The Ten Point Program

On 8 June 1974, the 12th session of the Palestine National Council, meeting in Cairo, adopted the PLO’s Interim Program — ten points that changed the trajectory of Palestinian politics. Point two committed the organization to “employ all means, and first and foremost armed struggle, to liberate Palestinian territory and to establish the independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated.”

The sentence was crafted to hold a fracturing movement together, and every word carried argument: armed struggle remained “first and foremost”; the authority would be “combatant,” not a state at peace; and the program elsewhere restated the refusal of Resolution 242, which “obliterates the national right of our people and deals with the cause of our people as a problem of refugees,” and rejected any settlement whose price was “recognition, peace, secure frontiers, renunciation of national rights.” But the phased logic was unmistakable: a national authority on part of Palestine meant, in time, a state beside Israel rather than in place of it.

The PFLP, the PFLP-General Command, the Arab Liberation Front, and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front read it exactly that way — a possible first step toward a two-state settlement — and aligned against it in 1974 as the Rejectionist Front, less an organization than a declared refusal of the new course. The program nonetheless opened the diplomatic season of 1974: the Rabat summit’s recognition of the PLO in October, and Arafat’s appearance at the UN General Assembly in November. Every subsequent step — Algiers 1988, Madrid, Oslo — descends from the sentence adopted in Cairo that June.