The Rabat Summit

In October 1974, the seventh Arab League summit met in Rabat, Morocco, with the leaders of twenty Arab states in attendance. Its central resolution, passed unanimously, recognized the PLO for the first time as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to return, to self-determination, and to establish an independent national authority under the PLO’s leadership on any liberated Palestinian territory.

The decision settled, at the level of Arab diplomacy, the question that had run through Palestinian politics since 1948: who speaks for the Palestinians. King Hussein of Jordan, whose kingdom had annexed the West Bank in 1950 and whose army had expelled the PLO in 1970–71, was forced to yield his claim to represent the Palestinians and to accept that any future Palestinian state would be independent of Jordan. The oil states committed multi-year financial support to the confrontation states and to the PLO. American diplomacy, which had preferred Hussein as the negotiating address for the West Bank, lost that option.

Rabat capped the diplomatic season opened by the Ten Point Program in June. One month later, Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, which recognized the Palestinian right to self-determination in Resolution 3236 and granted the PLO observer status in Resolution 3237. The formula agreed at Rabat — the PLO as sole legitimate representative — remained the constitutional bedrock of Palestinian diplomacy through Algiers, Madrid, and Oslo, and it is the standing Jordan formally relinquished when it cut legal ties to the West Bank in 1988.