeli general elections scheduled for the following May, he founded the Arab Movement for Change (AMC). With ambitions to become one of the leaders of the Palestinian Israeli camp, he envisaged constituting a common electoral list with the Democratic Front for

452

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

TIKVA (ha Tikva, hope, in Hebrew): Israeli political bloc essentially for immigrants from Ethiopia. Founded in January 1999 in anticipation of elections scheduled for the following May, this party proposed defending the interests of the Ethiopian community, which was badly integrated into Israeli society. Its founder, Ephraim Yona, is a former Likud militant. Tikva secured no Knesset seats in the 1999 or 2001 elections and did not run in 2003. SEE ALSO Knesset; Likud. TIPH Temporary International Presence in Hebron.

SEE

TLAS, MUSTAFA (Abu Firas; 1932– ): Syrian general, born in May 1932 at Rastan. In 1952, Mustafa Tlas started on a military career, joining the same unit as his later friend, Hafiz al-Asad. In December 1959, both were part of a group of officers attached to the Egyptian army, as part of the attempted integration T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TUFAYLI, SUBHI ALI AL-

of the United Arab Republic (UAR). They stayed in Egypt until September 1961, when the UAR was dissolved. The shunting aside of the BaEthists by the Syrian government relegated them to subordinate positions. In April 1962, as members of a BaEthist underground committee, they participated in the “free officers” rebellion, demanding the resumption of the alliance with Egypt. Arrested and imprisoned, they were freed on 8 March 1963, after the BaEth Party took over the government in a coup d’état. Rejoining the Syrian army, Mustafa Tlas was assigned to the military tribunal of Homs. Between 1964 and 1966 he was in command of the Fifth Armored Division in this city. In February 1968, Tlas was promoted to general, and named army chief of staff and defense vice minister, the defense minister being Hafiz al-Asad. A member of the military committee of BaEth, headed by Asad, Tlas supported the latter in his differences with the civil committee of the party. On 13 November 1970, he participated in the coup that put Asad in power. On 22 March 1971, when the latter had been elected president of the Republic, Tlas was named defense minister. Tlas played a significant role in the rapprochement between Syria and Jordan. On 13 May 1972, with his Soviet counterpart, he signed an important accord for military cooperation between the Soviet Union and Syria. In January 1978, he was named lieutenant general, a rank that had not existed until then in the Syrian army. In November 1983, when Asad was ill, he was among those to whom the latter entrusted the government in the interim, and also preventing the president’s brother RifEat al-Asad from trying to seize power. In September 1984, Tlas became vice prime minister, responsible for defense. Since the death of Hafiz al-Asad, Mustafa Tlas has remained one of the main supports of the Syrian regime, someone on whom the new president, Bashshar al-Asad, relies. On 7 March 2000, he was named vice prime minister and defense minister in the government of Muhammad Miro. In 1983 Tlas published a book called The Matzo of Zion, a work founded on the classic Christian “blood libel” against the Jews. SEE ALSO Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-; BaEth; United Arab Republic.

cient texts relating to the Exodus to Sinai. The Torah consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Ancient Jewish translations of these books into Greek were the basis of the Christian Old Testament, and are referred to as the Pentateuch (Law of Moses), which is a collection of five texts: Genesis (Bereshit, in Hebrew), Exodus (Shemot), Leviticus (Vayiqr Da), Numbers (Bamidbar) and Deuteronomy (Devarim). Modern Hebrew versions of the Torah exist both as a printed book within the larger printed Hebrew Bible and as a handwritten scroll used in synagogue rituals. Although some ultra-Orthodox rabbinic sages regard the Torah as being older than the creation of the world, a representation of the principle at the heart of reality, most modern Jewish scholars view it in the light of European intellectual traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some interpret it not as a set of laws demanding obedience but as an expression of unchanging moral and ethical values. Others perceive it as the record of profound personal religious experiences. For the majority, it embodies the unique Jewish spiritual and cultural experience as it has developed through the ages. The Torah is the foundation of religious and historical Judaism, its fundamental affirmation being the oneness of God. Thus the study of the Torah remains a powerful unifying force in world Jewry. Many Orthodox Jews interpret the Torah (especially Genesis 15 and 17) as containing pledges and commandments amounting to a covenant between God and the Jewish people, as descendants of Abraham, including God’s promise of the Holy Land to the Jews. SEE ALSO Bible; Moses; Talmud.

TORAH (Tora, Thora; “doctrine”, in Hebrew): The book of Jewish scripture on which religious law (Halakhah) is based. According to Jewish tradition the Torah was given by God himself to the Jewish people through the intermediary Moses. Scholars, however, believe that it is an assembly of diverse an-

TUFAYLI, SUBHI ALI AL- (1948– ): Lebanese ShiEite religious leader, born in Brital in the Beqaa Valley. Tufayli studied theology in Najaf, Iraq, between 1965 and 1972, and briefly in Qom, Iran. A member of the al-DaEwa Party, he returned to Lebanon to teach. In June 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon,

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

TORAH FRONT SEE

United Torah Judaism Party.

TRANSJORDAN SEE

Jordan.

TSAHAL SEE

Israel Defense Force.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

453

TUFAYLI, SUBHI ALI AL-

TORAH. A JEW AT THE WESTERN WALL IN JERUSALEM TOUCHES HIS PRAYER SHAWL TO THE TORAH. BELIEVED BY JEWS TO BE THE LAW GIVEN GOD TO MOSES FOR THE JEWISH PEOPLE, IT CONSISTS OF THE PENTATEUCH, OR FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, COMPRISING GENESIS, EXODUS, LEVITICUS, NUMBERS, AND DEUTERONOMY; AND, IN A BROADER SENSE, ALL THE INTERPRETATIONS OF SCRIPTURE COLLECTIVELY CALLED THE MIDRASH. (© Paul A. Souders/Corbis)

BY

he joined the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) who had been sent from Iran, becoming one of their principal figures. In February 1985 he was named head of Hizbullah for the Beqaa. As president of the movement’s military commission he was in charge of coordinating operations in Lebanon with Tehran. He advocated radical policies towards the West and was believed to be involved in planning the attacks and kidnappings of Westerners that Hizbullah carried out in Lebanon. In 1986, backed by EAbbas alMussawi, he headed the mainstream of Hizbullah, facing a challenge from a faction led by Hasan Nasrallah. On 21 November 1988 he escaped a car-bomb assassination attempt. On 12 November 1989 he spoke out against the TaDif Accord, which had been signed a few days earlier. On 26 November he was named secretary general of Hizbullah, a post that had just been created. From this time on, his disagreements with the spiritual mentor of the movement, Muhammad Fa-

454

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

dlallah, as well as with Hasan Nasrallah, started to become more serious and sometimes translated into bloody confrontations between their respective partisans. On 29 March 1990 he escaped a second assassination attempt. In May 1991 he was removed from the leadership of Hizbullah and replaced by Abbas al-Mussawi. After al-Mussawi’s death in February 1992, Nasrallah became secretary-general of the movement. Thereafter, Tufayli affirmed the necessity of continuing the fight against Israel, even if Israel withdrew from South Lebanon, but he opposed the policy of integrating Hizbullah into Lebanese political life for fear that it would lead to the disappearance of the movement. In November 1993 he became head of the Union of Muslim Ulamas (TajamuE al-EUlama al-Muslimin) of the Beqaa, hoping to turn this movement into a party capable of competing with Hizbullah. Denouncing the Lebanese government’s lack of any real social policy, on 4 July 1997 he launched the “revolt of the hungry” (ThaT H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TZOMET PARTY

wrat al-JaEan), calling on inhabitants of the Beqaa not to pay their taxes.

party won two seats, taken by Rafael Eitan and Yoach Tziddon.

Confronted by this internal opposition, the leadership of Hizbullah gradually shunted him aside, succeeding despite a number of demonstrations that he organized in his support. On 23 January 1998 Tufayli was expelled from Hizbullah. Shortly afterward the Lebanese army, with the approval of Syria, moved on Tufayli. Bloody confrontations took place between his supporters and the army, in the course of which Khodr Tlays, a deputy partial to Tufayli, was killed. Tufayli sought refuge in his fief of Brital. Since then, his stock of arms has been seized and his radio station destroyed; he is under observation by government security forces, who have occasionally threatened to arrest him, and his following has shrunk; he has engaged in very little public activity.

Between June 1990 and December 1991, Eitan was minister of agriculture in the government of Yitzhak Shamir, becoming outspoken in favor of Jewish settlements. The leader of Tzomet resigned from the Shamir government after the latter agreed to participate in negotiations with the Palestinians. In June 1992, in spite of the electoral defeat of the Israel right, Tzomet obtained eight seats in the Knesset. A poll indicated that more than 17 percent of army conscripts voted for this party. Parleys were arranged to discuss an eventual entrance of Tzomet into the government of the Laborite Yitzhak Rabin. Meretz threatened to withdraw from the governmental coalition, and Rabin renounced this plan. In February 1994, a split in the party, prompted by Gonen Segev, who criticized the authoritarianism of the head of Tzomet, gave rise to a new grouping, Yad. Thereby Tzomet lost three seats. In February 1996, anticipating elections for the following May, Tzomet presented a common list with Likud, with Benjamin Netanyahu at the top of it. On the following 7 March, the Gesher Party joined the TzometLikud alliance, with Eitan accepting third position on the party list, behind Netanyahu and David Levy. After the ballot, Tzomet had won 5 seats, with the Likud-Gesher-Tzomet parliamentary bloc obtaining 32 seats of the 120 in the Knesset. On the following 18 June, two Tzomet members joined the Netanyahu government: Rafael Eitan (as deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture and the environment) and Moshe Peled (as deputy minister of education). During their term in office, while the government seemed to be on verge of making progress in the negotiations with the Palestinians, ministers Eitan and Peled were adamant in their opposition to any concessions to the latter. In January 1999, after he announced a month earlier his candidacy for the post of prime minister, Eitan abandoned this idea. On the following 17 May, having obtained no seats in the scheduled general elections, Tzomet disappeared from the Israeli political scene.

SEE ALSO Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn; Hizbullah; Nasrallah, Hasan; Pasdaran; TaDif Accords.

TZOMET PARTY (Junction; Movement for the Zionist Renaissance, in Hebrew): Ultranationalist Israeli party, founded in October 1983 by General Rafael Eitan (called Raful), former army chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) for the Operation Peace for Galilee. Partisan of the ideology of Greater Israel, this party was on the extreme right of the Israeli political spectrum. Shortly after it was created, Tzomet allied with ha-Tehiyah, but very rapidly there was discord between the leaders of the two groups, prompting a separation. For the election campaign of 1988, which took place in the shadow of the first Intifada, Tzomet presented the following platform: (1) No land currently under Israel sovereignty will be returned; (2) The solution to the Palestinian problem is to be found on the other side of the Jordan; (3) Israeli jurisdiction must extend to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; (4) the creation of an Israeli constitution; modification of the electoral law so as to make the Jewish deputies more representative; active Arab representation in the Israeli administration; reduction of the role of the state; (5) separation of religion and the state. As a result of the vote, this

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

SEE ALSO Gesher “Bridge” Party; Greater Israel; Ha-Tehiyah; Rabin, Yitzhak; Shamir, Yitzhak.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

455

U UIA SEE

UMM (Om): Arabic word meaning “mother of.” Universal Israelite Alliance.

UMMA: Arabic term for the Muslim community. UJA SEE

United Jewish Appeal.

ULAMA SEE

Alim.

ULEMA SEE

Alim.

ULPAN: Absorption center; where new Jewish immigrants are taught basic Hebrew language and the rudiments of life in their new Israeli homeland. ULTRA-ORTHODOX: Jewish religious faction affirming the strict and literal application of Biblical law. This faction includes religious extremists who are hostile to the state of Israel because, believing that Jews should have waited for the Messiah to proclaim it, they see it as a secular abomination. In accordance with their interpretation of strict Halakhah, some are hostile to those who recognize the state and work and lobby for its governance, and some believe that all the occupied territories should be retained in fulfillment of what they understand as God’s promise. SEE ALSO Chabad; Lubavitcher Hasidim; Neturei Karta; Satmar.

UMMA AL-ARABIYYA, AL-: Arab term originally designating the whole Arab community; it has become an Arabic intellectual concept suggesting a unity of values, traditions, history, and language. Great Britain had attempted to use the idea of a “Great Middle East Arab State” as a means to weaken the Ottoman Empire, but Arab unity became a mobilizing regional political theme at the end of World War I when the oil needs of France, the United States, and Great Britain preferred a lack of unity among the Arab states. This in turn led to the rise of a new feeling of national identity in the Arab community, al-Umma al-Arabiyya. SEE ALSO Umma.

UMM JIHAD SEE

Wazir, Intisar al-.

UMRA: Arab word designating the “lesser pilgrimage” made by Muslims to Mecca. Umra can occur at anytime of the year except during the period of the “great pilgrimage” (hajj). During Umra, the pilgrim is exempted from certain obligations, but is not excused from making the “great pilgrimage.” SEE ALSO Hajj.

457

UNIATE CHURCHES

UNIATE CHURCHES: A group of Eastern-rite churches that broke from the Greek (or Eastern) Orthodox Church and affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. These churches accept Roman Catholic doctrine and acknowledge the primacy of the Roman Catholic pope, but retain their own customs and forms of hierarchy and liturgy. Uniate churches include the Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Chaldean Catholic and Greek Catholic Churches, which affiliated with Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Maronite Catholic Church, which affiliated with Rome in 1182.

UNIFIED NATIONAL LEADERSHIP OF THE UPRISING (UNLU) SEE

Intifada (1987–1993).

UNIFIED TORAH LIST SEE

Unified Torah Judaism Party.

UNITED ARAB LIST (al-LaEiha al-Arabiyya alMuwahhada, in Arabic; Ha-Reshimah Ha-Aravit Ha-Me’uhedet, in Hebrew): Israeli electoral alliance formed in September 1993 in anticipation of municipal elections and uniting a number of Israeli Arab candidates of diverse views under the leadership of Abed Quseibi. In April 1996, in preparation for the Knesset elections of 29 May, when for the first time Knesset members and the prime minister were to be elected on separate ballots, the list was reconstituted under the impetus of Abdulmalik Dehamshe. On it were joined the Israeli Islamic Movement, to which Dahamshe belonged, and the Arab Democratic Party of Abdul Wahab Darawshe. The list won four deputy seats in the Knesset, which were taken by Darawshe, Talib al-Sanaa, Tawfiq Khatib, and Dehamshe, the first Islamist ever to sit in the Knesset. On 18 May 1999, following the general elections, which saw the victory of the Labor Party’s leader, Ehud Barak, the United Arab List consolidated its position by winning five seats, two of which went to the Israeli Islamic Movement. Before 2001, the United Arab List generally supported the Labor Party, which officially advocates a peace accord with the Palestinians. In the February 2001 election for prime minister, faced with a choice between the incumbent, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon of Likud, the leadership recommended abstention. In the Knesset elections of 2001, United Arab List won five seats; in the 2003 elections, two seats. The United Arab List favors the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and the dismantling of all Israeli settlements. Within Israel it fa-

458

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

vors full civil rights for Palestinian Israelis, making Israel a “state of all its citizens.” SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party; Barak, Ehud; Darawshe, Abdul Wahab; Dehamshe, Abdulmalik; Gaza Strip; Israeli Islamic Movement; Israel Labor Party; Likud; Sharon, Ariel; West Bank.

UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC (UAR): After the Suez Crisis and Egypt’s successful defiance of the imperial West, Egypt’s prestige and that of its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, were extremely high in the Arab world. In Syria, which was weak, politically unstable, and vulnerable to outside threats from the West and particularly from the subversive actions of conservative and royalist Iraq, whose own stability was threatened by the existence of left-leaning Arab governments. The idea of a federation between the two countries appealed to many, particularly the socialist, panArabist BaEth Party, which was the country’s largest party; other elements favored it as a way to prevent leftists, such as the left wing of the BaEth, from getting into power. The Syrian National Assembly called for union with the larger, more populous and more powerful Egypt; Nasser eventually agreed, but only on strict conditions. As a result, the United Arab Republic was proclaimed on 1 February 1958 and confirmed in a referendum on 21 February. It was structured as a unified state, not a federation; its capital was Cairo; its leader was Nasser; and it had a oneparty political system. The military was unified under Egyptian command, with Syrian officers in subordinate positions, and banks, major industries, and large landholdings were nationalized. In 1960 the National Assembly was dissolved and replaced with a new, appointive body. In March 1958, Nasser also formed a union between Egypt and Yemen, called the United Arab States. The same month the UAR was formed, as a conservative counterweight, King Hussein of Jordan and his cousin King Faysal II of Iraq announced a federation of their kingdoms, the Arab Union. It failed five months later when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Faysal was assassinated. After the revolution in Iraq, Nasser held discussions with the new regime about joining the UAR, but nothing came of them. The American decision to send troops to Lebanon during the 1958 civil war there was, in part, a response to these developments. Nasser’s structural changes and policy measures alienated politically important elements of the Syrian population: the landholders, the middle class, the politicians, and the officer corps. Later changes to T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

UNITED NATIONS INTERIM FORCE IN LEBANON

state structures, such as abolition of local autonomy and the planned unification of currencies, furthered centralized control, and government policies were based primarily on Egyptian conditions. Dissatisfaction and resentment grew—there was a feeling that, rather than union, the UAR was more like an Egyptian occupation—and there was growing talk of secession. In September 1961 Syrian army officers staged a coup d’état in Damascus, and Nasser decided not to fight it. On 28 September Syria withdrew from the UAR. In December Nasser ended the union with Yemen, which had had no more success than the Syrian experiment. Egypt continued to use the name United Arab Republic until 1971, after Nasser’s death. SEE ALSO Hussein ibn Talal; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Suez Crisis.

UNITED HEBREW RESISTANCE SEE

Irgun; Lohamei Herut Yisrael.

UNITED JEWISH APPEAL: The primary organization through which U.S. Jews support Jews in other parts of the world. The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was founded in 1939, when the United Palestine Appeal merged with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the National Refugee Service. Most of the funds raised by the UJA go to the United Israel Appeal, which operates through the Jewish Agency in Israel. In 1999 the UJA, the United Israel Appeal, and the Council of Jewish Federations merged to form the United Jewish Communities, which that year was reported to have raised $524 million. UNITED NATIONS EMERGENCY FORCE (UNEF): Military force created on 7 November 1956 by the UN General Assembly following the Suez-Sinai War of 1956, to allow the evacuation of Israeli, French, and British troops from Egyptian territory. Composed of 6,000 men, commanded by Canadian General E.L.M. Burns headquartered in Ballah, this force operated on the Egyptian side of the Egyptian-Israeli frontier of 1949. On 19 May 1967, at the request of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, the UNEF evacuated from Egyptian territory a few weeks before the start of the 1967 War. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1967); Nasser, Gamal Abdul; Suez Crisis. UNITED NATIONS EMERGENCY FORCE II (UNEF II): Military Force created on 25 October 1973 by UN Security Council Resolution 340 following the D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Arab-Israel War that started on 6 October 1973, to allow the Israelis to evacuate the Suez Canal zone and the Sinai. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973).

UNITED NATIONS INTERIM FORCE IN LEBANON (UNIFIL): Military unit created in 1978 by the United Nations to restore peace in Lebanon. Under Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426, adopted on 19 March 1978 following the invasion of South Lebanon by Israel, UNIFIL was given a mandate to confirm the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restore international peace and security, and assist the government of Lebanon in assuring the return of its effective authority in the area. The mandate has been extended every six months since then, most recently by Security Council Resolution 1553 of 29 July 2004. UNIFIL was deployed over an area of 680 km with around 400,000 inhabitants. Since March 1978, when Israel occupied South Lebanon, UNIFIL has been a powerless witness of the nonobservance of various UN resolutions. It was “shoved aside” in May 1982 by Israeli forces, engaged in Operation “Peace in Galilee.” The Israeli army occupied a “security zone” of around 850 km in South Lebanon after its partial retreat of 1985. A UNIFIL post at Qana was bombarded by Israeli artillery, on 18 April 1996 during Operation “Grapes of Wrath,” causing over a hundred deaths among the Lebanese refugees that were under UNIFIL protection. On 27 July 2000, a month after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from South Lebanon, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1310, renewing the mandate while calling on the government of Lebanon to proceed with the deployment of a significant number of Lebanese armed forces as soon as possible. On 30 January 2001, in Resolution 1337, it reduced the number of UNIFIL troops from 5,800 to 4,500, thereby signifying disapproval of the Lebanese government, which did not seem in a hurry to reestablish its authority over the area vacated by the IDF. This resolution also expressed concern about the violation of the withdrawal line set by the UN and urged both parties to fulfill the commitments they had made to respect it. Subsequent resolutions have continued to express such concern, reduce troops, and emphasize the interim nature of UNIFIL. On 31 August 2004 UNIFIL had a force of 1995 troops, representing seven different countries, assisted by some 50 military observers from United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) and a civilian staff of over 400. In resolution 1559, adopted on 2 September 2004, the Security Council

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

459

UNITED NATIONS RELIEF AND WORKS AGENCY FOR PALESTINE REFUGEES IN THE NEAR EAST

declared that it was “gravely concerned” at the continued presence of armed militias in Lebanon that prevented the Lebanese government from exercising full sovereignty over it territory, and called for their disbanding and disarmament. It also declared its support for a “free and fair electoral process” in Lebanon’s upcoming presidential election. SEE ALSO United Nations Truce Supervision Organization.

