Tensions emerged between the secular United National Command and Hamas as the Intifada ran through the spring and into the summer of 1988. Both organizations claimed to represent the Palestinian resistance. In its leaflets, Hamas referred to itself as “your movement, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas,” and the UNC claimed leadership of the Palestinian masses, “this people that heeded the call of the PLO and of the United National Command of the Uprising.”⁵⁴ The secular and Islamist rivals read each other’s leaflets and vied for control over popular actions in the streets. When Hamas called for a national strike in its leaflet of August 18—a prerogative the PLO claimed for itself in the Occupied Territories—the UNC issued its first direct criticism of the Islamist organization, claiming “every blow to the unity of ranks is tantamount to doing the enemy a significant service and harms the uprising.” Such jostling for ascendancy masked the fundamental differences that divided Hamas from the PLO: whereas Hamas sought the destruction of the Jewish state, the PLO and the UNC wanted to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas viewed the whole of Palestine as inalienable Muslim land that needed to be liberated from non-Muslim rule through jihad. Its confrontation with Israel would be long-term, for its ultimate objective was the creation of an Islamic state in the whole of Palestine. The PLO, in comparison, had been moving toward a two-state solution since 1974. Yasser Arafat seized on the Intifada as a vehicle to achieve independent statehood for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem—even if this meant conferring recognition on Israel and conceding the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948 to the Jewish state. The positions of the two resistance movements could not be reconciled, and so the PLO proceeded down the path of the two-state solution without consideration for the views of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Palestinian resistance and Israeli repression had placed the Intifada squarely on the front pages of the international press—and nowhere more so than in the Arab world. In June 1988, the Arab League convened an emergency summit in Algiers to address the Intifada. The PLO took the opportunity to present a position paper that called for mutual recognition of the right of the Palestinians and the Israelis to live in peace and security. Hamas rejected the PLO?s position outright and reasserted its claim for Muslim rights to the whole of Palestine. Its leaders made their views known in Hamas?s leaflet of August 18, in which the Islamic Resistance insisted that ?the Muslims have had a full?not partial?right to Palestine for generations, in the past, present and future.? Undeterred by Islamist opposition, the PLO proceeded to use the Intifada to legitimize its call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In September 1988 the PLO announced plans to convene a meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile, to consolidate the gains of the Intifada and secure the Palestinian people’s “national rights of return, self-determination, and the establishment of an independent state on our national soil under the leadership of the PLO.”⁵⁵ Again Hamas rejected and condemned the PLO position. Its leaflet of October 5 read, in part: “We are against conceding so much as an inch of our land which is steeped in the blood of the Companions of the Prophet and their followers.” Hamas insisted that “we shall continue the uprising on the road to the liberation of our whole land from the contamination of the Jews (with the help of God).” The lines of confrontation between the PLO and the Islamic Resistance could not have been clearer. Arafat’s agenda for the meeting of the PNC, which had been set for November 1988, was nothing less than a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the Occupied Territories. For many in Gaza and the West Bank, worn down by eleven months of the Intifada and violent Israeli reprisals, statehood held the promise of independence and an end to the occupation, which seemed sufficient gains for their sacrifices, and they looked forward to the November meeting of the PNC with growing anticipation. Though Sari Nusseibeh had some reservations about the PLO’s policies, he saw the impending declaration of independence as “an important milestone, and like everyone else, I looked forward to its unveiling.” Nusseibeh, who had received an advance copy of Arafat’s text, wanted the Palestinian declaration of independence to be a moment that people would remember, and he hoped to read the text to “tens of thousands of people” in the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex atop the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “I wanted a people under occupation, the people of the intifada, to congregate at the center of our universe, and to celebrate our independence.” It was not to be. On November 15, 1988, the day Arafat addressed the PNC, Israel imposed a draconian curfew over the territories and East Jerusalem, banning cars and civilians from the streets. Nusseibeh chose to disregard the curfew and made his way through the backstreets to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where a handful of political activists had gathered, milling about with religious clerics. “Together, we all walked into Al-Aqsa mosque. At the appointed hour, as the bells from the [church of the] Holy Sepulchre swung, and calls wailed out from the minarets, we all solemnly read our declaration of independence.?⁵⁶ The declaration, which Arafat read to the nineteenth session of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, represented a radical departure from past PLO policies. The declaration endorsed the UN partition plan of 1947 that provided for the creation of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, and it approved UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, drafted after the 1967 and 1973 Wars, that established the principle of the return of occupied land for peace. The declaration committed the PLO to peaceful coexistence with Israel. The PLO had come a very long way since its London diplomat Said Hammami’s first attempts to broach the two-state solution in 1974. No longer a guerrilla organization—Arafat now categorically renounced “all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism”—the PLO presented itself to the international community as the provisional government of a state in waiting. International recognition was quick to follow. Eighty-four countries extended full recognition to the new state of Palestine, including most Arab states, a number of European, African, and Asian countries, and such traditional supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement as China and the Soviet Union. Most West European states granted a diplomatic status to Palestine that fell short of full recognition, but the United States and Canada withheld recognition altogether. In mid-January 1989 the PLO scored another symbolic victory by gaining the right to address the UN Security Council on equal footing with member states.⁵⁷ The PNC declaration did not meet with the Israeli government’s approval. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir responded in a written statement on November 15 to denounce the declaration as “a deceptive propaganda exercise, intended to create an impression of moderation and of achievements for those carrying out violent acts in the territories of Judea and Samaria,” and the Israeli cabinet dismissed it as “disinformation meant to mislead world public opinion.”⁵⁸ Hamas too was unimpressed by the statement. The Islamic resistance issued a communiquй in which it stressed “the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state on all the soil of Palestine,” not just in the Occupied Territories: “Do not heed the U.N. resolutions which try to accord the Zionist entity legitimacy over any part of the soil of Palestine . . . for it is the property of the Islamic nation and not of the U.N.”⁵⁹