Abstract
From the onset, Arab states surrounding Israel - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon - were concerned with the emergence of a non-Arab state adjacent to their borders, and it is this preoccupation, more than a genuine sense of solidarity with Palestinians, that explains Arab involvement in what would come to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because Arab states seem to stand behind Palestinians, and feel entitled and obligated to respond to Israel's behavior towards its Palestinian minority, striking parallelisms exist between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab-Israeli dispute.
A few wide trends can be distinguished in the history of this broader conflict. Firstly, the timeline of the Arab-Israeli conflict is marked by a change in nature brought on by the 1967 Six-Days war. In turn, because Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts are so deeply intertwined, this change of the Arab-Israeli conflict affected the relations between Israel and Palestinians. I argue that the complicated rapport between Palestinians and other Arab nation-states blurs the line between the two conflicts. I also argue that each conflict has had profound long-term effects on the other, partly due to the dream of Arab unity and the intricate links between Arab states on the one hand, and the Palestinian leadership and diaspora on the other hand.
