Palestinian Political Organizing PLO Basic Facts About the Palestine Problem Circa 1970

Palestine Liberation Organization

Ephemera

Palestine Liberation Organization. Basic Facts About the Palestine Problem, issued circa 1970, documents the PLO’s effort to shape American and international opinion through its New York information office. Organized as twenty emphatic questions, the flyer presents the organization’s positions on Palestinian landownership, the 1947 United Nations partition recommendation, displacement, Israeli military policy, discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Israel’s relationship to Western power. The material records a political communication system through a compact English-language handout, revealing how the PLO selected statistics, legal arguments, and anticolonial language for circulation among American activists, diplomats, and other readers, and providing primary-source evidence for the study of Palestinian nationalism, Cold War propaganda, Arab American political organizing, and debates over Israel and Palestine after 1967. Research on Palestinian offices in the United States identifies the New York delegation, opened in 1965, as both an information center and the PLO’s unofficial American embassy; among its earliest widely distributed texts was Fayez A. Sayegh’s closely related Do You Know? Twenty Basic Facts about the Palestine Problem.

Basic Facts About the Palestine Problem. New York: Palestine Liberation Organization, circa 1970. Double-sided flyer measuring approximately 10 × 8 inches. Issued from 801 Second Avenue, New York, New York 10017. Beneath the bold, all-capital heading, twenty numbered or bullet-pointed statements begin with the repeated prompt “DO YOU KNOW,” giving the document the form of a political questionnaire while directing readers toward predetermined conclusions. Early passages claim that Palestinian Arabs owned “97 1/2% of the land” during an earlier period and that Zionist ownership amounted to no more than six percent when the United Nations recommended partition in 1947. Other statements dispute the General Assembly’s authority to recommend partition, accuse Israel of repeated attacks across the 1949 Armistice Demarcation Lines, and characterize the country as isolated from the developing Afro-Asian and Non-Aligned worlds. The final sections compare Israeli policies toward Arab citizens to apartheid, citing military administration, restricted residence, unequal education, and disparities in employment and pay. These assertions constitute the PLO’s advocacy claims and should be read as polemical arguments rather than neutral statistical findings.

The flyer belongs to a broader campaign in which Palestinian information offices adapted nationalist arguments for English-speaking audiences and sought alliances among antiwar, Black freedom, student, anticolonial, and international solidarity movements. The text’s question-and-answer strategy was already influential by 1967, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee drew extensively upon Sayegh’s earlier twenty-fact pamphlet in its own discussion of Palestine. A circa 1970 date places this issue before the PLO received United Nations observer status on November 22, 1974, making it evidence of the public advocacy that preceded the organization’s expanded diplomatic recognition. Minor creasing and edge wear, without reported loss of text. Very good. A concise record of the PLO’s New York publicity apparatus and its use of legal, statistical, and anticolonial rhetoric to advance a Palestinian account of the conflict.

Item #21744

Price: $225.00