The Palestinian National Charter Revised

In July 1968, a year after the June war and four months after Karameh, the Palestine National Council met in Cairo and adopted a revised National Charter (al-Mithaq al-Watani) — the founding text of 1964 rewritten for a movement now dominated by the fedayeen organizations rather than by the Arab states that had created the PLO.

The revised charter opened by declaring that “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland.” Its most consequential sentence was Article 9: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.” On the Jewish presence in the country, Article 6 stated that “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians” — a formula whose cutoff date was left to interpretation, and which Fatah’s parallel advocacy of a democratic state for Muslims, Jews, and Christians would later strain against.

The charter became the reference point of Palestinian politics for two decades — and the text every negotiation was measured against. The Ten Point Program of 1974 bent its logic toward a phased politics without amending it; the 1988 Declaration of Independence effectively superseded its territorial claim; and on 24 April 1996, as part of the Oslo undertakings, the PNC voted 504 to 54 to amend the articles inconsistent with the PLO’s letters of recognition — a vote whose precise legal effect was itself disputed. The charter’s language, however, remained the touchstone for every current of Palestinian politics that rejected that trajectory.