Palestine Liberation Organization

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), of which Fatah is a part, formally recognized Israel in 1993. The PLO is an umbrella group effectively acting as the name of a coalition of parties in the Palestinian Authority, the significant exception being Hamas. Fatah, however, never recognized Israel.

First established in 1964, notably before the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, its founding declaration declared the "right of the Palestinian Arab people to its sacred homeland Palestine and affirming the inevitability of the battle to liberate the usurped part from it, and its determination to bring out its effective revolutionary entity and the mobilization of the capabilities and potentialities and its material, military and spiritual forces". In other words, its initial focus was on regaining the land assigned to the State of Israel, by UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which partitioned the British Mandate of Palestine.

Fatah had existed as an underground since the mid-1950s. On January 1, 1965, its Al-‘Asifa military wing began guerilla warfare against Israel. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, many of the PLO elements moved into Jordan, and to a lesser extent Syria.

Fatah proposed a one-state settlement in January 1968, which would, however, have not preserved the Jewish identity of Israel. Israel took military action against PLO bases in Jordan in June. The PLO charter was changed at a Palestine National Congress in Cairo, to adopt a more militant approach.

Yasser Arafat became Chairman in 1969. In September 1970, the military forces of Jordan, in an action called "Black September" by the PLO, drove their forces out of their bases. The leadership moved to Beirut, Lebanon.

In 1982, Israel moved against the Lebanese bases, and Arafat moved the headquarters to Tunisia. He returned the next year, but left afterwards.

While it had been believed that Tunisia was out of Israeli range, they flew an exceptionally long mission and bombed facilities there in 1985.