Palestine Liberation Organization

PLO is a redirect to this article. Further meanings are listed under PLO (disambiguation) .

Logo of the PLO

The Palestine Liberation Organization ( Arabic منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية Munaẓẓamat at-Taḥrīr al-Filasṭīniya ), PLO for short(from the English Palestine Liberation Organization ), is an umbrella organization of various parliamentary groupsthat seeks torepresent all Palestinians , includingthosein Arab and non-Muslim exile. By far the strongest faction is Fatah .

The PLO was founded on May 28, 1964 at the constituent meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) on the initiative of the then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Jerusalem to create a representation of the Arab people in Palestine as part of a pan-Arab movement. From 1969 until his death on November 11, 2004, Yasser Arafat was PLO chairman. Arafat contributed significantly to the development of a Palestinian national consciousness and the desire for an independent state of Palestine. The 1967 Six-Day War triggered a wave of Palestinian refugees: their representation brought the PLO to its present-day importance. Under Arafat's leadership, the PLO became radicalized and terrorist attacks were carried out. After the Battle of Karame , the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan became the PLO's power base. The Jordanian Army expelled the PLO militias in Black September 1970 . The PLO then limited itself in the refugee camps with the help of foreign funding to social goals such as building hospitals and schools and at the same time built an army of around 20,000 men in southern Lebanon. After the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in 1982 , the PLO had to move its headquarters to Tunis . In the following internal power struggles of the PLO, Arafat was able to prevail. In the course of the First Intifada and Second Intifada , a power struggle developed between the PLO and Hamas , in which the PLO lost its leading role as the representative of the Palestinian people.

The PLO's greatest foreign policy success was its recognition as “representative of the Palestinian people” by the United Nations in 1974. Since Arafat's death, the new chairman has been the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas .

history

Founding history

Ahmad Schukeiri , representative of Palestine to the Arab League , was given the task of founding an executive organization for the Palestinian side at the 1964 Arab League summit in Cairo. On May 28, 1964, the first Palestinian National Council (PNC) met in Jerusalem and decided on June 1, 1964 to found an "Organization for the Liberation of Palestine". Schuqairi took over the management of the organization. Under Shuqairi (or after 1967 Y. Hammudas) the PLO was de facto a tool of Egyptian politics.

Motives for founding

• The initiative came from the then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser , who saw in the young Palestinians living in refugee camps a political and military potential that he intended to use for himself. He entrusted his friend Ahmed Schuqairi with the chairmanship of the PLO.
• Nasser claimed leadership in the Arab world for himself. After the Israelis' Jordan project, he was forced to take action and defend this claim.
• The PLO should be an official representative of the Arab people of Palestine and be under the control of the Arab League.
• The leadership of the various Palestinian groups, which until then had worked as secret resistance movements, should be centralized.

Further development and detachment from pan-Arabism

For the time being, Fatah stayed away from the PLO. The 1967 Six Day War exacerbated the Palestinian problem in the Middle East . As a result of the Israeli conquests, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians came under foreign rule or fled. As a result of the devastating defeats of the Arab armies, the Palestine refugees' hope, which had existed for twenty years, that "they would only have to wait for help from neighboring Arab countries in their camps" was not fulfilled. Instead of the repeatedly promised solution to the Palestine problem, the constant state of war brought new misery and occupation instead of freedom and self-determination. The Palestinians no longer wanted to be a calculus in the interest politics of Nasser and other aspiring Arab rulers. After Nasser's defeat in the Six Day War of 1967, Shuqairi also lost influence and had to hand over the leadership of the PLO to the lawyer Hammudi.

In 1968, after a terrorist attack on a bus occupied by Israeli children, the Battle of Karame broke out , which initiated the takeover of power by the Palestinian resistance led by Yasser Arafat in the PLO. In the same year the mandates of the PLO were redistributed. The resistance movements now formed the majority. Fatah was the strongest faction in the PLO. The armed struggle against Israel was included in the National Charter, the basic program of the PLO. On February 3, 1969, Hammudi was defeated by Yasser Arafat , founder and head of the militant-revolutionary al-Fatah and symbolic figure for the liberation efforts of the Palestinians and for the new self-image as the Palestinian people. From then on, the PLO pursued a decidedly Palestinian nationalism and the goal of establishing a secular state of Palestine within the borders of the old British Mandate of 1920 (this includes the areas of present-day Israel, the Gaza Strip , the West Bank , part of the Golan Heights and the Kingdom Jordan with one).

