Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993

This is the book people mean when they say a claim about the PLO can be checked. Yezid Sayigh covers the forty-five years from the establishment of the State of Israel to the PLO–Israel accord of 1993, and does it with a documentary base that no one else assembled: unprecedented access to PLO archives, the official publications and internal papers of the guerrilla organisations, and more than four hundred interviews the author conducted himself, many of them with the rank and file rather than the leadership.

Its central concern is the one the title states. A national movement without territory set out to liberate a country and, in the process, built the apparatus of a state — bureaucracies, budgets, armed forces, welfare institutions, foreign relations — in exile, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Tunis. Sayigh traces how the imperatives of state-building and the imperatives of armed struggle pulled against each other over four decades, and how the movement arrived at 1993 with a great deal of state and very little liberation.

It is a long, patient, heavily documented book, and it does not spare the movement it studies. Written from inside Palestinian political life by a man who was part of it, it is nonetheless a critical history, which is precisely what makes it citable. It has stood since publication as the definitive study of the movement, and later work is measured against it.

About the author

Yezid Sayigh is a senior fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. He has held teaching and research posts at King’s College London, Cambridge and Oxford, and headed the Middle East programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was an adviser, negotiator and policy planner in the Palestinian delegation to the talks with Israel from 1991 to 2002, and advised on Palestinian institutional reform until 2006. He took his doctorate in war studies at King’s College London.

Details

• Clarendon Press, Oxford, in association with the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C., 1997 — around 800 pages
• Paperback 1999 — ISBN 9780198296430; hardback ISBN 9780198292654; online ISBN 9780191685224

Where to find it

• In print from Oxford University Press; the full text is on Oxford Academic for readers with institutional access.
• Held by essentially every university library with a Middle East collection.