I believe that was his point, that the '67 war was the point at which it became a strategy to invent a "Palestinian people."
I've only read up to here in the thread so far, so maybe somebody else has already queried this.
If the concept of a "Palestinian people" didn't exist until 1967 then how come Fatah was founded in 1959 ? From Wikipedia (and numerous other places on the net) Fatah means something like "the movement for liberation of the Palestinian homeland" or "The Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine". How could you have any kind of Palestinian Homeland or National Liberation if the concept of a Palestinian people didn't exist until eight years later ? It's preposterous.
If you look around the net you can repeatedly find this claim that the Palestinians were "invented" in 1967. Most of the sites are pro-Israeli or out and out Zionist, not surprisingly. A good example is
Middle East Facts. On their main page is this quote :
This website is dedicated to spreading the truth about Israel and the "Palestinians" (who incidentally didn't call themselves that and didn't have a national movement before 1967).
However they then do a rather excellent job of shooting themselves in the foot. They have lot of stuff about Fateh, including a section
reproducing their 1964 Constitution. I quote from the site :
To the Middle East Facts visitor - this document was written in 1964, three years before the so-called "Israeli occupation".
You can then read the Constitution - I think the first two articles are key to this discussion :
Article (1) Palestine is part of the Arab World, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab Nation, and their struggle is part of its struggle.
Article (2) The Palestinian people have an independent identity. They are the sole authority that decides their own destiny, and they have complete sovereignty on all their lands.
So there we have it - a pre-1967 document (reproduced on a pro-Israeli site no less) that
specifically refers to the Palestinian people. In fact that 1964 Constitution is littered with references to the Palestinian people.
As far as I can tell the claim that the Palestinians effectively weren't there before 1967 is pretty much the same sort of thing as the way the white South Africans used to claim the blacks weren't in large parts of the region prior to the Europeans settling. It's a lie and you've been suckered by it.
Now what you can say is that 1967 - specifically the aftermath of the 6-day war - marked a sea change in the attitudes of the Palestinians. They had been relying on the other Arab countries to help them, after the war they realised anything they were going to achieve would have to be done by themselves.
Confused ? You will be...
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