Ever since Nazi Germany’s infamous claim to the Sudetenland and the subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia, the fear that a state with an ethnic majority will adopt an aggressive foreign policy against any bordering state containing a minority of the same ethnic group haunts the world despite its relatively rare occurrence in post–World War II politics (Horowitz 1985: 229). The fear that the minority will reciprocate either by demands for secession as a first step toward integrating with the “motherland” or with establishing a state of its own is even more pervasive. We define political entities who try expanding their control to include an ethnic minority across borders as “irredentist” states. Alternatively, when a minority seeks either to join a motherland or more frequently to establish a political entity of its own, the minority in question is referred as separatist or secessionist. Of course, these phenomena need not be mutually exclusive – the goals of the irredentist state and the separatist movement might indeed coincide. A whole array of conflicts exhibited both characteristics: the breakup of the multiethnic Soviet and Yugoslavian states in the 1990s, Serbia and the Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia, Croatia and the Croatians in Bosnia, Albanian involvement in Kosovo, Russia in its relationship to the Russians in the region of Dniester in Moldova (Gagnon 1994–1995; Lynch 1998–1999).

In few ethnic conflicts in the world today is the fear on both sides as intense as in Israel and Palestine. The PLO was unique in the annals of national movements that not only sought liberation of its “homeland” but the destruction of an existing state. It was founded on the premise that the territories Israel occupied in 1967 were only part of the struggle. The PLO’s founding document, the Covenant of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (especially its second version revised in 1968) called for the liberation of the whole of Palestine. The emblem of Fatah (the major political and terrorist faction in the PLO since 1968) denotes the whole of Palestine with a circle surrounding it. The circle has been interpreted to denote a focus on the Palestinian issue in exclusion of other issues of Arab national liberation. More recently, textbooks revised and issued by the Palestinian Authority have included maps of the whole of Palestine, reference to Arab localities within pre-1967 Israel, and of course, there is the issue of the right of return, which blurs the partition envisaged by the Oslo peace process. It was not surprising that analysts debated whether the PA in its relationship to its Arab citizens would exhibit irredentist behavior and in the event that the PA adopted such a policy, that it would be reciprocated by Israel’s Arab elites and regular citizens. Fears of irredenta have hardly abated with the emergence and ascendance of Hamas, its electoral victory in legislative council elections in January 2006, and its subsequent takeover of Gaza after defeating the forces supporting Mahmud Abbas, the elected President and successor to Arafat.