After fighting off attacks from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the state of Israel became independent in 1949, occupying most of the former Palestine, and was immediately recognized by the USSR and the USA. During the fighting which started in 1948, there was some ethnic cleansing on the Jewish side. Many Arabs remained in Israel. The West Bank, the ancient Judah minus western or modern Jerusalem, remained under Jordanian control. Gaza was practically left to Egypt as a refuge for the Palestinians who by force or fear left their homes in what became Israel. There were also Palestinian refugees in Jordan, in Lebanon, and in Syria.

As Israel consolidated, there were Arab and Israeli raids and counter-raids across the de facto borders of Israel. But the main military threat to Israel was Egypt, where the monarchy was overthrown and an extremely nationalist and anti-Israel regime, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, was established.

In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez canal, which enraged the British and the French. Fishing in troubled waters, Israel thrust towards the Suez and the British and French parachuted into the canal zone. The entire operation was pre-arranged. Under American and UN pressure, the invaders backed off. The Sinai was placed under UN administration. But Nasser barred shipping to and from Israel through the Suez canal.

Israel was pestered by Arab attacks and it occasionally retaliated with ruthless raids against Arab villages inside the West Bank. Except for the aggressive military presence of Egypt on Israel's western border, Palestinian actions were uncoordinated. This led to the formation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was a political cover for diverse fighting and terrorist groups, in the way that Sinn Fein "covered" for the provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

In 1967, in a fit of defiant recklessness, Nasser ordered the UN out of the Sinai, sent in Egyptian troops, and threatened to cut off the entrance to the gulf of Aqaba and to Eilat, Israel's only port to eastern Africa and Asia. Israel attacked and in six-days overran the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. In less than one week Israel had acquired sovereignty over a million Palestinians and the remaining territories of the former Palestine. The Golan Heights dominate the plain of Galilee and are situated west of Damascus. The Israeli occupation of Sinai extended as far as the Bar Lev line, parallel to the Suez canal, which was shut down. Egypt was powerless to defend Palestinian grievances.

The PLO and international terrorism

Initially, the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians was to live and let live. This was the doing of Moshe Dayan, the strategist who won the Six Days war, and who later, as minister of agriculture, administered the occupied territories. However, in 1968 there was already afoot a movement to colonize with Israelis parts of the West Bank and of Gaza, particularly the West Bank. The colonization could be done by purchases, which was how Jews came to occupy so much of Palestine in the first place, and now also through "legal" confiscations of one sort of another.

In 1969, the PLO became cohesive and militant under Yasir Arafat, who headed Al Fatah, the most aggressive of the anti-Israel fighting organizations. The PLO had its offices in Jordan, where Palestinians outnumbered natives, who were mainly bedouins and urbanized bedouins. The PLO was like a political party with military clout. Arafat's objective was to take over Jordan and make it a base for war against Israel.

Anti-Israeli international terrorism became rife. The most odious was the assassination of nine Israeli athletes during the Munich olympics in 1972. But the most spectacular had taken place two years earlier when Palestinians hijacked four planes simultaneously, one to Egypt and the other three to the Dawson air force base in the Jordanian desert, where they were blown up, after the release of the hostages, with the world's cameras whirring away. King Hussein of Jordan was not amused and he counted on his country's army, whose historical core was the superbly trained Arab Legion, the only Arab force that had ever shown itself capable of facing up to and defeating highly motivated and well-weaponed Israeli fighters.

In September 1971, Hussein declared martial law, ordered the PLO out, and sent his army on the streets of Amman and in the field to contain a Syrian threat. By early 1972, the PLO and all affiliated organizations were forced to evacuate Jordan. Arafat set up headquarters in Damascus but the bulk of Palestinian fighters went to Lebanon, which already was the ungracious but unavoidable host of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

The Lebanese civil war and the Israeli settlements

In 1973, Egypt gave Israel a scare with a surprise invasion across the Suez canal and into the Sinai. This was a gamble by Anwar Sadat, who had become president upon Nasser's death in 1970, because Egypt had broken off its close military collaboration with the USSR in order to conciliate the USA. Egypt, in sum, was fighting with its arsenal alone. When Israel's arsenal became depleted during the early phase of the fighting, the Israelis appealed to the Nixon administration and were promptly re-supplied. And then, as if to dot the i's and cross the t's, the American secretary of state, the Jewish-American Henry Kissinger, ordered a world-wide American nuclear alert when the Russians warned Israel not to even think about advancing to Cairo.

