Fatah official: Oslo gave us PA, international recognition; otherwise revolution would have ended in exile

Official PA TV program The PLO – The Rows of Documents, on the Palestinian declaration of independence, hosting Palestinian National Council member and Fatah Central Committee member Rawhi Fattouh

Palestinian National Council member and Fatah Central Committee member Rawhi Fattouh: “Of course there are certainly many criticisms of the Oslo Accords, but the Oslo Accords led to our [the PLO’s] current presence in the Palestinian land after we were in exile. In fact, if it hand’t been for these accords the Palestinian revolution would have ended in the exile. We came and returned to the homeland and now we have a [Palestinian] Authority, government, and political regime. We are looking ahead, and at the same time we have become a UN observer state, and this is a great accomplishment… We say that we in our homeland, those who returned – and just those who returned after the Oslo [Accords] – are over 1 million people; they are over 1 million people, over 1 million Palestinian citizens."

Rawhi Fattouh also holds the following positions: head of the Palestinian National Council’s Parliamentary Relations Committee and Fatah Commissioner of International Relations.

Palestinian declaration of independence - On Nov. 15, 1988, before the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile in Algeria, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Yasser Arafat declared the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Although the borders were not specified in the declaration, it recognized the UN partition plan of 1947, which called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the former British Mandate for Palestine.