This pattern of armed propaganda continued to characterize Palestinian armed attacks. It was aimed at winning Palestinian opinion over to Fatah and at convincing Arab public opinion of the feasibility of direct action against Israel.
The June 1967 war, in which several Arab nations were soundly defeated by Israel, was nonetheless a watershed that led to the rebirth of a Palestinian national movement with a strong separate identity. The rebirth occurred in several stages. The first was winning a crucial victory in the battle of Karameh in the Jordan river valley in March 1968, where outnumbered Palestinian guerrillas, backed by Jordanian artillery, stood up to Israeli armored forces. The importance of this battle was not in the relatively limited Israeli losses, but in the fact that the Israelis appeared to have been driven back by Palestinian irregulars only nine months after the rout of three Arab regular armies in .
1967. During the next stage, also in 1968, the Palestinian guerrilla groups, who called themselves fida'iyeen (fedayeen), or self-sacrificers, seized control of the PLO from the leadership that had been installed by Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1964.
Arafat's Rise:.
Arafat was born in Jerusalem in 1929 and brought up in Gaza. He studied civil engineering at Cairo University, where he headed the League of Palestine Students (1952-1956), and fought in the Suez war of 1956. In the late 1950's he lived in Kuwait and helped to establish Fatah, which began terrorist operations against Israel in the early 1960's. From about 1965, and particularly after Israel's victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, a power struggle developed within the Palestinian resistance movement, mainly between advocates of Arab state sponsorship and those, like Arafat, supporting an independent movement. In 1969 Arafat, as leader of the most powerful group in the PLO, was elected chairman. .
Under Arafat's leadership, the PLO developed a variety of political, socioeconomic, and educational institutions in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Palestinian Diaspora.