Victory to the uprising of our people, down with the occupation! Glory and eter-
nal life to our people’s virtuous martyrs!
The Palestine Liberation Organization
The United National Command of the Uprising in the Occupied Territories
January 18, 1988
SOURCE: Shaul Mishal and Reuben Aharoni. Speaking Stones: Communiqués from the Intifada Underground.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994.Jordan Relinquishes the West Bank
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
Nearly four decades after King Abdallah declared Jordanian sovereignty over the West
Bank, his grandson King Hussein formally relinquished all claims to the potato-shaped
territory to the west of the Jordan River in July 1988. Hussein’s action ended an often-
troubled relationship between the government in Amman and the Palestinian Arabs
living on the West Bank, some of whom had fled Israel at the time of the 1948 Arab-
Israeli war and many of whom had relatives among the Palestinian majority of Jor-
dan’s population (Founding of the State of Israel, p. 67).
Between King Abdallah’s annexation of the West Bank in 1949 and King Hus-
sein’s renunciation of it in 1988, most West Bank Palestinians held Jordanian citi-
zenship. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, along with the Sinai Peninsula and
Golan Heights following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, did not alter Palestinians’
citizenship status. The government of Jordan continued to pay the salaries of thou-
sands of West Bank civil servants, and King Hussein saw himself as the legal guardian
of the rights of residents on the West Bank (June 1967 Arab–Israeli War, p. 94).
The relationship between King Hussein and Palestinian leaders was often a strained
one. The low point came in 1970, when Palestinian guerrillas hijacked four European
airliners and flew three of them to Jordan. Hussein responded with a crackdown on
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other groups, provoking a brief civil
war that almost drew in Syria. In 1971 the king drove most of the Palestinian fight-
ers into Lebanon, where their presence would contribute four years later to the out-
break of the long and bloody Lebanese civil war (Lebanese Civil War, p. 331).
Despite his conflicts with the PLO leadership, King Hussein continued to claim
to represent the Palestinian people as a whole. He lost that claim on October 28, 1974,
when Arab leaders, at a summit in Rabat, Morocco, recognized the PLO as the “sole
200 ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS