Palestinian fedayeen () are militants or guerrillas of a nationalist orientation from among Palestinian Arabs. Most Palestinians consider the fedayeen to be freedom fighters, while most Israelis consider them to be terrorists.
Considered symbols of the Palestinian national movement, the Palestinian fedayeen drew inspiration from guerrilla movements in Vietnam, China, Algeria, and Latin America. The ideology of the Palestinian fedayeen was mainly left-wing nationalist, socialist, or communist, and their proclaimed purpose was to defeat Zionism, claim Palestine and establish it as "a secular, democratic, nonsectarian state". The meaning of secular, democratic, and non-sectarian, however, greatly diverged among fedayeen factions.
Emerging from among the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their villages as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War,Almog, 2003, p. 20. in the mid-1950s the fedayeen began mounting cross-border operations into Israel from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Fedayeen attacks were directed on the Gaza and Sinai borders with Israel. As a result, Israel undertook retaliatory actions, targeting the fedayeen while also often targeting the citizens of their host countries, which in turn provoked more attacks. The earliest infiltrations were primarily against civilian targets, however, some infiltrations were against agricultural and military targets. The Gaza Strip, the sole territory of the All-Palestine Protectorate—a Palestinian state declared in October 1948—became the focal point of the Palestinian fedayeen activity.Facts On File, Incorporated. Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East.
Fedayeen actions were cited by Israel as one of the reasons for its launching of the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon. Palestinian fedayeen groups were united under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization after the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War, though each group retained its own leader and independent armed forces.
Definitions of the term
The words "Palestinian" and "fedayeen" have had different meanings to different people at various points in history. According to the Sakhr Arabic-English dictionary, fida'i—the singular form of the plural fedayeen—means "one who risks his life voluntarily" or "one who sacrifices himself". In their book The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Tony Rea and John Wright have adopted this more literal translation, translating the term fedayeen as "self-sacrificers".
In his essay, "The Palestinian Leadership and the American Media: Changing Images, Conflicting Results" (1995), R.S. Zaharna comments on the perceptions and use of the terms "Palestinian" and "fedayeen" in the 1970s, writing:
Edmund Jan Osmańczyk's Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements (2002) defines fedayeen as "Palestinian resistance fighters", whereas Martin Gilbert's The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2005) defines fedayeen as "Palestinian terrorist groups". Robert McNamara refers to the fedayeen simply as "guerrillas", as do Zeev Schiff and Raphael Rothstein in their work Fedayeen: Guerrillas Against Israel (1972). Fedayeen can also be used to refer to militant or guerrilla groups which are not Palestinian. (See Fedayeen for more.)
Beverly Milton-Edwards describes the Palestinian fedayeen as "modern revolutionaries fighting for national liberation, not religious salvation," distinguishing them from mujahaddin (i.e. "fighters of the jihad"). While the fallen soldiers of both mujahaddin and fedayeen are called shahid (i.e. "martyrs") by Palestinians, Milton nevertheless contends that it would be political and religious blasphemy to call the "leftist fighters" of the fedayeen.
History
1948 to 1956
Palestinian immigration into Israel first emerged among the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, living in camps in Jordan (including the Jordanian-occupied West Bank), Lebanon, Egypt (including the Egyptian All-Palestine Protectorate in Gaza), and Syria. Initially, most infiltrations were economic in nature, with Palestinians crossing the border seeking food or the recovery of property lost in the 1948 war.
