The PLO Charter (1968)

The Palestinian National Charter of 1968 (also called the PLO Covenant) is the rewritten founding constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organization, adopted in Cairo on 17 July 1968, that declares the creation of Israel void, denies Jews any national claim to the land, and commits the PLO to “armed struggle” as the sole path to Palestine’s “liberation.” It replaced a milder 1964 original and has never been rescinded through the process the document itself requires, a gap that still shapes debates over whether the PLO ever formally accepted Israel’s existence.

What the document is

The Palestinian National Charter (in Arabic, al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Filastini) functions as the PLO’s constitution, the statement of the organization’s purpose and the legal basis for its institutions, chiefly the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee and Palestinian National Council (PNC). Its Article 33 states that it “shall not be amended save by [an] absolute majority of two-thirds of the total membership of the National Congress of the Palestine Liberation Organization,” a threshold that matters later, because that formal process was never completed. The full amended text is preserved at Yale’s Avalon Project, the primary source for anyone who wants to read the 33 articles directly rather than take a summary on faith.

Who wrote it, and when

The charter has two dates that get conflated. The original Palestine National Charter was adopted at the PLO’s founding congress in East Jerusalem, 28 May to 2 June 1964, under the sponsorship of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Arab League, with Ahmad Shuqeiri as the PLO’s first chairman. That 1964 text, in its Article 24, explicitly disclaimed any PLO territorial claim over the West Bank (then held by Jordan) or Gaza (then held by Egypt), meaning the organization’s stated ambitions were confined to the land that had become Israel in 1948.

The document known today as “the PLO Charter” is the 1968 revision, adopted by the fourth Palestinian National Council meeting in Cairo from 1 to 17 July 1968, under PLO chairman Yahya Hammuda. It came a year after the Six-Day War, fought after Jordan and Egypt lost the West Bank and Gaza to Israel, and after the Khartoum Resolutions had already committed the Arab League to “no peace, no recognition, no negotiations” with Israel. Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s faction, had grown dominant inside the PLO after the humiliation of the Arab armies in 1967 and would formally take control of the organization in February 1969, seven months after this rewrite. The 1968 congress deleted Article 24’s territorial disclaimer entirely; the new charter claimed all of Mandate Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, as the Palestinian homeland.

Why it was rewritten

The 1964 charter had been a state-sponsored, largely symbolic document, built to give Nasser’s Arab League leverage over a fragmented Palestinian cause without ceding it too much independence. The 1967 defeat discredited that top-down Arab-state model of confronting Israel and elevated Fatah and the fedayeen guerrilla factions, who argued that only Palestinian-led armed struggle, not conventional Arab armies or diplomacy, would recover the land. The 1968 charter is that argument written into a constitution: it drops the caretaker language of 1964 and commits the PLO to a permanent revolutionary struggle rather than statehood negotiated by outside patrons.

What it says

The charter’s core provisions are blunt, not implied. Article 2 defines “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate,” as “an indivisible territorial unit,” meaning the whole of what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Article 6 limits who counts as Palestinian to “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion,” a cutoff elsewhere in the document tied to the era of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine, which by definition excludes the great majority of Israeli Jews and their descendants.

Article 9 states flatly: “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase.” Article 19 declares the 1947 UN Partition Plan and “the establishment of the State of Israel” to be “entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time,” rejecting UN Resolution 181 outright. Article 20 goes further, calling the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, and “all that has been based upon them” as “null and void,” and denies any “historical or religious ties” between Jews and Palestine, asserting that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality, and that Jews are not “one people with an independent personality.” Article 21 rejects “all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine,” ruling out partial or negotiated settlements as a matter of stated doctrine.

What happened as a result, and its status today

The PLO went on to fight from Jordan (until its expulsion in the 1970 Black September conflict), then Lebanon, then Tunisia, using the charter’s armed-struggle mandate as its operating premise through the 1970s and 1980s, including attacks that killed Israeli and foreign civilians. The turn came with the Oslo process: on 9 September 1993, Arafat wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist… are now inoperative and no longer valid,” and the PLO pledged to formally submit the charter’s amendment to the PNC. The Oslo Accords were signed on that basis days later.

The PNC met in Gaza in April 1996 and voted by show of hands to authorize its legal committee to redraft the charter, dropping the clauses incompatible with the letter to Rabin. Arafat and PLO officials repeatedly cited that vote as fulfilling the commitment, including in a further reaffirmation before President Clinton in December 1998. What never happened is the specific act Article 33 itself requires: a new charter text, redrafted and put back to the National Council for an article-by-article, two-thirds vote. No replacement charter has ever been ratified that way. The 1968 text, uncorrected clause by clause, remains the PLO’s charter of record on paper even as PLO leaders have long since publicly recognized Israel and negotiated with it.

How it is misquoted and misused

The most common distortion runs in both directions. Pro-Israel commentary sometimes treats the charter as though its language governs Palestinian policy unchanged since 1968, ignoring the real, repeated, and public PLO recognitions of Israel from 1993 onward and the PLO’s decades of security coordination and negotiation since. Pro-Palestinian advocacy sometimes claims the opposite: that the charter was formally amended in 1996 and the offending articles simply no longer exist, which overstates what the 1996 vote actually did. The honest record is in between: the PLO’s leadership has repudiated the charter’s core claims in writing and in practice for three decades, but the constitutional housekeeping Article 33 demands was never finished, leaving critics a legitimate, narrow, and frequently overstated point.

The 1968 charter is also often confused with a separate document entirely: the 1988 Hamas Covenant, a different organization’s founding text with its own explicitly antisemitic and genocidal language, later followed by the Hamas 2017 document, which Hamas presented as a softening but which left the 1988 covenant itself formally in place. The PLO and Hamas are rival, not identical, organizations with separate charters, separate histories, and separate unresolved questions about what each has actually renounced.

Palestine Liberation Organization · Yasser Arafat · Khartoum Resolutions, 1967 · The 1988 Hamas Covenant · Oslo Accords, 1993 to 1995 · Who attacked first in the Six-Day War