UNITED NATIONS RELIEF AND WORKS AGENCY FOR PALESTINE REFUGEES IN THE NEAR EAST (UNRWA): Relief and development agency of the United Nations, created by General Assembly Resolution 302 of 8 December 1949. UNRWA was created in the aftermath of the 1948 War to provide social services and emergency aid to Palestinian refugees for what was imagined to be a temporary period. Its mandate has been extended repeatedly. It runs the Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan; it provides schooling, health care, and other social services to over four million registered refugees. It is the UN’s largest operation in the Middle East, and its staff of more than 25,000 is made up largely of refugees. Funding comes almost entirely from voluntary contributions from governments and the European Union, rather than from UN assessments. Some statistics give an idea of the scope of UNRWA’s operations. The 59 camps it runs contain 663 schools, covering the first through the ninth grades, plus five secondary schools in Lebanon, with a total enrollment of 491,978, half of whom are girls, and a total staff of 15,814. They also contain eight vocational and technical training centers, with an enrollment of 5,131. The agency’s 122 primary health care facilities have a staff of 3,642; medical and dental patient visits and consultations totaled 8,829,639 between July 2003 and June 2004. UNRWA also operates 64 women’s program centers and 37 community rehabilitation centers. Between the 1991–1992 fiscal year and 30 June 2004, the agency funded 5,398 poverty alleviation projects and made 76,668 small enterprise loans with a total value of $85,442,882 U.S. The total budget for 2003–2004 was $350,968,000 U.S. The al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in September 2000, has brought violence, curfews, and closures in the Occupied Territories, and imposed heavy new demands on the UNRWA’s services. The agency estimates that more than 50 percent of the population is without work, and that between 50 percent and 60 percent live with an income of less than $2 U.S. per

460

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

day. The United Nations estimates that almost two million Palestinians, 62 percent of the population, have inadequate access to food, shelter, or health services. In 2002 a U.S. Agency for International Development study reported that malnutrition and anemia had increased among Palestinian children to emergency levels. The UNRWA has increased its food aid, feeding almost 220,000 families in the West Bank and Gaza in 2004. The agency has also assisted thousands of refugees whose homes have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli military operations, and it is rebuilding the Jenin and Rafah refugee camps. Increases in the demand for health services have been comparable. Schooling has been radically disrupted in many areas, with teachers and students often unable to reach their schools. To cover these increased needs, the agency has made several emergency appeals for additional funds since 2001, and has also cut back on services; schoolbooks and materials, for instance, are no longer provided free of charge. These appeals have not been as successful as the agency had hoped, and the agency is experiencing serious financial problems. The UNRWA has been controversial, however, at least among supporters of Israel. As evidence that it is not “neutral” or “unbiased” but “anti-Israel”— indeed “pro-terrorist”—detractors have cited the facts that the agency supports people in the camps on the assumption that they have a right to return (an assumption the United Nations supports), rather than inducing them to disperse to other Arab states; that the agency employs Palestinians; and that the agency has criticized Israeli attacks on the camps. They argue that violent resistance groups have recruited and trained in the camps. Critics have also accused UNRWA of being complicit with corrupt Palestinian officials who have stolen food and medicine from the agency and sold them on the black market. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Gaza Strip; Resolution 302; Right of Return; West Bank.

UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL COMMISSION

ON

IRAQ

(UNSCOM): Agency of the United Nations, created by Security Council Resolution 687 of 3 April 1991, following the Gulf War of 1991, to oversee the elimination of Iraq’s non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers (57.92 miles), and to assist the International Atomic Energy Agency in eliminating nuclear weapons development programs. Its mandate was to carry out inspections, take possession of T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

UNTSO

weapons or materials, and destroy them or render them harmless. With a great deal of resistance from Iraq, the passage of a number of additional Security Council resolutions, and U.S. interference in the process, UNSCOM carried out its mandate, a fact it was able to confirm only after the occupation of Iraq by the United States and Britain during the Iraq War of 2003. SEE ALSO Gulf War (1991); Iraq War (2003).

UNITED NATIONS TION (UNTSO): A

TRUCE SUPERVISION ORGANIZA-

peacekeeping operation originally established in May 1948 to assist the United Nations Mediator and the Truce Commission in supervising the observance of the truce in Palestine. Since then, it has been given additional assignments in the Middle East; UNTSO military observers remain in various areas to monitor ceasefires, supervise armistice agreements, prevent isolated incidents from escalating and assist other UN peacekeeping operations. Among its tasks have been supervision of the General Armistice Agreements of 1949, and observation of the ceasefire in the Suez Canal area and the Golan Heights following the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. At present, UNTSO assists and cooperates with the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) on the Golan Heights in the Israel-Syria sector, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the Israel-Lebanon sector. UNTSO is also present in the Egypt-Israel sector in the Sinai. It maintains offices in Beirut and Damascus. As of 31 August 2004 its staff consisted of 153 military observers from 23 different nations, supported by 89 international civilian personnel and 121 local civilians. SEE ALSO United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

UNITED TORAH JUDAISM PARTY (Yahadut ha-Torah; also known as United Torah List): Israeli parliamentary bloc formed in 1973 by an alliance between several ultra-orthodox religious group, such as Degel ha-Torah, PoEalei Agudat Israel and Agudat Israel. After winning five seats in the Knesset, this bloc enabled the religious parties to remain unavoidable partners in Israeli political life, a phenomenon well established in Israel’s long history of coalition governments. Confronted with divergences among its members, United Torah Judaism brought them together on the single issue of respect for the status quo by signing an agreement in 1948 between the Israeli government and the religious movements. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

On 30 May 1996 the bloc won four seats in the Knesset—occupied by Meir Porush and Shmuel Halpert for Agudat Israel, and Avraham Ravitz and Moshe Gaoni for Degel ha-Torah. Three years later the bloc was renamed United Torah List, and won five seats in the general elections of 17 May 1999, which gave victory to Labor Party leader Ehud Barak. A few weeks later, United Torah List agreed to support the Barak government in exchange for lowering the quota of orthodox students in the army, but on the following 5 September, United Torah List quit the coalition government of Ehud Barak. After the election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in mid-March 2001, United Torah List refused to join a national unity government judging that the posts it was offered were insufficient, but did agree to support it in the Knesset. Led by Avraham Ravitz, United Torah List often joined SHAS, Moriah, and the National Religious Party (NRP) in a bloc known as the Torah Front. In the 2003 elections, United Torah List received 4.3 percent of the vote (five Knesset seats). SEE ALSO Agudat Israel; Barak, Ehud; Degel haTorah; Knesset; Moriah; National Religious Party; PoEalei Agudat Israel; Sharon, Ariel; SHAS.

UNIVERSAL ISRAELITE ALLIANCE: Jewish organization founded in Paris on 17 May 1860 for the purpose of opening up Judaism to the world. The statement its originators made that day was meant to be understood in the tradition of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (and of the Citizen), and aimed at organizing Judaism on a universal basis, by dissociating the individual citizen from the individual member of any specific community. UNLU SEE

Intifada (1987–1993).

UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

SEE

UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission on Iraq.

SEE

UNTSO United Nations Truce Supervision Organization.

SEE

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

461

V VAEAD LEU’MI: Hebrew for National Council; constituted in Tel Aviv in April 1918 to function as a provisional government for the Jewish community of Palestine. It answered to an elected assembly, the “Assefat ha-Nivrharim,” and had jurisdiction over spheres of internal communal interest until 1948. It functioned along with the Zionist Executive, which was responsible for political relations with the British Mandate authorities.

VENICE SUMMIT: In a general declaration of principles released at the European summit, meeting in Venice on 13 June 1980, the member countries of the Community affirmed that the Palestinian people should be able to exercise their right to selfdetermination, and that their representative, the Palestine Liberation Organization, should be associated with the Middle East peace process.

VANGUARD OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR OF LIBERATION

VISHNITZ: Great Hasidic dynasty, founded by Menachem Mendel Ben Hayyim Hager (1830–1884); became one of the basic elements of the Agudat Israel Party. SEE ALSO Agudat Israel.

SEE

SaEiqa, al-.

VANGUARDS OF THE CONQUEST SEE

Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

VARASH (Va’ad Rashei Ha Sherutim, the Committee of the Chiefs of Services): Coordinating commission for Israeli security services. Varash is responsible for coordinating the activities of Israel’s three main intelligence services: military intelligence (Agaf Modi’in, or Aman); the Mossad (HaMossad LeModi’in U’LeTafkidim Meyuhadim, Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks); and the General Security Service (GSS). Mossad and the GSS operate under the auspices of the prime minister’s office, and coordinate intelligence gathering and assessment with Aman through Varash. SEE ALSO Aman; Mossad.

VOICE OF PALESTINE (VOP; Sawt al-Filastin): The official radio broadcasting service of the Palestinian Authority (PA), operated by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) from stations in Ramallah and Gaza. The current operation was created in 1994 with the establishment of the PA. Previously the Palestine Liberation Organization had operated a Voice of Palestine radio service in other Arab countries from facilities made available to it by local governments. It operated in Cairo until 1970, when it was shut down by President Gamal Abdel Nasser; it has also operated from Baghdad and Beirut. Israel

463

VOICE OF PALESTINE

has accused the Voice of Palestine of “inciting violence.” In 1997 the Israeli government began jamming VOP broadcasts. On 13 December 2001, during the al-Aqsa Intifada, Israel bombed the PBC radio and television transmitter in Ramallah. On 19 January 2002 it blew up the building housing its offices and studios. Both the VOP and the other PBC

464

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

stations continued to broadcast from borrowed commercial facilities in the West Bank. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority; Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation; West Bank.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

W WAFA: Palestine News Agency (Wakalat al-AnbaD al-Filastiniya; WAFA is both an acronym and a word meaning “trust”), the official news outlet of the Palestine Liberation Organization, created in 1972 in Beirut. After 1982, following the expulsion of the Palestinians from Lebanon to Tunisia, its headquarters was in Tunis. On 20 July 1994, with the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the agency moved to the Gaza Strip. SEE ALSO Gaza Strip; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestinian Authority.

WAFD: In November 1918, at the end of World War I, the Egyptian Legislative Assembly charged a delegation (wafd), led by SaEd Zaghlul, with demanding of the British high commissioner that they be allowed to petition the British government for Egyptian independence. The high commissioner’s refusal led to the formation of a coalition to agitate for independence. Some of the group’s leaders were expelled. Widespread demonstrations and uprisings in 1919 led the British to grant nominal independence in 1922; the Wafd organized itself as a nationalist political party in 1924 and dominated Egyptian political life until the fall of the monarchy in 1952. In December 1922, King Fu’ad, needing the backing of the party to promulgate a new constitution, drew close to the Wafd, which continued nevertheless to demand an end to the British occupation. In January

1924 the party won the legislative elections and Zaghlul formed the first constitutional government of Egypt. The new prime minister soon clashed with the king, who wanted to retain all his prerogatives. Following the assassination of the British commander of the Egyptian army and under pressure from the British, Zaghlul resigned on 24 November 1924. Out of power for nine years, the Wafd returned to the government in November 1934 through the initiative of the British who, threatened by Italian designs on the Red Sea, needed a strong Egyptian government behind them. Negotiations led by Mustafa alNahhas (known as Nahhas Pasha), the successor to Zaghlul, who had died in 1927, resulted in a treaty, signed on 26 August 1936, in which Great Britain recognized the independence of Egypt. After Nahhas resigned as prime minister, a scission in the party led to the creation, on 3 January 1938, of the SaEdist party. On 4 February 1942, in the midst of World War II, Britain forced a Wafdist anti-German government on King Faruk. After the victory of his party in the legislative elections, Nahhas returned to power in January 1950. The Wafd remained at the head of the government until the revolution of July 1952, which saw the fall of the Egyptian monarch. The new regime, put into place by the Free Officers movement, suspended the constitution and dissolved all political

465

WAHHABIS

parties, including the Wafd. Twenty-five years later, on 4 February 1978, under the impetus of Fuad Serag al-Din and Ibrahim Farag, the Wafd was officially reconstituted and renamed the Neo-Wafd (al Wafd alGadid). The new party adopted “socialism as economic and social system, but without foreign ties,” while recognizing Islamic law (shariEa) as the “original source” of the law. As an opposition party, criticizing the regime of Anwar al-Sadat, the group found itself under pressure to cease its activities. After Sadat’s assassination in November 1981, the coming to power of Husni Mubarak allowed the Neo-Wafd to resume its activities. Having made a strategic alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1984 elections, the Neo-Wafd won fifty-eight seats and by 1990 emerged as the main opposition force in Egypt. It boycotted the 1993 elections. It has become the party of a small minority. SEE ALSO Mubarak, Husni; Muslim Brotherhood; Sadat, Anwar al-; ShariEa.

WAHHABIS: Followers of a conservative, puritan, orthodox Sunni Muslim movement, Wahhabiya, or Wahhabism, founded in the eighteenth century in Arabia by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703– 1792). After schooling in Iraq and Iran, Wahhab returned to Arabia around 1739, where he began preaching and composed his best known work, Kitab al-Tawhid (Treatise on Divine Unity). Wahhabi was adopted by the SaEud clan after his marriage to a daughter of Muhammad ibn SaEud in 1744, and Wahhabi doctrine later became the official state religion of Saudi Arabia. Fiercely opposed to ShiEism, Wahhabism rejects all rationalist exegesis of the QurDan and of the shariEa. Wahhabis, who are distinguished by their austerity, reject poetry, music, and laughter. Wahhabism has influenced the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafiyya current. Contemporary radical Islamist movements have also been inspired by Wahhabism, partly through its uncompromising religious ideology and partly through the lavish subventions of the Saudis, who have established madrasas (religious schools) and supported radically conservative social groups all over the Muslim world. SEE ALSO Muslim Brotherhood; QurDan; Salafiyya; ShariEa.

WAILING WALL SEE

Western Wall Disturbances.

WAKALAT AL-ANBAD SEE

466

WALI: Usually translated as “saint,” a wali, in Islam, is a holy person, someone who is close to God, wali Allah. A wali may be a very pious person or spiritual master, or someone living or dead who is believed to have the power to intercede with God. Strict schools of Muslim thought do not believe there can be such a thing as a wali, since every Muslim has equal access to God through the QuDran. Although the practice is not sanctioned by scripture, the tombs of many awliya D (walis, plural) have become popular shrines. WAQF: Muslim public religious trust or endowment (plural, awqaf). It may consist of any kind of income-producing property used for the benefit of the community: to maintain schools, colleges, hospitals, mosques, shrines, charities, or any such public institution or activity. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “prevention” or “stopping,” in the sense of preventing some significant property from ever being owned by any private interest, or from being sold or disposed of. (Private individuals may also create a waqf for the benefit of family or charity, but the word as used here refers to a communal foundation.) Control of awqaf confers political influence and has often been the subject of contention between religious and state authorities and is either controlled or regulated by the state. At some times and places the awqaf have been in control of a major portion of a community’s property. In Iran in the 1930s, for instance, awqaf controlled a sixth of all agricultural land. In contemporary Palestine/Israel, properties controlled by a waqf include the Haram al-Sharif (which rightly includes, according to many Muslims, the Western Wall). SEE ALSO Haram al-Sharif.

WASHINGTON ACCORD SEE

Oslo Accords II.

WASHINGTON SUMMIT: Meeting of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Musa, sponsored by U.S. President Bill Clinton. The meeting lasted from 1 to 3 October 1996; its purpose was to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, blocked since the Israeli right wing came to power. SEE ALSO Arafat, Yasir; Hussein ibn Talal; Musa, Amr Muhammad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Palestine Liberation Organization.

AL-FILASTINIYA

WATAN: Arabic word meaning homeland or country.

WAFA. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

WAZIR, INTISAR AL-

PRECIOUS RESOURCE. A SWEET-WATER RESERVOIR, PART OF ISRAEL’S NATIONAL WATER SYSTEM, FLANKS THE ROAD TO EAFULA, IN THE JEZREEL VALLEY IN NORTHERN ISRAEL. FRESH WATER IS AN ESSENTIAL BUT RELATIVELY RARE RESOURCE IN LARGE PARTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST, INCLUDING ISRAEL. (© Hanan Isachar/Corbis)

WATER: Water is an indispensable resource in the Middle East both for development and for the survival of its people. It carries such importance that historically it has been a major reason for both conflict and cooperation, both war and peace. In fact, along with poverty, water distribution is one of the two most serious problems in the Middle East. Natural conditions render storage capacities to be quite modest, whether natural or artificial, and hydrographic and aquiferous resources are dispersed unequally. Faced with the inexorable decrease of water resources, there is general agreement that a plan for regional management should be established, with each country doing its best to set aside historical and political claims.

WAZIR, INTISAR AL- (Umm Jihad; 1941– ): Palestinian political figure, born in Gaza City. In 1959 Intisar al-Wazir became the first woman member of Fatah, where she made the acquaintance of Khalil al-Wazir, a movement leader, whom she married two years later. From 1963 to 1965 the couple lived in Algiers, D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

where Khalil al-Wazir was the Fatah representative. An ardent militant, upholding the place of women in the Palestinian resistance, Intisar al-Wazir was one of the founders of the General Union of Palestinian Women, of which she was secretary-general from 1980 to 1985. In the 1960s she helped to found such Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) social service organizations as the Social Affairs Committee, the Martyrs’ Families Organization, and the Committee for Prisoners and the Injured, which is responsible for helping the families of dead or imprisoned fida Diyyun. In 1974 she became a member of the Palestine National Council. In 1978 she obtained a degree in history from the University of Damascus. In 1981 she joined the revolutionary council of Fatah. On the night of 14–15 April 1988, when she and her husband had been living in Tunis for six years, an Israeli commando assassinated her husband in front of her. That same year she was elected to the PLO Executive Committee. In August 1989, at the fifth congress of the movement in Tunis, she joined the Fatah Central Committee. In 1995 she returned

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

467

WAZIR, KHALIL AL-

to the Gaza Strip after thirty years in exile and was appointed social affairs minister of the Palestinian Authority. In January 1996 she was elected a deputy from Gaza City in the new Palestinian Legislative Council. SEE ALSO Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; General Union of Palestinian Women; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Legislative Council; Wazir, Khalil al-.

WAZIR, KHALIL AL- (Abu Jihad; 1935– ): Palestinian resistance figure, born in Ramla. At the time of the 1948 War, he was expelled with his family. They settled in the Burayj refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, where he attended a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. He is said to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1951. Around this time he is also said to have received military training either in Gaza or in Egypt. In 1954 he made the acquaintance of Yasir Arafat and also formed a commando unit in Gaza, which carried out sabotage against the Israelis, for which he was briefly imprisoned by the Egyptians. In 1955 he became secretary of the General Union of Palestinian Students in Gaza. In 1956 he enrolled at the University of Alexandria but did not complete his education. From 1959 to 1963 he worked as a teacher in Kuwait, where in December 1959 he participated with Arafat in the creation of Fatah. In 1962 he married Intisar al-Khalil, an ardent Fatah militant. In November 1963 he became head of the first Fatah diplomatic mission, in Algiers. The following year, he traveled to China, North Vietnam, and North Korea, establishing contacts, and took part in the meeting of the Palestine National Council at which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. When the Fatah Central Committee decided to begin military action against Israel, Wazir was appointed deputy commander of Fatah’s military wing. In March 1965 he moved to Damascus, where he acted as the liaison between underground fighters in Israel and the PLO. In May 1966 he was arrested by Syrian authorities, who released him after thirty days. In 1968, following the Arab defeat in the 1967 War, he became deputy commander of the PLO military forces and was put in charge of Fatah (al-jihaz al-gharbi) operations launched against Israel from the occupied territories. In 1970 he participated in the Black September 1970 confrontations in Jordan, after which, like most of the fidaDiyyun, he was banished to Lebanon. Between 1971 and 1982, during

468

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

the Lebanese Civil War and inter-Palestinian conflicts, his activities at the head of Palestinian forces were crucial to Arafat’s survival. In 1982 he followed the latter into exile in Yemen, and then to Tunisia. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon forced a change in Wazir’s approach to fighting Israel; instead of direct military challenge from outside, he now favored popular resistance from within, and he organized local resistance committees in the Occupied Territories, which later were the institutional base for the first Intifada, which began in late 1987. According to his colleagues, Khalil al-Wazir had been planning to go to Baghdad in April 1988 to attend an intraPalestinian meeting to coordinate the Intifada, but on the night of 14–15 April he was assassinated in his villa near Tunis by an Israeli commando. His death weakened Arafat’s position in the PLO. A member of the central committee of Fatah, Khalil al-Wazir had been one of the principal military leaders of the Palestinian resistance and he was very close to Arafat. He was much admired in the Palestinian community, as well as being greatly respected by many Arab political figures. No hint of the corruption that was indulged in by other senior members of the PLO leadership ever clung to him. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir Muhammad; Black September 1970; Fatah, al-; Gaza Strip; General Union of Palestinian Students; Intifada (1987–1993); Khalil, Intisar al-; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

WEIZMAN, EZER (1924–): Israeli military and political figure, eleventh president of Israel (1993–2000). Born in 1924 in Haifa into one of the most illustrious Jewish families, Ezer Weizman was the nephew of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann. In 1942 he enlisted in the (British) Royal Air Force, where he became a pilot, and in 1946–1947 studied aeronautics in Britain. He was one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force (IAF); in 1950 was named its chief of operations, and in 1956 its commander. In 1966 be became the Israel Defense Force (IDF) head of operations and deputy chief of staff. In 1969 Weisman resigned from the IDF to start on a political career, joining Herut Party. He served as leader of the GAHAL bloc and as minister of transportation in the National Unity government. He resigned in 1970 to go into private business, but continued to be active in Herut, for a short time T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

WEIZMANN, CHAIM

serving as president of its executive committee. In 1977 when Herut, GAHAL and other right-center groups formed the Likud bloc, he was campaign manager; and after its victory he became defense minister in the government of Herut leader Menachem Begin. He supervised the invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and later that year, was a moderating influence at the Camp David peace talks. However, his increasing support of a moderate view caused conflict with Likud, and in 1980 he resigned from the cabinet. The following November, he was expelled from Herut for having voted against the policies of the Begin government in the Knesset. In 1984 Weizman formed his own centrist party, Yahad, which backed the electoral campaign of the Labor Party and won three Knesset seats in the election. He was then appointed minister without portfolio in the National Unity government. In January 1985 he was appointed coordinator of Arab affairs. In 1986 he and his party Yahad joined the Labor Party; and when it joined the National Unity government with Likud in 1988, he served as minister of science and technology. In January 1989 he came out openly for direct dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), provoking outrage in the government. Accused of secret meetings with the PLO, in 1990 he resigned his seat in the Knesset; but in 1993, as Labor Party candidate, he was elected pesident of the State of Israel, taking office on 14 May. In 1996, in an attempt to restart the IsraeliPalestinian peace process, Weizer invited Yasir Arafat to his own home, causing outrage in Israeli political circles. Nevertheless, he was reelected to the presidency in 1998. In 2000, however, he was alleged to have received large sums of money as bribes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and although no formal charges were brought against him, the scandal forced him to resign. He left office on 10 July 2000. SEE ALSO GAHAL Party; Herut Party; Israel Labor Party; Likud.

