PLO Founded
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded at a conference in East Jerusalem in May 1964, on the initiative of the Arab League. That origin is the important fact about the first four years. The League — and Nasser in particular — wanted Palestinian nationalism channelled into an organisation Arab governments could control, rather than into independent guerrilla groups that might drag them into a war they were not ready for. Its first chairman, Ahmad Shukeiri, was appointed rather than chosen, and its charter deferred to Arab unity. The Six-Day War of June 1967 destroyed that arrangement. Egypt, Syria and Jordan lost in six days, and the argument that Palestinians should wait for Arab armies collapsed with them. Fatah, founded by Yasser Arafat and others in Kuwait in 1959 and committed to independent armed struggle, took over the organisation in 1969 with Arafat as chairman. It was expelled from Jordan after Black September in 1970, when it had become a state within a state and Hussein's army drove it out; it moved to Lebanon, contributed to the civil war there, and was expelled again by the Israeli invasion of 1982, moving to Tunis. The first intifada in 1987 was a rising from inside the territories rather than from the exile leadership. The PLO recognised Israel and renounced terrorism in 1988, signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, and returned as the Palestinian Authority. The state those accords deferred has not come. Arafat died in 2004, and the organisation has held no election for its own institutions since. Hamas won the last legislative vote in 2006 and split the territories the following year.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Political