With Fatah's takeover of power by the PLO, the focus of the work shifted from the political to the military. Numerous radical subgroups became part of the PLO and have since shaped its activities very strongly. From 1970 on, the PLO fought underground , mainly from Beirut , Lebanon . She and other rebel groups had previously been expelled from Jordan after Black September . The trigger for the expulsion from Jordan was an assassination attempt by the Palestinian DFLP on the Jordanian King Hussein I , which resulted in an outright civil war. Around 3,000-5,000 Palestinians, including many civilians, were killed in the fierce fighting between the PLO and the Jordanian military . In its new base of operations, Lebanon, the PLO soon sparked another civil war when it began fighting with local militias. First she fought against the Maronite Phalange militia , and later also against the Shiite Amal militia . For this reason, the PLO was extremely hated by many Lebanese, Muslims and Christians alike; the Israeli invasion of 1978 even found short-term support from large parts of the Lebanese population.

In the 1970s, the PLO was an umbrella organization of eight organizations with headquarters in Beirut as well as in Damascus . However, the PLO's relations with Syria deteriorated in the early 1980s. In 1999 the Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas Arafat called a "son of 60,000 prostitutes". Yasser Arafat visited Damascus for the first time after 17 years of absence in 2000 at the funeral of President Hafiz al-Assad . Since Arafat's death, however, there seems to have been a rapprochement through Mahmoud Abbas to Syria . The PLO gained worldwide attention through numerous attacks against civilians (hostage-taking, such as the hostage-taking of Munich during the 1972 Olympic Games, or aircraft hijackings). At the 1974 Arab League meeting , the PLO was recognized as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and shortly afterwards also by the United Nations , and it was granted observer status in the UN General Assembly . Their actions in Israel, some of which were very bloody, contributed to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (see Ma'alot massacre and coastal road attack ).

Loss of the right to sole representation and development from 1987

Arafat (r.) With Ehud Barak (l.) And Bill Clinton in Oslo in November 1999

With the First Intifada from 1987 onwards, the PLO's claim to sole representation and its leadership role among the Palestinians suffered. Organizations with more radical positions, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad , became more and more important. The support of Iraq by the Arafat-led PLO during the Second Gulf War resulted in the displacement of the Palestinians from Kuwait in 1991 and the onset of Arab support for the PLO. Around 450,000 Palestinians had to leave Kuwait within a few days. The disaster, which was comparable to the Nakba but received much less media attention, had consequences as the Palestinians began secret negotiations with Israel that led to the Oslo Accords . It was only after Arafat's death that Palestinian leaders were ready to apologize for supporting Hussein.

From 1993 onwards, the PLO played an important role as a Palestinian partner in the peace negotiations in Oslo and Cairo with the USA and Israel and promoted Palestinian autonomy based on the Gaza-Jericho Agreement . For the mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, Yasser Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres . In the first elections in the autonomous areas on January 20, 1996, Fatah received a high percentage of the vote and PLO leader Arafat was elected president of the autonomous authority. The establishment of the Palestinian Autonomy and Arafat's diplomatic successes brought back the PLO's initially lost sympathy.

With the failure of further peace negotiations at Camp David in 2000, however, a peace settlement was again a long way off, and a lack of willingness to compromise on both sides has led to growing conflicts since then. At the end of 2000 the second intifada broke out, in which the PLO participated. A spiral of terror and retribution undermined much of the progress. When Yasser Arafat was placed under house arrest by the Israelis in 2001, his position and that of the PLO continued to decline; more extremist organizations have since grown in importance. The PLO ran its own prisons in Lebanon, in which Palestinians were locked up who did not want to support the PLO's struggle personally or financially.