The PLO at that point had to accept certain facts. International terrorism did more damage to its cause than to Israel, which was impervious to the worse that any Arab state could do. America was accepted even by the USSR as hegemonic in the Middle East, and America would never abandon Israel. Politics was called for. And politics was what the PLO achieved with its recognition by the UN in 1974 as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. There still remained a military card to play and that was Lebanon.

Lebanon had immemorially been part of Syria. The French created Lebanon in the 1920s with the part of Syria where Christians constituted about the same in numbers as Muslims and Druzes combined. The Druzes, an Islam-derived sect, were the traditional rivals of Christians. With the influx of Palestinian refugees, a majority of whom were Sunni Muslims, the political situation became unstable. In particular, the Lebanese army, many of whose officers were Maronite Christians, became disarticulated.

In 1975, civil war broke out between Christians and the other Lebanese. The seasoned PLO was in an optimal position to participate in this conflict and it soon gained the military upper hand. There was even the possibility that it could take over Lebanon, a development which Israel and most Lebanese, but especially the Maronites, dreaded. The Christians appealed to Syria, which responded cautiously (because of fear of Israel) but contained the PLO offensive.

Israel gets the atomic bomb and invades Lebanon

Israel in the meantime was not sitting on its hands. During the 1970s it produced atomic bombs at the Dimona nuclear facilities, built with French aid, and it tested one in the open sea south of South Africa, whose racist regime benefited from Israeli nuclear technology. (After apartheid collapsed in 1992, South Africa revealed it possessed nuclear weapons and scrapped them.) More ominous was that during the Israeli administration of Menachem Begin (1977-1983), the former leader of the terrorist organization Irgun, Israel became fully committed to a active policy of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially in the West Bank, which Israeli extremists, now politically empowered, considered a rightful part of Israel. Ominously too, Saddam Hussein became dictator of Iraq in 1979 and immediately gave impulse to an Iraqi nuclear weapons project. In 1981 Israel bombarded the Iraqi Ossirak nuclear plant.

In Lebanon, although the PLO was prevented from pursuing its advantages by the other participants in the civil war--in all, there were, besides the Palestinians and the Syrian army, Maronite, Druze, and Shiite militias--the unstable situation was a permanent menace to northern Israel. Ariel Sharon, a competent general in the 1973 war, and now minister of war, planned and oversaw an Invasion of Lebanon as far as Beirut in 1982. In one night of terror, Maronite militias, their actions facilitated by Israeli flares, entered the camps of Shabra and Shatilla and massacred some two thousand Palestinians, needless to say including women and children. The leader of the Maronite forces was reputedly Elie Hobeika. He was killed by a car bomb in 2002. Sharon was accused of genocide before a tribunal in Belgium during the time this country claimed universal jurisdiction over atrocious violations of the right of human beings to life. (In 2003, the Belgians rescinded the self-attribution.)

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon achieved the objective of castigating the PLO, which was considered intrusive by most Lebanese anyway, and in 1983, the last Palestinian fighters were evacuated from Tripoli in northern Lebanon. Increasingly under pressure to become a Syrian proxy, Arafat left Damascus for Tunis. But Israel was under fire in Lebanon from all quarters. It was taking prohibitive and ultimately unnecessary losses and in 1985 it evacuated Lebanon and created a cribbled buffer zone on the other side of its northern border which it manned with the Christian South Lebanese Army (SLA). Southern Lebanon was mostly Shiite territory, where the Iran-backed Hizbollah militia operated, and has continued operating, mounting sporadic rocket attacks on Israel.

Hussein is execrated for annexing Kuwait and Israel gobbles up chunks of Palestine

In 1981, with the backing of most Arab states, all majority Sunni, and later of the USA, Hussein made war on jihadist Shiite Iran. There were reasons for this war but none that was individually truly proportionate to the amount of fighting and killing that went on.

