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2026-04-03 · markdown · shared

The State Within the State: Palestinian Armed Factionalism and the Destabilization of Host Countries

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Introduction

The Palestinian refugee crisis, born of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and deepened by the 1967 Six-Day War, produced one of the most consequential displacement events of the twentieth century. What followed was not only a humanitarian tragedy but a political and military one: wherever the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) established itself in significant force — Jordan, Lebanon — it built parallel institutions, armed militias, and quasi-sovereign zones that directly challenged the host state’s authority. The pattern repeated with remarkable consistency, leaving a trail of civil conflict, expulsion, and regional destabilization. This essay documents that pattern through the primary cases of Jordan and Lebanon, with secondary consideration of Kuwait and Libya, drawing on primary testimonies, diplomatic records, and contemporaneous accounts.

The argument is not that Palestinian refugees as a population caused instability. It is narrower and more precise: that armed Palestinian factionalism — specifically the PLO’s systematic construction of what analysts and journalists called “a state within a state” — generated genuine, documented instability in every host country where it operated at scale. Arab states drew rational lessons from these episodes, lessons that have shaped refugee policy to the present day.

I. Jordan: Black September, 1970

Background

Following the 1948 war and the subsequent displacement of Palestinians, Jordan absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees, eventually granting citizenship to most — a policy unique among Arab states. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the PLO’s armed factions, the fedayeen, relocated to Jordan in large numbers. Their standing rose dramatically after the Battle of Karameh in March 1968, which Palestinian factions claimed as a symbolic victory against Israeli forces and which, in the words of scholar Andrew Terrill, established a “political mythology” that legitimized the fedayeen movement throughout the Arab world (Terrill, Middle East Journal, Winter 2001).

By 1969, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat commanded roughly 40,000 armed fighters operating from Jordanian territory. The consequences for Jordanian sovereignty were immediate and severe.

The State Within the State

American diplomat Morris Draper, serving in Amman during the period, left one of the most vivid firsthand accounts in an oral history recorded by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training:

“El Fatah, headed by Yasser Arafat, had taken over control of the PLO. It had gained some prestige from its operation against the Israelis and it became a powerful force within Jordan — sort of a third force consisting of tens of thousands of armed fighters. They lived in Jordan and trained there. They swaggered down the street, behaving pretty badly in many respects. They controlled total areas of Jordan, including parts of the city of Amman. They operated their own system of justice; they constituted a powerful threat to the stability of the monarchy.”

— Morris Draper, U.S. Embassy Amman (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training oral history)

A BYU academic study drawing on Arabic-language primary sources elaborates the institutional detail:

“The Palestinians set up their own police forces, courts, and roadblocks. In addition, they levied illegal taxes, arrested and punished people, and often roamed the streets of Amman attacking soldiers… Palestinian fedayeen enclaves in Jordan began to set up ‘independent republics’ where they attempted to set up checkpoints and tax citizens.”

— Vaughn Durfee, “Black September, 1964–1970: The Leading Role of Egypt’s Nasser,” Al-Buhuuth (BYU)

Zaid Rifai, Chief of the Jordanian Royal Court and subsequently Prime Minister, provided perhaps the starkest testimony about the atmosphere on the ground, as recorded in historical accounts of the period: that fedayeen violence against civilians had become routine and explicit, including documented atrocities against Jordanian soldiers.

King Hussein himself, writing in My War with Israel (William Morrow, 1969), described the growing impossibility of his position: the fedayeen’s strength had made them “a political force parallel to that of the Hashemite monarchy” by the end of 1968 — a state within his state.

The Dawson’s Field Crisis and Civil War

The breaking point came in September 1970. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a PLO faction led by George Habash, hijacked five commercial airliners — four successfully — forcing three to land at Dawson’s Field in the Jordanian desert. The PFLP held over five hundred hostages, including American and British citizens, and blew up the empty planes before international press cameras. The explicit purpose, as the PFLP announced, was to demonstrate “Hussein’s impotence” before the world.

The hijackings triggered what King Hussein later called an inevitable reckoning: “It was inevitable, because it was either them or us” (France 24, September 15, 2020, citing Hussein’s recorded words). On September 17, 1970, the Jordanian Army moved against PLO positions throughout the country. Syria intervened the following day, sending armored units into northern Jordan in support of the Palestinians, forcing Hussein to fight on two fronts. Israel, in turn, mobilized forces to deter Syria — a remarkable four-party crisis triggered by the armed Palestinian presence in a single host country.

