Comment: Whither the Palestine Liberation Organisation? – Gulf Digital News

Comment: Whither the Palestine Liberation Organisation? – Gulf Digital News

When it comes to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the PLO is near dead. The good news is that the Palestinian people’s quest for national self-determination remains very much alive and well.

The PLO was created to embody the Palestinian people’s right to national independence and self-determination. Israel always hated the PLO, and from the organisation’s inception Israel waged an intense propaganda campaign to project it as a terrorist entity or an agent of the Soviet Union.

When the PLO was embraced by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Israel drew on a colonial-era racist trope, describing it as the uncivilised peoples of the world confronting civilised democracies.

In fact, Israel’s main objection to the PLO, according to their leaders, was not “terrorism”, but rather because the PLO represented Palestinian national identity and its recognition meant accepting the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

In 1975, Israel extracted a US pledge not to engage with the PLO in exchange for Israel’s acceptance of a US-brokered Israel-Egypt-Syria disengagement plan. That “no-talk” pledge hampered US diplomacy for 17 years. It cost UN Ambassador Andrew Young his job for meeting with the PLO’s UN representative. Legislation prohibited the PLO