“Palestine, State of”
Years: 1988 - 2057
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Yassser Arafat seeks to establish himself as the only leader who can unite and speak for the Palestinians, and in mid-1988 he takes the diplomatic initiative.
At the nineteenth session of the PNC, held near Algiers, Algeria, from November 12 to 15, 1988, he succeeds in having the council issue a declaration of independence for a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Arafat proclaims the state (without defining its borders) on November 15.
The council votes overwhelmingly to accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338, calling for Israel to evacuate the occupied territories and for all countries in the region "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries."
Does this imply PLO recognition of Israel's right to exist?
At first Arafat refuses to say, whereupon the United States denies him a visa to make a trip to the UN.
The tactics of the Intifada are highly sophisticated.
Union-organized strikes, commercial boycotts and closures, and demonstrations are carried out in one part of the territories, and then, after Israel has reestablished its local power there, they are transferred to a previously quiescent area.
Palestinian refugee camps provide major centers for the resistance, but Palestinian Arabs living in more affluent circumstances also participate, and some Israeli Arabs show their sympathy with the goals of the uprising.
During its first year, more than three hundred Palestinians are killed, more than eleven thousand five hundred wounded (nearly two-thirds of whom are under fifteen years of age), and many more arrested.
Israel closes universities and schools, destroyed houses, and imposes curfews—yet is unable to quell the uprising.
Yasser Arafat is elected by the Central Council of the Palestine National Council (the governing body of the PLO) on April 2, 1989, to be the president of a hypothetical Palestinian state.
A whole generation of Palestinian youth has grown up under Israeli occupation (more accurately described as military rule after 1978) by the late 1980s.
More than seventy percent of Palestinians are younger than twenty-five years of age.
Their political status is uncertain, their civil rights diminished, and their economic status low and dependent upon Israel's economy.
Between one hundred thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand Palestinians cross daily from the occupied territories into Israel to work.
They do not have much faith in Arab governments, nor do they place strong trust in the PLO, which, although still a powerful symbol of Palestinian aspirations, has not succeeded by either diplomatic or military efforts to win Palestinian self-determination.
Remittances to family members left behind from those hundreds of thousands who had migrated to Jordan and the Persian Gulf states for work in the 1960s and '70s dry up drastically as the Middle Eastern economies respond to falling oil prices.
Increasingly Palestinians come to rely on their own efforts.
Hamas's armed wing, the 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam Forces, begin a campaign of terrorism against Israel.
Yitzhak Rabin has served as defense minister in the Labor-Likud coalition governments from 1984 to 1990, responding forcefully to the uprising by Palestinians in the occupied territories.
The International Red Cross estimates that more than eight hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces, more than two hundred of whom were under the age of sixteen, by mid-1990.
Some sixteen thousand Palestinians are in prison.
By contrast, fewer than fifty Israelis have been killed.
Some hundreds of Palestinians in the occupied territories, accused of being collaborators with Israel, are killed by their compatriots.
Political paralysis grips Israel.
Shamir has continued the Begin policy of settling Jews throughout the West Bank, hoping to isolate the Arab towns and villages that might form the basis for a Palestinian state.
Few Israelis responds to this initiative until minister of industry and trade Ariel Sharon, who returns in 1990 to Shamir's cabinet as housing minister, begins subsidizing residential communities that are within easy commuting distance of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where housing is scarce and expensive.
After Shamir's government falls in 1990, Shamir eventually succeeds in forming his own coalition government (without Labor), including several representatives of ultraconservative groups.
...elsewhere, including an endorsement by PLO head 'Arafat.
By the 1990s, with the split in the PLO's ranks healed, 'Arafat had reclaimed his leadership of Fatah, which remains the largest constituent member of the PLO.
As the United States dispatches troops to Saudi Arabia and organizes an international coalition against the Iraqi invasion, ...