The death toll from what became known as Black September remains disputed. Jordanian sources cited roughly 3,000 dead; PLO sources claimed tens of thousands. The PLO was expelled entirely by July 1971.

The aftermath was immediate and further destabilizing: the Black September Organization, a Fatah splinter group formed explicitly to avenge the expulsion, assassinated Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tal in Cairo in November 1971, and carried out the massacre of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. According to historian Benny Morris, Fatah moderates “acquiesced in the creation of Black September in order to survive” internal pressure from militants — illustrating how the ideology of armed resistance was structurally self-radicalizing.

II. Lebanon: The Fifteen-Year Civil War, 1975–1990

The PLO’s Arrival

Expelled from Jordan, the PLO relocated to Lebanon in 1971 — and replicated, with variations, exactly what it had done in Jordan. Lebanon was a far more fragile host: a confessional system balancing Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and Druze on a knife’s edge, governed by a census-based power-sharing arrangement that dated to 1943. By 1975, more than 300,000 Palestinian displaced persons lived in Lebanon (Wikipedia, Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon). The PLO established its headquarters in Beirut’s Fakhani neighborhood — quickly dubbed the “Fakhani Republic” by journalists — and its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, which Israeli and Western press labeled “Fatahland.”

The Wikipedia article on the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon summarizes the structural situation precisely: “With its own army operating freely in Lebanon, the PLO had created a state within a state.”

The Cairo Agreement and Its Collapse

In 1969, Lebanon and the PLO signed the Cairo Agreement, which formalized PLO authority over the refugee camps and granted the right to engage in armed struggle from Lebanese territory. It was an extraordinary concession — a sovereign state formally ceding control of territory to a foreign armed organization. Scholar Rex Brynen, in his study of PLO finances and political economy (Sanctuary and Survival, McGill-Queen’s University Press), describes the PLO’s relationship to the Lebanese National Movement as producing militias that were essentially “shop-fronts” — armed gangs without independent ideological foundation, existing on PLO payroll. The agreement, rather than stabilizing the situation, formalized the dual-sovereignty arrangement that made civil war structurally likely.

A 2024 Historia Scripta analysis, drawing on Brynen’s work, notes the human consequences for Lebanon’s Shia population in the south:

“The PLO had taken control of the centers of Sidon and Tyre, and in southern Lebanon, the Shiite population had to endure the humiliation of passing through PLO checkpoints ‘with permission.’”

This experience directly generated the Amal movement — the Shia militia formed in reaction to PLO domination of the south — which would later evolve into the broader Shia political mobilization from which Hezbollah eventually emerged. The PLO’s presence thus set in motion institutional forces that reshaped Lebanese Shia politics for decades.

Civil War

The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced approximately one million. Its causes were multiple — sectarian tensions, Syrian intervention, Israeli involvement, Cold War proxy dynamics. But the PLO’s armed presence was a major catalyst. Britannica’s account of the Lebanese Civil War identifies the PLO explicitly as one of the four primary armed factions, and traces the war’s proximate trigger — the Phalangist attack on a Palestinian bus in April 1975 — to the accumulated tensions between Christian militias and the Palestinian armed presence.

The academic Jillian Becker, quoted in the Wikipedia article on the PLO in Lebanon, rendered a stark verdict: Lebanon “was destroyed by, and because of, the PLO.” This is a contested claim — many Lebanese historians emphasize internal sectarian tensions as primary — but it represents a serious scholarly position, not propaganda. Mondoweiss, a pro-Palestinian publication, acknowledges that “in some Lebanese political narratives, the PLO is cast as a destabilizing force that brought the country to ruin” — conceding the substance of the charge even while contesting its framing.

The Israeli invasion of 1982, which killed over 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, was itself a direct consequence of PLO cross-border operations launched from Lebanese territory — including the Coastal Road massacre of 1978 (37 Israeli civilians killed) and continuous Katyusha rocket fire into northern Israel throughout the late 1970s. The PLO’s military use of Lebanese sovereignty produced Israeli military responses that Lebanon bore the cost of, without having chosen the conflict.

The PLO was expelled to Tunisia in August 1982. Lebanon, shattered by fifteen years of civil war, took another decade to reach a formal ceasefire under the Taif Accord (1989–1990).

