The State of Palestine was proclaimed in November 1988, by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during a solemn session of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers. In its founding document, the State affirms it "believes in the solution of international and regional problems by peaceful means," and "rejects the threat or use of force, violence and intimidation." It considers that the UN partition plan for Palestine in November 1947, between a Jewish state (with 55% of the territory) and an Arab state (with 45%), attaches "conditions to international legitimacy that guarantee the Palestinian Arab people the right to sovereignty and national independence." The plan was rejected by the Arab side at the very moment it was approved by the Zionist leadership, leading to civil war between Jews and Arabs in British Mandate Palestine. When the mandate expired in May 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed by a "National Council representing the Jewish people of Palestine and the Zionist movement of the world."
Israel's declaration of independence was explicitly based on the UN partition plan to establish "an independent Jewish state in Palestine." It made no mention of a possible Arab state, a prospect that was effectively buried at the end of the first Arab-Israeli conflict in 1949: 77% of Palestine was incorporated into the new state of Israel, 22% was annexed by Jordan and the remaining 1% was administered by Egypt as the "Gaza Strip." After the Six-Day War, it was on the 23% of territories occupied by Israel in 1967 that the PLO planned, two decades later, to establish the State of Palestine. The Algiers proclamation was followed by the recognition of Palestine by more than half the members of the UN.
French president François Mitterrand considered that "the peoples of Israel and Palestine will have to live together as neighbors one day" and decided, without going as far as recognition, to elevate the PLO's Paris office to the rank of "general delegation" of Palestine. Syria distinguished itself from other Arab countries by refusing to recognize Palestine, due to the Assad regime's virulent hostility to the PLO. As for the Islamic Republic of Iran, its formal recognition of Palestine did not affect in any way its support for factions opposed to the PLO, foremost among them Hamas.
In September 1993, Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, made the historic gesture of mutual recognition of their respective homelands. But the "Oslo Accords" were silent on the question of the Palestinian state, which was to be decided at the end of a five-year interim period. With the talks deadlocked, in March 1999 the European Union (EU) expressed its conviction "that the creation of a democratic, viable and peaceful sovereign Palestinian State on the basis of existing agreements and through negotiations would be the best guarantee of Israel's security and Israel's acceptance as an equal partner in the region." This gamble on negotiations meant that no EU member took the step of recognizing Palestine.
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