WEIZMANN, CHAIM (1874–1952): Zionist leader and Israeli statesman, first president of the State of Israel. He was born in November 1874 in Belorussia, and from early youth was a convinced Zionist. He earned his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Freiburg in 1899 and taught at the University of Geneva from 1900 to 1904. The following year he left Switzerland for England, where he took a position at the University of Manchester. Naturalized a British citizen in 1910, he directed the laboratories of the British Admiralty from 1916 to 1919. Throughout these years, he participated in Zionist activities. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

CHAIM WEIZMANN. A NOTED CHEMIST AND LEADER OF THE WORLD ZIONIST CONGRESS, WEIZMANN WAS INFLUENTIAL IN WINNING BRITISH ACCEPTANCE OF A JEWISH HOMELAND IN PALESTINE (WHICH CAME IN A LETTER THAT BECAME KNOWN AS THE BALFOUR DECLARATION). IN THE FINAL YEARS OF HIS LIFE, FROM 1949 TO 1952, WEIZMANN SERVED AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

In 1917, Weizmann was instrumental in persuading the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, that a Jewish state in Palestine would serve British interests in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for establishment of a Jewish homeland, was a turning point in modern Jewish history. In 1918, Weizmann headed the Zionist Commission to Palestine. He also led the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of that year, and in 1920–1922 he negotiated the document that laid the legal foundation for the Jewish National Home. As president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) from 1920 to 1931 and 1935 to 1946, Weizmann continued to promote policies that strengthened the position of Jews in Palestine; but he was disappointed by the slow progress of Zionist development there. He became simultaneously president of the Jewish Agency, the official liaison with the British authorities; however, the Palestinian riots of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

469

terra

Nazareth

Jenin

Medi Netanya Tulkarm

Nablus

Tel Aviv

Jorda n Riv e r

1929 and subsequent decline in British support for Zionism led him to resign in protest from the presidency of both organizations. Returning to head the movement in 1935, he helped to bring about the Palestine Royal Commission’s recommendation for partition of Palestine, successfully persuading a majority of the Zionist Congress to accept partition in principle. But the British government reversed its initial approval and issued a White Paper that limited Jewish immigration. Thereafter, Weizmann’s influence gradually decreased because of his opposition to the radical policies of rising WZO leaders. After his term as president ended in 1946, he remained actively involved and helped persuade U.S. president Harry Truman to support the establishment of Israel in 1948. Weizmann served as the new nation’s first president, which at that time was a largely ceremonial post that he found frustrating. He died on 9 November 1952. SEE ALSO Balfour Declaration; Jewish Agency for Israel; White Papers on Palestine; World Zionist Organization.

nean S ea

WEST BANK

J O R DA N

West Bank Amman Ramallah Jericho Jerusalem

ISRAEL

Bethlehem

Hebron

N

Dead
Sea

0 0

10 10

20 mi. 20 km

West Bank International border “Green line” City

WEST BANK: The area of Mandatory Palestine inside the 1949 armistice line west of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem, not controlled by Israel at the end of the 1948 War. Covering an area of 2,270 square miles, the West Bank was controlled by the Jordanians following the war and occupied by Israel following the 1967 War. Its principal cities, in addition to East Jerusalem, are Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, Ramallah, Tulkarm, and Jenin. The West Bank was a part of the Arab state whose creation was proposed in the partition plan adopted by the United Nations by General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947. Referred to by many Israelis as “Judea and Samaria,” it was opened to settlement by the Israeli government and is home to several hundred thousand Israeli settlers. In 1978, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza showed strong opposition to the Camp David Accords, which led to Israeli military and administrative repression. In 1982 the majority of Palestinian mayors were discharged and replaced by Israeli administrators. This measure, combined with the departure of Palestinian forces from Lebanon, moved a group of young West Bank intellectuals to oppose the Israeli occupation openly, a move that resulted in a great number of arrests. In December 1987 the Intifada broke out in the Gaza Strip and spread to the West Bank. On the following 15 November, at a meeting of the Palestine

470

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

National Council in Algiers, Yasir Arafat proclaimed the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. In May 1994 the Oslo Accords led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and Jericho became the first autonomous territory under its control. The following year, the Oslo Accords II allowed approximately one-third of the West Bank to recover partial autonomy and the Israel Defense Force started withdrawing from the principal cities, with the exception of Hebron. According to the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles signed on 13 September 1993 in Washington, D.C., the “definitive and permanent” status of the West Bank and Gaza should have been decided by the end of 1999. In late September 2000 a new uprising, the al-Aqsa Intifada, broke out in the Palestinian territories. In 2002 Israel reinvaded and reoccupied many West Bank cities. Israel has also increased its confiscations of Palestinian property, increased its restrictions on Palestinian movement and economic activity, increased Israeli settlement, and begun to construct a “separation wall” between Jewish and Palestinian areas inside the Green Line. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

WESTERN WALL DISTURBANCES

SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Arab-Israel War (1967); Arafat, Yasir; British Mandate; Camp David Accords; Gaza Strip; Intifada (1987–1993); Jordan River; Oslo Accords; Oslo Accords II; Palestine National Council; Palestinian Authority; Resolution 181.

WESTERN WALL DISTURBANCES: The Western (Wailing) Wall, or Kotel, in Jerusalem is a site sacred to both Muslims and Jews. It is a wall on the west side of a hill (the Temple Mount), on top of which is the Haram al-Sharif. Its original purpose is unknown; it may have been a retaining wall or a part of a Romanera building. For Muslims, the entire hill, including the wall, is part of the Haram; for Jews, the wall is a remnant of the Second Temple. In the 1920s, use of the site was governed by an arrangement that had been enforced by Ottoman authorities and continued by the British Mandatory government. It was owned by the Muslim community and although Jews were permitted access to it they were not allowed to adapt it in any way for religious ceremonies. In 1928 Zionist institutions were rapidly growing stronger after several years of stagnation; Jewish immigration was up, the economy of the Jewish community was expanding, and Jewish political militancy was increasing. Efforts were even made to purchase the wall. On 23 September of that year, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holy day, Jews gathered at the wall to pray placed a screen to separate the men from the women in the traditional way. Muslims asserted that this was a forbidden “innovation” and complained to the British authorities, who removed the screen. The authorities attempted to find a compromise, but the situation was too charged and became a political issue for both sides over the next few months; for the Zionists it became part of a campaign for expanded rights. On 15 August 1929 a group of right-wing Zionists from the Revisionist faction, raising the Zionist Star of David flag, staged a demonstration at the wall; Muslims staged a counterdemonstration the next day, destroying slips of paper containing prayers, which had been put into the crevices in the wall by the Jews. Over the next few weeks violence broke out. Palestinians attacked Jews—mainly religious and nonZionist—in Jerusalem, Hebron (killing 64) and Safad; Jews attacked and killed Palestinians in several cities. In all 116 Palestinians and 133 Jews died in the riots, although many of the Palestinian deaths were caused by shots fired into crowds by British troops and police. The disturbances inspired fresh political organizing among the relatively unorganized PalesD I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

THE WESTERN WALL. JEWS PRAY AT THE SYMBOLICALLY IMPORTANT REMNANT OF THE ANCIENT RETAINING WALL FOR THE SECOND TEMPLE OF JERUSALEM (WHERE THE DOME OF THE ROCK, AT UPPER LEFT, NOW STANDS). (© Corbis)

tinians. The Arab Executive demanded an end to Jewish immigration and land purchases and the creation of a democratic government. The British government, while refusing on principle, established commissions to study the matter. The Shaw Commission studied the causes of the violence; the HopeSimpson Commission studied the land situation and its effect on the Palestinians. The findings of these commissions led to the Passfield White Paper of 1930, which called for limiting immigration and land purchases and for changing Britain’s policy toward the Palestinians—90 percent of the population— who had until then been considered merely “non-Jewish communities” by a government whose policies were based on establishing a “Jewish National Home.” The recommendations of the White Paper were never implemented.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

471

WHITE PAPERS ON PALESTINE

SEE ALSO Arab Executive; British Mandate; Haram al-Sharif; Hebron; Ottomans; White Papers on Palestine.

WHITE PAPERS

ON PALESTINE: British policy statements on Palestine issued from 1922 to 1939. The British government ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922 until 1948. Policy statements, called “command papers” or “white papers,” were issued during this time in an attempt to deal with the tensions and violence between Arabs and the Jewish communities there. The British government faced conflicting pressure from Zionists, who wanted implementation of the promises made in the Balfour Declaration concerning establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the Arabs, who wanted annulment of the Balfour Declaration and independence under an Arab-majority government. The first major British white paper, the Churchill White Paper of June 1922, attempted to placate both by stating that the Jewish national home existed by right, yet that Jewish immigration would be limited and Arabs would have selfgovernment with a majority in a council to be elected in the near future. Neither side was satisfied. The next white paper, issued in on 19 November 1928, and four more issued in 1930 centered on conflict at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem. The first of these affirmed that no benches or screens could be brought to the wall by Jews, since they had not been allowed during Ottoman rule; but there were Arab attacks against Jews there as well as in several other towns, and religious tension added to the Arab’s growing fears of physical displacement. The second argued that the government must issue clear statements safeguarding Arab rights and regulating Jewish immigration and land purchase. The third recommended the appointment of a special commission to assess the problems facing landless Arab peasants and the prospects for expanded agricultural cultivation. Finally, the Hope-Simpson report recommended a drastic reduction in Jewish immigration on the grounds of insufficient cultivatable Arab land and widespread Arab unemployment; and the simultaneous Passfield White Paper endorsed stricter controls on Jewish immigration, asserting for the first time that the British government had equal obligations to both communities. Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency, threatened to resign if the Passfield White Paper was implemented. The resignation threat produced the 1931 MacDonald Letter (called the “Black Letter” by the Arabs) which undid the anti-Zionist thrust of the Passfield White Paper.

472

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

One of the most important white papers was the Palestine Royal Commission Report of July 1937. Also known as the “Peel” Commission, it had been sent to investigate the causes of the Palestinian-Arab rebellion that had erupted in April 1936. After many months of hearing evidence, the commissioners came to the radical conclusion that the Mandate was no longer workable as originally conceived, and that the rival Jewish and Arab communities might find peace only if the land were partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state (the latter to be annexed to Transjordan). While the Zionist leadership was pleased with the proposal, in principle, to create a Jewish state, the Arabs rejected the plan as a violation of their majority status and claims to Arab sovereignty. The rebellion resumed, and the British gradually retreated from the idea of partition, especially after a further investigation (the Woodhead Commission Report of November 1938) suggested the nearimpossibility of drawing acceptable boundaries between proposed Jewish and Arab areas. The white paper of 17 May 1939 sought to establish a new British policy for Palestine on the eve of an imminent world war. After lengthy but unfruitful discussions in London between the Jewish Agency, Arab governments, and Palestinian Arabs, the government issued the “MacDonald” white paper that repudiated the concept of partition. In an attempt to satisfy Arab demands for independence, it proposed the development of self-governing institutions in a single independent state that would not be dominated by either Arabs or Jews. The white paper also limited Jewish immigration to seventy-five thousand over five years, with subsequent immigration to require Arab approval, and limited purchase of land by Jews. This paper, which reversed earlier promises to the Zionists and the recommendations of the Peel Commission, was received with anger by Jews throughout the world, especially since it came just at the time when many were seeking to escape from the Nazis in Europe. SEE ALSO Balfour Declaration; British Mandate; Jewish Agency for Israel; Weizmann, Chaim; World Zionist Organization.

WJC SEE

World Jewish Congress.

WOLFOWITZ, PAUL (1943– ): U.S. deputy secretary of defense. Paul Wolfowitz was born on 22 December 1943. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Cornell University in 1965 and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

WZO

1972. He worked from 1973 to 1977 in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, participating in Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and joined the Pentagon in 1977 as deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs. He served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, then as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. From 1989 to 1993, Wolfowitz served as undersecretary of defense for policy, then in 1994 became dean and professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University. In March 2001, Wolfowitz was sworn in as U.S. deputy secretary of defense. An early advocate of “preemptive” U.S. strikes against Iraq, he is considered a hawkish neoconservative. Wolfowitz supports a pro-Israel policy, yet he has publicly acknowledged the sufferings of the Palestinian people, for which he was heckled at a pro-Israel rally in 2002.

WORLD ISLAMIC FRONT FOR HOLY WAR AGAINST JEWS AND CRUSADERS (al-Jabha al-Islamiiya al-Alamiya liJihad al-Yahoud wa al-Salibiyyin): Radical Islamic movement gathering together a number of international extremist groups. Its existence was announced by a communiqué published on 12 February 1998, carrying the signatures of Osama Bin Ladin; Abu Yasir Rifai Ahmad Taha, of al-JamiEa al-Islamiyya; Ayman Zawahri, of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Mir Hamza, of the ulamas of Pakistan; Fazlur Rehman Khalil, of the Pakistani Harakat al-Ansar; and Shaykh Abdul Salam Muhammad, of the Pakistani Islamic Jihad. The communiqué called for jihad against the Americans. The movement has been regarded as being either identical to the International Islamic Front or else part of it. SEE ALSO Alim; Bin Ladin, Osama; Egyptian Islamic Jihad; International Islamic Front; Jihad; JamiEa al-Islamiyya, al-; Zawahri, Ayman Muhammad al-.

WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS (WJC): Institution founded in Geneva on 13 August 1936 for the defense of the cultural and religious rights of Jews throughout the world and to strengthen the unity of the Jewish people. The WJC represents 70 Jewish

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

communities in the world and is one of the nongovernmental organizations in attendance at the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the Commission for European Unity.

WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION (WZO): Organization that turned the idea of establishing a Jewish state into a reality. The WZO has played a major role in sensitizing Jewish communities, dispersed throughout the world, to the issue of a national renaissance. It was created in 1897 at the first Zionist congress, in Basel, and was open to all Jews who accepted its goals and paid a small membership fee. Although it was originally organized on a regional basis, political parties developed within it. During the era of the British mandate in Palestine, it functioned as a quasigovernment of the Jewish community there, serving as the Jewish Agency for which the mandate provided until 1929 and remaining the dominant power within that agency when it expanded to include nonZionists. It therefore played a significant role in the creation of the Jewish national home. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, many of the WTO’s functions were taken over by the Israel government, for which it became a foreign propaganda, economic support and political mobilization arm. It has remained active in the diffusion of information on Israel and the collection of funds, but in 1952 the Jewish Agency was given responsibility for development and settlement of the land and for the absorption of immigrants. Since 1960 only organizations, rather than individuals, have been eligible for WZO membership. SEE ALSO Zionism. WYE PLANTATION ACCORDS SEE

Oslo Accords II.

WYE RIVER ACCORDS SEE

Oslo Accords II.

WZO SEE

World Zionist Organization.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

473

Y YAD (also Ya’ad, Yehud, Yud; Hebrew for ensemble, union): Israeli political bloc created in February 1984 following a split in the extreme right party, Tzomet.

SEE ALSO Golan Heights; Knesset; Peres, Shimon; Tzomet Party; Weizman, Ezer.

First constituted in 1984 by Ezer Weizman, Yad won two seats in the legislative elections of that year, following which Weizman was named minister without portfolio in the national union government headed by Shimon Peres. Four years later Yad was dissolved, after which its leaders decided to join the Labor Party. The revival of Yad in 1994 resulted in the Tzomet losing three seats in the Knesset.

YAD VASHEM: Hebrew for an everlasting name [Isa-

Yad was envisioned as a nationalist and liberal party, although its proposals were sometimes vague. It saw itself as upholding the “spirit of the Camp David accords” and supported Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. In July 1994 two of the party’s leaders, Gonen Segev and Alexander Goldfarb, joined the government of Yitzhak Rabin as minister of energy and deputy minister of housing respectively. During their mandate they tried to support the development of Jewish settlements and advocated holding a referendum before Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Weakened by a power struggle among its leaders, and by a judicial procedure involving one of its officials, Yad progressively lost influence. After failing to obtain any seats in the Knesset elections of 1996, Yad disappeared from Israeli politics.

YAHADUT HA-TORAH

iah 56:5]. Name of an Israeli institution founded in 1953 to honor the memory of the martyrs and heroes who died during the Shoah. SEE ALSO Shoah.

YAHADUT: Hebrew for Judaism.

SEE

United Torah Judaism Party.

YAHUD: Arabic word for Jew. YAMIN ISRAEL (Right of Israel, in Hebrew; sometimes spelled Yemin Israel): Israeli political group of the extreme right, a splinter from Moledet, founded in November 1995 by Shaul Gutmann. It calls itself a party, but was disqualified from registering as a party by the Israeli Supreme Court because its stated principles would violate the democratic rights of nonJewish citizens and perhaps incite racism. Presently it is attempting to create an “incorporated front” of extraparliamentary nationalist groups. Yamin Israel believes that the essence of Israel as a Jewish state must be the nation’s paramount prin-

475

YARMUK

ciple, and that therefore an oath to this effect should be a prerequisite for participating in elections or holding public office. It also advocates adoption of a new constitution, including reforms proposed by the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy and supported by other parties, but going further to integrate them into a “comprehensive system based on Jewish ideas and values.” It believes the right of Jews to settle throughout Palestine is absolute and that the presence of non-Jews is undesirable. In addition, it favors a market economy and privatization of national resources and assets. In 2004, Paul Eidelberg is the president of Yamin Israel; other current leaders include Eleonora Shifrin, Felix-Azriel Kochubievsky, Victoria Vexelman, Shlomo Markov, Yaakov Segal, Israel Hanukoglu, Konstantin Danovich, Miriam Adahan, Yrachmiel Elias, and Ya’akov Golbert.

YARMUK: Name of a tributary on the eastern bank of the Jordan river; location of an important battle in August 636 between the Byzantine armies of Heraclius and the victorious Arab-Islamic troops. Also the name of a Palestine Liberation Organization military brigade. SEE ALSO Palestine Liberation Organization.

