The Palestine Liberation Organization: What is the PLO?

“If Israel would simply stop building settlements then the Palestinians wouldn’t fight against Israel anymore.”

Over and over again this suggestion is made – in the UN, in parliaments across the world, and on college campuses. There is a premise that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists because of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

There is one major flaw in this theory: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an agency of which is now the Palestinian Authority, was established before there were any settlements. Israel began constructing settlements in the West Bank following the Six Day War in 1967. The PLO was established in 1964 – three years before there were any settlements. Clearly the issue that the Palestinian leadership has with Israel runs deeper than the issue of settlements.

The PLO served as an umbrella institution for many terror groups that opposed the existence of Israel. These groups, often described as “factions,” include Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and others.

It was designed to serve as a “government in exile” and included a 740-member parliament called the Palestine National Council (PNC) “elected” by the people, and an 18-member executive government elected by the parliament. The PLO created a Palestinian National Charter which described its ideology, and a constitution called the “Fundamental Law.”

Ahmad Shukeiri served as Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee from 1964 to 1967, Yahia Hammuda took over in 1967, and Yasser Arafat held the position from 1969 until his death in 2004.

Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas is not only the PLO Executive Chairman but is also the President of the Palestinian Authority as well as the leader of the Fatah party, the largest faction of the PLO.

So, why was the PLO established and what did it actually do?

The PLO declared its mission as “the liberation of Palestine.”  Not the West Bank.  Not Gaza.  But Palestine, which at that time meant Israel. The following samples from the PLO Charter make this very clear:

• Article 2: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” This is another way of saying “there cannot be a Jewish state within the boundaries of the Holy Land.”
• Article 3: “The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country in accordance with their wishes and entirely of their own accord and will.”
• Article 4 refers to the “Zionist occupation.” Not the occupation of the West Bank but the occupation of any space in the Holy Land.
• Article 7: All Palestinians “must be prepared for the armed struggle and ready to sacrifice his wealth and his life in order to win back his homeland and bring about its liberation.”
• Article 9: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it.”
• Article 10: “Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness, and the mobilization of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and their organization and involvement in the armed Palestinian revolution.”
• Article 15: “The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.”
• Article 19: “The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.”
• Article 20: ?The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.”
• Article 21: “The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine.”

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A terrorist organization

The PLO unleashed an armed struggle against Israel which included an attack on Israel’s national water carrier in 1965 and continuous guerrilla attacks against Israelis launched from their bases in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria.

Following the Six Day War, the PLO offensive against Israel intensified with a series of horrific terror attacks against Israeli citizens. The PLO was expelled from Jordan in July 1971 and began to function from Damascus, Syria and Beirut, Lebanon from where they continued to launch terror attacks against Israel. The PLO is made up of a number of Palestinian factions and parties, including currently Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Thus, the PLO operated as an umbrella for its terrorist membership that were responsible for terror attacks including:

• An attack against a school bus in Avivim, killing nine children, three adults, and seriously injuring 19;
• The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972;
• The massacre in 1974 of 26 students and adults at a school in Ma’a lot, leaving over 70 wounded;
• The 1975 killing of 8 hostages at the Savoy Hotel;
• The massacre of 37 Israelis and wounding of 76 in what become known as “the Coastal Road massacre” of 1978;
• Numerous plane hijackings in the late 1960s and early 70s.

The Palestine Liberation Organization is recognized by the Arab League as “the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”, and by the United Nations as “the representative of the Palestinian people”. Despite its terror activities, most of the world also treated the PLO in similar fashion although Israel and the US designated it a terrorist organization.

Israel eventually recognized the PLO’s representative status in 1993, which led to the signing of the Oslo Accords.

During the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority became the governing authority in the West Bank for the PLO and the PLO leadership officially reneged on its call for the destruction of Israel and committed to remove those elements denying Israel’s right to exist from its Charter. In practice, however, this has not really happened. First of all, Article 33 of the Charter states: “This Charter shall not be amended save by [vote of] a majority of two-thirds of the total membership of the National Congress of the Palestine Liberation Organization [taken] at a special session convened for that purpose.” And that step never took place.

Second and most significantly, the Palestinian Authority continues to educate its children that one day they will return to all of Israel with maps that show all of Israel as “Palestine,” and it encourages and even pays its people to commit terror attacks against innocent Israelis – exactly as the PLO was established to do.

This indicates that the Palestinian leadership has not forsaken its original PLO roots which had nothing to do with the West Bank or Gaza but the destruction of the Jewish state.

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