BEIRUT -- There has always been a vital Arab dimension to the Palestinian struggle. For a long period, in fact, the Arabs bore the brunt of the struggle, waging four, mainly disastrous, wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, with little or no Palestinian participation in them.
Only after despairing of impossible military solutions did the Arabs -- or their dominant players at least -- turn in the 1970s to diplomacy. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon each sought a peace for themselves. But at the same time, they could not envisage such an all-embracing Arab-Israel settlement without a specifically Israeli-Palestinian one at its heart, one that went some way to gratify the Palestinians' national aspirations and redress the injustice done to them, which was the root cause of a seemingly implacable conflict.
Ultimately, a consensus was to form around the idea of an historic compromise under which the Palestinians should set up a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza, the 22 percent of original Palestine that, until the Zionist colonization, had been almost entirely theirs, ceding the other 78 percent to Israel.