Summary: Reading Time: 10 minutesFor the Palestinians, the 1970s were a dark decade. We have already looked at the beginning of this in my post on Palestinian terrorism. Today we look at the event known to Palestinian history as Black September. If you recall, the group who conducted the terrorist attack on the <a href="http://www.theendofhistory.net/most_recent/complete-balanced-guide-israeli-palestinian-conflict-chapter-13-palestinian-terrorism/">Munich Olympics in 1972 was named Black September</a>. This is the event from which that organization took their name. <br> <br> Brief Recap of Palestinian History Before Black September<br> <br> Let’s quickly retrace the Palestinian history before we jump into Black September.<br> <br> <br> * They had lived as Arabs in the land of Palestine under the Ottomans for centuries but their history actually goes back farther than that. It was always an Arab or Ottoman history though, not necessarily a Palestinian history.<br> * After World War 1 they began experiencing the contest for Palestine with the influx of Jewish immigrants. Much of this flared up into an uprising 1936-39 that failed. In that failure much of the Palestinian leadership was lost and they were unprepared for events after the World War 2.<br> * In 1948 the British left Palestine and Israel declared statehood. This triggered the Arab invasion and many Palestinians lost their homes. Much of their homeland was now under the control of Israel, Egypt, or Jordan.<br> * In 1967 the Six Days War took place and they lost their homes again. The Israelis moved into the West Bank and Gaza and uprooted thousands of Palestinians. This left them without homes, without homelands and without a lot of hope going forward.<br> <br> <br> As we have already seen, it was within this sense of a loss of hope and homeland that the rise of Palestinian terrorism was initiated. This would only worsen as the decade of the 1970s went on. A rise of Palestinian terrorism would feed a rise of Israeli counter measures which would feed into a greater hopelessness on the part of the Palestinians which would feed into a wider amount of Palestinian terrorism. It was an unending cycle of self-destruction.<br> I think it is also important to note that most Palestinians were not and are not terrorists. Most of the Palestinians were husbands and wives, sons and daughters, people simply trying to make their way in life for themselves and their families. These average citizens were frequently caught in between the actions and counter actions of the different actors within this conflict since 1948. Therefore, many of the actions of the Palestinian terrorists were reprehensible but did not necessarily represent the will and nature of the Palestinian people. And many of the counter measures of Israel and the IDF were justified against the Palestinian terrorists but frequently landed upon the lives of these ordinary Palestinian people. This is where much of the tragedy of the story lies.<br> Setting the Stage for Black September <br> <br> After the Six Days War tens of thousands of Palestinians retreated behind the lines of the Jordanian border for safety. They, like many of the refugees from the 1948 war were expelled from the newly acquired lands of Israel in the midst of the fighting. From Jordan Palestinian guerillas began launching raids into Israel at this point. Israel would counter these raids with strikes on the Palestinians within Jordan itself.<br> The most infamous of these of these Israeli strikes was <a href="http://www.theendofhistory.net/most_recent/complete-balanced-guide-israeli-palestinian-conflict-chapter-12-yasser-arafat/">the Battle of Karameh</a> which we looked at in an earlier post. The Jordanians backed the Palestinian guerillas in the fighting against Israel and effectively achieved a victory over the Israelis. The success at Karameh resulted in a massive boom in Palestinian confidence in the PL...
