Summary
The Palestinian representative to the Arab League whom Hawari calls “The initial founder of the PLO”, and who formulated the Palestine Liberation Organization’s first political documents, including the national charter and statutes (Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future, line 183).
Details
- The documents he formulated “were later approved by an assembly of 422 Palestinians who met in Jerusalem and who included notables, local heads, professionals such as doctors and lawyers, and representatives from women’s organizations (in the end women were only assigned a limited number of seats). There was a noticeable absence of those from refugee camps and from peasant or working class backgrounds” (line 183). Hawari cites Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State (1997), p.99 for this passage (footnote 4, line 221).
- In Hawari’s account this unrepresentative founding is the starting point of her consensus history: discontent at it, at the PLO’s subservience to the Arab states and at its not being a revolutionary body “sowed the seeds for radical structural change” that brought Yasser Arafat to the chairmanship in 1969 (line 183).
Related pages
Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future, Palestine Liberation Organization, Revolutionary consensus