Building a Diplomatic Coalition: The PLO and Arab States
In 1947, following vigorous debates between Jews, British colonialists, and Palestinians, a UN commission proposed creating a Palestinian state on 41 percent of mandatory Palestine. Discussions of Palestinian statehood faded after 1947–49, however, as Jewish forces had seized some 70 percent of the region, while Jordan and Egypt had taken the rest. Autonomous Palestinian forces played only a small role in the fighting, and until 1967, Palestinians were treated by all sides as marginal players. This trend dovetailed with the intellectual thrust of pan-Arabism, which emphasized Arab unity over the interests of particular Arab groups. Resolution of the Israeli-Arab imbroglio was supposedly the responsibility of the entire Arab world, not of the Palestinians themselves.
An initial effort to create separate Palestinian organizations was launched in Kuwait in 1959, when a handful of Palestinians formed the Fatah guerrilla group. The faction remained politically marginal, however, as long as Arab states claimed a lead role in dealing with Israel. Other refugees created Palestinian unions in Egypt and the Persian Gulf, but these too remained outside the political mainstream. The PLO was founded in 1964, adding weight to the notion of an autonomous Palestine, but the organization remained heavily constrained by Egypt, its chief supporter. Guerrilla groups such as Fatah were not yet in control of the PLO, and the organization did not become a state-seeking body until 1967, when military defeat discredited the pan-Arabist movement.
Autonomous Palestinian politics began in earnest after the war, starting with a wave of anti-Israeli guerrilla attempts. Their manifest goal was to defeat Israeli military forces, but their more important (latent) goal was to create a distinct Palestinian national identity centered around notions of armed struggle and self-reliance.[36] Although the guerrillas spoke of liberating all of mandatory Palestine (including Israel proper), they mostly used infiltration operations to promote their organizations, raise funds, mobilize Palestinians, and win Arab recognition. Within a short time, the strategy paid off, and in July 1968, Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) gained half the seats in the PLO's legislative body.
Although the PLO's guerrilla efforts against Israel were largely ineffectual, the organization's diplomatic and political initiatives fared much better. In 1973, the PLO persuaded Arab states to secretly recognize it as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and one year later, that recognition was made public.[37] From then on, the PLO's monopoly