Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

The Palestine Liberation Organization is an umbrella nationalist organization dedicated to establishing an independent Palestinian state. It has been recognized by the United Nations since 1974 as the official representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO is governed by a 15-member executive committee, which the Palestinian National Council (PNC) elects. The PNC is a parliament composed of representatives from at least eight political parties or factions, some of which are militant. The largest is Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah party, which has separate political and paramilitary components. Arafat was consistently reelected by the PNC as PLO chairman from 1969 until his death in 2004. Though responsible for the increase in the organization's militancy when he came to power, Arafat's diplomatic efforts also gave the Palestinian people their first independent national identity after imposition of the State of Israel to replace Palestine's British protectorate status. Under Arafat, the PLO, Palestine, and the legitimacy of Palestinians' right to self-determination were recognized by the United Nations and, eventually, by Israel itself.

The PLO became less relevant when Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, creating the Palestinian Authority (PA)—a new governing body designed to administer an independent Palestinian state in parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. With its membership overlapping that of the PA, the PLO continues to exist, its mission of a functional state with sustained self-determination still challenged by the ongoing military actions and government policies of Israel and the United States, by lack of unity among the PLO's membership organizations, and by the 2006 popular election of Hamas, a radically militant and competing political party, to a majority of council seats in the PA.

The 1948 establishment of Israel on a majority of Palestine's land made the Arab Palestinians stateless refugees in need of liberation. During the Pan-Arabism movement led by Egypt's President Nasser, the PLO was created at the Arab League's 1964 Cairo Summit as a government-in-exile to mobilize a war of liberation. The PLO's first act was to write a Palestinian National Charter disputing the legitimacy of the State of Israel. After Israel's 1967 annexation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank (the Occupied Territories), the charter was amended to call for the destruction of Israel, Arafat was appointed chairman, and the PLO became fully independent, beginning a period of guerrilla warfare against Israel that included terrorism against civilians. Their most publicized attack was when the group Black September, a member of the PLO, massacred six Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

The PLO had many setbacks over the next two decades, fleeing to Lebanon with many Palestinian refugees after being expelled from Jordan in 1970. The PLO's dual tactics of diplomacy and militancy made it [Page 1081]difficult to achieve the credibility of the former without at the same time losing the united support of its more militant factions. In 1974, Arafat unsuccessfully proposed a 10-point program to establish a single binational Israeli-Palestinian state that would be secular and democratic. He then supported a 1976 U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a two-state solution along pre-1967 borders. Objecting to these legitimizations of Israel's existence, hard-line factions left the PLO to form the militant Rejectionist Front, partially rejoining the PLO later to register their objections to the 1979 Camp David Accords by which Egypt recognized Israel's right to exist. While the PLO fought against both Israel and numerous hard-line Arab factions in Lebanon's civil war, Arafat's diplomatic efforts continued, gaining international credibility alongside Saudi King Fahd and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

...