The Declaration of Independence, Algiers

The nineteenth extraordinary session of the Palestine National Council met in Algiers from 12 to 15 November 1988, in the twelfth month of the first intifada. The Council’s own Political Communiqué names the session three times over: “the session of the intifadah (uprising) and national independence, the session of the martyr and hero Abu Jihad.” The declaration adopted at its close was transmitted the following day to the UN Secretary-General by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s deputy permanent observer, Riyad Mansour, and circulated as an official document of the General Assembly and the Security Council — which is why the authoritative English text sits today in the United Nations archive rather than in any Palestinian one.

Most of the declaration is an argument about history rather than a legal instrument. It sets the Palestinian claim on continuity of habitation — “an organic, indissoluble and unbroken relationship among people, land and history” — and it names, precisely, the sentence it was written to refute:

“a people deprived of independence, and one whose homeland was subjected to a new kind of foreign occupation, was exposed to an attempt to give general currency to the falsehood that Palestine was ‘a land without a people’.”

Then it does something the Palestinian national movement had never done in a founding text: it grounds the claim in the instruments of the international order that had been used against it. The declaration cites Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, under which the Palestinian Arab people was recognised as “no different from the other Arab peoples detached from the Ottoman State.” And it cites General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947 — the partition plan the Arab states had rejected — on the ground that it “continues to attach conditions to international legitimacy that guarantee the Palestinian Arab people the right to sovereignty and national independence.”

The operative sentence is short:

“The Palestine National Council hereby declares, 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.”

Read alongside the Political Communiqué adopted in the same session, the text amounts to the PLO’s acceptance of partition and, with it, of a state on part of the territory — the decisive concession of the movement’s history, made in exile, in the middle of an uprising the exiles had not started. Nothing on the ground changed. What changed was the terms on which everything after Algiers — Madrid, Oslo, the United Nations votes that followed — would be argued.

Sources

• Declaration of the State of Palestine, Palestine National Council, 15 November 1988 — full text with the Political Communiqué, United Nations (UNISPAL)