The popular version of this conflict begins in 1967, with “the occupation,” as if history started there. It did not. Two things happened around that date that the slogan version leaves out entirely.
First, who started the 1967 war and why. Second, the long list of times a Palestinian state was put on the table and turned down. Third, why Israel went into Lebanon, a war sold as pure aggression that began as a defence. Here is each, with the dates and the documents.
1967: The War They Don't Explain
It is described as the start of “the occupation,” rarely as a war, and almost never with its cause. Here is the month that led to the first shot, in order.
You will sometimes see a line from an Israeli general or minister years later, conceding that Nasser “did not actually intend to attack.” It is quoted to suggest the threat was invented. It proves nothing of the sort. Closing an international waterway to a country's shipping is, under international law, an act of war in itself, intention or not. Add the expulsion of the UN force, 100,000 troops in Sinai, a war pact with Jordan and the open promise to destroy Israel, and no nation on earth waits to be hit first.
Here is the question the “1967 occupation” story cannot answer. From 1949 to 1967, the West Bank was held and annexed by Jordan, and Gaza was ruled by Egypt. For nineteen years, two Arab states controlled exactly the land a Palestinian state would sit on.
In all that time, neither created a Palestinian state, offered one, or was asked to. There were no settlements, no Israeli checkpoints, no “occupation” in the sense meant today. If that land was the whole grievance, those nineteen years are unexplained.
And the timing gives it away: the PLO was founded in 1964, three years before Israel held an inch of the West Bank or Gaza. What it set out in 1964 to “liberate” was Israel itself.
The Rejection Record
A favourite inversion says that even when Palestinians accepted a state, it was never enough for Israel. The record runs the other way. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's former foreign minister and its chief negotiator at Camp David, put the core of it in one sentence: three times, in 1937, in 1947, and in 2000–2001, the Palestinians were offered statehood, and three times they rejected it. The full record runs longer. Here is the offer, and the answer, each time.
This is not a claim that peace is impossible. It is a claim about who kept saying no. When an Arab leader chose peace, he got it: Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 and received every inch of Sinai back; Jordan made peace in 1994. The door was never locked. It was walked away from, again and again.
Why Israel Went Into Lebanon
“Israeli aggression in Lebanon” is the charge, and the maps of Israeli tanks rolling north seem to prove it. The dates tell a different story: a foreign militia turned a neighbour's border into a firing line, and every Israeli move north came after an attack launched from it.
Israel has no claim on Lebanon and never wanted it. The trouble was who moved in next door. Thrown out of Jordan, the PLO rebuilt in southern Lebanon and turned it into “Fatahland”: an armed enclave the Lebanese government could not control, dedicated to attacking Israel across the border. The wars that followed were not a land grab. They were Israel trying to stop the shooting.
The dates run one way only. The 1969 Cairo Agreement hands the PLO the right to attack Israel from Lebanon; Black September floods the south with its fighters. From there come the Kiryat Shmona and Ma'alot school massacres of 1974, and the Coastal Road massacre of 1978 (38 dead, 13 of them children), each answered by an Israeli operation; then the shelling of the Galilee that ends in the 1982 war driving the PLO out to Tunis. The full timeline, dates and all, plus the Hezbollah years and the wars of 2006 and 2024, is on Israel & Lebanon.