15 November—On this date in 1988 (a.k.a. 5 Rabi‘ al-Thani 1409) the Palestine Liberation Organization’s parliament (yes, believe it or not, the PLO really has a legislative body), the Palestinian National Council (PNC), convened in Algiers to adopt a (or the) Palestinian Declaration of Independence. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat proclaimed the independent State of Palestine in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip and in the course of time became the first President of the Palestinian National Authority.

The declaration is said to have been written largely by Palestine’s national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who, suffice to say, was no fan of Hamas. To read it, you wouldn’t think a poet had anything to do with it. It’s a nasty bit of work, as you’ll see from excerpts below in red.

In 1994—and seemingly irrelevant now—Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israel’s Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East,” as the Nobel committee put it, by initiating the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, which was executed by Rabin and Jordan’s Prime Minister Abdelsalam al-Majali.

That treaty finally brought an end to 46 years of official, declared war between Israel and Jordan. It was only the second full peace agreement that Israel had been able to reach with an Arab nation, after the groundbreaking Carter-era Camp David Accords.

The Camp David Accords were two agreements executed in cooperation with—make that under pressure from—President Jimmy Carter following 12 days of secret negotiations at the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland in September of 1978 by Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace prize that year for what the Nobel committee called “their contribution to the two frame agreements on peace in the Middle East, and on peace between Egypt and Israel.”

(Jimmy Carter finally won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”)

Here, for your edification, are some illustrative pregnant excerpts from the lengthy Palestinian Declaration of Independence, in the official English translation by Prof. Edward Said:

When in the course of modern times a new order of values was declared with norms and values fair for all, it was the Palestinian Arab people that had been excluded from the destiny of all other peoples by a hostile array of local and foreign powers. Yet again had unaided justice been revealed as insufficient to drive the world’s history along its preferred course.

And it was the Palestinian people, already wounded in its body, that was submitted to yet another type of occupation over which floated the falsehood that “Palestine was a land without people.” This notion was foisted upon some in the world, whereas in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) and in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the community of nations had recognized that all the Arab territories, including Palestine, of the formerly Ottoman provinces, were to have granted to them their freedom as provisionally independent nations.

Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination, following upon UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this resolution that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty and national independence.

By stages, the occupation of Palestine and parts of other Arab territories by Israeli forces, the willed dispossession and expulsion from their ancestral homes of the majority of Palestine’s civilian inhabitants, was achieved by organized terror; those Palestinians who remained, as a vestige subjugated in its homeland, were persecuted and forced to endure the destruction of their national life.

Thus were principles of international legitimacy violated. Thus were the Charter of the United Nations and its Resolutions disfigured, for they had recognized the Palestinian Arab people’s national rights, including the right of return, the right to independence, the right to sovereignty over territory and homeland.

The Palestine National Council, in the name of God, and in the name of the Palestinian Arab people, hereby proclaims the establishment of the State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem (Al-Quds Ash-Sharif).

The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights. In it will be safeguarded their political and religious convictions and their human dignity by means of a parliamentary democratic system of governance, itself based on freedom of expression and the freedom to form parties. The rights of minorities will duly be respected by the majority, as minorities must abide by decisions of the majority. Governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality and nondiscrimination in public rights on grounds of race, religion, color or sex, under the aegis of a constitution which ensures the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Thus shall these principles allow no departure from Palestine’s age-old spiritual and civilizational heritage of tolerance and religious coexistence.

The State of Palestine is an Arab state, an integral and indivisible part of the Arab nation, at one with that nation in heritage and civilization, with it also in its aspiration for liberation, progress, democracy and unity. The State of Palestine affirms its obligation to abide by the Charter of the League of Arab States, whereby the coordination of the Arab states with each other shall be strengthened. It calls upon Arab compatriots to consolidate and enhance the emergence in reality of our state, to mobilize potential, and to intensify efforts whose goal is to and Israeli occupation.

The State of Palestine proclaims its commitment to the principles and purposes of the United Nations, and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It proclaims its commitment as well to the principles and policies of the Non-Aligned Movement.

It further announces itself to be a peace-loving state, in adherence to the principles of peaceful co-existence. It will join with all states and peoples in order to assure a permanent peace based upon justice and the respect of rights so that humanity’s potential for well-being may be assured, an earnest competition for excellence be maintained, and in which confidence in the future will eliminate fear for those who are just and for whom justice is the only recourse.

The State of Palestine herewith declares that it believes in the settlement of regional and international disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with the UN Charter and resolutions. Without prejudice to its natural right to defend its territorial integrity and independence, it therefore rejects the threat or use of force, violence and terrorism against its territorial integrity or political independence, as it also rejects their use against the territorial integrity of other states.

Therefore, we call upon our great people to rally to the banner of Palestine, to cherish and defend it, so that it may forever be the symbol of our freedom and dignity in that homeland, which is a homeland for the free, now and always.

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

“Say: O God, Master of the Kingdom, Thou givest the Kingdom to whom Thou wilt, and seizest the Kingdom from whom Thou wilt. Thou exaltest whom Thou wilt, and Thou abasest whom Thou wilt; in Thy hand is the good; Thou art powerful over everything.”

Sadaqa Allahu al-‘Azim.

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