The 1964 PLO Charter: A Nation Invented for the Sole Purpose of Destroying Another
There is a document that tells you everything you need to know about the Palestinian national movement — not what its spokesmen say to Western journalists and United Nations diplomats, but what it actually is, what it was actually founded to accomplish, and why the state it claims to seek has never been its real objective. That document is the original Palestinian National Charter, adopted at the founding conference of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jerusalem on May 28, 1964. Read without ideology, without the filter of decades of Western media coverage, it is one of the most clarifying texts in the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It does not describe a people struggling to reclaim a homeland stolen by colonial settlers. It describes a pan-Arab military project whose single stated purpose is the elimination of Israel.
The Founding — Jerusalem, 1964, Three Years Before the “Occupation”
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded on May 28, 1964, at a conference convened by the Arab League in East Jerusalem — which was at that time under Jordanian control. The date is significant. The year is significant. 1964 was three years before the Six-Day War of June 1967, in which Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In 1964, not a single Israeli soldier stood on a single inch of either territory. Jordan had controlled the West Bank since 1948, when it annexed the territory following the Arab-Israeli War. Egypt had administered Gaza since the same year. The entire basis of the modern Palestinian narrative — that the Palestinian people are stateless because Israel “occupies” their land — did not yet exist as a geographical reality. And yet, the PLO was founded.
The question this fact demands is simple: if the founding of the PLO was a response to Israeli occupation, what exactly was it responding to in 1964? The answer, written plainly in the founding charter, is that the PLO was not responding to occupation at all. It was responding to the existence of Israel. The target was not Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza. The target was the State of Israel itself — its existence within any borders, on any territory, in any form.
“The PLO was founded in 1964 — three years before Israel held an inch of the West Bank or Gaza. The founding charter never mentions occupation. It mentions elimination.”
What the 1964 Charter Actually Says
The original PLO National Charter of 1964 consisted of 29 articles. Its language is direct, its intentions unambiguous. Article 1 declares: “Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of the Arab Countries and which together form the great Arab homeland.” Note that Palestine is defined as part of the Arab homeland — not as the homeland of a distinct Palestinian people. This is consistent with the broader pan-Arab nationalist framework of the period, in which Palestinian identity was understood as a subset of Arab identity rather than a separate national consciousness.
Article 2 defines the territory: “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” The boundaries of the British Mandate — which ran from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, encompassing the entirety of what is today Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza — are declared to be the boundaries of “Palestine.” This is not a demand for a state in the West Bank and Gaza. It is a demand for the elimination of the State of Israel from every square mile of the land it occupies.
Article 17 is the most legally explicit: the founding of Israel is declared “fundamentally null and void.” Not territorially excessive. Not unjustly administered. Not occupying land that should be returned. Null and void — in its entirety, unconditionally, regardless of how much time has passed. This is not a grievance about the 1967 lines. This is a declaration that the State of Israel has no right to exist anywhere, on any territory, at any time.
Article 24 — The Most Revealing Clause in the Entire Charter
Of all 29 articles in the 1964 PLO Charter, the most revealing is Article 24 — and it is the one that receives the least attention. Article 24 states explicitly that the PLO “does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.” This article is breathtaking in what it reveals. In 1964, the PLO — the organization that today claims the West Bank and Gaza as the territory of a Palestinian state — explicitly and formally disclaimed any interest in the West Bank and Gaza.
Why? Because in 1964, those territories were in Arab hands. Jordan held the West Bank. Egypt held Gaza. The PLO had no interest in “liberating” land from Arab control. Its interest was in liberating land from Jewish control — specifically, the land that Israel occupied west of the Jordan River, inside the pre-1967 armistice lines. The “Palestine” the PLO sought to liberate in 1964 was not the West Bank and Gaza. It was Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. It was the entirety of the Jewish state.
The 1968 Amendment — Updating the Target After the Six-Day War
Following the Six-Day War of June 1967 — in which Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt in six days of combat — the PLO amended its charter in 1968. The amended version, which became known as the Palestinian National Covenant, expanded the charter to 33 articles and introduced significant changes. Most notably, Article 24 — the clause that had explicitly excluded the West Bank and Gaza from PLO territorial claims — was deleted. The West Bank and Gaza were now incorporated into the PLO’s territorial demands.
