PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)
The umbrella body that invented a Palestinian address in world politics, won recognition as the Palestinians' sole representative, and never converted it into a state.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in 1964, and it was founded by the wrong people for the wrong reason. It was an Arab League creation, sponsored above all by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and its purpose was less to liberate Palestine than to keep Palestinian politics under Arab government control. Its first chairman was a lawyer chosen for his reliability. It had no forces worth the name and no independence.
The 1967 war destroyed that arrangement along with three Arab armies. Once Nasser's Egypt had been humiliated in six days, the argument that Palestinians should wait for Arab states to act collapsed, and the armed factions that had been operating independently took over the shell. Yasser Arafat, head of Fatah, became chairman in 1969, and the PLO became what it remained for the next thirty-five years: a coalition of factions with Fatah dominant, a government-in-exile without territory, and a personality.
Two expulsions
The PLO's history is largely the history of being thrown out of places.
In Jordan it built a state within a state, with its own checkpoints and taxes, and by 1970 was openly challenging King Hussein. He moved in September, and the fighting known as Black September ended with the PLO expelled to Lebanon by mid-1971.
In Lebanon it repeated the experiment on weaker ground, becoming an armed actor in a country whose sectarian balance could not absorb one. That contributed directly to the civil war from 1975 and to Israel's invasion in 1982, after which Arafat and the leadership were evacuated from Beirut to Tunis, a thousand miles from Palestine and dependent on Gulf money.
Recognition without a country
What the PLO achieved in exile was diplomatic rather than military, and it was substantial. In October 1974 the Arab League at Rabat declared it the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, which stripped Jordan of the claim to speak for the West Bank. Weeks later Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, telling it he came bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun and asking it not to let the branch fall from his hand. The Assembly granted the PLO observer status.
Palestinians had gone from being a refugee problem discussed by other governments to being a party with a seat. That was Arafat's real accomplishment, and it was accomplished substantially through terrorism, including the Munich Olympics killings of 1972, which is a fact the organization's admirers and its enemies have spent fifty years respectively minimizing and treating as the whole story.
In November 1988 in Algiers the Palestine National Council declared independence and, decisively, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338, implicitly accepting Israel within the 1967 lines and renouncing terrorism. That opened a dialogue with Washington and made the next step possible.
Oslo and after
The Oslo process began with mutual recognition letters in September 1993 and produced the Palestinian Authority in 1994, with Arafat returning to Gaza after twenty-seven years abroad. The PLO signed; the PA administers. The distinction still matters, because the PLO remains the body that holds the international recognition and negotiates final status, while the PA is a municipal government with a police force.
Arafat died in November 2004 and was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas, which was never a PLO member, won the 2006 legislative elections and seized Gaza in 2007, splitting Palestinian politics into two governments and leaving the PLO representing a people it does not fully govern.
The echo
The PLO's founding wager was that recognition would produce a state. It got the recognition. More than 140 countries recognize Palestine, it holds a UN observer seat, and its leadership is received in capitals worldwide. What it does not hold is territory, borders, or the capacity to stop what happens inside them.
That gap is the organization's whole tragedy and a general lesson about national movements: international legitimacy is winnable by diplomacy, and sovereignty is not.