Declared 38 years ago, denied since: the Algiers Declaration remains a milestone in the Palestinian struggle

On 15 November, 1988, in Algiers, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), stood before the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, and proclaimed the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Drafted by the celebrated late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the text claimed sovereignty over the territories Israel occupied in 1967 – the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Some 75 countries recognised the declaration within a month, and more than 90 had done so by early 1989, giving the Palestinian national movement unprecedented diplomatic momentum. Yet nearly four decades later, Palestinian statehood remains unrealised on the ground.

This historic declaration did not emerge in a vacuum but rather after a long fight against Israeli occupation. Two distinct developments forced the Palestinian liberation movement to make such an announcement. First, the eruption of the First Intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising, in December 1987 shifted the political centre of gravity to the occupied territories, compelling the PLO leadership in exile in Tunis to translate popular resistance into a concrete diplomatic platform. It was one of the rare moments in the history of the Palestinian struggle in which those living under brutal occupation forced their own will on their leadership abroad.

Second, King Hussein of Jordan’s formal severance of legal and administrative ties with the West Bank in July 1988 created a vacuum that forced the PLO to assert immediate authority. By making this move in Algiers, the PLO executed a major strategic pivot: invoking UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the 1947 partition plan, alongside UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, it implicitly accepted a two-state framework, trading the historical demand for total liberation for a sovereign state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine.

This major development in the Palestinian struggle had far-reaching diplomatic consequences. First and foremost, it forced the administration of US President Ronald Reagan to open formal talks with the PLO for the very first time. Following the first official session in Tunis in December 1988, the US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Pelletreau, described the talks as “practical” and marked by a “seriousness of purpose”. 

While this dialogue did not immediately translate into official US recognition of the Palestinian right to independence and statehood, it signalled a seismic shift. It demonstrated that the US, as Israel’s primary military, financial and political patron, could no longer ignore the reality on the ground: that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land was unsustainable, and that maintaining the status quo was both morally indefensible and politically costly. 

Though no one expected an immediate breakthrough, opening a direct diplomatic channel with Washington was a major political victory for the PLO – an essential milestone that forced the international community to engage directly with the organisation, ultimately paving the way for Israel’s formal recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people under the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Yet 38 years after Yasser Arafat read those words in Algiers, no sovereign Palestinian state exists, and the horizon for achieving one seems further away than it ever has been. Israel has steadily fragmented and swallowed up the very land on which that state was proclaimed in 1988. Over nearly four decades, continuous land confiscation, state-sanctioned illegal construction and an ever-expanding infrastructure of military control have systematically carved up the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

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Every day, gangs of private colonisers steal the territory designated for a future Palestinian state – armed, state-backed paramilitary networks often sanitised under the benign label of “settlers”, as though they were peaceful pioneers arriving in a land without a people. What was declared as the foundation of a sovereign nation has instead been trapped in an ongoing process of forced displacement and de facto annexation, rendering the idea of an independent Palestinian state more elusive today than at any point since the Algiers Declaration.

But as dark as the physical reality on the ground remains, the international standing of the Palestinian cause has reached a historic turning point. Three years after the onset of the devastating genocide in Gaza, the world not only possesses a deeper understanding of Palestinian suffering but has also rallied behind its struggle with unprecedented diplomatic and popular support. Western governments that once resisted statehood have been forced to align with global reality; major European powers, including the United Kingdom, France and Spain, have formally recognised the State of Palestine – a diplomatic breakthrough unthinkable just a few years ago. 

Even within the United States, Palestine is no longer a distant foreign policy issue quietly buried in diplomatic corridors. As the country heads towards the crucial midterm elections on 3 November, with control of both houses of Congress up for grabs, Palestinian liberation has emerged as a central domestic campaign issue. In states such as Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights, won the Democratic Senate nomination in August, pro-Palestine candidates are mounting formidable campaigns for Congress, proving that the call for Palestinian rights has broken through to the highest halls of Western power.

On the legal front, the Palestinian aspiration for liberation has found a powerful parallel in international courts and human rights tribunals, shifting from political declarations to binding accountability. This transformation has gathered pace in recent years: in November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued historic arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, piercing decades of systemic impunity. This followed monumental legal interventions by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

Two decades after its landmark advisory opinion of 9 July, 2004, which declared Israel’s separation wall in the occupied West Bank illegal, the ICJ issued a historic advisory opinion on 19 July, 2024, declaring Israel’s decades-long occupation fundamentally unlawful and demanding that it end as rapidly as possible. Backed by successive UN Human Rights Council reports, an overwhelming UN General Assembly vote to upgrade Palestine’s rights at the UN and a mounting international consensus, international jurisprudence has effectively unmasked the occupation as a criminal enterprise that diplomatic grace can no longer shield.

Thirty-eight years after the late Yasser Arafat stood in Algiers and declared independence, the contrast between the diplomatic vision of 1988 and the brutal reality on the ground could not be starker. Yet the Palestinian cause has broken out of the geopolitical cage that decades of cynical management and Western-backed impunity built for it. Today, unprecedented global solidarity, monumental legal reckonings and a generation refusing erasure confront the physical fragmentation of the land and the relentless theft by armed colonisers. The 1988 declaration was never merely a piece of paper; it was an enduring baseline of national identity and justice. And as the scales of international law and global conscience finally begin to tip, that foundational promise remains unyielding – and its fulfilment inevitable.

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