The significance of this change cannot be overstated. It proves, with documentary precision, that Palestinian claims to the West Bank and Gaza were not driven by the attachment of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland. They were driven by the strategic calculation that once Israel held those territories, they could be incorporated into the anti-Israel campaign. When Jordan held the West Bank, the PLO had no interest in it. When Israel held it, it suddenly became sacred Palestinian land. The territory was the same. The people on it were the same. Only the nationality of the controlling power had changed — and that was the only factor that mattered to the PLO.
The 1968 Charter retained the core declarations of the 1964 version. Article 9 stated: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.” Article 19 declared: “The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.” Article 20 declared: “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void.” The Jewish people, Article 20 continued, “do not constitute a single nation with an identity of its own” and therefore have no right to national self-determination.
“When Jordan held the West Bank, the PLO had no interest in it. When Israel held it, it became sacred Palestinian land. The land never changed. Only the target changed.”
Oslo and the “Nullification” That Never Was
During the Oslo peace process of the 1990s, the United States and Israel demanded that Arafat formally abrogate the clauses of the PLO Charter that called for Israel’s destruction. Arafat wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993 stating that the PLO “recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and that the relevant clauses of the PLO Charter were “inoperative and no longer valid.” The Palestinian National Council voted in April 1996 to amend the charter, but the specific articles to be changed were never formally listed, and no amended text was ever produced and ratified.
President Clinton attended a PNC session in Gaza in December 1998 and declared that the Palestinians had voted to amend the charter. Independent legal scholars, Israeli officials, and former US negotiator Dennis Ross subsequently noted that no formal, legally valid amendment had ever been adopted. The charter as written remains, in the judgment of many legal experts, the operative document of the PLO. What did change was the rhetoric used in English for Western consumption. What did not change was the underlying strategic objective — as Arafat’s walk-away from Camp David in 2000 and the subsequent Second Intifada made unmistakably clear.
A Nation Invented to Destroy a Nation
The title of this article is not a polemical flourish. It is a precise description of what the historical record shows. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, three years before Israel held any of the territories it is accused of occupying. Its founding charter did not claim the West Bank or Gaza — it explicitly disclaimed them, because they were in Arab hands. Its founding charter declared the entirety of the State of Israel to be null and void, called for armed struggle as the only means of liberation, and denied the Jewish people any right to national self-determination. The organization was not created to build a Palestinian state. It was created to destroy a Jewish one.
This is not a conclusion drawn from inference or interpretation. It is the explicit, literal content of the PLO’s own founding document, available for anyone to read on the Yale Law School Avalon Project, the Avalon Project being one of the most authoritative online repositories of historical legal and diplomatic documents. The PLO did not conceal its objectives in 1964. It stated them plainly, in unambiguous language, in a charter adopted at a formal founding conference. That the world has since chosen to reinterpret the Palestinian national movement as a struggle for statehood rather than a campaign for Israel’s elimination is not a product of the evidence. It is a product of very successful propaganda — and the willingness of Western institutions to accept it.
What God Says About Israel’s Permanent Right to the Land
The PLO Charter declares the establishment of Israel to be “fundamentally null and void.” The Word of God declares the opposite. The covenant God made with Abraham — “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18) — has not been revoked, amended, or superseded by any subsequent event, any political document, or any vote of any international body. The prophet Jeremiah records God’s own words: “Only if these decrees vanish from my sight, declares the Lord, will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” (Jeremiah 31:36). The decrees have not vanished. Israel has not ceased.
The PLO charter and the covenant of God make the same foundational claim over the same piece of land, and they are irreconcilable. One says the Jewish state is null and void. The other says the Jewish state is God’s everlasting gift to His people, confirmed to a thousand generations. The Christian who stands with Israel does not stand on shifting political ground. He stands on the eternal Word of the God who cannot lie, who does not revoke His promises, and who has demonstrated, in the very existence of the modern State of Israel against every historical probability, that His purposes for His people and His land remain in force. The nations may plot. The charters may be written. But God has the final word — and He has been speaking it every day since May 14, 1948.