Between 1948 and 1955, emigration of Palestinians to the nascent State of Israel was opposed by Arab governments,"There is strong evidence from Arab, British, American, UN and even Israeli sources to suggest that for the first six years after the war, the Arab governments were opposed to infiltration and tried to curb it...The Lebanese...effectively sealed the border with Israel. The Syrian authorities also exercised strict control over their border with Israel, and infiltration was rarer. The Egyptian authorities...pursued a consistent policy of curbing infiltration until 1955...Secret Jordanian documents captured by the Israeli army during the June 1967 war...reveal strenuous efforts on the part of the Jordanian military and civilian authorities...to keep [infiltrators] from crossing [the Israeli border]." – Shlaim, The Iron Wall pp. 84–85, As an Israel Foreign Ministry official stated:
For years the army [i.e. IDF] has been informing the Ministry and the outside world that infiltration is being sponsored, inspired, guided, or at least utilised by the Legion or other powers that be. However...when [we] asked [the army for] ...some clear documentary proof of the [Arabs] Legion's complicity [in the infiltrations]...no clear answer came from the army. Finally Fati [i.e. deputy DMI Yehoshafat Harbaki] told Leo [Savir, senior Foreign Ministry official] and myself, on two separate occasions, that no proof could be given because no proof existed. Furthermore, Fati told me that having personally made a detail study of infiltration, he had arrived at the conclusion that Jordanians and especially the Legion were doing their best to prevent infiltration, which was a natural decentralised and sporadic movement. In fact, listening to Fati or his colleagues these days, one could almost mistake them for British Foreign Office [which consistently argued in this vein]." Benny Morris (1993) Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War Oxford University Press, P 67 with the goal being the prevention of escalation into another war. The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the All-Palestine Protectorate in Gaza from the Israeli-held Negev area proved vexing, largely due to the presence of over 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza area.UN Doc S/1459 of 20 February 1950 a report on the activities of the Mixed Armistice Commissions The terms of the armistice agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza Strip. In keeping with this restriction, the Egyptian government's solution was to form a Palestinian paramilitary police force. The Palestinian border police was created in December 1952. The border police were placed under the command of Abd-al-Manimi Abd-al-Rauf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander, Muslim Brotherhood member, and Revolutionary Council member. The training of 250 Palestinian volunteers started in March 1953, with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December. Some border police personnel were attached to the military governor's office under 'Abd-al-'Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza Strip.Yezid Sayigh (1999) Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement 1949–1993. Oxford University Press p 61 After an Israeli raid on an Egyptian military outpost in Gaza in February 1955, during which 37 Egyptian soldiers were killed, the Egyptian government began to actively sponsor fedayeen raids into Israel."Records show that until the Gaza raid, the Egyptian military authorities had a consistent and firm policy of curbing infiltration...into Israel...and that it was only following the raid that a new policy was put in place, that of organizing the fedayeen units and turning them into an official instrument of warfare against Israel." – Shlaim, pp. 128–129. However, official policy and actual actions were not always consistent – whether due to incompetence or deliberately turning a blind eye to Palestinian actions, both in Jordan and in Egypt. In fact, during this period there were some 7,850 infiltrations and border incidents on the Jordanian border (including incidents in which Jordanian troops sniped into Israeli areas, conducted intelligence forays or, in one case tried to block the Israeli road leading to the southern Israeli town of Eilat) – how many of these actions by Jordanian troops were local initiatives and how many were officially sanctioned is not clear. On the Egyptian border there were in this period approximately 3,000 infiltrations and incidents, the vast majority along the Gaza section of that border. These too were virtually all Palestinian in origin, but also included an undetermined number of shooting incidents initiated by Egyptian troops – usually against Israeli border patrols. Carta's Atlas of Israel Volume 2: The First Years 1948–1961 (Hebrew)
The first insurrection by Palestinian fedayeen may have been launched from Syrian territory in 1951, though most attacks between 1951 and 1953 were launched from Jordanian territory. According to Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of Israeli military intelligence, these early infiltrations were limited "incursions", initially motivated by economic reasons, including the crossing of Palestinians into Israel to harvest crops in their former villages. Gradually, they developed into violent robbery and deliberate terrorist attacks as the fedayeen drew new recruits from the refugee population.
In 1953, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion tasked Ariel Sharon, then security chief of the Northern Region, with setting up a new commando unit, Unit 101, designed to respond to fedayeen infiltrations. After one month of training, "a patrol of the unit that infiltrated into the Gaza Strip as an exercise encountered Palestinians in al-Bureij refugee camp, opened fire to rescue itself and left behind about 30 killed Arabs and dozens of wounded."Yoav Gelber, 2006, "Sharon's Inheritance" In its five-month existence, Unit 101 was also responsible for carrying out the Qibya massacre on the night of 14–15 October 1953 in the Jordanian village of the same name. Cross-border operations by Israel were conducted in both Egypt and Jordan "to 'teach' the Arab leaders that the Israeli government saw them as responsible for these activities, even if they had not directly conducted them." Moshe Dayan felt that retaliatory action by Israel was the only way to convince Arab countries that, for the safety of their own citizens, they should work to stop fedayeen infiltrations. Dayan stated, "We are not able to protect every man, but we can prove that the price for Jewish blood is high."
According to Martin Gilbert, between 1951 and 1955, 967 Israelis were killed in what he claims were Arab terrorist attacks, a figure Benny Morris characterizes as "pure nonsense". Morris explains that Gilbert's fatality figures are "3-5 times higher than the figures given in contemporary Israeli reports" and that they seem to be based on a 1956 speech by David Ben-Gurion in which he uses the word nifga'im () to refer to "casualties" in the broad sense of the term (i.e., both the dead and the wounded).
According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, between 1951 and 1956, 400 Israelis were killed and 900 wounded in fedayeen attacks. Dozens of these attacks are today cited by the Israeli government as major Arab terrorist attacks against Israelis prior to the 1967 Six-Day War.