We had a bunch of kooks in Texas declare that the Republic of Texas was now independant of the USA. While I wouldn't disagree with that principle, they have no sovereign territory so their statement is only rhetoric.
The same applies in this situation because there is no sovereign territory called "Palestine"
Here are the facts about this declaration.
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The 1988 declaration was approved at a meeting in
Algiers, by a vote of 253-46, with 10 abstentions. The declaration invoked the
Treaty of Lausanne (1923) and
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 in support of its claim to a "State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital
Jerusalem". The proclaimed "State of Palestine" was recognized immediately by the
Arab League, and about half the world's governments recognize it today. It maintains embassies in these countries. The State of Palestine is not recognized by the
United Nations, although the
European Union, as well as most member states, maintain diplomatic ties with the
Palestinian Authority, established under the
Oslo Accords (
Leila Shahid, envoy of the PLO to France since 1984, was named in November 2005 representative of the PNA for Europe).
Currently, the proclaimed State of Palestine is not an independent state, as it does not have any sovereignty over its claimed territory. The declaration was ignored and eventually rejected, by the State of Israel. Israel has controlled the territory claimed by the State of Palestine since the 1967 Six-Day War when it captured them from Egypt and Jordan.
The declaration is generally interpreted to have recognized Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, or was at least a major step on the path to recognition. Just as in
Israel's declaration of establishment, it partly bases its claims on
UN GA 181. By reference to "resolutions of Arab Summits" and "UN resolutions since 1947" (like
SC 242) it implicitly and perhaps ambiguously restricted its immediate claims to the
Palestinian territories and
Jerusalem. It was accompanied by a political statement that explicitly mentioned SC 242 and other UN resolutions and called only for withdrawal from "
Arab Jerusalem" and the other "Arab territories occupied."
[1] Yasser Arafat's statements in Geneva a month later were accepted by the United States as sufficient to remove the ambiguities it saw in the declaration and to fulfill the longheld conditions for open dialogue with the
United States.
The PLO envisages the establishment of a State of Palestine to include all or part of the
West Bank, the
Gaza Strip, and
East Jerusalem (the
Palestinian territories), living in peace with
Israel under a democratically elected and sovereign government. To this end, it took part in negotiations with Israel resulting in the 1993
Declaration of Principles, which along with subsequent agreements between the two parties provided for the establishment of a Palestinian interim self-governing authority with "partial control over defined areas in the Palestinian territories.
This authority, known as the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian National Authority (PNA), however, does not claim sovereignty over any territory and therefore is not the government of the "State of Palestine" proclaimed in 1988.
