Why Did the Palestinians Lose — Part 2

28/09/2026

By Hicham Bou Nassif |Weinberg Associate Professor of International Relations and the Middle East and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College-California

When the Palestine Liberation Organization decided to withdraw from Beirut in 1982, it spent months struggling to find Arab countries willing to receive its fighters. The Gulf states did not welcome them, nor did Egypt. Hafez al-Assad’s Syria agreed to take in only those elements loyal to it. After arduous negotiations, the Palestinians were dispersed among the two Yemens, Tunisia and Sudan, while other countries accepted smaller numbers.

The Israelis were hardly surprised by the Arab states’ coldness toward the Palestinians, despite the traditional rhetorical fervor surrounding the “central cause.” Declassified U.S. diplomatic archives show that Moshe Arens, then Israel’s ambassador to Washington and later its defense minister, sought to reassure American officials who were worried about the damage Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon might inflict on its relations with the Arab world. The Arab regimes, he told them, were not exactly shedding tears over the PLO’s defeat in Beirut.

In truth, Arens was right. Arab regimes generally treated Palestinian organizations, at best, as instruments to be used when useful and, at worst, as destabilizing forces to be kept at arm’s length. The funding extended to the Palestinians was, by and large, a way of containing trouble and discharging an obligation. Indeed, some have argued that Arab governments spent more supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets during the 1980s than they did supporting Palestinian factions over several decades.

Hafez al-Assad’s regime, meanwhile, struck the Palestinians repeatedly. His forces invaded Lebanon in 1976. He later facilitated the split led by Abu Musa from Yasser Arafat’s leadership. He then laid siege to Arafat in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon. And during the War of the Camps, he used the Shiite Amal Movement against the Palestinians.

None of this created a serious crisis for Assad in his relations with the Arab world, because no Arab government was prepared to risk confronting him for Arafat’s sake.

But were the Arab peoples themselves significantly more committed to the Palestinian cause than their governments were?

When the Arab street truly had the opportunity to express what was on its mind during the mass uprisings of 2011, in Egypt and elsewhere, the slogans were “Bread, freedom and social justice” — not “Onward, onward, until Jerusalem.”

If we set aside the identification that existed between sections of Lebanese society and the Palestinians during the 1960s and 1970s, the broader record is difficult to ignore: Over the past five decades of the Palestinian question, neither Arab governments nor their populations have been willing to put their security and economies at serious risk for its sake.

Indeed, one could argue that even the Lebanese identification with the Palestinians was driven less by a profound commitment to restoring Palestine than by the calculations of Lebanon’s perennial sectarian conflict.

All of this, compounded by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, formed the immediate backdrop to Yasser Arafat’s decision to enter the Oslo process in the early 1990s and place his bet on a two-state solution negotiated with Israel.

It is easy to second-guess Arafat. It is even easier to denounce him for agreeing to sit at the negotiating table with Israel. But none of those who condemned him ever offered a convincing answer to the central question that confronted him at the time:

Given the regional and international circumstances surrounding the Palestinian cause, what serious alternative did Arafat actually have in the early 1990s, other than the course he ultimately chose?

To be continued: The Palestinian Question — Now What?

This article was originally published in Arabic by Nida al-Watan on 28 September 2026. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.