In the course of the rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas in 2011, it was announced that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should also be represented in the PLO in the future. On December 22, 2011, a provisional leadership committee was set up in Cairo to prepare for the two organizations to join.

The National Charter

The 1968 text of the Palestinian National Charter contains many sections calling for the destruction of Israel. In an exchange of letters between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in connection with the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip , Arafat agreed to remove these sections. On April 26, 1996, the Palestinian National Council voted to delete or correct all of these passages and determined that a new text should be drafted. A letter from Arafat to then US President Bill Clinton in 1998 listed all the affected sections and a meeting of the Palestinian National Council approved this listing. A public meeting of members of the PLO, the National Council (PNC) and the PLO Central Council (PCC) also confirmed the letter in the presence of Clinton.

Nevertheless, a new text for the National Charter has never been drafted, which leads to ongoing controversy. Critics of the Palestinian organizations claim that the fact that no changes have been made shows the insincerity of the Palestinian side. One of the replies to this was that the constitution of the future state of Palestine would replace the charter. The draft constitution, published in 2003, contains the following section relating to the national territory: "It is an indivisible entity based on the borders of June 4, 1967".

The Charter has not been changed. For example, Article 22 still calls for the destruction of Israel. A German translation of the charter can be viewed, for example, on the official website of the Palestinian representation in Berlin.

Chairwoman of the Executive Committee of the PLO

Mahmoud Abbas (2009)

The Palestinian National Council (PNC) elects the Executive Committee of the PLO.

Official	Term of office
Ahmad Schukeiri (Ahmed Shukeiry)	June 2, 1964 to December 24, 1967
Yahia Hamuda	December 24, 1967 to February 2, 1969
Yasser Arafat ("Abu Amar")	February 4, 1969 to November 11, 2004 (†)
Mahmoud Abbas ("Abu Mazen")	since November 11, 2004

Sub-organizations

The PLO is an umbrella organization of groups that pursue different, sometimes extreme goals. Other members in addition to Fatah , the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine - DFLP), the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), the Popular Struggle Front (PSF) and a number of smaller groups . The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is the second largest faction of the PLO and left the Executive Committee in 1974 (but not the PLO itself) on the grounds that it betrayed the goal of destroying Israel in favor of a two-state solution. In 1981 the PFLP re-entered. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a split from the PFLP, left the PLO in 1974 for the same reasons and has not returned to this day. Islamist organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah- affiliated Lebanese Shiite Islamic Jihad do not recognize the umbrella organization and were never members of the PLO, but were founded in opposition to it.

literature

• Gerrit Hoekmann: Between olive branch and Kalashnikov. History and Politics of the Palestinian Left. Unrast, Münster 1999, ISBN 3-928300-88-1 .

Web links

• Website of the General Delegation of Palestine in the Federal Republic of Germany
• Saeb Erekat , What the PLO Has to Offer , New York Times, February 1, 2006

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Die Welt, Issue 21, p. 4: Half a Century of PLO , May 25, 2014.
2. ^ Bernhard Chiari, Dieter H. Kollmer, Martin Rink (eds.): Middle East. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76759-2 , p. 117.
3. ^ Bernhard Chiari, Dieter H. Kollmer, Martin Rink (eds.): Middle East. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] 2009, pp. 114-122.
4. ^ Bernhard Chiari, Dieter H. Kollmer, Martin Rink (eds.): Middle East. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] 2009, p. 121.
5. ^ Benny Morris: One State, Two States. Resolving the Israel / Palestine Conflict. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. a. 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-12281-7 , pp. 110f.
6. ↑ PLO now with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. December 22, 2011, accessed December 24, 2011 . 
7. ↑ Hamas says it plans to join Fatah-dominated PLO. December 23, 2011, accessed December 24, 2011 . 
8. ↑ 2003 Permanent Constitution draft. In: The Palestinian Basic Law. February 17, 2008, accessed March 16, 2019 . 
9. ↑ Palestinian National Charter (PDF) on palaestina.org
10. ^ Bernhard Chiari, Dieter H. Kollmer, Martin Rink (eds.): Middle East. 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] 2009, p. 115.