YASIN, AHMAD ISMAEIL (1936–2004): Palestinian Islamic activist, born in the village of al-Jura near Ashqelon. Shaykh Yasin was the founding father and spiritual guide of HAMAS. In 1948, during the first Israeli-Arab conflict, he and his family became a refugees in the Gaza Strip, where four years later, as a result of an accident, he became hemiplegic for life. In 1956 he went to Egypt to study Arabic literature and religion, and there he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He returned to Gaza, teaching religion and preaching for a number of years, and in 1973 he created the Islamic Collective (al-MajmaEa al-Islami), sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood, and became active in charity work. He was assisted by Ibrahim alYazuri, Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, and Mahmud Zahhar. Yasin became one of the guiding lights of the Palestinian Islamic movement. In October 1983 he was arrested by Israeli authorities and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for possession of arms and constitution of armed cells. In 1985, as part of a prisoner exchange between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command and Israel, he was released and placed under house arrest in Gaza. The Palestinian Islamic movement, in the meantime, had become radicalized under the influence of some of Yasin’s close collaborators. On 14 December 1987, with six other Muslim Brothers, he

476

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SHAYKH AHMED YASIN. IN 1987, THIS MEMBER OF THE RADICAL MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FOUNDED THE ISLAMIC RESISTANCE MOVEMENT, OR HAMAS, DEDICATED TO ARMED STRUGGLE AGAINST ISRAEL FOR CONTROL OF ALL OF PALESTINE. THE SPIRITUAL LEADER OF HAMAS, SHAYKH YASIN WAS KILLED BY AN ISRAELI MISSILE ATTACK ON 22 MARCH 2004. (AP/Wide World Photos)

published a communiqué supporting the Intifada that had just broken out in the Gaza Strip and announcing the creation of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawima al-Islamiyya), or HAMAS. HAMAS rejected any compromise with Israel, preaching jihad for Islamic recovery of the whole of Palestine; it played an important role in the Intifada and was classified by Israel as a terrorist organization. In May 1989 Yasin was again arrested and on 15 October was sentenced to life in prison. From his prison cell he continued to direct HAMAS and maintain its unity. On 1 October 1997, following a failed Mossad assassination attempt on Jordanian soil against a HAMAS representative, King Hussein of Jordan obtained his release, as well as that of some twenty other prisoners who held Jordanian passports. After passing through Amman to undergo medical examinations, Yasin arrived in Gaza on 6 October, where he was welcomed as a returning T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

YATOM, DANI

hero. On 2 May 1998 he launched an appeal to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasir Arafat asking him to join the “resistance front” against Israel. On 25 June, after a long tour through the Gulf countries, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Sudan, Yasin returned to Gaza in spite of some administrative difficulties. In an interview he declared his opposition to HAMAS participation in a PA national unity cabinet and called for jihad against Israel. On 29 October he was assigned to house arrest by the PA following an attack in Gaza by members of his movement. In July 1999, following Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s appeal for a “peace of the brave,” he replied that HAMAS wanted a peace restoring the rights of the Palestinians, the end of Israeli occupation, the dismantling of the Jewish settlements, and the restitution to Jerusalem of its Islamic character. In 2000 he criticized the PA for taking part in the Camp David talks in July. At the same time, however, he announced that if the Israelis stopped attacking Palestinian civilians HAMAS would stop attacking Israeli civilians, and that if the Israelis pulled out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip HAMAS would observe a truce. With the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian territories in October 2000, HAMAS and the PA reconciled. In November 2000 HAMAS joined the resistance committees on which national and Islamic forces coordinated their local actions. At the beginning of 2001, when the Intifada was intensifying in the Palestinian territories, Yasin reaffirmed HAMAS’s determination in the struggle, intensifying its campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, leading to many Israeli reprisal operations. In September 2003 the Israelis attempted to assassinate Yasin by bombing a house they believed he was in. On 22 March 2004 they succeeded in killing him in a helicopter-fired missile attack. SEE ALSO Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel Conflict (1948); Arafat, Yasir; Barak, Ehud; Camp David II Summit; Gaza Strip; HAMAS; Intifada (1987–1993); Jihad; Muslim Brotherhood; Palestinian Authority; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command; Rantisi, Abd al-Aziz; West Bank.

YATOM, DANI (1945– ): Israeli military figure. Born in Israel in 1945, Dani Yatom started his military career in 1963. Between 1966 and 1973 he was in the Sayeret Matkal, a special unit attached to the Israel Defense Force (IDF) general staff. On 8 May 1972 he took part in the storming of a Sabena Airlines plane that had been taken over by Palestinian terrorists at D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

DANI YATOM. A

CAREER MILITARY OFFICER,

PUBLICLY NAMED HEAD OF FROM

1996

TO

YATOM WAS THE FIRST MOSSAD, ISRAEL’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE,

1998. YATOM HAS ALSO SERVED AS A GOVERNMENT

ADVISER ON DEFENSE MATTERS. (© Corbis Sygma)

the Tel Aviv Airport. At his side were Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. From 1983 to 1985, Yatom served as advisor to Defense Minister Moshe Arens. Two years later, he was appointed head of the planning department of the IDF general staff. In December 1990, Yatom became commander-in-chief of the central military region of Israel, replacing General Yitzhak Mordechai. By 1992 he had risen to become chief of the central command, military secretary to the prime and defense ministers in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet. There, he rapidly became Rabin’s closest confidant and most trusted counselor. In February 1994 Yatom temporarily assumed command of the central military region, replacing General Tamari, who was killed in a helicopter accident. Among Yatom’s biggest challenges in this position was dealing with the massacre of twenty-nine Muslims by a Jewish settler in Hebron. On the following 12 April, Yatom was replaced by General Ilan Biran, and he resumed his duties with the prime minister. In December 1994, Yatom became a member of the Israeli delegation, which, in the context of

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

477

YEDIOT AHARONOT

the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, went to Washington, D.C., to participate in parleys with Syrian representatives. On 2 June 1996 Yatom became head of Mossad, replacing Shabtai Shavit. In February 1998 a series of failures in his service forced him to resign this post. In July 1999 Yatom became security adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Considered as the éminence grise of the new prime minister, Yatom’s particular mission was to restart the Israeli-Syrian negotiations, which had been stalled since April 1996. In November 1999, Yatom—as Barak’s chief of staff—traveled to Paris to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah and discuss Israel’s issues with Syria. In July and October 2000, Yatom took part in the Middle East peace summits at Camp David with Barak and Yasser Arafat, and presided over by U.S. president Bill Clinton. Although President Clinton’s October summit objectives included a cease-fire and a plan to eventually return to the peace discussions that had broken down that July, Yatom conceded that that the situation was very complicated and the talks were going very slowly—and soon after talks broke down again. A discreet personage, Yatom has been considered as a perfectionist, someone well acquainted with the subtleties of power. SEE ALSO Arens, Moshe; Barak, Ehud; Israel Defense Force; Lipkin-Shahak, Amnon; Mordechai, Yitzhak; Mossad; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Sayeret. YEDIOT AHARONOT (Hebrew for “latest news”): Israeli daily newspaper. Founded in 1939 by the Moses family who remain its owners, the Yedioth Aharanot is a truly independent newspaper that has remained free of constraints despite any current government. Its politics are considered to be center-right with a tendency to support the Labor Party. In September 1995 the editor-in-chief was forced to resign after it was revealed that he was involved in an incident of telephone-tapping that included directors of another daily newspaper, the Ma Eariv.

YEHUD: Hebrew word meaning Judean, from the land of Judea. By extension designates the Jewish state in the Persian empire. YEHUDI: Hebrew word for Jew. YEKKIS: Mildly derisive term applied to German immigrants, supposedly pedantic and perfectionist in nature, who began arriving in Palestine in the 1930s, but resisted assimilation.

478

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

YELLIN-MOR, NATAN (1913–1980): Israeli underground leader. Born as Nathan Friedman-Yellin in Grodno, Poland, Natan Yellin-Mor became active in the Polish branch of Betar, then in the Irgun ZvaDi LeDumi. With Abraham Stern, he edited the Irgun’s Polish newspaper, Di Tat. He then left for Palestine with Stern, joining Stern’s underground organization, Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI), which conducted a campaign of propaganda and terror attacks against the British. After Stern’s death in 1942, Yellin-Mor assumed leadership of LEHI, as part of a triumvirate, along with Israel Eldad and Yitzhak Shamir. Yellin-Mor was tried and convicted in 1949 for the 1948 assassination of United Nations emissary Count Folke Bernadotte. The sentence, however, was commuted in exchange for Yellin-Mor’s vow to refrain from further terrorist activities. As a leader of the Fighters Party, LEHI’s political entity, he was elected to the Knesset in 1949. In later years YellinMor embraced the politics of the left, renouncing Zionism and advocating the creation of an Arab-Jewish socialist state. SEE ALSO Lohamei Herut Yisrael; Stern, Abraham.

YESHIVA (pl. yeshivot): A school for the study of Jewish sacred texts. A fundamental element of the Jewish religious world, these schools were basic religious institutions of Palestine and Babylonia, where clarification and compilation of ancient texts led to the creation of the Talmud. Modern yeshivot are intended for all Jews who wish to increase their knowledge of Judaism as well as those preparing to be ordained as rabbis. Although they were once only for males, many now admit women. Some, which are often called day schools in North America, offer secular studies in addition to intensive religious study. In Israel, yeshivot are of two types: those that embrace Zionism, whose students combine military service with study, and those that do not, whose students are exempt from military service. Some of the former have played a significant role in promulgating annexationist or messianic ideologies at the expense of the Palestinians in Jerusalem or the territories. SEE ALSO Talmud.

YISHUV (Settlement or community, in Hebrew): The Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel. The Yishuv was divided into two sections: the Old Yishuv, Jews of communities established prior to the start of the Zionist movement; and the New Yishuv, consisting of Zionists who came to Palestine in the hope of establishing a T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

YISHUV

YESHIVA. ISRAELI BOYS WEARING DECORATED SKULLCAPS CALLED KIPPOT, OR YARMULKES, STUDY—ESPECIALLY SACRED TEXTS—IN A YESHIVA, OR JEWISH DAY SCHOOL, IN THE GALILEE. THE STYLES OF THE HEADGEAR SOMETIMES INDICATE POLITICAL OR RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION. (© Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis)

national Jewish homeland. The two had different cultures and aims and their members were often antagonists. Members of the Old Yishuv came to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe, starting in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth. Pious men and scholars concerned by the waning of traditional Jewish culture in Europe, their goal was a routine centered upon study, prayer, and observance of religious commandments, based on medieval European ways of life. The communities and schools they established were funded by wealthy Jews in Europe and the United States who were supportive of this aim; but as their numbers grew, these funds became inadequate and most lived in poverty. When Zionism emerged in Europe in the 1880s, Zionists, too, began to sponsor immigration to Palestine; but the goal of the newcomers was a selfsupporting secular, egalitarian society based on productive labor and a Hebrew cultural renaissance, fueled by a vision of political change. They wanted D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

to cut ties with tradition and build modern independent Jewish state. So the two lifestyles clashed, and the social change brought about by the new threatened to overwhelm the old—a situation exacerbated by the fact that both competed for funding. After World War I, when Palestine came under the British mandate, British policy recognized the Yishuv as a religious community; but in practice, it encouraged the Zionists’ establishment of nationalstyle institutions. These began with the election of a national council (VaEad Le’umi), which administered the community. Many members of the Old Yishuv refused to participate in the elections because they objected to female suffrage and to the secular aims of Zionism. Most Zionists, on the other hand, refused to obey traditional Jewish laws, such as the one requiring land to lie fallow every seventh year. There was, of course, some overlap, as some newcomers were strongly religious and some members of the older communities embraced new ways; but on the whole the Yishuv became largely Zionist in its out-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

479

YOM HA-ATZMA E UT

look, providing the foundation upon which the State of Israel was created. From the time of the first Zionist congress of 1897 to the UN plan for partition of Palestine in 1947, the Yishuv grew from 40,000 to 600,000 persons, from 27 to 300 agricultural settlements and from land holdings of 204,000 to 1,800,000 dunams. SEE ALSO Balfour Declaration; Dunam; Herzl, Theodor; Jewish Agency for Israel; VaEad Le’umi; Weizmann, Chaim; World Zionist Organization; Zionism.

tion). Celebrated on the tenth day of Tishri (20 September–12 October) when every Jew accounts to God for his or her actions. Following Rosh haShanah, this holiday is characterized by a complete fast of 24 hours and by the ceremony of Kol Nidre, during which all participate in a common repentance. The Egyptians and Syrians surprised the Israelis by launching a major Arab-Israeli war on Yom Kippur in 1973. SEE ALSO Arab-Israel War (1973).

YOM HA-ATZMAEUT: Hebrew name of the holiday cel-

YOM KIPPUR WAR SEE

ebrating the independence of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948.

YOM

HA-SHOA:

“Holocaust remembrance day”; on the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (27 Nisan on the Hebrew calendar), which is usually in the middle or at the end of April.

YOM HA-ZIKARON: “Day of remembrance of soldiers fallen in the wars of Israel.” Preceding Yom HaAtzma’ut, the independence holiday; falls between the end of April and beginning of May. YOM KIPPUR: Name of the Jewish holiday termed “the Great Forgiveness” (also Expiation or Purifica-

480

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Arab-Israel War (1973).

YOSEF, OVADIAH (1920–): Israeli religious and political leader. Born in Baghdad, Ovadiah Yosef lived in Mandatory Palestine from childhood and became a rabbi by the time he was twenty years old. Although he was deputy chief rabbi of Cairo in 1948, he returned to Israel in 1950 to become a religious judge. Chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, he formed the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic SHAS Party in 1983 with other former members of the Ashkenazi-dominated Agudat Israel Party. In 2003 SHAS won eleven Knesset seats (8.2 percent of the vote). Yosef continues to be the ruling force behind the SHAS Party.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

Z ZAKAT: Arab word designating the religious tax (2.5 percent of personal wealth) every Muslim (male and female) and Muslim community owes. According to the QurDan the purpose of the zakat is to purify goods and the defilement of sin. It is one of the five obligations of Islam. SEE ALSO Islam; Muslim.

ZAKI, ABBAS SEE

MishEal, Sharif Ali.

ZAWAHRI, AYMAN MUHAMMAD,

AL- (1952– ): Egyptian Islamist, descended from an illustrious Cairo family. His grandfather was the imam of the al-Azhar Mosque and his great-uncle was secretary-general of the Arab League. When still very young, Ayman alZawahri joined the Muslim Brotherhood. After earning a degree in surgery, he left the Muslim Brotherhood and joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad. In October 1981, following the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat, he was arrested and imprisoned for three years. While in prison he established himself as one of the principal leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, representing its most radical current. Freed in October 1984, he practiced surgery for a time. In May 1985 he left Egypt, first going to Saudi Arabia and then to Pakistan to support the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army. At the end of 1986, with Osama bin Ladin, he created al-QaEida, the International Islamic

Front, where he was responsible for recruitment and logistical support of the Afghan resistance. By 1992 he appears to have quit the Egyptian Jihad in order to found his own movement, TalaEi alFatah (Vanguard of the Conquest), a name already used by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. In November 1995 he claimed responsibility for the attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, which caused seventeen deaths. On 12 February, at Peshawar, he and Osama bin Ladin created the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. On April 18 1999, with eight members of Egyptian Jihad, he was condemned to death in absentia by the Egyptian High Court of Military Justice. On September 25 2001 a “priority international arrest warrant” was issued against him, charging him and bin Ladin with masterminding the attacks of 11 September 2001 against the United States, which caused several thousand deaths. Zawahri is also under indictment in the United States for bombing the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. After the 11 September attacks, he issued a public statement, on tape, in which he condemned Israeli crimes against the Palestinians and American complicity in them. Zawahri’s whereabouts are unknown, although he is thought to have fled with bin Ladin into the Afghan mountains after the September 11 attacks. SEE ALSO Bin Ladin, Osama; Egyptian Islamic Jihad; International Islamic Front; League of

481

ZAWIYA

Arab States; Muslim Brotherhood; Sadat, Anwar al-; World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

ZAWIYA: Arab word designating a place of prayer; a hall; may or may not be attached to a mosque; often conjoined to the tomb of a Muslim saint where the faithful assemble. Historically related to Sufi practices. SEE ALSO Mosque. ZAYDAN, MUHAMMAD EABBAS (Abu al-EAbbas; 1943 or 1948–2003): Palestinian political figure, born in Palestine. After fleeing with his family to Syria in 1948, at the time of the 1948 War, Muhammad EAbbas Zaydan went to Egypt, where he studied in Cairo. In 1965 he joined the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) of Ahmad Jibril, then followed Jibril when he merged his PLF into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by George Habash. In 1968 he followed Jibril again when he quit the PFLP to create the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC). In 1977 Jibril’s resolutely pro-Syrian policy prompted Zaydan to quit the PFLP–GC, along with TalEat YaEqub, Ali Zaydan, and Said al-Yussuf, to found the Palestine Liberation Front (1977), with headquarters in Baghdad. YaEqub was named secretary-general of the new PLF and Zaydan its political leader; their movement joined the Rejection Front [1], from which the PFLP–GC had just been expelled, leading to bloody confrontations between their respective members. In 1983, after Palestinian forces evacuated Lebanon, two tendencies surfaced in the PLF: one was pro-Syrian and headed by YaEqub, the other was pro-Yasir Arafat and supported by Zaydan. Zaydan remained leader of the PLF, and YaEqub formed his own movement. In November 1984 Zaydan was elected to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee, accentuating his break with the YaEqub faction. In September 1985 he became secretary-general of the PLF. On 8 October, in response to an Israeli raid on the PLO headquarters near Tunis, a commando of his movement took the passengers of an Italian ship, the Achille Lauro, hostage. A Jewish U.S. citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed during the operation. Italy later tried Zaydan in absentia and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Until 1999 he lived in Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and Iraq. On 22 April 1987 his presence at the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers prompted a U.S. protest to the Algerians. In May, when Arafat was urging unity in the

482

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

PLO, Zaydan reconciled with TalEat YaEqub. On 30 May 1990 a PLF commando attempted to stage a naval raid on Tel Aviv, leading to a halt in the dialogue with the PLO that U.S. authorities had just started. The following September Zaydan was expelled from the PLO Executive Committee and replaced as PLF representative by Ali Ishaq. In spite of his support for Arafat, he was hostile to the peace process launched at the Madrid Conference of 1991 and opposed the Oslo Accords of 1993. After several members of his movement joined the opposition front, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces, Zaydan supported Arafat. In 1999 Zaydan returned to the Gaza Strip after agreeing to support the Oslo peace process, apologizing for Klinghoffer’s death and receiving immunity from Israeli prosecution. In 2002, during the al-Aqsa Intifada, he returned to Iraq and from there directed his supporters’ actions in the Palestinian territories. In April 2003 he was captured by American forces in Iraq during the Iraq War of 2003 and died in custody in March 2004, apparently from cardiovascular disease. SEE ALSO Achille Lauro; Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF); Aqsa Intifada, al-; Arab-Israel War (1948); Arafat, Yasir; Gaza Strip; Habash, George; Iraq War; Jibril, Ahmad; Madrid Conference; Oslo Accords; Palestine Liberation Front (1965); Palestine Liberation Front (1977); Palestine Liberation Organization; Palestine National Council; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command; Rejection Front [1].

ZE’EVI, REHAVAM (1926–2001): Israeli military and political figure, founder of the right-wing Moledet Party. He was born in 1926 in Jerusalem and joined the ranks of the Haganah when he was very young. Then, after the creation of the Israeli army, in 1948, he began a career in the military. From 1964 to 1968 he was Chief of the Department of Staff in the Israeli General staff. Between 1969 and 1972, he served as the Commander of Israel’s Central Military District, where he was responsible for security in the West Bank. He retired in September 1973 but rejoined the army the following month at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War and served for several more months as the Chief of the Department of Staff. Ze’evi next served as a consultant on combating terrorism to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the following year became Rabin’s advisor on intelligence. In March 1977 he resigned from this position, and in 1981 was appointed director of the Ha’aretz T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

ZU ARTZENU

museum in Tel Aviv. In February, 1988, during the first Intifada in the occupied territories, he announced the creation of a new party, Moledet, which advocated the transfer of the Palestinian population to Arab countries. As a result of the elections of the following June, his party won two seats in the Knesset. Five months later, he was named minister without portfolio in the government of Yitzhak Shamir. In 1992, after publicly expressing his disagreement with the policies of the government on negotiations with the Palestinians, he resigned his ministerial post. Moledet joined with Herut and Tekumah to form the National Union group in 1999. On 7 March 2001, after the election of Ariel Sharon to the post of prime minister, Rehavam Ze’evi became minister of tourism. On the following 17 October, having resigned from the government two days earlier, he was assassinated by a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) squad in reprisal for the August killing of the leader of that movement. He was the only major Israeli politician to die in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. SEE ALSO Haganah; Moledet; National Union; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

ZIONISM: An international movement for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, formally founded in 1897 although initiated in the 1880s. The word “Zionist,” which was coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, is derived from “Zion,” one of hills of ancient Jerusalem, in the Bible sometimes applied to Jerusalem itself. From the beginning, Zionism had both religious and secular aspects. Religious Jews believe that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God, that their right to it is inalienable, and that their return to it was promised by God in biblical prophecies. However, not all of them have agreed with the idea of establishing a Jewish state by human agency before the return of the Messiah; before the 1930s many opposed it, and even today a few consider it blasphemous. For secular Jews, on the other hand, Zionism was a political movement. Born of the continual oppression and persecution to which the Jews of Eastern Europe were subjected, it was triggered by the 1881– 1884 pogroms in Russia. At that time, a few Jews began moving to Palestine; Rishon Le-Zion, the first Jewish agricultural colony, was established near Jaffa in 1882. Books and pamphlets proposing a Jewish homeland circulated among Europeans Jews, most notably “The Jewish State” by Theodor Herzl. The first world Zionist Congress, which was convened by D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Herzl and held in August of 1897 in Basel, endorsed the concept and began making plans, after which it became known worldwide. At first Jews of all political and religious persuasions joined to form the movement and worked together toward its goals. Later, dissention developed and Zionism split into factions. Socialist Zionism, favored by many secular Jews, was among the main branches. Support for Zionism grew among Jews grew throughout the early twentieth century. The Holocaust, followed by the problem of refugees after World War II, convinced the vast majority, as well as many non-Jews, that a Jewish homeland in Palestine was urgently needed. Although not all of them approved of the radical tactics of some Zionists, in 1948 the movement achieved its aim through the creation of the State of Israel. Since that time, most Jews throughout the world have considered themselves Zionists in the sense that they support the existence of that state; but there are differences among them as to what Zionism entails. The international Zionist movement continues to support Israel by such means as encouraging immigration and the investment of private capital, mobilizing public opinion in Israel’s favor, and fundraising. However, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been opposition, both within Israel and elsewhere, to the view that there should be no compromise with the Palestinians. The term “Zionist” is now also applied to groups in the Christian Zionism movement. Some fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants believe that according to Biblical prophecies, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the building of the Third Temple are necessary preconditions for Jesus to return and reign on Earth, and that by supporting Israel, they are helping to fulfill God’s plan. This is a distinct, and much less widespread, view than the general belief of most Christians that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel; and it has political consequences, as these groups are adamantly opposed to any peace plan involving compromise. SEE ALSO Balfour Declaration; Herzl, Theodor; Jewish Agency for Israel; Weizmann, Chaim; World Zionist Organization; Yishuv.