With Egypt long out of contention, Syria bogged down trying to put Lebanon under its tutelage, and Iraq getting clawed by the Iranian tiger it had aroused, the PLO had to counter with its own devices that, under Yitzhak Shamir (1983-1984), another former terrorist, Israel was expanding its intrusions into Palestine with upwards of 100,000 settlers. Thus it was that in 1987, Palestine itself became the setting for the Palestinian struggle. This uprising consisted mainly of stone-throwing mobs in the streets. It was called the "shaking off", or Intifada. Israeli defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, made what seemed like a short meal of it. But in fact the Intifada went on in a low intensity mode during which Palestinians acquired experience in terrorist tactics in their homeland. Among other things, Hamas was created as a Muslim organization that Israel at first thought could be used to counter the detested Arafat's influence.

With the end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988, and with Saddam Hussein's credentials as an uncompromising enemy of Israel, it was natural that Palestinians look towards Iraq as another credible challenge to Israel. Nevertheless, the PLO knew that Israel was not going to founder any time soon and in 1989 it did the only realistic thing it could do, which was to recognize the right of Israel to exist. It did not renounce the right of return of Palestinians to their former homes in Israel. But it probably knew that this was mostly a bargaining instrument. Israel did not then reciprocate with an analogous conciliatory gesture.

Enter Osama bin Laden

A hyper-fervent Saudi multi-millionaire-by-inheritance, Osama bin Laden, had been part of the USA-backed struggle against communism in Afghanistan. The Soviets evacuated in 1989. Fresh from his honeymooning with America (enveloped in the faint odor of lethal gas), Hussein of Iraq, basing his action on some tenuous jurisdictional argument from Ottoman times, annexed Kuwait as Iraq's so-called 19th province in 1990. The Palestinians, who were a considerable part of Kuwait's population, were overjoyed. Arafat, who did not thereby rescind his one-sided recognition of Israel, backed Iraq. The USA was indignant and most of the world concurred that Hussein had acted high-handedly. Hussein was bragging about the "mother of all battles" but in fact Iraq was outgunned and "out-teched" and it went down to a quick defeat in early 1991. Palestinian expectations were dashed. Arafat's friendly sounds towards Israel were partially discredited.

When in 1991 Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia after his successful tour of military-religious duty in Afghanistan, he could see up close what he already knew was happening. There were American troops in Saudi Arabia, which went against Muhammad's injunction about foreigners invading Arabia. There is ambiguity about these things, but American military bases where there had been none before in the Prophet's homeland left little room for misapprehension, even though those bases existed with Saudi consent for reasons of self-defence. The media has harped on this particular aspect of bin Laden's indignation. But there also were other untoward occurrences: an Arab country, Iraq, was practically under mainly American constraint, and in Palestine Israel continued persecuting malcontent Arabs with impunity. The over-all picture was that, to put it bluntly, Arabs were getting the shaft from the USA and from Israel.

Bin Laden complained out loud in religious rather than political terms. The Saudi ruling house has its historical roots in Wahhabism, a fundamentalist religious tradition. It wasn't about to take lessons in theology from an upstart and it expelled Osama bin Laden and deprived him of citizenship. Osama went to Sudan where Hassan Turabi, an Islamic ideologue and a firebrand preacher, had then much influence.

In 1992, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres initiated exploratory talks for ending the Israel/Palestine conflict through a two-state solution. But all the world knew was that the Palestinians were still being violently recalcitrant to Israeli rule.

Sometime between mid-1991 in Saudi Arabia and October 1993 in Somalia, Osama bin Laden must have founded al Qaida, meaning the base, as the wealthy coordinator of global terrorism against the USA. Al Qaida claims, and the USA government does not dispute, that the killing 18 American soldiers in Somalia was its doing. Earlier, in February 1993, Muslim extremists tried to blow up the foundations of the WTC. The link with al Qaida here is possible but not proven. The operation lacked both muscle and sophistication. If there is one thing bin Laden and Qaida eschew are major operations that fail. Nothing discredited international terrorism more than the sensational Israeli raid on the Entebbe airport, in Uganda, and the rescue of the Israeli hostages of a hijacked Air France airliner in 1976.

