allocated to the Arabs. The neighboring Arab states, which sent their armies into Palestine in order to help their brethren, ultimately annexed the remaining parts of Palestine. At the end of the war Palestine had ceased to exist as a political entity; it was divided among Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Yet Palestine remained a mental reality. The Palestinians never resigned themselves to a fate which meant that they had ceased to exist as a nation. In Jordan, in the Gaza Strip, in refugee camps dispersed all over the Region, the idea of Palestine lived on. It was exploited by the Arab states in their fight against Israel and among themselves, each of several states trying to usurp the role of the patron of the Palestinian nation. Egypt installed a shadowy adventurer, Ahmed Shukairy, a refugee from Haifa, as the chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a post he was forced to relinquish in December 1967. Hussein pretended that his shaky kingdom was the true personification of Palestine. The Syrians supported the Palestinian el Fatah ("conquest") organization, whose acts of sabotage led directly to the crisis of the 1967 war.
The official Israeli attitude has fluctuated between diametrically opposed poles, according to expediency. Until the 1948 war, the Zionist leadership insisted that its conflict was solely with the Palestinian Arabs. It objected vigorously to the official invitation extended by the British government to the Arab states to take part in discussing the Palestine problem. This was believed to be a typical trick of perfidious Albion, an attempt to cheat us out of our rights and annul the Balfour Declaration. After the 1948 war, the government of Israel maintained that Palestine had ceased to exist, together with any imaginary Palestinian nation, and that its conflict was now solely with the Arab states. This stand was taken because any recognition of the existence of a Palestinian nation might raise questions about boundaries and refugees which the government was anxious to avoid. Now, after the 1967 war, the