ZU ARTZENU (Hebrew for “this is our land”): Israeli nationalist movement of the extreme right, created in December 1993, following the Israeli-Palestinian Accords, which was signed in Washington, D.C. Zu Artzenu united settlers opposed to the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the course

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

483

ZU E BI, MAHMUD AL-

of the summer of 1995, after months of dormancy, the movement, headed by Moshe Feiglin, returned to the Israeli political scene by supporting demonstrations against the government of Yitzhak Rabin. Its leadership, alluding to the Israeli-Palestinian Accords, accused the prime minister of “selling Israel to the Arabs and pushing the country towards war.” At the beginning of September, the Israeli police arrested the principal leaders of the organization, who were accused of inciting revolt among the settlers in the Occupied Territories. On 14 September, Zu Artzenu organized a large demonstration against the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, during which some fifty people were injured. On 4 November, Jewish extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir was later found to have connections to branches of Kach, Eyal, and Zu Artzenu. The actions of the movement found support in the extremist party, Moledet, of Rehavam ZeDevi. In March 1996, anticipating the Knesset elections of the following May, Zu Artzenu leader Rabbi Benyamin (“Benny”) Elon appeared on the electoral list of Moledet. On 29 May, when Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister, Moledet gained two seats, one of which was taken by Rabbi Elon. From then on, befitting to the government’s policy favoring Israeli settlements, the movement consolidated its position in the settler community. At the beginning of 1999, some of Zu Artzenu’s members, essentially Russian in origin, decided to join the ranks of Israel Beiteinu. SEE ALSO Elon, Benjamin; Eyal; Israel Beiteinu; Kach Party; Likud; Moledet; Netanyahu, Benjamin; Rabin, Yitzhak; West Bank; ZeDevi, Rehavam.

a wealthy Sunni family of Khirbat Ghazal. Mahmud al-ZuEbi obtained a degree in agronomical engineering in 1963 from the University of Cairo and was named director of the Syrian agricultural center of Ghab a few months later. He was in charge of agrarian reform in the Ghab valley from 1964 to 1968 during which time he joined the BaEth Party and became a member of the council of agronomical engineers. In 1971 he was elected to the Syrian peoples council (Parliament), and occupied the posts of regional secretary of the BaEth party and assistant secretary general of the national bureau of agriculture from 1971 to 1973. From 1973 to 1976 he directed the Society for Investment in the Euphrates, responsible for the agricultural development of a large part of Syria. He was elected acting member of the regional command of the BaEth Party in March 1975, and four years later become a full member in charge of the peasant office. In 1981 ZuEbi was elected president of the Syrian peoples council, serving until October 1987 when President Hafiz al-Asad named him prime minister in place of Abdul Rawuf al-Kasem. On 29 June 1992 ZuEbi was asked by the Syrian president to form a new government. During his first term the Syrian economy revived, and Syrian isolation among Arab nations and within the world ended. While ZuEbi was serving his second term, President Hafiz al-Asad and his designated successor, Asad’s son Bashar, launched a campaign against corruption that touched many Syrian leaders. Himself accused of corruption, ZuEbi resigned from his post of prime minister on 7 March 2000; he was expelled from the BaEth Party on the following 13 May and committed suicide eight days later.

ZUEBI, MAHMUD AL- (ZoEbi; 1938–2000): Syrian political figure; born at Khirbat al-Ghazalah, Syria, to

484

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

SEE ALSO

BaEth.

T H E

Asad, Bashshar al-; Asad, Hafiz al-;

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY 1878

First Jewish settlement in Palestine. Petah Tikvah, several miles outside Tel Aviv, is founded by a group of religious Jews from Jerusalem. By 1882, the Jewish population in Palestine is about 24,000.

1881

Russian czar Alexander II assassinated by revolutionaries. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee the pogroms (1881–1884) in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Russian Zionist movement, Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), establishes the first European Jewish farming colonies in Palestine. Because the settlers speak many different languages, Hebrew is revived and used as a common tongue.

1881– 1903

First Aliyah. About 30,000 to 40,000 Jews, mostly Eastern European fleeing the pogroms, settle in Palestine during this first wave of immigration.

1896

Publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Book written by Theodor Herzl, primarily as a response to European antiSemitism, claiming that both the world and Jews need a Jewish state. At the First Zionist Congress, the author establishes the Zionist Organization (later known as the World Zionist Organization), which forms the foundation of the Zionist movement.

1897

First Zionist Congress, Basel, Switzerland. Meeting of Jewish leaders to discuss the ideas in Der Judenstaat of establishing a Jewish state. Issues the Basel Programme, which calls for a “home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law.”

1901

Fifth Zionist Congress. Establishes the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to raise funds and buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlers. By the early 2000s, the JNF owns about 14% of the land in Israel.

1903

Sixth Zionist Congress, Uganda proposal. A Zionist homeland is proposed in Uganda in East Africa by Herzl and Great Britain. The suggestion bitterly divides the congress because many Jews trace their homeland back to biblical territories (Palestine) and want to establish a state there.

1903– 1914

Second Aliyah. About 35,000 to 40,000 Jews, mostly socialist-Zionists, immigrate to Palestine and establish the kibbutz and Zionist labor movements.

1905

Failed revolution in Russia. Pogroms (1903– 1906) force thousands of Jews to flee Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands settle in Palestine.

485

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1914– 1918

World War I. As a result of the Allies’ victory, lands previously under Ottoman rule are divided between France and England; Palestine lands under British rule.

1915– 1916

Husayn-McMahon correspondence. Series of ten letters between Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, a leader of the Arab nationalist movement and king of the Hijaz, and Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt. British pledge support for Arab independence in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans and an alliance between the sharif and Britain.

1915

Sykes-Picot Agreement. Secret agreement between the French and British that divides Middle Eastern lands between the two countries after World War I. Formally known as the Anglo–Franco–Russian agreement, Britain receives common-day Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine; France receives commonday Syria and Lebanon.

1916

1916– 1919

Balfour Declaration. Letter drafted by Zionist leaders of the British government calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This declaration is in direct conflict with the Husayn-McMahon correspondence (1915–1916), which called for an independent Arab state. Arab revolt against Ottomans. Arab nationalist movement against Turkish rule of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and most of the Arabian Peninsula. Backed by British supplies and led by Husayn ibn Ali and his four sons, the Arabs gain control of Mecca and other Ottoman garrisons, thus proclaiming their independence.

1917– 1918

British troops occupy Palestine to secure a sea and land route to India.

1917– 1922

Russian revolution and civil war. Pogroms (1919–1921) force many Jews to flee Russia, and thousands settle in Palestine.

1918

Muslim-Christian Association formed. Palestinian nationalist organization opposed to Zionism.

1919

Paris (Versailles) Peace Conference. Produces the Treaty of Versailles (1920), which ends World War I and establishes the League of Nations and the mandate system of lands surrendered by Germany. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) virtually dismantles the Otto-

486

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

man Empire. Britain gains control of Palestine. 1919

King-Crane Commission. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson sends two representatives, Henry C. King and Charles R. Crane, to Palestine and Syria to gather local reactions to rule under Britain and France. They find that the Palestinians and Syrians are opposed to the mandate system, perceiving it as a form of colonial rule, and want national independence for their countries. Zionists also oppose. British and French disregard the report.

1919– 1924

Third Aliyah. About 35,000 Jews, mostly from Poland and Russia, immigrate to Palestine in response to the Russian Revolution.

1920

San Remo (Italy) Conference. Palestine and Iraq are assigned to Britain and Syria and Lebanon are assigned to France as Class A mandates, or trusteeships. Independence is promised only when the British or French determine that political systems are developed enough to be admitted to the League of Nations.

1921

Faisal I ibn Hussein—Amir Faisal—expelled from Syria by the French. A leader of the Arab revolt for nationalism from the Ottomans and king of Syria (1920) and Iraq (1921–1933), Faisal is forced to leave Syria shortly after he is appointed constitutional monarch by a congress of Arab nationalists.

1921

British accept Emir Abdullah as client ruler of Transjordan, install Faysal in Iraq. Britain grants the Palestinian Mandate east of the Jordan River to Abdullah II, who forms the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. Jewish settlement is outlawed.

1922

Churchill White Paper. Policy paper by British government on the tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. The statement claims equal protection and rights to both groups: Jewish immigrants should continue to settle in Palestine and have the right to do so; Arabs should not be subordinated by the immigration; and immigration should be economically sustainable by the region.

1922

British and French Mandates confirmed. League of Nations confirms British Mandate

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1924– 1930

1929

1930

1930

1930

1931

in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. Syria and Lebanon are given to French Mandate.

1931– 1939

Fourth Aliyah. Due to tough economic conditions, about 80,000 Jews from Poland immigrate to Palestine.

Fifth Aliyah. About 225,000 Jews, mostly educated and professional, immigrate to Palestine to flee the Nazis’s increasing hold over Germany.

1933

Nazi accession to power in Germany. AntiSemitic policies lead many Jews to flee Eastern Europe. At first, Nazis support the immigration to Palestine, as it helps their ethnic cleansing policies. However, once the Jewish population seeks statehood, Hitler sees a possible threat in the eastern European refugees.

1933– 1945

Holocaust in Europe. Anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich (Nazi Germany, 1933–1945) that include land and rights seizures; forced migrations into ghettos, work camps, and concentration camps; and the systematic genocide of six million Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee Europe to Palestine, as both legal immigrants and refugees.

1936

General strike and formation of the Arab Higher Committee. Palestinians strike against the British and the Jewish economy, determined to continue until Jewish immigration ceases, land sales are prohibited to Jews, and a national government and elected assembly are established. Five days into the strike, Palestinians form the Arab Higher Committee to present Arab demands to the British government.

1936– 1939

Palestinian insurrection (“Arab Revolt”). Revolt against British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Beginning with the general strike in 1936, the revolt escalates to full combat with the British and Jewish population from 1937–1938. About 10% of the adult male Palestinian population is killed, injured, or detained; the revolt has disastrous consequences for the Palestinian economy and leadership.

1937

Peel Commission Report. British Royal Commission Report that outlines solutions to tensions and unrest between the Arab Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. It concludes that the mandate system cannot work without repressing the Arab population and recommends that Palestine be divided into two nations, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish Agency accepts the plan, but opposes the borders and insists that the Palestinian population be deported from the Jewish

Zionist demonstrations over prayer rights at Western (Wailing) Wall; Palestinian attacks on Jews. At the Western (Wailing) Wall, a holy site to both Jews and Muslims, Zionists protest when the British tear down a partition they had built to separate men and women. Palestinians attack religious Jewish communities, and Jews riot, killing Palestinians. British and police open fire in an attempt to stop the violence. About 250 people die that year. Passfield White Paper. Policy paper by British government on tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine finds that Arabs fear their economic, political, and national future is obstructed by Jewish immigration and land ownership, which results in violence against the Jews. Recommends clear policy statements protecting Arab rights and regulating Jewish immigration and land purchase. Shaw Commission. Commission of inquiry by British government on the violence between Arabs and Jews at the Western (Wailing) Wall in Palestine, 1929. Finds that Arabs are hostile toward immigrating and land-owning Jews because they pose a threat to the future of their economic and political stability and control. Calls for a policy that limits Jewish immigration. Sir John Hope-Simpson White Paper. Policy paper by British government on the tensions between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. Calls for drastic reduction in the number of Jewish immigrants and restrictions on land purchase because of widespread Arab unemployment and lack of farmable land. MacDonald Letter. Written by British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929– 35) to Zionist leader and future president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. The letter reaffirms British support for Arab and non-Arab people in Palestine while expressing a responsibility to establish Jewish homeland in the region.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

487

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

state. The Palestinians’ Arab Higher Committee denounces the plan, arguing that they have 70% of the population and 90% of the land and that Palestine should remain a unified state. 1937

Bludan Conference. Meeting of delegates from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to discuss the Peel Commission. They reject the recommendation of splitting Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and call for a boycott of Jewish goods and British goods if the commission is carried out.

1938

Publication of The Arab Awakening. Book written by George Antonius, an Egyptianborn Christian and member of the British Palestine Administration. Discusses, from an Arab point of view, the origins of Arab nationalism, the significance of the Arab Revolt (1916), and the consequences of the British mandate system of dividing the Arab world after World War I.

1938

Woodhead Partition Commission. British report that retracts the Peel Commission’s suggestion to partition Palestine.

1939

London (St. James/Roundtable) Conference. British host discussions between Arabs and Jews of Palestine on the future political situation in the Mandate. Talks held through British intermediaries, as the Arabs and Jews will not meet face-to-face. The Arabs call for the end of the mandate system, the creation of an independent Arab state, an end to Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews, and minority rights for Jews. The Jews call for an increased immigration to Palestine, especially with Hitler’s rise to power and growing anti-Semitism in Europe.

1939

488

MacDonald White Paper. Policy paper issued by the British government outlining Britain’s proposals from the London Conference on the post-Mandate government of Palestine. It calls for Jewish immigration to be limited to 75,000 over five years, after which Arab approval will be needed, limited land purchase by Jews, and promised selfgovernment for Palestinians within ten years. Jews will have minority rights. Because of the outbreak of World War II, this policy is largely unimplemented. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

1939– 1945

World War II. British and French fight to secure their interests in the Middle East from the Germans. At the end of the war, Britain and France maintain control of the region.

1942

Biltmore Conference. New York City conference of about 600 American Zionists, plus many from around the world. They demand implementation of the Balfour Declaration (1916), which calls for a Jewish homeland, denounce the 1939 MacDonald White Paper as “cruel” in its quota of Jewish immigration to Palestine during a time of persecution and genocide in Hitler’s Germany, and declare that there will never be peace in the world without a Jewish homeland. Sponsorship for Jewish immigration to Palestine shifts from Britain to the United States.

1943

National Pact in Lebanon, effective independence established. Christian and Muslim leaders come together to negotiate terms of a government independent of French influence in Lebanon.

1945

Arab League (League of Arab States) established. Formed to express the economic and security needs of Arab states. First founded with 7 Arab states; In 2004, it has 22 members.

1946

Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. American and British collaboration formed to address the Arab-Israel conflict and Jewish refugees and survivors of the Holocaust.

1946

Morrison-Grady Plan for Palestine. Report by Britain’s Herbert Morrison and United States’ Henry Grady calling for a semiautonomous Palestine divided into Jewish and Arab regions. Limits Jewish immigration to 100,000 in the first year, then to be determined by Britain, with Britain controlling the military, foreign relations, immigration, and customs. Rejected by both the Jews and Arabs.

1946

Anglo-American Conference (second Bludan Conference). Arab League meets to discuss Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry report. They criticize American interference in Palestine, suggest a boycott of Jewish goods, and vow to help the Palestinian Arabs.

1946

France leaves Syria and Lebanon; British end Mandate over Transjordan.

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

1947

United Nations votes partition plan (Resolution 181). Award Jews a homeland in Palestine. With one-third of the population and 7% of the land ownership, Jews are awarded 55% of Palestine. The plan is violently rejected by Arab Palestinians.

1948

Dayr Yasin (Deir Yasin) massacre. Surprise attack and massacre on Palestinian village outside Jerusalem kills 105 to 205 people and leaves the village in ruins. Conducted by Jewish paramilitary units, National Military Organization (led by Menachem Begin) and Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.

1948

British Mandate on Palestine expires on 14 May. British relinquish Mandate. Next day Jews proclaim the independent State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader, becomes Israel’s first prime minister. Neighboring Arab countries send in troops to combat the Jews as British depart.

1948– 1949

Arab-Israel war; known as Nakba to the Arabs and the War of Independence to the Jews. In Arabic, Nakba means “disaster” or “catastrophe.” This war over the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine results in the displacement of 700,000 to 750,000 Arabs (more than half the Arab population in the Mandate), confiscation of property, massacres, and the loss of a Palestinian homeland and society. Neighboring Arab countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq) come to the aid of the Palestinians. Israel extends its boundaries by about 2,500 square miles.

1948

Count Folke Bernadotte assassinated; UN General Assembly passes Resolution 194. Bernadotte, a United Nations mediator in Israel and Palestine, proposes a truce between Arabs and Jews, which is broken and restored several times. In the two versions of the Bernadotte Plan for Arab-Israeli Settlement, boundaries are proposed in which Jerusalem goes to Transjordan (version 1) or is placed under United Nations control (version 2). Displaced Palestinians are offered repatriation or compensation for resettlement. Israel is to be recognized as an independent state. Both Arabs and Israelis reject his plan. On September 17, Bernadotte is gunned down by the Israeli group LEHI in Jerusalem.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

1948

All-Palestine government; Palestine declaration of independence. In response to the formation of the Israeli state, the Palestinians declare the need for an Arab government to represent and defend their interests. It is backed by surrounding Arab countries, but ultimately is ineffective.

1949

General armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Peace agreements, sponsored by the United Nations and mediated by Ralphe Bunche, put an end to the 1948 Arab-Israel War.

1951

King Abdullah I is assassinated by a group of disgruntled Palestinians thought to have been working for Egypt’s intelligence agency. In 1950, Abdullah I had held a conference in which it was proposed that the East and West Banks of Palestine were to be part of Jordan with parliamentary representation. The proposition was adopted unanimously and Abdullah became king of Palestine.

1953

Revolution in Egypt. Led by Nasser and the Free Officers, the coup overthrows the monarchy of King Farouk installed by the British. A republic is formed.

1954

Lavon Affair. Also known as the “mishap.” Israeli-trained espionage group of Egyptian Jews are caught in mid-sabotage. They claim orders came from the head of the Intelligence Division of the Israeli Defense Forces, Colonel Benjamin Gibli, who in turn cites orders from Pinchas Lavon, the minister of defense. Lavon’s involvement cannot be proven. The scandal extends into the 1960s and ultimately leads to the temporary withdrawal of David Ben-Gurion from politics in 1963.

1954

Moshe Sharett becomes prime minister of Israel when Ben-Gurion resigns.

1955

David Ben-Gurion elected prime minister of Israel for the second time.

1956

Arab-Israel War; Suez Crisis and War. The United States, Britain, and the World Bank pull out support for loans to Egypt after ties between Egypt and the Soviet Union grow closer. Egypt retaliates by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, of which Britain is the largest shareholder. In response, Britain and France declare war on Egypt with support

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

489

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

and troops from Israel. Under pressure by the United States, Britain, France, and Israel accept a cease-fire after about ten days of fighting. 1958

Founding of United Arab Republic (UAR). The UAR combines Syria and Egypt from 1958–1961 and poses a threat to the West with Nasser’s pan-Arab mission and antiWestern stance.

1958

Civil war in Lebanon, U.S. intervention. Sparked by the killing of a journalist, but rooted in grievances of political access, corrupt elections, elitist politics, and representation in government. Lebanon’s president, Camille Chamoun, blames the UAR for inciting the violence and requests military intervention by the United States on his behalf.

1958

1959

1961

Revolution in Iraq. Hashemite monarchy, installed by British in 1921, violently overthrown in military coup led by the Free Officers. The revolution’s goals are to rid the region of imperialistic forces and promote social and cultural reform. It results in a republican government and a foreign policy of nonalignment. Al-Fatah (Palestinian Liberation Movement) founded. Palestinian nationalist movement founded by Yasir Arafat. Its mission is to liberate Palestine by Palestinians, not by outside Arab assistance, through methods of armed struggle, not negotiation. Dissolution of UAR. Syria becomes increasingly dissatisfied with its diminishing role in the government; the BaEthist party is dismissed and Nasser’s policies seem more like an occupation than a collaboration. Syria’s contingency in the army mounts a coup, which is met by little resistance from Nasser.

1963

Levi Eshkol becomes prime minister of Israel upon Ben-Gurion’s resignation.

1964

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestine National Council (PNC) founded; Palestine National Covenant approved. Formed as a result of the first Arab Summit in Cairo, the PLO’s mission is to be an organized representative body of Palestinian nationalism and liberation. The PNC is its parliamentary branch. The Covenant

490

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

calls for a liberation of Palestine by the Palestinians and the end of Israel. 1967

Arab-Israel War, also known as the Six-Day War. Issues left simmering from the British Mandate period—Palestinian refugees, water rights, and border with Arab States, arms race, growing Arab nationalism, and Israel’s right to exist—lead to war between Israel and Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. As a result of the war, Israel increases its land mass by almost three times and includes Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

1967

UN Security Council Resolution 242. The “land for peace resolution” calls for peace in the region based on Israel’s withdrawal from lands won during the 1967 war and a recognition of secure boundaries. Little progress is made on the resolution.

