Palestine

Palestine refers to the territory claimed by the Palestinian people as the basis for an independent state, comprising the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. The question of Palestinian statehood derives from the British Mandate period (1920-1948) and the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel, which displaced approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe). The West Bank was held by Jordan from 1948 to 1967 and occupied by Israel following the Six-Day War; the Gaza Strip was held by Egypt and similarly occupied by Israel in 1967.¹

PLO and Palestinian Organizations

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 as an umbrella organization for Palestinian political and military factions. Under Yasser Arafat's leadership following the 1967 war, the PLO's Fatah movement became dominant. The PLO established itself in Jordan, conducting cross-border operations against Israel, until it was expelled following Black September 1970 - when King Hussein crushed PLO forces in Jordan. The PLO relocated to Lebanon, from which it conducted operations until Israel's 1982 invasion forced its departure to Tunis.

Palestinian factions active in the period covered by this vault include:

• Fatah - Arafat's mainstream nationalist faction
• Black September - a PLO-affiliated clandestine unit responsible for the Munich massacre of September 5-6, 1972
• PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) - Marxist faction that conducted hijackings including the 1976 Entebbe operation
• Abu Nidal Organization - breakaway faction that conducted attacks in multiple countries, allegedly with connections to Iraq and Libya

Mossad Operations

Mossad's response to the 1972 Munich massacre - in which Black September killed eleven Israeli athletes - was Operation Wrath of God, a long-running assassination program targeting those responsible. Mossad teams tracked and killed multiple PLO operatives across Europe and the Middle East over the following years. The operation was dramatized in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich and documented in George Jonas's Vengeance (1984). A mistaken assassination in Lillehammer, Norway in 1973 - in which Mossad killed a Moroccan waiter believing him to be a PLO operative - led to arrests of Mossad officers by Norwegian police.²

Palestinian intelligence organizations - including Force 17 and the PLO's intelligence branch under Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf) - maintained connections with Arab intelligence services and, through back-channels, with Western intelligence agencies seeking information on Palestinian operations. The CIA maintained contacts with PLO representatives despite the U.S. government's official refusal to deal with the organization.

PA and Oslo

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO established the Palestinian Authority (PA), which assumed limited self-governance authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The PA's intelligence apparatus, the Preventive Security Service (Amn al-Wiqaiya), maintained security cooperation with both the CIA and Israeli Shin Bet from the Oslo period onward as part of coordinated counterterrorism programs targeting Islamist factions.¹