The Palestine Liberation Organization

Sixteen years after the Nakba the Palestinians had no institution of their own. The West Bank had been annexed by Jordan, which prosecuted the very word “Palestinian” as separatism; Gaza was under Egyptian military administration; the refugees were a caseload of the UN Relief and Works Agency, defined by ration cards. It was in this vacuum, and out of an Arab League summit in Cairo in January 1964 — convened by Nasser to co-ordinate against Israel’s diversion of the Jordan river — that the League commissioned the Jerusalem lawyer and diplomat Ahmad al-Shuqayri to consult the Palestinian people and constitute a body to represent them. Arab governments wanted an organisation they could supervise. The Palestinians who filled it wanted an organisation that would make them, again, a political people rather than a humanitarian problem.

The first Palestine National Council met at the Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem from 28 May to 2 June 1964, with 422 delegates. It adopted a Basic Law and the Palestine National Charter — al-Mithaq al-Qawmi al-Filastini — and announced the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization on 2 June. The Charter’s preamble is written in the first person plural and reads as a claim to existence: “We, the Palestinian Arab people, who waged fierce and continuous battles to safeguard its homeland, to defend its dignity and honor, and who offered all through the years continuous caravans of immortal martyrs…” Article 2 stated that “Palestine, with its boundaries at the time of the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” Article 5 insisted that “the Palestinian personality is a permanent and genuine characteristic that does not disappear. It is transferred from fathers to sons” — a sentence written against the proposition, then respectable in Western capitals, that the Palestinians would dissolve into the Arab states within a generation.

The June 1967 defeat destroyed the sponsors and handed the organisation to the fighters. At the fourth PNC in Cairo in July 1968 the guerrilla organisations, Fatah foremost, took control of the PLO’s governing bodies and rewrote the Charter, changing its Arabic title from the pan-Arab qawmi to the specifically Palestinian watani. The 1968 text opens: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.” Article 9 declares: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.” In February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the Executive Committee, a post he held until his death. The PLO became an apparatus as much as a front — a parliament in exile in the PNC, an executive, an army, the Palestine Red Crescent under Fathi Arafat, the Palestine Research Centre, the SAMED industrial and agricultural enterprises, schools, pensions, a films unit, the Palestinian National Fund. For the camps in Lebanon and Syria it was, for two decades, something close to a state.

The record of those decades is not one thing. The PLO built the institutions that made a dispersed people governable by itself, and it won the international argument: at the Rabat summit of October 1974 the Arab League recognised it as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and on 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, closing with the line that fixed the organisation in the world’s memory — “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” The same period includes hijackings and attacks on civilians carried out by member organisations and by Fatah’s Black September; the civil war in Jordan in 1970–71 and expulsion; deep and destructive involvement in the Lebanese civil war; the Israeli invasion of 1982, the siege of Beirut, the evacuation to Tunis, and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen inside an Israeli-controlled perimeter in September 1982. The Ten Point Programme adopted by the twelfth PNC in Cairo in June 1974 began the shift: point 1 reaffirmed the rejection of Resolution 242 “which obliterates the national right of our people and deals with the cause of our people as a problem of refugees,” while the programme as a whole authorised, for the first time, a “national authority” on any part of Palestinian territory that was liberated. The PFLP and three other organisations walked out and formed a Rejectionist Front over exactly that clause.

The end point of the shift was Algiers. On 15 November 1988, at the nineteenth PNC — “the session of the intifadah and national independence, the session of the martyr and hero Abu Jihad” — the Council adopted a Declaration of Independence drafted by Mahmoud Darwish and proclaimed “in the Name of God and on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people, the establishment of the State of Palestine in the land of Palestine with its capital at Jerusalem.” The Declaration described the PLO itself as the political framework the national will had built, “the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and committed the new state to “a democratic parliamentary system based on freedom of opinion and the freedom to form parties,” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to non-alignment. Read alongside the Political Communiqué’s acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338, it was the formal Palestinian acceptance of a state on 22 per cent of the land.

Today the PLO is at once indispensable and hollowed out. It signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, exchanged letters of mutual recognition with Israel, and produced the Palestinian Authority, which then absorbed its personnel and its purpose; the PNC has met only rarely since; Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad remain outside it, and the 2017 Hamas document explicitly calls for the PLO to be “preserved, developed and rebuilt on democratic foundations.” The State of Palestine the PLO declared in 1988 is recognised by around 150 states and holds non-member observer status at the United Nations, granted by General Assembly Resolution 67/19 in November 2012. It has an embassy in most of the world’s capitals and, on the ground, no sovereignty at all.

Sources

• Palestine National (qawmi) Charter, Jerusalem, 28 May 1964 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, July 1968 — Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• PLO Interim Program (the Ten-Point Program), 12th PNC, Cairo, June 1974 — palquest
• Declaration of State of Palestine and Political Communiqué, 19th PNC, Algiers, 15 November 1988 — UN Question of Palestine
• Palestine Liberation Organization (I) — palquest
• Palestine Liberation Organization (II) — palquest
• Speech by Yasser Arafat, UN General Assembly, 13 November 1974 — al-bab.com