CBS REPORT: The Palestinians (1974)

Since 1967, Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have lived under military occupation, creating, according to Avram Bornstein, a carceralization of their society.

In the meantime, pan-Arabism has waned as an aspect of Palestinian identity. The Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank triggered a second Palestinian exodus and fractured Palestinian political and militant groups, prompting them to give up residual hopes in pan-Arabism. They rallied increasingly around the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been formed in Cairo in 1964.

The group grew in popularity in the following years, especially under the nationalistic orientation of the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

Mainstream secular Palestinian nationalism was grouped together under the umbrella of the PLO whose constituent organizations include Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among other groups who at that time believed that political violence was the only way to "liberate" Palestine.

These groups gave voice to a tradition that emerged in the 1960s that argues Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots, with extreme advocates reading a Palestinian nationalist consciousness and identity back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, when such a consciousness is in fact relatively modern.