ABSTRACT
The Palestinian leadership, under Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had seen its own forces and those of its Arab allies humiliatingly defeated on the battlefield. The major strategy of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders who had proposed the mini-state concept was that by establishing a firm claim to Palestinian sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza they could line up alongside the Syrians and Egyptians in the still-promised, comprehensive Geneva peace talks. The PLO will struggle by every means, the foremost of which is armed struggle, to liberate Palestinian land and to establish the people’s national, independent and fighting sovereignty on every part of Palestinian land to be liberated. The Palestinian leadership which emerged after 1967 was dominated by an organization called ‘the Palestinian Liberation Movement’, or ‘Fateh’. The Fateh leadership had coalesced in the early 1960s from a number of groups and individuals who argued the need for Palestinian self-activity, independent from the activities of the Arab regimes.
