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.
Who Wrote It — and Who Controlled It
The circumstances of the charter’s authorship are as revealing as its content. The document was drafted by Ahmad al-Shukeiry, the PLO’s first chairman, a lawyer and diplomat closely tied to Egypt and to the Arab League that had convened the founding congress. The PLO was not a grassroots movement that bubbled up from a self-conscious Palestinian nation demanding its own state. It was created from above, at an Arab summit, by the established Arab states — chiefly Nasser’s Egypt — as an instrument of their own policy toward Israel. Its legislative body, the Palestine National Council, was assembled from notables, professionals, and officials selected for the purpose; its military wing, the Palestine Liberation Army, was folded into the armies of the surrounding Arab states. For its first years, the PLO did little to advance any distinct Palestinian self-determination, precisely because that was never the project. The project was the destruction of Israel, pursued under Arab League supervision.
This is why the charter reads the way it does. A document produced by a genuine national-liberation movement seeking statehood would be preoccupied with the institutions of the future state — its borders, its government, its constitution, its relationship to its neighbors. The 1964 charter is preoccupied with none of these. It contains no blueprint for a Palestinian state, no description of how such a state would be governed, no vision of Palestinian sovereignty as a positive good. What it contains, over and over, is the language of liberation understood as removal — the undoing of Israel. Scholars who have analyzed the text observe that the single concept of “liberation” recurs sixteen times across the charter’s twenty-nine articles, and that every other idea in the document is subordinate to it. It is not the founding charter of a nation. It is the operating manual of a campaign against one.
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.”
The Denial of Jewish Peoplehood
Embedded in the charter is a claim that goes beyond territory and strikes at identity itself. The document does not merely contest Israel’s borders or its policies; it denies that the Jewish people are a people at all. The 1968 charter’s Article 20 states flatly that the Jews “do not constitute a single nation with an identity of its own” and that “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.” It dismisses the historical and religious ties of Jews to the land as “incompatible with the facts of history.” In a single stroke, four thousand years of documented Jewish peoplehood — a people with a language, a law, a liturgy, a homeland, and a continuous historical memory attested by every empire that ever ruled the region — is declared not to exist.
The irony is total, and it is worth stating plainly. A movement that had to invent a national identity in the second half of the twentieth century — assembling a people out of the Arabic-speaking population of the former Mandate, under the supervision of the Arab League, for the express purpose of opposing Israel — turned around and denied the nationhood of the one people in the region whose national identity is the most thoroughly documented in human history. The charter projects onto the Jews the very artificiality that defines its own origins. It is the manufactured nation accusing the ancient one of being a fiction. And it does so not as an incidental rhetorical flourish but as a load-bearing pillar of the entire argument: if the Jews are not a people, then they have no right to a state, and the destruction of that state becomes, in the charter’s twisted logic, an act of justice rather than aggression. Strip away that single false premise — that the Jews are merely a religion and not a nation — and the entire moral architecture of the charter collapses, because what remains is simply the demand that one nation be erased so that another may take its place. That demand, stated openly in 1964 and softened only in its English-language packaging ever since, is the unbroken thread running from the charter to the present day. Every later document, every negotiation, every carefully worded statement for Western ears must be read against this original and unretracted foundation. The charter is where the movement told the truth about itself, before it learned how useful a softer story could be.
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.
It is worth sitting with how unusual this is. In most historical disputes, the founding documents of a movement are buried, ambiguous, or lost, and historians must reconstruct intentions from fragments. Here, there is no reconstruction required. The PLO wrote down exactly what it intended, published it, adopted it at a formal congress, and left it in the public record where it sits to this day. The case does not rest on a leaked memo or a disputed quotation or the testimony of an enemy. It rests on the movement’s own charter, in its own words. Anyone who wishes to know what the Palestinian national movement was founded to do has only to read the document it wrote to announce itself — and to notice that the word it never uses, in 1964, is the one word the world now insists was its purpose all along: a state of its own, alongside Israel, at peace.
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.