Excerpted from: Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War. Oxford University Press, 2002, pg. 1

A squad of Palestinian guerrillas crosses from Lebanon into northern Israel. Armed with Soviet-made explosives, their uniforms supplied by the Syrians, they advance toward their target: a pump for conveying Galilee water to the Negev desert. A modest objective, seemingly, yet the Palestinians' purpose is immense. Members of the militant al-Fatah (meaning, "The Conquest," also a reverse acronym for the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine), they want to bring about the decisive showdown in the Middle East. Their action, they hope, will provoke an Israeli retaliation against one of its neighboring countries—Lebanon itself, or Jordan—igniting an all-Arab offensive to destroy the Zionist state. This, al-Fatah's maiden operation, ends in fiasco. First the explosive charges fail to detonate. Then, exiting Israel, the guerrillas are arrested by Lebanese police. Nevertheless, the leader of al-Fatah, a thirty-five-year-old former engineer from Gaza named Yasser Arafat, issues a victorious communique extolling "the duty of Jihad (holy war) and ... the dreams of revolutionary Arabs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf."

The author notes: Al-Fatah's first operation is described in many sources. The versions vary, however. See, for example, Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement 1949-1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 107-8, 121. Ehud Yaari, Strike Terror: The Story of Fatah (New York: Sabra Books, 1970), pp. 49- 79. Salah Khalaf, My Home My Land, A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (New York: Times Books, 1981), pp. 44-49. Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 22-39. Alan Hart, Arafat: A Political Biography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994), pp. 155-56. Ahmad al-Shuqayri, Mudhakkirat Ahmad al-Shuqayri, 'Ala Tariq al-Hazima, Ma'a al-Muluk wal-Ru'asa' (Beirut: Dar al-'Awda, 1971), 3, pp. 152-88, 229-56. Arafat quote in Riad El-Rayyes and Dunia Nahas, Guerrillas for Palestine (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 27.