Palestine

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A declaration of a \"State of Palestine\" (Arabic: دولة فلسطين‎) was approved on November 15, 1988, by the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The proclaimed \"State of Palestine\" is not and has never actually been an independent state, as it has never had sovereignty over any territory.

Approval of Declaration

The 1988 declaration was approved at a meeting in Algiers, by a vote of 253-46, with 10 abstentions. The declaration invoked the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and UN General Assembly Resolution 181 in support of its claim to a \"State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem\". The proclaimed \"State of Palestine\" was recognized immediately by the Arab League, and about half the world's governments recognize it today. It maintains embassies in these countries. The State of Palestine is not recognized by the United Nations, although the European Union, as well as most member states, maintain diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, established under the Oslo Accords (Leila Shahid, envoy of the PLO to France since 1984, was named in November 2005 representant of the PNA for Europe).

Impact of Declaration

Currently, the proclaimed State of Palestine is not an independent state, as it does not have any sovereignty over its claimed territory. The declaration was ignored and eventually rejected, by the State of Israel. Israel has controlled the territory claimed by the State of Palestine since the 1967 Six-Day War when it captured them from Egypt and Jordan.

The declaration is generally interpreted to have recognized Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, or was at least a major step on the path to recognition. Just as in Israel's declaration of establishment, it partly bases its claims on UN GA 181. By reference to \"resolutions of Arab Summits\" and \"UN resolutions since 1947\" (like SC 242) it implicitly and perhaps ambiguously restricted its immediate claims to the Palestinian territories and Jerusalem. It was accompanied by a political statement that explicitly mentioned SC 242 and other UN resolutions and called only for withdrawal from \"Arab Jerusalem\" and the other \"Arab territories occupied.\" Yasser Arafat's statements in Geneva a month later were accepted by the United States as sufficient to remove the ambiguities it saw in the declaration and to fulfill the longheld conditions for open dialogue with the United States.

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