Significance
The declaration concerns the Palestine region, as defined by the British Mandate of Palestine, which includes the whole of Israel as well as the West Bank and the Gaza strip. It references the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine of 1947 (which also serves as the basis for Israel's declaration of independence) and "UN resolutions since 1947" in general. It invokes the Partition Plan as providing legitimacy to Palestinian statehood, at which time the Palestinians refused to accept the partition resolution (as opposed to Israel, which did accept the Partition Plan).
The declaration does not explicitly recognize the State of Israel. However, an acompanying document that explicitly mentions UN Security Council Resolution 242 and Yasser Arafat's statements in Geneva a month later were accepted by the United States as sufficient to remove the ambiguities in the declaration. Based on these statements, the declaration can be interpreted to have recognized Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries.
The declaration's reference to Palestine being the "land of the three monotheistic faiths" has been held as recognising the Jewish historical connection to the land, instead of arguing that Jews are colonists and foreigners in the land. Referring to "the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination," the declaration recalled the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and UN General Assembly Resolution 181 as supporting the rights of Palestinians and Palestine. The declaration then proclaims a "State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem". The borders of the declared State of Palestine were not specified. The population of the state was referred to by the statement: "The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be". The state was defined as an Arab country by the statement: "The State of Palestine is an Arab state, an integral and indivisible part of the Arab nation".
Read more about this topic: Palestinian Declaration Of Independence
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