III. Kuwait: The 1991 Expulsion

The Kuwait case illustrates a different but related mechanism of destabilization: political rather than military, but with equally catastrophic consequences for the Palestinian community involved.

Kuwait had one of the largest Palestinian populations in the Gulf — approximately 400,000 people, many of whom had been recruited to staff Kuwait’s administrative and professional infrastructure since the 1950s. Palestinians had built significant economic lives in Kuwait over generations. The PLO, under Arafat, had received substantial Kuwaiti financial support.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the PLO leadership publicly sided with Saddam Hussein — a calculation based on the hope that pan-Arab solidarity with Iraq would serve Palestinian political interests. Arafat attended a meeting of the Arab League in which he refused to condemn the invasion and was photographed embracing Hussein. Following Kuwait’s liberation by the U.S.-led coalition in 1991, the Kuwaiti government expelled nearly the entire Palestinian population — approximately 300,000 people — in reprisal.

The episode is documented in detail by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who describes it as a catastrophic miscalculation by PLO leadership that punished an entire population for a political decision made by its leaders. The expulsion ended a multigenerational Palestinian presence in Kuwait and permanently redirected Palestinian remittance flows that had sustained families in the West Bank and Gaza.

IV. Libya: Instrumentalization and Expulsion

Libya under Muammar Gaddafi represents a case of systematic instrumentalization of Palestinians as political leverage. Gaddafi periodically expelled tens of thousands of Palestinian workers — estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000 in major expulsion episodes during the 1970s and 1990s — as punitive responses whenever the PLO leadership failed to follow his preferred political line. Palestinians were welcomed as labor when useful and expelled when the political calculus changed.

The pattern illustrates a broader dynamic: Palestinian populations in Arab host states were perpetually subject to expulsion contingent on the political behavior of armed factions they had limited ability to control. The PLO’s political decisions had direct consequences for civilian refugees living thousands of miles from PLO headquarters.

V. Analysis: The Structural Pattern

Across cases, a consistent structural pattern emerges:

1. The state-within-a-state dynamic. In both Jordan and Lebanon, the PLO established parallel institutions — courts, police forces, checkpoints, taxation — that directly challenged host state sovereignty. This was not incidental but deliberate: the PLO required territorial control to sustain armed operations. The cost was borne by the host country.

2. The radicalizing pressure of factionalism. The PLO was never a unified command. Multiple factions — Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, and others — competed for legitimacy through escalating militancy. This internal competition structurally precluded the PLO from exercising restraint: factions that moderated lost members and resources to those that escalated. The host country therefore faced not a negotiating partner but an internally competitive armed movement with no institutional incentive to de-escalate.

3. Political decisions punishing civilian populations. In Kuwait and Libya, PLO political miscalculations — decisions made by Arafat and other leaders — produced mass expulsions of civilian refugee communities who bore no individual responsibility for those decisions. Palestinian civilians were instrumentalized twice: first by Arab states that kept them stateless as political leverage against Israel, and second by PLO leadership whose political calculations they could not control.

4. The feedback loop. The PLO’s expulsion from Jordan seeded the Lebanon crisis. The Lebanon crisis generated the conditions for Israel’s 1982 invasion. The invasion produced Hezbollah. Each iteration generated new armed formations and new regional destabilization. The Palestinian refugee crisis was not a static humanitarian emergency but a dynamic political engine producing cascading regional consequences.

Conclusion

The documented record establishes that Palestinian armed factionalism — distinct from the Palestinian refugee population as such — produced genuine, severe destabilization in every host country where it operated at scale. Jordan nearly lost its monarchy. Lebanon lost fifteen years and 150,000 lives to a civil war in which the PLO’s armed presence was a major catalyst. Kuwait expelled a multigenerational Palestinian community in direct response to a PLO political miscalculation.

Arab states that subsequently refused Palestinian mass refugee absorption were not acting purely from ethnic prejudice or political convenience, though those factors were present. They were acting on hard empirical lessons drawn from what they had observed in Amman and Beirut. The fear was not irrational; it was well-founded.

What the record also establishes, however, is that Palestinian civilians were the ultimate victims of this dynamic — stateless, instrumentalized by Arab states that used their cause as political capital while denying them rights, and subject to collective punishment for the decisions of armed factions operating in their name. The pattern of destabilization and the pattern of civilian suffering are not competing narratives. They are the same story, told from different positions in the same structure of abandonment.

Sources and Citations

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