The Struggle for Palestinian Rights: The Palestinian Campaign for Self-Determination and Statehood at the United Nations, 1967-1989

Abstract

This thesis examines the struggle of the Palestinian national movement, under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to advance the Palestine Question within the political organs of the United Nations (UN) in the period spanning Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem to the 1987-1990 first Palestinian intifada. Drawing upon documentary sources found in the archives of the United States, United Kingdom, and UN, it demonstrates that the transformation of the international community’s apprehension of the Question of Palestine from that of mere “refugee rights” to one of “self-determination and statehood” was not the result of straightforward extension of pre-existing international legal principles, but rather of concerted post-1967 activism and diplomacy by the PLO and its attendant national movement. Relatedly, this thesis sheds new historical light on the capacity of the Palestinian national movement to wield non-conventional weapons (international legitimacy, legal right, and popular mobilization) to challenge and potentially overcome conventionally dominant Israeli and American opponents. In doing so, it both challenges dominant understandings of the PLO’s evolution towards acceptance of Israeli sovereignty and reveals the critical Palestinian role in the formation and promulgation of the international two-state state consensus for resolving the Israel- Palestine conflict. Conversely, this thesis also sheds new light on the forms and consequences of the United States and Israel’s persistent rejection of this self-same settlement, including the Israeli Defense Force’s resort to massive and unprovoked violence as a means of stymieing PLO moderation and precluding conciliatory Palestinian peace offers.