1967

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) founded. Unites three groups: Heroes of the Return, the National Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Independent Palestine Liberation Front. Mission based on Palestinian national sovereignty, Arab unity, opposition to the State of Israel, and Marxist-Leninist ideology, borrowing some of Fidel Castro’s methods. Second in importance and influence to al-Fatah.

1968

Palestine National Charter revised. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, the charter is revised to emphasize an Arab Palestinian homeland, national sovereignty, and selfdetermination. Calls for armed struggle to gain liberation.

1969

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) founded. Marxist-Leninist group organized to liberate Palestine.

1969

Golda Meir becomes prime minister of Israel upon Eshkol’s death.

1970

“Black September.” Term used by some Palestinians (PLO and PFLP) to describe their defeat in the Jordanian Civil War. They had staged attacks against Israel from the Jordanian border since 1967, which provoked Israeli counter-attacks. The Jordanian army wins after ten days and thousands of casualties, many of which are civilian Palestinian refugees. A radical Palestinian terrorist

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

group founded by members of al-Fatah takes this name. 1970

Gamal Abdel Nasser dies. President of Egypt from 1956–1970 and figurehead of pan-Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, and anti-Israel policies dies of a heart attack.

1971

PLO expelled from Jordan. At the end of the Jordanian Civil War (1970–1971), the Jordanian army ousts the PLO from the country, pushing them into southern Lebanon.

1973

1973

Arab-Israel War, also known as the October War, Yom Kippur War, or Ramadan War. Caused by failure to resolve territorial disputes from the 1967 war. After diplomatic efforts fail, Egypt and Syria, backed by Soviet Union arms, plan a secret two-front attack on Israel, which is supported by United States weapons. A cease-fire is called when the United States proclaims a military alert in response to the Soviet Union’s offer to send troops to Egypt. The war results in thousands of dead and injured and a dependence on the Soviet Union (Egypt) and the United States (Israel) for military support. UN Security Council Resolution 338. Passed during the cease-fire of the 1973 war. Calls for an immediate end to military operations, implementation of Resolution 242 (from 1967), and a start to peace negotiations.

1974

Yitzhak Rabin elected prime minister of Israel. First native-born prime minister. Makes major strides in diplomacy with Jordan and Palestine. Shimon Peres succeeds him in 1977 after a financial scandal.

1974

PLO implicitly accepts two-state solution. At the PNC in 1974, the PLO modifies its goal of liberating all of Palestine and focuses on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

1974

UN and Arab League accept PLO as sole legitimate representative of Palestinians. Yasir Arafat makes first appearance at the UN proposing peace.

1974

Suez I, or Sinai I, agreement between Israel and Egypt. Cease-fire agreement ending the 1973 war; moderated by U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger. Israeli troops pull back west from the Suez Canal and east on the Sinai front of the canal. Three buffer security

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

zones are created for Israel, Egypt, and the UN. 1975

Suez II, or Sinai II, agreement between Israel and Egypt. Cease-fire agreement ending the 1973 war moderated by U.S. secretary of state Kissinger. Israel withdraws troops an additional 12 to 26 miles and the UN occupies buffer zone.

1975

UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Equates Zionism with racism.

1975– 1990

Lebanese Civil War. Series of domestic disruptions in southern Lebanon where the PLO is based and many Palestinian refugees live. Much fighting occurs in the region between Israelis and Palestinians.

1977

Menachem Begin elected prime minister of Israel. First right-wing prime minister. His term is marked by diplomacy with Egypt.

1978

First Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israel backs the Lebanese Forces, a coalition of right-wing militias, and Syria backs the Palestinians. Israel invades to rid the region of pro-Palestinian groups and PLO training camps and occupies a strip of land called “the security zone.”

1978

Camp David Accords. Peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, mediated and hosted by the United States. Calls for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 “land for peace” principle whereby Israel will return the Sinai to Egypt (pre1967 borders) in exchange for peace. Palestine and Lebanon oppose the accords. The establishment of an autonomous Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is not achieved. The accords mark the first time an Arab nation officially recognizes the statehood of Israel.

1979

Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Treaty signed by Egypt and Israel as a result of the Camp David Accords. The two agreements include “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East” and “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel.”

1979

Revolution in Iran. Overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last monarch of the 450-year old Safavid dynasty. The shah had used the secret police to repress dissident voices during a period of social, economic, and cultural change. Its leader, Aya-

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

491

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

tollah Khomeini, opposed the shah’s alliance with the United States and his support of Israel. A religious Islamist state replaces the monarchy. 1980– 1988

1981

1982

1982

Iran-Iraq War (First Gulf War). Iraq launches a surprise attack on Iran in 1980 because, according to Iraq, Iran was plotting raids across the border. Missile attacks and raids last for eight years, mostly on Iraqi soil, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. The UN Security Council intervenes in 1987 when international ships are threatened in the Gulf. Anwar al-Sadat assassinated. President of Egypt and successor to Nasser killed by three Egyptian soldiers discontented that Sadat did not ensure a liberated Palestine at the Camp David Accords and by Egypt’s deteriorating economic condition. Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon (“Operation Peace for Galilee”). A PLO rocket attack on Israel prompts Israel to invade Lebanon and rid the area of PLO forces and Syrian troops. Israeli forces reach Beirut and the conflict takes over 20,000 lives. The U.S. mediates and expels PLO and Syrian troops from Beirut. Sabra and Shatila massacre. From 800 to 2000 Palestinian refugees, mostly women, children, and the elderly, are massacred at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by the Phalange (Lebanese Christian militias). Israeli troops, which had invaded West Beirut and surrounded the camps, stand back while the massacres take place. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon is found indirectly responsible for the killings.

of land and property seizure and demolition, censorship, restricted travel and construction, and military tribunals instead of civilian courts. The uprisings escalate from labor strikes, boycotts against Israeli goods, demonstrations, and Palestinian youths throwing stones at Israeli troops in 1987 to riots and violence in 1994. More than 20,000 people die. 1987

HAMAS founded. Palestinian liberation group with the mission of establishing an Islamic Palestinian state. Employs methods of terror and violence.

1988

Algiers Declaration. Palestinian statehood proclaimed at PNC meeting.

1990

Iraq occupies Kuwait. After eight years of fighting with Iran, Iraq is left in severe debt. Accuses Kuwait of overproduction of oil to lower the price per barrel, which is seen as an act of war. U.S. forces are sent to protect Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, under the operation Desert Shield. TaDif Accord ends Lebanese Civil War. Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria make recommendations to Lebanon and Syria to end the war and establish Syria and Lebanon’s relationship with Israel.

1990

1991

Multinational war against Iraq (“Operation Desert Storm,” Second Gulf War). A major five-week air offensive and 100-hour ground campaign, led by the United States, drives the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

1991

UN General Assembly Resolution 4686. Revokes Resolution 3379, which equates Zionism with racism.

1991– 1993

Madrid Peace Conference. U.S.-led and -mediated talks between Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. First time Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab diplomats (except Egypt) meet for public peace talks. Arab states recognize Israel as a nation.

1982

PLO expelled from Lebanon. Although the mission of the Israeli invasion is to wipe out the PLO in Beirut, they succeed in transplanting the PLO to Tunis, Tunisia.

1983

Yitzhak Shamir becomes prime minister of Israel.

1992

Shimon Peres becomes prime minister of Israel.

Yitzhak Rabin elected prime minister of Israel for second time.

1993

Oslo Accords I; Palestinian-Israeli “Declaration of Principles.” Secret talks between PLO and Israel resulting in a land-for-peace agreement. PLO and Israel agree to recognize each other and sign the “Declaration of Principles,” which outlines sovereignty for

1984

1986

Yitzhak Shamir becomes prime minister of Israel for second time.

1987– 1994

First Intifada. Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli policies

492

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for five years. PLO gives up claims to territory won by Israel in the 1967 war. 2000–

Institution of Palestinian Authority. Autonomous Palestinian government set up in the West Bank and Gaza, chaired by Yasir Arafat and comprised of other PLO ministers.

Second Intifada (al-Aqsa Intifada). In reaction to Ariel Sharon’s tour of the al-Aqsa mosque (Islam’s third holiest shrine) with 1000 riot police, Palestinians take to the streets in demonstration. Israeli police shoot live ammunition and rubber bullets at the crowd, killing six. Fundamentally, the Palestinians rise up against the dead-end peace process. They are against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the growing number of settlements in the area, land seizures, home and property destruction, and restricted travel.

2001

Oslo Accords II (Taba Accord). Set the stage for Palestinian elections, security, economic relations, and legal and civil matters. The accords do not lead to peace. Instead, escalating violence and terrorism rack the area in the late 1990s and into the 2000s.

Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Taba. U.S. -mediated talks that lay the final plans for Israeli withdrawals and Palestinian refugees. Time runs out on the accords before the details can be agreed upon and the proposals are not followed through.

2001

Ariel Sharon elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon advocates harsh punishments for Palestinian terror groups and campaigns against the Oslo peace accords. He wants a Greater Israel and encourages the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Violence escalates and Israel re-occupies almost all of the West Bank during Sharon’s time in office.

2001

Palestinians claim Zionism is racist. At the World National Conference Against Racism, Palestinians claim that they are victims of crimes against humanity and the Zionist movement is racist.

2003–

U.S.-UK war against, and occupation of, Iraq. Without UN support, the United States, Britain, and a coalition of countries send troops into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Although the stated mission is to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, none are found.

2004–

Israel to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza Strip. Announcement made by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in February seen as source of clashes with settlers, bitter disagreements in Israel, and potential split within Likud. On 26 October, the Knesset approves Sharon’s plan, which calls for Gaza’s complete evacuation by end of 2005.

1994

Hebron massacre. U.S.-born Israeli settler opens fire on Palestinian worshippers at the al-Haram al-Ibrahimi mosque, killing 29.

1994

Cairo Agreement. Outlines Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza. A five-year plan is laid out for further Israeli withdrawals, negotiations on Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and Palestinian sovereignty.

1994

1995

1995

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. Israeli prime minister killed by Jewish extremists who are opposed to his peace negotiations with Palestine. Shimon Peres succeeds him.

1996

First Palestinian elections for PLO president and Palestinian National Congress. Arafat wins election for president.

1996

Benjamin Netanyahu elected prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu’s Likud Party campaigns against the Olso Accords and Peres and Rabin’s peace process with Palestine.

1998

Wye River Memorandum. Document produced by talks between Israel and the United States after an 18-month stagnation of the peace process. Calls for Israel to hand over 80% of Hebron and outlines further withdrawals from the West Bank.

1999

Ehud Barak runs on a Labor platform and is elected prime minister of Israel. Barak, running on a platform of bringing peace between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, wins the election and resumes peace talks with Palestine.

2000

tains is Syrian territory and therefore can occupy with troops.

Israel withdraws from Lebanon. Barak calls the army out of the region, except for the area of the Shab’a Farms, which Israel main-

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

493

TIMELINE OF MODERN ARAB-ISRAELI HISTORY

2004

494

In mid-October, Yasir Arafat grows increasingly weak with an unknown illness. On 29 October he is allowed to leave his compound in Ramallah to seek medical help. He is taken to a military hospital outside Paris for diagnosis and treatment.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

2004–

T H E

Yasir Arafat dies 11 November from an unknown illness. Mahmud Abbas sworn in as PLO chairman. Rawhi Fattuh sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority. Faruq Qaddumi named al-Fatah leader.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT 1897

First Zionist Congress discusses plans to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

1914– 1918

World War I; the Ottoman Empire is defeated.

1916

Sykes-Picot Agreement divides Ottoman Arab lands into zones controlled by either the French or the British.

1917– 1918

Palestine comes under British control, as British troops move northward from their bases in Egypt.

1917

Britain issues the Balfour Declaration, supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, . . .it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. . .”

1920

1922

League of Nations at San Remo divides Arab lands into mandates, which are supposed to eventually create nation states for the indigenous peoples. Britain holds the Mandate for Palestine. British create the Amirate of Transjordan out of Mandatory Palestine east of the River Jordan. The Jewish national home provisions of the Balfour Declaration will be applied only west of the Jordan.

1933

Adolf Hitler begins his rise to power in Germany. Jewish immigration to Palestine increases.

1936– 1939

The Arab Revolt against British pro-Zionist policy and in a quest for an independent Arab state in Palestine.

1946

Hostilities in Palestine escalate and include Jewish terrorism against Britain. U.S. president Harry S. Truman expresses support for partition and a “viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine.”

1947

The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommends the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with greater Jerusalem to be an international city. The resolution is adopted by a vote of 33-1310, but rejected by Arab and Muslim delegates.

1948

Israel declares statehood as the British Mandate over Palestine ends. Arab armies attack Israel. The resulting war leaves Jerusalem divided and 650,000 Palestinians refugees. UN Resolution 194 declares that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, and establishes a commission to facilitate their repatriation or compensation.

495

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

1949

An armistice is signed at Rhodes between Israel and Egypt. Similar agreements with Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria follow. U.N. conference at Lausanne produces no agreement between Israeli and Arab delegations.

1949– 1950

Israel holds 77 percent of the former Palestine. Jordan annexes East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Egypt controls the Gaza Strip. The United Nations Relief and Work Agency is established. Jews from several Arab countries begin migration into Israel.

1956– 1957

Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal leads to military action by Israel, Britain, and France. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatens economic sanctions against Israel and succeeds in forcing Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza. United Nations puts UNEF [Emergency Force] along the Egyptian-Israeli frontier.

1964

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is established.

1967

Israel captures the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. As many as 600,000 Palestinians become refugees. UN Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal and establishes the “land for peace” principle.

of its Arab neighbors. The Arab League expels Egypt. Israel invades Lebanon in response to terror attacks and in an attempt to clear out Palestinian fighters along the border. 1980

The Israeli government declares Jerusalem its capital. Ambassadors are exchanged between Israel and Egypt.

1981

Israel annexes the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967. Sadat is assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists.

1982

Israel invades Lebanon a second time, laying siege to Beirut. The PLO moves its headquarters from Beirut to Tunis. The Reagan Peace Initiative and the Fez Summit Peace Proposal are launched.

1987

Palestinian uprising, known as the Intifada, begin in Gaza and spread to the West Bank. Over the next several years, several thousand Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis are killed in the fighting.

1988

The Palestinian National Council (PNC) accepts UN Resolutions 242 and 338, tacitly recognizing Israel, and declares a Palestinian state. The United States government begins dialogue with the PLO.

1991

The Gulf War begins in January. Later that year, a Middle East peace conference opens in Madrid between Israel and Arab nations, including, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Palestinian representative participate, for the first time, in such an international forum as part of the Jordanian delegation.

1969– 1970

Israel begins establishing settlements in disputed areas. Egypt’s War of Attrition against Israel, with Soviet aid, leads to the Rogers Plan, which uses UN Resolution 242 as the basis for negotiations.

1973

Egypt and Syria attack Israel. No territorial changes result. UN Resolution 338 calls for negotiations between the parties. Minor border changes result as U.S. helps to broker disengagement agreements.

1992

The administration of U.S. president George H. W. Bush stops $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel in an attempt to curtail the spread of Israeli settlements into disputed areas.

1977

Menachem Begin and the Likud coalition win Israeli elections. Settlements in Occupied Territories increase. Egypt’s president Anwar al-Sadat goes to Israeli Knesset in the first efforts toward an Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

1993

1978

Negotiations between Sadat and Begin are brokered by U.S. president Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland, and result in the Camp David Accords, followed in 1979 by the first peace treaty between Israel and one

The Oslo Process begins during the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin meet at the White House. The PLO and Israel sign the Declaration of Principles, outlining a plan for Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories.

1994

The Cairo Accords between the PLO and Israel establish Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho but allow Israeli settlements to remain in place. Jordan and Israel sign a

496

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

TIMELINE OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

peace treaty with Clinton in attendance. Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Rabin receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nativity in Bethlehem is stormed by armed Arab Palestinians. A Saudi peace plan, endorsed by the Arab League, promises recognition of Israel in exchange for ending occupation of all Arab lands. UN Resolution 1397 affirms a two-state vision for Israel. U.S. president George W. Bush announces a plan for a “viable Palestinian state next to a secure Israel.” Israel begins construction of a highly controversial “security fence” around the West Bank in response to suicide bombing inside Jewish civilian population areas.

1995

The Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II, establishes three areas in the West Bank, one under direct Palestinian control, one under both Palestinian civilian control and Israeli security, and one under Israeli control. Rabin is assassinated in Tel Aviv.

1996

Benjamin Netanyahu is elected Israel’s prime minister. Israel launches Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon. Arafat, Jordan’s King Hussein, Netanyahu, and Clinton participate in a political summit in Washington, DC to negotiate for peace.

2003

The Hebron Protocol divides the city of Hebron. Palestinians protest the building of an Israeli settlement, Har Homa, on a hill overlooking East Jerusalem.

The United States invades and begins its occupation of Iraq. The Road Map for Peace, sponsored by the “Quartet” (U.S., U.N., Russia, and the European Union), is released.

2004

Ariel Sharon’s government promotes a plan that involves Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip and the abandonment of the settlements there. In October the Knesset votes to back Sharon’s plan to remove Israeli troops, as well as twenty-one settlements from Gaza and four small settlements from the northern part of the West Bank. The vote—sixtyseven for, forty-five against, and seven abstentions—marks the first time in twenty years that the parliament had favored the withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the region. Sharon rejects a call for a referendum by the Likud which creates turmoil in the Knesset.

2004

In mid-October, Yasir Arafat, suffering from an unknown illness, is allowed to leave his compound in Ramallah to seek diagnosis and treatment in France. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon states that if Arafat dies, he will not allow Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem.

2004–

Yasir Arafat dies 11 November from an unknown illness. Mahmud Abbas sworn in as PLO chairman. Rawhi Fattuh sworn in as interim president of the Palestinian Authority. Faruq Qaddumi named al-Fatah leader.

1997

1998

The Wye River Memorandum is signed but not implemented.

1999

The PLO postpones a declaration of statehood. Ehud Barak, newly elected prime minister of Israel, pledges to work for peace. The Sharm al-Shaykh memorandum is signed between Israel and the PLO. Clinton attends a PNC meeting in Gaza to witness the elimination of Palestine National Covenant clauses calling for the destruction of Israel.

2000

Israeli Army withdraws from South Lebanon. At the Camp David II meetings in July, Clinton chairs negotiations between Arafat and Barak. Negotiations break down. The alAqsa Intifada begins, fueled by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al– Sharif.

2001

Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel.

2002

Israeli troops reoccupy Palestinian areas in response to a terrorist suicide bombing of elderly people celebrating Passover at a resort hotel. Arafat is placed under house arrest in his Ramallah compound. The Church of the

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

497

GLOSSARY ADAR: Name

of the sixth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of the month of February and the beginning of the month of March. A second month of Adar is added every 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th years of the calendar’s nineteen-year cycle to align with the lunar calendar.

AGHA: Socio-political

title of authority. Agha (“chief,” “master”) was associated with certain administrators in the Ottoman empire. It is also used in other settings, such as among Kurds. Name of the central platform in a synagogue, from which the rabbi officiates. Also called a bima.

ALMENOR:

AMIR:

Political title. See dictionary entry “Emir.”

ASHUR: Islamic

tithe. Also called zakah or zakat, ashur (from the Arabic word for “ten”) is a charitable tithe prescribed in Islam. In North Africa, ashur also denotes the tenth month of the Islamic calendar, Muharram.

AV:

Eleventh month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of July and the beginning of August. The destruction of the Temple of Solomon is commemorated on the 9th of Av (Tish’a b-Av). “Son of the commandment,” in Hebrew. Jewish religious ceremony celebrating the passage from adolescence to majority and one’s ad-

BAR-MITZVA:

mission into the adult community. During the ceremony the 13-year old “mitzva” reads from the Torah and puts on phylacteries, symbolic of the commandments to which he will henceforward submit. The equivalent of bar-mitzva for young women is the bas-mitzva, which is celebrated at the age of 12. BEIT MIDRASH: School of rabbinical studies, generally attached to a synagogue. BETH: Also “beir, bait, bayt, beit.” Hebrew word meaning “house,” often figuring in composite names such as Bethel (house of God), Bethlehem (house of bread) or Beth Din (house of the law). BEY: Political title. Bey is a Turkish term often translated as “prince.” In the Ottoman empire’s administration and military, it was given to midlevel officers. In modern Turkey, it is often used as a suffix to a man’s first name as a polite form of address. BINT: Arabic, “girl.” Female children in the Arab world sometimes are referred to by making reference to their father. Thus, “so-and-so, bint [daughter] so-and-so.” CASBAH: Old quarters of an Arabic city. From the Arabic qasaba (“divide,” “cut up”; also, “citadel” or “capital”), it is a term often used by Europeans to denote the older, native quarters of a town, as distinct from the newer areas in which foreigners lived.

499

GLOSSARY

DARB: Street or path. Has come to refer to a neighbor-

hood, especially in Morocco. DEY:

Political title. The Turkish word for maternal uncle, the position of dey originally was military, but came to denote administrative power as well. Deys were found in North Africa, especially Tunisia and Algeria, from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries.

DHU

AL-HIJJAH: Name of the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar.

DHU AL-QIEDAH:

NAME OF THE ELEVENTH MONTH OF THE IS-

LAMIC CALENDAR.

Monetary unit. Dinar is derived from the Greek “dinarion” and the Latin “denarius.” During the early Islamic period, it was a type of gold coin. Currently it serves as the currency of Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, and Tunisia.

