Growing Palestinian activism in the early part of the 1960's provided the impetus for the convening of the first summit conference of Arab leaders in 1964 to plan a unified response to Israeli plans to divert some of the waters of the Jordan River. This activism influenced the decision, made at that conference, to create the PLO. It also precipitated the slide of the Arab states into the June 1967 war with Israel. In the mid-1960's the Arab regimes were again haunted by a force they had not had to deal with since 1948: a Palestinian nationalist movement that, in spite of being divided into several underground groups, could exert great pressure on them by playing on public opinion and inter-Arab pressures.

During the early and middle 1960's di

The uprising provoked intense sympathy in the Arab world and galvanized Palestinians everywhere, bringing their cause to the attention of the world (Gerner, 1992). Palestinians inside Israel carried out sympathy demonstrations and strikes. A growing number of Jews voiced doubts about Israeli policy. As a direct result of domestic and other pressures sparked by the uprising, Jordan's King Hussein, on July 31, 1988, severed his country's links with the West Bank and renounced Jordan's sovereignty over it, thereby reversing nearly 40 years of Jordanian policy.

The rise of the PLO to the world stage really began with the well-known Intifada, or mass uprising, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was at the end of 1987 where resistance to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip began to sharply escalate in the form of demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and violence. It came to involve virtually the whole Palestinian population in those areas, and continued even two years later in spite of the hundreds of Palestinian deaths and thousands of detentions that came at the hands of Israeli police forces.

The uprising was the product of a generation that had been brought up under Israeli control. By the late 1980's two out of every three Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had either been born or were less than five years old when the Israeli occupation began. For two decades the people had had no control over their own lives and their future was becoming increasingly unsure. This was primarily due to the creeping annexation of land by the Israeli occupation authorities and the establishment of Israeli settlements on the confiscated lands. By 1993, more than 60 percent of the West Bank land and about 50 the land of the overcrowded Gaza Strip had been appropriated by

Some topics in this essay:
Israeli Israeli, Gaza Strip, Palestine Students, Jordan River, Nasser Heacock, Karameh Jordan, Yassir Arafat, Arab June, Bank Gaza, Jordanian Egyptian, west bank, gaza strip, bank gaza strip, west bank gaza, bank gaza, israeli occupation, jordan river, peace agreement, peretz 1990, people's rights freedom, nasser heacock, heacock 1990, including palestine, resolutions 242 338, rights freedom national,