The Second Intifada

In Oslo, in September 1993, an apparently breakthrough accord was achieved. It contemplated the gradual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian Authority, ironically not unlike the Jewish Agency that managed the specific affairs of the Jewish community in Palestine under the British mandate in the 1930s and until the creation of Israel. It was Arafat who signed for the "Palestinian side". He, Peres, and the Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. It looked as if the time for a solution to the Israel/Palestine problem had arrived.

Things were not as rosy as they seemed. In 1995, Qaida bombed an American military building in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Darkly premonitory, a Jewish fanatic, acting under the intellectual influence of a rabbi, assassinated Rabin. Implementation of Oslo had not been going along smoothly. In fact, it had hardly begun and opposition to the agreement was intense and widespread. The well-meaning Peres substituted Rabin and called for elections. It was hoped that the Labor party and the movement for conciliation and peace with the Palestinians would win. Instead in 1996 Benyamin Natanyahu, a young and fanatical opponent of Oslo, and of Palestine in general, was elected. Oslo was dead. And it wasn't Arafat who had killed it.

In 1966, Qaida struck once more against USA military installations in Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, the extremist Taliban movement, amply supported by Pakistan, in turn backed by America, captured Kabul. In Sudan, which had its hands full with an interminable civil war in the south, Osama bin Laden was asked to decamp and he did so to the welcoming arms of the Taliban.

In 1998, USA embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by al Qaida. Tomahawk cruise missiles were aimed at Afghanistan and Sudan. The Afghan targets were imprecise but the attack demonstrated that the USA knew who its greatest hater was and where he was hatching his terrorist plans. In Sudan, a legitimate drug firm was mistaken for a chemical weapons factory. Iraq expelled the UN arms inspectors, who anyway largely thought that the country did not constitute a believable international terrorist menace. Israel was another proposition altogether because the settlements in Palestine kept growing year in year out.

It was a combination of Israeli population encroachment and the purely electoral visit of Sharon to the Al Aqsa mosque that in 2000 set off the Second Intifada. Sharon's visit was like a military invasion. Al Aqsa is a national symbol even for Palestinians disinclined to religion.

The Second Intifada started very much like the first one: crowds of people, mostly young men, hurling stones at armed-to-the-teeth soldiers firing live ammunition coated with rubber for the sake of appearances that fooled no one. Even the complaisant America media had to admit these projectiles were as deadly as those with a full metal jackets. The Second Intifada seemed to be as doomed as the first one. But Palestinian combativeness was higher and as Israeli repression toughened, the Palestinian police, which had been formed in accordance with Oslo, began to participate in the encounters. In the harbor of Aden, al Qaida organized a bombing against the warship USS Cole during a refueling stop causing seventeen dead.

The culmination of 9/11

In March 2001 Sharon was elected PM and Palestinians started using suicide bombers on a regular basis. According to one account, it was the deadliest month of the Second Intifada: eighteen bombs killed eighty Israelis.

Two at least of the perpetrators of the Cole attack escaped to join an al Qaida cell in Germany. Members of this cell travelled to America where they trained as pilots during the time that Sharon was being given a mandate in Israel to suppress Palestine and Palestinians were killing themselves to frustrate Israeli designs.

On 11 September al Qaida struck in New York City and Washington the most sensational terrorist acts in history, apart of course from state terrorism at war such as the bombing of Dresden. Since 9/11, the Second Intifada has continued with varying degrees of intensity. Israel is finally looking at the evacuation of Gaza, which is not viable as a state, but its army is still taking losses, and inflicting regular killings of Palestinians. Separately, these attacks on Palestinian militants and civilians are not genocide of course but in the aggregate they have a vague family resemblance.

Osama bin Laden occasionally emits a blustering tape in which he blends jihadism with the political denunciation of Israel. To Muslims he has become a legendary hero. He is holed up somewhere in the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Between the unsolved Israel/Palestine problem, which is unsolvable under purely Israeli-American terms, and the hatred of Muslims the world over, the possibility of another 9/11 will be haunting America indefinitely.