There is a popular belief that Palestine was a country stolen and occupied by invading Jews in 1948. This has no basis in fact.

When the British Mandate ended in May 1948, there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab government waiting to assume power. There was no functioning Arab parliament, cabinet, constitution, or national administration prepared to govern an independent state.

The Jewish community took a different path. Over decades it had built the institutions of self-government: representative political bodies, courts, schools, hospitals, financial institutions, and a defense force. When Britain withdrew, those institutions became the foundation of the State of Israel.

The local Arab leadership did not establish comparable institutions of national government. Not before 1948 nor after.

Instead, neighboring Arab armies invaded the newly declared Jewish state. Transjordan assumed control of the West Bank. Egypt administered Gaza. A short-lived All-Palestine Government was announced later that year, but it exercised little authority and never became an effective sovereign government.

For the next sixteen years, there was no effort to start a Palestinian State.

Only in 1964 did the Arab League create the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Even its name is revealing.

It was not called the State of Palestine. It was not called the Government of Palestine. It was called the Palestine “Liberation” Organization.

Governments are created to govern. Liberation movements are created to liberate territory from an existing sovereign.

The PLO’s founding charter reinforces that distinction. Rather than outlining the institutions of a future Palestinian state, Article 24 declared:

“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip, or in the Himmah Area [where Israel, Jordan and Syria meet].”

The PLO’s founding charter expressly declined to claim sovereignty over the parts of historic Palestine then under Arab administration. Yet throughout the document, its central mission was the “liberation of Palestine” – a struggle directed at Israel, the Jewish State. At its core, local Arabs wanted Arab rule, wherever it may come from. They opposed the so-called “Zionist invasion” and Jewish sovereignty “in any part of Palestine.“

When the first lasting Palestinian national organization finally appeared in 1964, it was constituted not as a government-in-waiting or a reclamation government but as a liberation movement, and its own charter expressly disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza while solely focusing its mission on Israel.

Within three years of its founding, the PLO and surrounding Arabs countries initiated their plan to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. They failed then as they failed in 1948.

The Palestinian “liberation” movement is a pan-Arab effort to remove the Jewish state first and foremost. Current efforts to portray it as a people seeking to reclaim their historic country is without any basis in fact.