When the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in May 1964, it was, in the blunt assessment of most historians, an Egyptian-managed project designed to channel Palestinian nationalism rather than empower it. The Arab states that convened the first Palestinian National Council wanted a voice they could control. What they created, within a few turbulent years, would escape that control entirely — and become, for decades, the closest thing the Palestinian people had to a government in exile.
That arc — from instrument of Arab state politics to internationally recognized representative body to its current diminished, widely questioned role under Mahmoud Abbas — is the story of Palestinian political modernity itself. Understanding the PLO means understanding both what Palestinian self-determination has achieved and what has been lost, conceded, or simply hollowed out.
The Founding and the Fatah Takeover
The PLO’s founding charter, adopted in 1964, called for the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle and explicitly excluded any recognition of Israeli sovereignty. Ahmad al-Shuqairi, the organization’s first chairman, was widely regarded as a client of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The catastrophic Arab defeat in the June 1967 War — in which Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai, and Golan Heights in six days — discredited the Arab states as stewards of the Palestinian cause and created the political opening that Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement had been preparing for.
Fatah, which Arafat and colleagues including Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) had founded in the late 1950s, believed Palestinians must lead their own liberation rather than wait on Arab armies. After a minor but symbolically charged raid on Israeli infrastructure at Karameh, Jordan, in March 1968 — in which Palestinian fighters stood their ground against an Israeli military assault — Fatah’s prestige surged. By 1969, Arafat had assumed the chairmanship of the PLO, a position he would hold until his death in 2004.
Under Arafat, the PLO became a genuine umbrella organization, incorporating Fatah alongside the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), founded by George Habash, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) under Nayef Hawatmeh, and smaller factions. The Palestinian National Council — often described as a parliament in exile — functioned as the organization’s legislative body, with hundreds of delegates representing Palestinians across the diaspora.
Expulsions, Black September, and Lebanon
Political power in exile is precarious, and the PLO learned this repeatedly. By 1970, the organization’s armed presence in Jordan had grown large enough that King Hussein perceived it as a state within a state. In September of that year, following a series of dramatic aircraft hijackings by PFLP militants, the Jordanian army moved against Palestinian fighters and refugee camps in what Palestinians remember as Black September — a massacre in which thousands of Palestinians were killed over several days of fighting. The PLO was expelled from Jordan and relocated to Beirut.
Lebanon became the PLO’s base for the next twelve years. The organization built institutions, ran social services, and launched cross-border operations into northern Israel. It also drew Israel deeper into Lebanese politics. In June 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered a full-scale invasion of Lebanon — Operation Peace for Galilee — with the stated aim of destroying the PLO infrastructure. Israeli forces advanced to Beirut. In August and September 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias, operating in areas under Israeli military control, massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The Israeli Kahan Commission later found that Sharon bore personal responsibility for failing to prevent the killings. Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi has described the 1982 war as a turning point that demonstrated the PLO’s fundamental vulnerability as a stateless armed actor.
The PLO was again expelled, this time scattering to Tunis, Yemen, and other Arab capitals. Arafat set up the organization’s headquarters in Tunis, where it would remain until Oslo.
UN Recognition and the Long Road to Oslo
Even at its most embattled, the PLO accumulated diplomatic recognition that no other Palestinian body could match. In October 1974, the Arab League summit in Rabat formally recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” The following month, Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly — famously arriving carrying what he described as an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun — and the UNGA granted the PLO observer status. UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974) affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and national independence.
The First Intifada, which erupted in December 1987 across the West Bank and Gaza, changed the internal political dynamics of Palestinian representation. The uprising was largely spontaneous and locally organized; the PLO leadership in Tunis initially struggled to keep pace. But it was in the context of this renewed Palestinian mobilization that the PLO took its most consequential — and, to many Palestinians, most costly — political step.
In November 1988, the Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers declared an independent Palestinian state and, implicitly, accepted a two-state framework by invoking UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which are premised on Israel’s existence within recognized borders. It was a historic compromise: the PLO was, in effect, accepting a state on 22 percent of historic Palestine. The United States and Israel did not respond immediately, but the declaration opened the door to the secret negotiations that would produce the Oslo Accords.
Oslo and the Transformation into the Palestinian Authority
The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn in September 1993, brought Arafat and the PLO back to Palestinian soil for the first time in decades. Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism. The Palestinian Authority was created as an interim governing body for parts of the West Bank and Gaza, with Arafat as its elected president from 1996.
Scholars and critics have documented the deep structural problems embedded in Oslo from the outset. As legal scholar Noura Erakat has argued in Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019), the accords created a framework in which Palestinian negotiators conceded on key issues of international law — refugees, Jerusalem, settlements — in exchange for recognition and a process that was never guaranteed to produce statehood. The PLO’s negotiating position was weakened, Erakat argues, precisely by its eagerness to be accepted as a legitimate interlocutor by the United States and Israel.
Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank accelerated throughout the Oslo years. The Camp David summit of 2000 collapsed. The Second Intifada erupted in September 2000. Arafat died under disputed circumstances in a French hospital in November 2004, widely mourned across Palestinian society as a symbol of national persistence, whatever the failures of his political strategy.
The PLO Under Abbas: A Hollowed Institution
Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Arafat as PLO chairman and Palestinian Authority president, has governed without a renewed electoral mandate since his four-year presidential term expired in 2009. The Palestinian National Council — the body that theoretically gives the PLO democratic legitimacy — has met only irregularly and has been criticized by human rights organizations and Palestinian civil society as unrepresentative.
The Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 split Palestinian governance geographically and politically, leaving the PLO’s claim to represent all Palestinians increasingly formal rather than real. Multiple reconciliation agreements between Fatah and Hamas — brokered in Cairo in 2011, Doha in 2012, and again in 2022 — have collapsed without implementation. The Palestinian Authority, dependent on international donor funding and security coordination with Israel, has faced sustained criticism from B’Tselem and other human rights organizations for its treatment of dissidents in the West Bank.
What remains is an institution whose international legal standing — as recognized representative of the Palestinian people at the UN, and as the body that signed binding agreements with Israel — still carries formal weight, but whose internal legitimacy is deeply contested. Founded sixty years ago as an instrument of others’ ambitions, shaped by Arafat into something genuinely powerful, and transformed by Oslo into a governing body without a state, the PLO today occupies a diminished and uncertain position — still structurally central to Palestinian political life, but struggling to speak for it.
Sources
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- Tariq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018)
- UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX), November 22, 1974
- The Kahan Commission Report (State of Israel, 1983)
- Declaration of Palestinian Independence, Palestinian National Council, Algiers, November 15, 1988
- Oslo Accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements), September 13, 1993
- B’Tselem, The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Oslo’s Interim Agreements as an Instrument of Israeli Control (2011)