DINAR:

DIRHAM: Monetary

unit. During the early Islamic period, the dirham was a type of silver coin. Currently it is used in Morocco, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Honorific title. The origins of this title are Greek, and refer to a man of property or education. During the late Ottoman period, it was used as a sign of respect for middle class males as well as for some bureaucratic positions. Another form of the word, effendum, is still used in Egypt to mean “mister” or “sir.”

EFFENDI:

“Leader of the exile” (rosh ha-gola, in Hebrew; resh galonta, in Aramaic). Lay head of some Jewish communities settled outside of Israel.

EXILARCH:

FEDDAN: Unit

of surface area. Deriving from an Arabic term for a yoke of oxen, it referred to the amount of land such animals could farm. Thus the actual surface area called a feddan varied from region to region. In Egypt, where it remains the standard unit of surface area today, it equals 4,200.883 square meters, slightly more than one acre. Peasant. Fellah (also fallah; plural: fallahun, but more commonly fallahin following colloquial usage) derives from the Arabic verb falaha (“cultivate”). It refers to small scale, subsistence level cultivators in Arab countries, but can be used, often derisively, by urbanites to refer to the rural population generally.

FELLAH:

GENTILE: Word

used by Jews, from the time of the end of the Second Temple (between 19 and 70 C.E.)

500

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

to designate non-Jews, then used by Christians to designate pagans. GHAZEL: Type of poetic form. The word is Arabic (ghazal; “flirtation” or “love poem”), and is also seen as gazel or ghazal. A lyrical poetic mode often expressing romantic love or eroticism, the form passed into Turkish, Persian, and Urdu poetry as well. GOY: (Goi, pl. goyim) “Nation or people” in Hebrew. Word used by Jews currently to designate “gentiles”, that is, non-Jews. HAZAN: Hebrew word used to designate the performer of a Jewish religious office, especially having to do with chanting prayers and teaching children. HESHVAN: Name of the second month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the end of October and the beginning of November. HOCA: Honorific title. Hoca is a Turkish word derived from the Persian khwaja. In the Turkish speaking parts of the Ottoman empire, it denoted religious scholars and certain administrative bureacrats. It is still used in modern Turkey to refer to teachers and religious scholars. See also “khawaja.” HOFSHI: Hebrew word meaning “free.” By extension designates a secular Jew. HOSAINIYEH: Place of a certain type of religious ceremony. In Iran, it is a place where the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn ibn Ali is commemorated, especially on Ashura, the tenth day of the Islamic month of Muharram. It refers to the death of Husayn, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in 680 at the hands of the Umayyads at Karbala, in Iraq. Traditionally, a hosainiyeh was a different structure than a mosque, and was a populist institution rather than one under the control of the Islamic clerics. INQILAB: Revolution or uprising. In modern Arabic political usage, the term inqilab is usually used to connote a sudden seizure of political power, often via a military coup d’état. In Persian, the term means “revolution,” such as the 1979 revolution in Iran. IYAR: Name of the eighth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to late April and early May. JUMADA AL-AWWAL: Name of the fifth month of the Islamic calendar. JUMADA AL-THANI: Name of the sixth month of the Islamic calendar. KADDISH: Hebrew word, from Aramaic, meaning “sanctification.” Prayer of praise, addressed to T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

God and recited periodically in the course of a synagogue service, by men in mourning. Also called the prayer of the dead. Hebrew term designating someone who reads and interprets sacred writings without the help of commentaries.

KARA:

KAZA: Ottoman

administrative unit. Kaza is a Turkish word derived from the Arabic qada. By the late Ottoman empire, a province (vilayet; Arabic: wilaya) was divided into governorates called sanjaks (Arabic singular: sanjaq) or livas (Arabic singular: liwa). These in turn were divided into smaller units called kazas. Kaza can also refer to the judgment of a qadi, or judge. See also “liwa,” “qaDimmaqam,” and “vilayet.”

Highway inn for travelers, or a warehouse for merchandise. Khans were built as rest stops for travelers and caravans. A khan was also an urban complex for storing merchandise and hosting merchants.

KHAN:

KHANJAR: Type

of Arabic dagger. A khanjar usually refers to a slightly curved, double edged dagger that tapers to a point. The hilt is often decorated.

KHATIB: Islamic preacher. A khatib is the religious offi-

cial who delivers the sermon during Friday prayers in a mosque, usually from a raised pulpit called a minbar. See also “minbar.” Honorific title of Persian origin. In Egypt and parts of the Fertile Crescent, khawaja was a title used to denote a non-Muslim, both foreigners as well as native Christians and Jews. The term comes from the Persian khwaja. See also “hoca.”

KHAWAJA:

KHAWR: Natural

harbor; also part of place names. The term is used in the Persian/Arabian Gulf region. High-level title used in Egypt from 1867– 1914. Khedive is a Persian word for a high prince that was used by the governors of Ottoman Egypt from 1867–1914 to replace the title “pasha” carried by other governors in the empire. It was first used by IsmaEil Pasha, grandson of Muhammad Ali, who secured this right from the Ottoman sultan in order to differentiate and elevate himself from other provincial governors. The term was replaced with “sultan” by the British, who occupied Egypt starting in 1882. See also “pasha.”

KHEDIVE:

Blessing pronounced at a meal, or during Jewish religious holidays.

KIDDUSH: KIDDUSH

HA-SHEM:

Hebrew word for Jewish martyrs in

general. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

(“yarmulka” in Yiddish) Skullcap worn by observant Jews, as a sign of submission to God. KISLEV: Word for the third month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of November and the beginning of December. On 25 Kislev, the holiday of Hanukkah is celebrated. KORAN: See dictionary entry “QurDan.” LAILAT AL-QADR: Muslim holiday, celebrated on 27 Ramadan, commemorating the night of Qur’anic revelation. LIRA: Ottoman monetary unit. The lira, or pound, was named after an Italian silver coin, and was the currency used in the Ottoman empire. Modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon continue to use the lira as their national currencies. LIWA: Ottoman administrative unit. During the late Ottoman empire, a province (vilayet; Arabic: wilaya) was divided into liwas (called liva in Turkish). A liwa was also called a sanjak (Arabic: sanjaq). These in turn were divided into smaller units called qadas or kazas. LUTI: Term implying deviation from moral standards. In Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term originally referred to a member of a chivalrous brotherhood. It later assumed more negative connotations implying drunkenness and moral deviation. In parts of the modern Arab world, luti is a term used for a homosexual. Some surmise that the term derives from the biblical figure Lot, son of Noah. MAJLES: Legislature or parliament. Majles is the Persian form of the Arabic majlis (in Turkish, meclis), which is derived from the verb jalasa (“to sit”). It can mean a meeting, or sitting, in a number of senses, both private and public. In the public realm, it became the term used for legislatures in the Middle East and North Africa once these began to emerge in the nineteenth century. It can also refer to an appointed consultative body. MALIK: “King” in Arabic. Malik derives from the Arabic verb malaka (“to own”). It has been used in the modern Arab world to mean king. MAEPALIM: Illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine. MaEpalim (Hebrew, “the daring ones”) were Jewish immigrants who entered Palestine in violation of immigration quotas established by the British Mandate in Palestine, especially after the 1939 White Paper. The Zionist community in Palestine established the clandestine organization Mossad le-Aliyah Bet in 1938 to assist Jews KIPPAH:

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

501

GLOSSARY

fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe in reaching Palestine. British forces intercepted many maEpalim and interned them in camps in Cyprus, including the 4,515 passengers aboard the ship Exodus, whose detainment in 1947 helped turn international sentiment against British rule in Palestine. MENORAH: Hebrew word for the seven-branch candela-

bra, principal object of worship in the Jewish temple. Its shape was inspired by a plant known in antiquity under the name of moriah. When the first temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, the candelabra disappeared with all the other sacred objects. Little case in wood or metal, containing a verse of the Torah, attached to the frame of the door to a house.

MEZUZAH:

MIKVAH:

Purifying bath, a practice of Orthodox Jews.

MINBAR: Pulpit

in a mosque. In a mosque, the sermon (khitab) is delivered by the preacher (khatib) from a raised pulpit called a minbar, derived from the Arabic nabara (“to raise the voice”). See also “khatib.”

MINHA: Hebrew word for “offering.” Name of the Jew-

ish afternoon prayer. MINYAN: Hebrew

word meaning “number.” A quorum of ten adult males is required for Jewish public prayer. Hebrew word used to designate a Jew who is opposed to the Hasidic movement.

MITNAGDI:

Practical commandments of Judaism. According to tradition, the Torah contains 613 commandments, of which 248 are “positive” (obligations) and 365 are “negative” (interdictions).

MITZVA:

MOSLEM

See the dictionary entry “Muslim.”

MUEZZIN: The

one who calls Muslims to pray. A muezzin (Arabic: mu Dadhdhin) calls the Muslim faithful to pray, usually from a minaret. The call to prayer must be in Arabic, even though most of the world’s Muslims do not speak Arabic.

MUHARRAM: Name

of the first month in the Islamic calendar. The first of Muharram is New Year’s Day; the tenth of Muharram, the Feast of Ashura, commemorates at once the meeting of Adam and Eve, the end of the deluge, and the death of Husayn. Among the ShiEa, Ashura is celebrated in distress, since they commemorate on this day only the death of Husayn. Before the Islamic epoch, the month of Muharram corresponded to a period of sacred repose. Concerning New

502

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Year’s Day, the Iranians continue to celebrate the “Naw Rouz” (new light), the Sassanid New Year’s Day, having survived the coming of Islam, which falls after the spring equinox, 21 March. MUKHTAR: Chief or headman. Deriving from the Arabic word khatara (“to choose” or “select”), a mukhtar (“selected one”) was an official appointed by the Ottoman authorities to serve as a go-between between the government and a tribe, village, or urban quarter. The function was part of the Ottomans’ centralization efforts, efforts that included attempts to undercut traditional religious figures who had maintained levels of local influence. The position is still found in parts of the Arab world. MULAI: Title and form of address. In Arabic, “my lord.” Also mawlai, mawlay. A form of address formerly used when speaking to a king, sultan, or caliph. It is still used in Morocco when referring to the crown prince. MUTASARRIF: Ottoman provincial official. A mutasarrif was the recipient of taxes from sub-provincial governorates in the Ottoman empire. By the late Ottoman era, the term denoted the governmentappointed head of a governorate, or sanjak (also liwa). See also “liwa.” NARGHILA: Water pipe. A narghila (also called arghila, qalyan, and shisha) is a water pipe used in the Middle East and North Africa to smoke tobacco, usually flavored tobacco called tombac. They are commonly seen in all-male coffee houses. NISSAN: Month of the Hebrew calendar, occurring between late March and early April. The holiday of Pesach (Passover) is celebrated from 15 to 21 Nissan. Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), observed on 27 Nissan, is a national day of mourning in memory of Jews who died in the Holocaust during World War II. OASIS: Watered area surrounded by desert. An oasis is a fertile area, watered by wells, that is found in the midst of a desert. They can be small or large. PESH MERGA: Kurdish, “those who face death.” Modern term used to denote armed Kurdish fighters. It first appeared during the Kurdish war against the Iraqi government that began in 1962. QADID: Arabic for “leader.” Arabic term denoting political leadership. QADIMMAQAM: Ottoman provincial official. The term itself is Arabic, and was the title given by Ottoman authorities to the official appointed to head a subgovernorate called a kaza (also qada). See T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

also “kaza,” “liwa,” and “vilayet.” It was also used to denote a low ranking military officer. Canal. A qanat (also qana) can mean an underground water channel for irrigating fields, but can also denote a surface level canal, both small and large (such as the Suez Canal).

QANAT:

QAT: Plant

with mildly stimulant effect. The leaves of the qat (also khat) plant, Catha edulis, are chewed in southwestern Arabia and eastern Africa for their mildly stimulant effect. Similar to the stimulant qualities of caffeine, qat is chewed in the company of others as an important form of social gathering. In this regard, gathering together to chew qat is akin to gathering in a coffee house to drink coffee or tea.

QIBLA: Direction

of Islamic prayer. The qibla is the direction in which Muslims must pray. The first qibla was Jerusalem, but this was quickly changed in the seventh century to the direction of Mecca. Muslims around the globe all pray in the direction of Mecca. Monetary unit. The Arabic word qirsh, and Turkish word ghurush or kurus¸, is translated as piastre, itself the Italian name for the medieval peso duro. The qirsh was introduced into the Middle East in the early seventeenth century and became a unit of Ottoman currency equivalent to one-hundredth of a lira. It is still used as a small unit of currency in parts of the Middle East.

QIRSH:

Name of the third month of the Muslim calendar. The 12th of this month is celebrated as the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Muhammad. In the Maghreb, this holiday is called al-Mawled (Muled, Mulud).

RABI AL-AWWAL:

Name of the fourth month in the Muslim calendar.

RABI AL-THANI: RAJAB: Name

of the seventh month of the Muslim calendar, during which, on the 27th, the Muslims commemorate the ascension of the prophet Muhammad. During this month, some believers also celebrate the birth of Zaynab, eldest daughter of the Prophet.

RAMADAN: Ninth month of the Islamic calendar, lasting

twenty-nine or thirty days. Ramadan is a month of fasting, which is one of the five obligations of Islam, and so between sunrise and sunset the believer abstains from smoking; partaking of food or drink; telling lies, gossiping and engaging in other unethical behavior; and engaging in sex. At sunset everyone breaks the fast, usually in a large meal with family and friends (iftar). The end of D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

the month of Ramadan is celebrated with a feast, the EId al-Fitr. Between the 27 and 28 Ramadan falls the Night of Destiny (lailat al-qadr), when according to a widespread belief everyone’s fate is decided. For some this date marks the first revelation of the QurDan to Muhammad. HA-SHANAH: (Rosh Hashana; head of the year, in Hebrew) Jewish New Year’s Day, celebrated on the first and second days of the month of Tishri (September-October). This holiday, after which, for a period of ten days, every Jew shows penitence, is extended by the additional day of Yom Kippur. On the afternoon of the first day the tashlih occurs, a purification ceremony. In the Old Testament, Rosh ha-Shanah was called Yom Teru Eah (Day of the Trumpet), since the new moon on that day was announced by the sound of the shofar.

ROSH

SAFAR: Name

of the second month of the Islamic cal-

endar. Arabic word for “master,” “lord,” “chief,” or “mister.” Prior to the coming of Islam, sayyid (plural: sada or asyad) was used in Arabia to denote a tribal chief. After the coming of Islam, it assumed a particular meaning: descendants and certain relatives of the prophet Muhammad. The term sayyid thereafter came to denote the direct descendants of the Prophet through his two grandsons, Hasan and Husayn, the sons of the union of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and his son-in-law (and cousin), Ali. In some part of the Arab world, notably in the Hijaz region of Arabia and parts of the Fertile Crescent, sayyid came to denote those who were part of the lineage of Husayn, while the term sharif denoted those descendant from Hasan. Sayyids were held in high social esteem. However, the terms sayyid or sid (also, “sidi”: “my lord”) have also been used in a variety of Islamic societies as a form of address for holy men and religious figures. It also is the modern Arabic equivalent of “mister.”

SAYYID:

Group of Western oil companies in the Middle East. The Seven Sisters were a cartel of Western oil companies that dominated the Middle Eastern oil industry from 1930–1970. They were: Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Mobil, and Gulf Oil. They increasingly lost power starting in the 1950s and 1960s as Middle Eastern countries began nationalizing their oil industries. With the merger of Chevron and Gulf in 1986, the number of “sisters” dropped to six,

SEVEN SISTERS:

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

503

GLOSSARY

which remain important companies in the fields of oil refining and distribution. SHAEABAN: Name of the eighth month of the Islamic calendar. According to a belief dating back to the 10th century, for every Muslim, the night of 14–15 of this month is considered as the “night of destiny,” in the course of which everyone finds out what the year to come has in store. Others think this “revelation” occurs on the night of 27–28 Ramadan. SHAWAL: Tenth month of the Islamic calendar, following the month of Ramadan. On the 1st of this month Muslims celebrate the end of the fast (Id el-Fitr). SHEVAT: Name of the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of January and the beginning of February. SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY: Term denoting a diplomatic intermediary shuttling back and forth between countries in an effort to arrange an agreement among contending countries. The term was first raised to the level of public discourse to describe the efforts of American secretary of state Henry Kissinger to bring about a disengagement of forces after the October 1973 Arab–Israeli war. Kissinger had to shuttle back and forth between the capitals of Egypt, Syria, and Israel, carrying his proposals, because the parties could not agree to meet together. SITT: Arabic for “lady.” Sitt is often used in female royal titles. SIVAN: Nine month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of May and the beginning of June. On 6 Sivan the holiday of the first fruits takes place (Shavuot). TAMMUZ: Name of the tenth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of June and the beginning of July. TAQLID: Islamic legal term. In Sunni Islam, the term taqlid came to mean “deference” or “imitation,” in the sense that religious jurisprudents were obliged to defer to the doctrinal precedents of their respective schools of law (the ShafiEi, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Maliki schools). This, then, reduces the realm of individual interpretation (ijtihad). In ShiEite Islam, however, the position of marja al-taqlid is quite different, and denotes an elite jurist who is spiritually empowered to employ ijtihad. TARIQA: Sufi order or brotherhood. Tariqa is an Arabic word derived from the term meaning “the way.” It is used to denote sufi mystical orders.

504

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Hill or mound. The Arabic word tall means a hill, and is used to describe such geographical features. In archeological parlance, however, it refers to a mound containing ancient archeological remains. Finally, it also refers to a large region of North Africa from Morocco to Tunisia.

TELL:

TEVET: Name

of the fourth month of the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of December and the beginning of January.

Maritime boundary. The thalweg principle of international law, whereby a river or some other body of water constitutes an international border, was most notably used in the Middle East in the case of the border between Iraq and Iran.

THALWEG LINE:

TISHRI: Name

of the first month in the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the period between the end of September and the beginning of October. On 1 and 2 Tishri the holiday of Rosh ha-Shana falls, on the 10th that of Yom Kippur, and on the 21st, Simhat Torah.

Arabic term for the tenth and eleventh months of the Gregorian calendar. In the modern Arab world, Tishrin al-Awwal (“First Tishrin”) refers to the Gregorian (Western) month of October, while Tishrin al-Thani (“Second Tishrin”) refers to November. Some Arab countries, notably Saudi Arabia, do not use the Gregorian calendar but only the Islamic (hijri) calendar. It is also the name of a newspaper in Syria, named after the initial Arab victories in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

TISHRIN:

TU B’SHVAT: Name

of the Jewish holiday, called “of the trees,” celebrated on 15 Shevat, month corresponding to the period between the end of January and the beginning of February. Turkic peoples in Turkmenistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The Turkmen are speakers of Western Oghuz Turkic, and were originally pastoral nomads. They lived east of the Caspian Sea and west of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River. In addition, Turkmen minorities today reside in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

TURKMEN:

URF:

Arabic customary law. Urf refers to largely unwritten tribal or customary codes that govern social relations, in contradistinction to Islamic law (shari Ea) or state legal codes (qanun). Arabic for “teacher” or “master.” This term (also ostad or ustaz) is used to denote a teacher or professor, but can also be used as a polite form of address for any educated person.

USTADH:

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

GLOSSARY

UZI: Type

of Israeli firearm. The uzi is a short submachine gun designed by the Israeli army office Maj. Uziel Gal, after whom it is named. Ottoman provincial governor. The term vali is the Turkish and Persian rendition of the Arabic wali, referring to someone who has been deputized to exercise authority. It meant “governor.” The Mamluks assigned valis to their smallest administrative units, whereas in Iran and later in the Ottoman empire, a vali was the governor of the largest type of administrative unit. In the Ottoman empire, a vali was head of a vilayet, or province. See also “kaza,” “liwa,” and “vilayet.”

VALI:

Ottoman Turkish term for province. A vilayet, from the Arabic word wilaya, was the largest

VILAYET:

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

administrative unit within the Ottoman empire. See also “vali.” Type of government official; “minister.” Under the Ottomans, the vizier (Arabic: wazir; Turkish: vezir) served as a government minister. The vezir-i azam, or grand vizier, was the functional equivalent of a prime minister under the sultan. The Ottomans replaced the term with vekil (Arabic: wakil) in the 1830s, although wazir is still in use to denote a government minister in the Arab world.

VIZIER:

ZAEIM:

Arabic for “boss” or “leader.” Usually used in an informal manner to denote a strong leader. It is also used as a military rank in some Arab countries.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

505

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbas, Mahmoud. Through Secret Channels: The Road to Oslo. Readings. Reading, UK: Garnet, 1995. Abed, George T. The Economic Viability of a Palestinian State. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1990. Abu-Amr, Ziad. Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994. AbuKhalil, AsEad. Bin Laden, Islam, and America’s New “War on Terrorism.” New York: Seven Stories, 2002. ———. Historical Dictionary of Lebanon. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. ———. “Lebanon.” Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Frank Tachau. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Aburish, Said K. Arafat: From Defender to Dictator. New York: Bloomsbury, 1998. ———. Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Adelson, Roger. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Alexander, Yonah. “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Palestinian Secular Terrorism. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2003. Algar, Hamid. “A Brief History of the Naqshbandi Order.” In Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, edited by Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone. Istanbul and Paris: Editions Isis, 1990. Almog, Oz. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, translated by Haim Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Alterman, Jon. New Media, New Politics?: From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998. Amery, Hussein A., and Aaron T. Wolf, eds. Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Arian, Alan, and Michal Shamir. The Elections in Israel, 1996. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Arian, Asher. The Second Republic: Politics in Israel. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1998.

