The long arc of the Palestinian struggle for liberation
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
The history of Palestinian liberation movements begins with rupture. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the war that accompanied it produced the Nakba (“catastrophe”) – an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and barred from return.
For nearly two decades afterward, Palestinian political agency was largely incorporated within the agendas of Arab states, which framed the recovery of Palestine as a pan-Arab cause rather than a uniquely Palestinian struggle. Stateless and scattered across refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, Palestinians initially had no independent vehicle for their national aspirations.
That changed in 1964, when the Arab League sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at a Cairo summit, when its founding congress convened in East Jerusalem. Initially conceived as a body controlled by Arab governments and led by the diplomat Ahmad Shuqeiri, the PLO was meant to channel and contain Palestinian nationalism.
The humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War discredited Palestinian reliance on Arab regimes and shifted momentum toward independent guerrilla factions. Foremost among them was Fatah, founded by Yasser Arafat, who in 1969 became chairman of the PLO and transformed it into a genuinely Palestinian-led national movement committed to armed struggle. In 1974, the Arab League and the United Nations General Assembly recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and Arafat delivered his famous “Gun and Olive Branch” address at the UN.
The movement’s character shifted again in the late 1980s. In December 1987, accumulated frustration with the then twenty-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza erupted into the First Intifada, a largely grassroots uprising of strikes, civil disobedience, and stone-throwing youth. The Intifada generated international sympathy and pressured the exiled PLO leadership, then based in Tunis, to recalibrate. In 1988, the PLO declared Palestinian independence and signaled acceptance of a two-state framework, implicitly recognizing Israel. The same period saw the emergence of an Islamist rival: Hamas, founded in 1987 out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which rejected compromise and offered an alternative to Fatah’s secular nationalism.
The early 1990s brought the high-water mark of the diplomatic path. The Oslo Accords of 1993–1995, signed by Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, secured mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and created the Palestinian Authority (PA) to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Yet Oslo’s promise of a negotiated state went unfulfilled. Settlement expansion continued, final-status talks collapsed, and frustration boiled over into the far more violent Second Intifada (from 2000 to 2005), marked by suicide bombings and heavy Israeli military reprisals.
Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004 elevated Mahmoud Abbas to the helm of both the PLO and the PA.
The post-Arafat era has been defined by internal division. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and, after a violent split with Fatah, seized control of Gaza in 2007, leaving the Palestinian Authority governing the West Bank. This geographic and political fracture between Ramallah and Gaza has persisted ever since, weakening the national movement and complicating any unified path to statehood. Internationally, Palestinians pursued recognition through institutions, gaining non-member observer state status at the UN in 2012.
The most catastrophic chapter opened with the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza that has followed since. The conflict reshaped regional politics and, paradoxically, accelerated diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood. In September 2025, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and several other Western states formally recognized the State of Palestine at the UN General Assembly, bringing the total to roughly 158 of 193 member states. The General Assembly also overwhelmingly endorsed the “New York Declaration,” backing a two-state solution while calling for Hamas to disarm and be excluded from governance.
A U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, as part of an American designed twenty-point peace framework chaired by an “International Board of Peace,” designed as a technocratic committee to administer Gaza following reform of the Palestinian Authority. As of mid-2026, that arrangement remains fragile and sporadic violence persists. Hamas disarmament has not happened, and the Ramallah–Gaza split endures. Recognition without sovereignty, as critics note, has affirmed Palestinian political identity without yet delivering the self-determination the movement has sought since 1948!