507

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Ballantine, 1997. Arnow, David. “The Holocaust and the Birth of Israel: Reassessing the Causal Relationship.” Journal of Israeli History 15, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 257– 281. Aronoff, Myron. Israeli Visions and Division: Cultural Change and Political Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1990. Aronson, Geoffrey. Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts in the West Bank. London and New York: Kegan Paul, 1990. Aronson, Shlomo. The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Aruri, Naseer H. The Obstruction of Peace: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1995. Arzt, Donna E. Refugees Into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997. Ashrari, Hanan. This Side of Peace: A Personal Account. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Avruch, Kevin, and Walter P. Zenner, eds. Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion and Government. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Awaisi, Abdal-Fattyah Muhammad al-. The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, 1928–1947. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998.

Beinin, Joel, and Joe Stork. Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Ben-Eliezer, Uri. The Making of Israeli Militarism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and S. Sharot. Ethnicity, Religion and Class in Israeli Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. Crisis and Transformation: The Kibbutz at Century’s End. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. ———. Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Benvenisti, Meron. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Berg, Nancy E. “Transit Camp Literature: Literature of Transition.” In Critical Essay on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government: Books on Israel, Vol. 4, edited by Kevin Avruch and Walter P. Zenner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Berkowitz, Michael. Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bickerton, Ian J., and Carla L. Klauser. A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.

Baker, Raymond William. Sadat and After: Struggles for Egypt’s Political Soul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Binur, Yoram. My Enemy, My Self. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Bar-On, Mordechai. The Gates of Gaza: Israel’s Road to Suez and Back, 1955–1957. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Black, Ian, and Benny Morris. Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

———. In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1996.

Bohn, Michael K. The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1999.

Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov. Israel and the Peace Process, 1977–1982: In Search of Legitimacy for Peace. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Bose, Meena, and Rosanna Perotti, eds. From Cold War to New World Order: The Foreign Policy of George H. W. Bush. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

Bass, Warren. Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Beaumont, Peter. “Water Policies for the Middle East in the Twenty-first Century: The New Economic Realities.” International Journal of Water Resources Development 18, no. 2 (2002): 315–334.

508

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Boyd, Douglas A. Broadcasting in the Arab World: A Survey of the Electronic Media in the Middle East, 3d edition. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999. Brentjes, Burchard. The Armenians, Assyrians, and Kurds: Three Nations, One Fate? Campbell, CA: Rishi, 1997. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brom, Shlomo, and Yiftah Shapir, eds. The Middle East Military Balance, 2001–2002. Cambridge, MA, and London.: MIT Press, 2002.

Cobban, Helena. The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 1991–1996 and Beyond. Washington, DC: Institute of Peace Press, 1999.

Brooks, David B., and Ozay Mehmet, eds. Water Balances in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2000.

———. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Brown, Nathan. Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Brynen, Rex. Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1990. Brynen, Rex; Bahgat Korany; and Paul Noble, eds. Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, 2 volumes. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995. Burdett, Anita, ed. The Arab League: British Documentary Sources, 1943–1963. Slough, UK: Archive Editions, 1995. Burrows, William E., and Robert Windrem. Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Corbin, Jane. The Norway Channel: The Secret Talks that Led to the Middle East Peace Accord. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994. Cubert, Harold. The PFLP’s Changing Role in the Middle East. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Davila, James R., ed. The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity: Papers from an International Conference at St. Andrews in 2001. Boston, MA: Brill, 2003. Davis, Joyce M. Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Caplan, Neil. Futile Diplomacy, Vol. 4: Operation Alpha and the Failure of Anglo-American Coercive Diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1954–1956. Totowa, NJ; London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Deeb, Marius. Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Carey, Roane. The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid. London: Verso, 2001.

Diskin, Abraham. The Last Days in Israel: Understanding the New Israeli Democracy. London: Frank Cass, 2003.

Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Caspi, Dan, and Yehiel Limor. The In/Outsiders: The Mass Media in Israel. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999. Cassese, Antonio. Terrorism, Politics, and Law: The Achille Lauro Affair. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989. Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. 2d ed. Boston: South End, 1999. Choueiri, Youssef M. Arab Nationalism: A History: Nation and State in the Arab World. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Ciment, James. Palestine/Israel: The Long Conflict. New York: Facts on File, 1997. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Divine, Donna Robinson. Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival. Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1994. Doumain, Beshara. Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Dowty, Alan. The Jewish State: A Century Later. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Drezon-Tepler, Marcia. Interest Groups and Political Change in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Dumper, Michael. Islam and Israel: Muslim Religious Endowments and the Jewish State. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994. ———. The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974, 3d edition. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1992.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

509

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eban, Abba. Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes. New York: Putnam, 1992. Eisenberg, Laura Zittrain, and Neil Caplan. Negotiating Arab–Israeli Peace: Patterns, Problems, and Possibilities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Elad-Bouskila. Modern Palestinian Literature and Culture. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Elmusa, Sharif S. Water Conflict: Economics, Politics, Law, and the Palestian-Israeli Water Resources. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997. El-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Adel Iskander. Al Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002. Elon, Amos. Herzl. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1975. Enderlin, Charles. Shamir. Paris: Orban, 1991. ———. Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002. New York: Other Press, 2003. Eshed, Haggai. Reuven Shiloah: The Man behind the Mossad, translated by David and Leah Zinder. London: Frank Cass, 1997.

Freedman, Lawrence, and Efraim Karsh. The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Friedland, Roger, and Richard Hecht. To Rule Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Friedman, Robert I. Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement. New York: Random House, 1992; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Friedman, Thomas L. From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. Fry, Michael, and Miles Hochstein. “The Forgotten Middle East Crisis of 1957: Gaza and Sharm el Sheikh.” International History Review 15 (1993): 46–83. Gal, Allon. David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Gawyrch, George W. The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Fahmy, Ninette. The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship. New York; Routledge, 2002.

Geddes, Charles L., ed. A Documentary History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Praeger, 1991.

Falk, Richard. “Azmi Bishara, the Right of Resistance, and the Palestinian Ordeal.” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 2 (winter 2002): 19–33.

Gerner, Deborah J. One Land, Two Peoples: The Conflict over Palestine, 2d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.

Farsoun, Samih K., and Christina Zachharia. Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1996.

Gilbert, Martin, ed. The Illustrated Atlas of Jewish Civilization: 4,000 Years of Jewish History. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Feiler, Gil. From Boycott to Economic Cooperation: The Political Economy of the Arab Boycott of Israel. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

———. Israel: A History. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, and Hocking, Mary Evelyn, eds. The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Finlan, Alistair. The Gulf War 1991. New York: Routledge, 2003. Firro, Kais. The Druzes in the Jewish State. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2001. Fleischmann, Ellen L. “Selective Memory, Gender and Nationalism: Palestinian Women Leaders in the British Mandate Period,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 141–158. Fraser, T. G. The Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.

510

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Glock, Albert. “Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, edited by Philip Mattar. New York: Facts On File, 2000. Glubb, John Bagot. The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography. London: Quartet, 1983. Golani, Motti. Israel in Search of A War: The Sinai Campaign, 1955–1956. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 1998. Goldberg, Harvey E., ed. Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Jr. A Concise History of the Middle East, 4th edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gollaher, David L. Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gordon, Haim, ed. Looking Back at the June 1967 War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Gorman, Anthony. Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation. London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Government of Palestine. A Survey of Palestine for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946), 2 vols. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Gowers, Andrew, and Tony Walker. Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution. London: W. H. Allen, 1990. Greilsammer, Ilan. “The Religious Parties.” In Israel’s Odd Couple: The 1984 Knesset Elections and the National Unity Government, edited by Daniel J. Elazar and Shmuel Sandler. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Grossman, David. Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. Haddadin, Munther J. Diplomacy on the Jordan: International Conflict and Negotiated Resolution. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Haidar, Aziz. Education, Empowerment and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Halamish, Aviva. The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, translated by Ora Cummings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Halper, Jeff. Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Halpern, Ben, and Reinharz, Jehuda. Zionism and the Creation of a New Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hart, Alan. Arafat: A Political Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hatina, Meir. Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001. Hazan, Reuven. Reforming Parliamentary Committees: Israel in Comparative Perspective. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2001. Heiberg, Marianne, and Geir Ovensen. Palestinian Society in Gaza, West Bank and Arab Jerusalem: D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

A Survey of Living Conditions. Oslo, Norway: FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science), 1993. Heilman, Samuel C. Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. New York: Schocken, 1992. Heller, Joseph. The Birth of Israel, 1945–1949: BenGurion and His Critics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. ———. The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics, and Terror, 1940–1949. Portland, OR, and London: Frank Cass, 1995. Herb, Michael. All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Monarchy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Hersh, Seymour. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1991. Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997. Herzog, Chaim. Living History: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997. Hetzron, Robert, ed. The Semitic Languages. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hilal, Jamil. “PLO Institutions: The Challenge Ahead.” Journal of Palestine Studies 89 (1993): 46–60. Hiro, Dilip. Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of the Israelis and Palestinians. New York: Olive Branch, 1999. Hitti, Philip K. History of the Arabs: From the Earliest Times to the Present, revised 10th edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Hourani, Albert. History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002. Hroub, Khaled. Hamas: Political Thought and Practice. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000. Ilan, Amitzur. Bernadotte in Palestine: A Study in Contemporary Humanitarian Knight-Errantry. London: Macmillan, 1989. ———. The Origin of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race: Arms, Embargo, Military Power and Decision in the 1948 Palestine War. New York: New York University Press; London: Macmillan, 1996. Inbar, Efraim. Rabin and Israel’s National Security. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

511

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Institute for Palestine Studies. The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement: A Documentary Record. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994. ———. United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1998. 4 vols. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988-99. Jaimoukha, Amjad. The Circassians: A Handbook. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Jankowski, James. Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Jumayyil, Amin. Rebuilding Lebanon’s Future. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992. Kaikobad, Kaiyan Homi. The Shatt-al-Arab Boundary Question: A Legal Reappraisal. New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1991. Kamalipour, Yahya R, and Hamid Mowlana, eds. Mass Media in the Middle East: A Comprehensive Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. ———. Mass Media in the Middle East. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Kaminer, Reuven. The Politics of Protest: The Israeli Peace Movement and the Palestinian Intifada. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1996. Kark, Ruth. Jaffa: A City in Evolution, 1799–1917, translated by Gila Brand. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1990. Katz, Yossi. Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998. Kawar, Amal. Daughters of Palestine: Leading Women of the Palestinian National Movement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Kennedy, Valerie. Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Khalaf, Issa. Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

512

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Khalidi, Rashid; Lisa Anderson; Muhammad Muslih; et al., eds. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Khan, Saira. Nuclear Proliferation Dynamics in Protracted Conflict Regions: A Comparative Study of South Asia and the Middle East. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Kimche, David. The Last Option: After Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein—The Quest for Peace in the Middle East. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991. Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel S. Migdal. Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993. ———. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Kolars, John. “The Spatial Attributes of Water Negotiation: The Need for a River Ethic and River Advocacy in the Middle East.” In Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace, edited by Hussein A. Amery and Aaron T. Wolf. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Kurzman, Dan. Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin, 1922–1995. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Kyle, Keith. Suez. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Landau, David. Who Is a Jew? A Case Study of American Jewish Influence on Israeli Policy. New York: American Jewish Committee, Institute on American Jewish-Israel Relations, 1996. Lahav, Pnina. Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies, 2d edition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Laqueur, Walter, and Barry Rubin, eds. The IsraelArab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 6th revised edition. New York and London, Penguin Books, 2001. Laqueur, Walter, and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Laskier, Michael M. Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood to Oslo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lesch, Ann Mosely. Transition to Palestinian SelfGovernment: Practical Steps toward IsraeliPalestinian Peace. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Lesch, Ann Mosley, and Dan Tschirgi. Origins and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Westport, CT: Greenwoood Press, 1998. Lesch, David W., ed. The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, 3d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. Livingstone, Neil C., and David Halevy. Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secret Funds, and the War against Israel and the United States. New York: Morrow, 1990. Lorch, Netanel. Shield of Zion: The Israeli Defense Forces. Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, 1991. Lockman, Zachary. Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Lowi, Miriam. Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lucas, W. Scott. Divided We Stand: Britain, the US, and the Suez Crisis. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. Lukacs, Yehuda, ed. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, 1967–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Mahler, Gregory S. Politics and Government in Israel: The Maturation of a Modern State. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Makovsky, David. Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government’s Road to the Oslo Accord. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Marr, Phebe. “The Iran-Iraq War: The View from Iraq.” In The Persian Gulf War: Lessons for Strategy, Law, and Diplomacy, edited by Christopher C. Joyner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Massad, Joseph A. Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Masud, Muhammad Khalid; Brinkley Messick; and David S. Powers, eds. Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Mattar, Philip. “The PLO and the Gulf Crisis.” Middle East Journal 48, no. 1 (winter 1994): 31–46. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Lunt, James. Glubb Pasha: A Biography. London: Harvill, 1984.

McGowan, Daniel, and Marc H. Ellis, eds. Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine. Brooklyn, NY: Olive Branch Press, 1998.

Lustick, Ian S. For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988.

Medoff, Rafael, and Chaim I. Waxman. Historical Dictionary of Zionism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.

———. Arab-Israeli Relations: A Collection of Contending Perspectives and Recent Research. 10 vols. Hamden, Conn.: Garland, 1994.

Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991.

Luz, Ehud. Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement, 1882–1904, translated by Lenn J. Schramm. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988.

Meyers, Eric M., ed. Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures. Duke Judaic Studies Series, vol. 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999.

MaDoz, Moshe, and Gabriel Sheffer, eds. Middle Eastern Minorities and Diasporas. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002.

Miller, Anita; Jordan Miller; and Sigalit Zetouni. Sharon: Israel’s Warrior-Politician. Chicago: Academy Chicago, Olive, 2002.

MacDonald, Eileen. Shoot the Women First. New York: Random House, 1991.

Mintz, Jerome R. Hasidic People: A Place in the New World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Magnes, Judah Leon. The Magnes-Philby Negotiations, 1929: The Historical Record. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1998.

Mishal, Shaul, and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

513

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mitchell, John, et al. The New Economy of Oil: Impacts on Business, Geopolitics, and Society. London: Earthscan, 2001.

Newman, David, ed. The Impact of Gush Emunim: Politics and Settlement in the West Bank. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Momen, Moojan. An Introduction to Shi Ei Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi Eism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Newman, David. Population, Settlement and Conflict: Israel and the West Bank. Update Series in Contemporary Geographical Issues. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Moosa, Matti. The Maronites in History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Morris, Benny. Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Oren, Michael B. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Pappé, Illan. The Israel-Palestine Question. London: Routledge, 1999.

———. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist– Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Parker, Richard B., ed. The Six-Day War: A Retrospective. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Moussalli, Ahmad. Historical Dictionary of Islamic Fundamentalist Movements in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999.

Peres, Shimon. Battling for Peace: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1995.

Moderate and Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Quest for Modernity, Legitimacy, and the Islamic State. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999.

Peres, Shimon, and Robert Littell. For the Future of Israel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Peretz, Don. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

Munthe, Turi, ed. The Saddam Hussein Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.

———. Palestinians, Refugees, and the Middle East Peace Process. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993.

Muslih, Muhammad Y. The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Peters, F. E. Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Mutahhari, Morteza. Jihad: the Holy War in Islam and the Legitimacy in the Qur Dan, translated by Mohammad Salman Tawhidi. Tehran, Iran: Islamic Propagation Organization, 1998.

———. The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Nashashibi, Nasser Eddin. Jerusalem’s Other Voice: Ragheb Nashashibi and Moderation in Palestinian Politics, 1920–1948. Exeter, UK: Ithaca, 1990. Nassar, Jamal R. The Palestine Liberation Organization: From Armed Struggle to the Declaration of Independence. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991. Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995.

Peterson, Erik R. The Gulf Cooperation Council: Search for Unity in a Dynamic Region. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988. Postel, Sandra. Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? New York: Norton, 1999. Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, revised edition. Berkeley, CA: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. Rabin, Leah. Rabin: Our Life, His Legacy. New York: Putnam, 1997.

Netanyahu, Benjamin. A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

Rabinovich, Itamar. The Brink of Peace: Israel and Syria, 1992–1996. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Newman, D. “Boundaries in Flux: The Green Line Boundary between Israel and the West Bank.” Boundary and Territory Briefing 1, no. 7 (1995).

Ranstorp, Magnus. Hizb Eallah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

514

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raswamy, P. R. Kuma, ed. Revisiting the Yom Kippur War. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000.

Rubinstein, Amnon. From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism. New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000.

Raviv, Dan, and Yossi Melman. Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Rubenstein, Danny. The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home. New York: Times Books, 1991.

Rebhun, Uzi, and Chaim I. Waxman, eds. Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/ Brandeis University Press, 2004.

Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal. Hizbullah: Politics and Religion. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

Reeve, Simon. One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation “Wrath of God.” New York: Arcade Books, 2001.

Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2d edition. New York: Knopf, 1996. Said, Edward. Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992.

Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.

———. End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Pantheon, 2000.

Reiter, Yitzhak. Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem under British Mandate. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

Sakr, Naomi. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. New York and London: I. B. Taurus, 2001.

Rogan, Eugene L., and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Savir, Uri. The Process: 1,100 Days that Changed the Middle East. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Rogers, Peter, and Peter Lydon, eds. Water in the Arab World: Perspectives and Prognoses. Cambridge, MA: Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 1994. Rolef, Susan Hattis, ed. Political Dictionary of the State of Israel, 2d edition. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Ron, James. Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Ross, Dennis. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. Rossoff, Dovid. Safed: The Mystical City. Spring Valley, NY, 1991. Rouhana, Nadim. Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Rouyer, Alwyn R. Turning Water into Politics: The Water Issue in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Roy, Sara. The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, 2d edition. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2001. Rubin, Barry. Revolution until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949– 1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Schiff, Benjamin N. Refugees unto the Third Generation: UN Aid to Palestinians. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Schiff, Ze>ev, and Ehud Ya’ari. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising—Israel’s Third Front. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Schumacher, Gottlieb. The Golan: Survey, Description and Mapping. Jerusalem, 1998. Seale, Patrick. Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. New York: Random House, 1992. ———. Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the Mandate, translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. Seikaly, May. Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Selim, Mohammad El Sayed, ed. The Organization of the Islamic Conference in a Changing World. Giza, Egypt: Center for Political Research and Studies, Cairo University, 1994. Shafir, Gershon. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

515

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Simon, Reeva S.; Michael M.Laskier; and Sara Reguer, eds. The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Shapira, Anita. Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Slater, Robert. Warrior Statesman: The Life of Moshe Dayan. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.

Shapland, Greg. Rivers of Discord: International Water Disputes in the Middle East. New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Hurst, 1997. Sharkansky, Ira. The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics: Looking at Israel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. Sharon, Ariel (with David Chanoff). Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, 2d Touchstone edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Sharoni, Simona. Gender and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Smith, Barbara J. The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Smith, Pamela Ann. Palestine and the Palestinians, 1876–1983. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Smith, Peter. The Babi and Baha Di Religions: From Messianic Shi Eism to a World Religion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Sofer, Sasson. Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988.

Shavit, Yaacov. Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948. Totowa, NJ; London: Frank Cass, 1988.

Sprinzak, Ehud. Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Shemess, Moshe. The Palestinian Entity, 1959–1974: Arab Politics and the PLO. 2d ed. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

Stern, Jessica. Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1995.

Sternhell, Ze’ev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Shlaim, Avi. Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Stillman, Norman A. The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991.

———. “The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza.” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 1 (autumn 1990). ———. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World since 1948. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Shlonsky, Ur. Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State. New York: Scribner’s, 1993.

Swedenburg, Theodore. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Takkenberg, Lex. The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1998. Tejirian, Eleanor H., and Reeva Simon. Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Sifry, Micah L., and Christopher Cerf, eds. The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Times Books, 1991.

Telhami, Shibley. Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Silberstein, Laurence J., ed. New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State. New York: New York University Press, 1991.

Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

516

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Teveth, Shabtai. Ben-Gurion’s Spy: The Story of the Political Scandal that Shaped Modern Israel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Touval, Saadia. The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–1979. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Troen, Selwyn Ilan. Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Troen, Selwyn Ilan, and Moshe Shemesh. The SuezSinai Crisis, 1956: Retrospective and Reappraisal. New York: Columbia University Press; London: Frank Cass, 1990. Victor, Barbara. Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2003. ———. A Voice of Reason: Hanan Ashrawi and Peace in the Middle East. New York; Harcourt Brace, 1994. Wallach, Janet, and John Wallach. Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990. Wasserstein, Bernard. The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929, 2d edition. Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1991. Waterbury, John. The Nile Basin: National Determinants of Collective Action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Weaver, Many Anne. A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey through the World of Militant Islam. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

D I C T I O N A R Y

O F

T H E

Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1998. Wilson, Mary C. King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Wolfe, Michael, ed. One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing About the Muslim Pilgrimage. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Zerubavel, Yael. “The Historic, the Legendary, and the Incredible: Invented Tradition and Collective Memory in Israel.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Zipperstein, Steven J. Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

I S R A E L I - P A L E S T I N I A N

C O N F L I C T

517

File not found (FNF)